Sarah shook her head. “There goes the budget for the next six months.”

“It’ll be okay. We’ll be saving hundreds on gas. Just wait and see. It’s a good deal.”

Sarah shook her head. “I think life was simpler when I only had to put up with you at home,” she said, and turned to make the trek back across the newsroom to her office.

I turned back to my computer screen and started typing. A moment later, I felt a pair of hands on my shoulder, then noticed the familiar scent of Sarah as she leaned down and put her mouth close to my ear.

“You were right about one thing,” she whispered.

“About what?” I said, eyes on my screen.

“Black, front clasp.” And she strode off. I would have spun around in my seat to say something, but I had responded, involuntarily, to her comment, and felt that keeping a good part of me under the desk was prudent for the next couple of minutes.

Stan poked his head from behind the partition. “That was a good guess on the clasp thing,” he said, startling me. “I wasn’t even sure she was wearing one at all.”

“You probably know, Stan, that Sarah’s my wife,” I said.

He nodded. “I had a feeling you’d met her before.” He came around the partition, dropped a contact sheet on my desk. “There’s the auction stuff. There’s another copy with the desk, whenever they want it.”

I glanced at the negative-size shots. Stan could take something as mundane as a lot full of cars and, with the right angles and lighting, turn it into something special.

“Great,” I said. Stan didn’t acknowledge the compliment. He’d been praised by people a lot more important than I. One of the frames caught my eye. “That the guy?”

Stan squinted. “What?”

“The one who wanted your film? That him there?”

The angry short man was off to the left side of the frame, not doing anything in particular. Stan’s focus had been a pair of guys looking under the hood of a Pontiac. “I think so. I wasn’t even shooting him. Asshole.”

“Hey, Walker,” someone on the other side of me said.

I looked around. It was Cheese Dick Colby, the paper’s star police reporter, a heavyset man in his mid-fifties. A police search of his medicine cabinet would be unlikely to turn up any deodorant.

“Hey, Dick,” I said.

“Thanks for the call the other night, about the hit-run outside the men’s shop. Just so you understand, I do the breaking stuff, you can do the puff pieces.”

“Sure, Dick. I just hope someday I’m trusted to handle the big stories like you.”

Colby, evidently oblivious to sarcasm, said, “What you working on?”

“A feature.”