WITH THE GUYS off in Leonard Tallgrass’s pickup to examine the cow-killing ground, we girls had time for less gory expeditions of our own.
First I stopped at a centrally located, low-profile place I knew, the Thunderbird Inn (Tallgrass would approve) to book a room for Ric and me. When I called Ric with the info, we agreed to meet there when it got too dark for field explorations.
Suited me. An unloaded Dolly and I made a beeline straight for my Wichita place of employment … before I’d been effectively driven out of it by a lecherous vampire, a scheming weather witch, and a rogue personal tornado.
Most TV stations are modest one-story buildings attached to tall broadcast towers occupying high ground where land is cheap, far from the city center. WTCH-TV had the usual long entry driveway and suburban neighborhood.
I reflected that by now the male investigative team of two guys and a dog was sniffing and sifting through a cow-patty-laden field I’d last seen by the gleam of a flashlight illuminating mutilated cattle corpses.
Another lovely Wichita memory, but it wasn’t as scary to me as all the “missing time” in my growing-up history. Right now, my major problem was to park Dolly discreetly. The aim was to avoid contact with anchorman Undead Ted Brinkman and Sheena Coleman, the station weather witch, during this hit-and-run visit.
I eased Delilah behind the far side of one of the station’s mobile broadcast vans.
Wichita was having a quiet news day. Videographer “Slo-mo” Eddie Anderson had been happy to hear from my cell phone and was at the station as of ten minutes ago. One never knew when news would break out, so I slipped around the building to the back loading dock.
I’d have to scale it in my mid-heeled suit pumps and black leggings, worn under a mini-length navy shirtdress, the casual opposite of my conservative hose-and-suit-wearing on-camera self. Eddie was an ace camera guy, but the lanky, morose type who was always down on “management,” so he was a born liaison for a disgruntled ex-employee.
“Delilah,” he greeted me with a whisper when I’d clambered the four feet up to the loading dock and eased into the slightly open end of the steel security curtain. “Man, it’s been no fun fest with only the supernaturals running the news desk. You look like being gone agrees with you.”
“I’d had some bad days before Sheena sent a ‘freak’ tornado to take out my rental house. Sorry I didn’t stick around to say good-bye.”
Eddie scratched at his scrawny new mustache. “Can’t blame you. They stole your paranormal news beats and then flaked out on covering them. They even rescheduled the interview we had cancelled, with the old lady at Sunset City retirement place. Then the new regime sent me back to Sunset City with Sheena, but her interview was pretty boring.”
“Really? That old woman, Caressa Teagarden, moved to the Vegas Sunset City. At least I found her there after I arrived.”
“Well, she must have been swept up and out in that targeted tornado of yours, because the old dame Sheena interviewed was named Lili West and she was a total fox of forty-something, like all of those artificially preserved Sunset City senior citizen residents. Your old Caressa lady looked senior. Kinda cool to see these days.”
I smiled, knowing what he meant. “She still does. Was Lili West at the same address as our aborted assignment?”
“Yeah, come to think of it. No general manager has ever done that to me, called me back from an assignment for no good reason, like a fast-food place mass shooting. Good thing he’s gone too.”
“Fred Fogelman is gone? Who’s running the station?”
“Guy named Javier. Hah-vee-air. Like I said, the place has gone downhill. It’s all happy ‘news you can use’ now.”
“It’d be a wonder if the station hadn’t declined with Undead Ted and Sheena taking over my beats,” I said. “Ted is an empty suit and a lame pair of fangs, and Sheena is a lousy weather witch without one reporter’s gene in her artificially supplemented body.”
“A little competitive with our weather gal, Sheena? You had network written all over you, Delilah. Sheena sure had it in for you.”
“Was it because I’d agreed to go out with Undead Ted that Friday? Didn’t even happen. He acted up and I kicked him out. He must have gone sniveling back to Sheena.”
“Maybe. Whatever bee got in her bonnet, it just sprung up, like a high pressure cell. While you were off for the weekend, she was in the general manager’s office trashing you from that Saturday on through Monday. She tried to get our scoop footage from the cow pasture scene off the air, I know that. Then you and I were called back Monday en route to that dumb old-lady interview assignment at Sunset City the GM put you on. I think that was her doing too.”
“Saddling me with that lame feature or getting us called back?”
“One, or maybe both,” Eddie said. “It was just unprofessional, that’s what it was. And now, Undead Ted, he just trots along on Sheena’s leash like a vamp tranqued on blood thinners.”
The conversation reminded me I’d spent that Saturday off taking my suddenly ailing dog to the vet, then finding he’d contracted blood poisoning and couldn’t be saved. All from biting Undead Ted’s ankle after the lech had tricked me into cutting a finger he wanted as an appetizer before mainlining on one of my major arteries after our dinner out.
I’d never heard of a vampire’s blood being poisonous to house pets before, like some species of plant, but then, they seldom did the bleeding and the Millennium Revelation was still revealing unsuspected supernatural variations and species. A pang of anxiety about Ric hit when I wondered what losing all your blood to vampires could do.
“I don’t know what went on that weekend, Eddie,” I told him. “I not only wasn’t scheduled to work, but I … lost my dog that Saturday.”
“That feisty white Lhasa? Too bad, Delilah. No wonder you were kinda down that Monday. You brought him in once. Akita or something.”
Eddie’s mistake saved me from a total emotional rerun. Reporters live to inform and correct. “An Akita is a breed of Japanese dog. My Lhasa’s name was Achilles.”
“Oh.” As if he cared. Cameramen have seen it all and are a nonchalant breed. “Like the Greek hero with something wrong with his heel.”
“Like the hero with the bum heel,” I agreed, beating back the memories. As a pup, Achilles had always chased my heels, so the name was appropriate. I just didn’t expect that the “hero” part would get him killed.
Eddie shook his head. “I don’t know what was going on that weekend, or since, but it’s been hell around here after you left. I’m thinking of quitting too.”
“You’re a great videographer.”
“But who does traditional ‘news’ anymore? We’re a dying breed. Whatcha doing in Vegas for a living?”
“Investigative work for a television producer, among other, er, major Vegas Strip clients.”
“Cool. You’ve landed on your girl-reporter pumps. I don’t wanta get you charged up about what’s over and done at the station. Besides Sheena being Bitch Witch, it’s a lot of management political correctness that’s been coming on for years. Hire the minorities, like the Latino brass, and the anchor vamps and the weather witches. You know the news has been going to hell since the big flare-up after the Millennium Revelation. It’s like, ‘Hey, the aliens have landed,’ but now they’re coming up out of our caves and cornfields and They R Us. Anyway, you can download your piece on the cow mutilations to your cell off my backup flash drive.”
“Great.” I was glad simple computerized functions didn’t need hookups now, just proximity. It was like zipless sex. In a second, his info was my info too.
“Hey, Delilah.” Eddie chuckled like a TV cartoon ghoul. “I added some hilarious footage of Undead Ted and Sheena screwing up on camera. I even caught ’em actually screwing in the dead storage vault. I YouTube that stuff now and then. You wanta come into the studio and say hello?”
“No, thanks. This is all I need, Eddie. Thanks for the ‘added value content.’”
“It’s a howl. Sheena accidentally had it hailing in the studio a couple weeks ago. Funny, we’ve been having a lot of freakish weather lately, but no indoor hail.”
“It’s the Midwest,” I said. “Freakish weather is our biggest tourist attraction.”
“Must be weird living in sunshine year-round in Vegas.”
“Yeah, it’s weird living in Vegas, but it’s not all sunshine,” I said in vague understatement.
“Can I help you off the loading dock?”
Fast Eddie bent to stretch out a lank arm with a helping hand on the end of it.
“Eddie, the gentleman? You must really miss me,” I commented as I grabbed his hand, although I appreciated his easing me through the four-foot drop.
He straightened up to tower above me, shaking his head, even his mustache drooping morosely. “You have no idea.”
WITH QUICKSILVER ABSENT and unable to play guard, I’d left Dolly locked with her top up.
So when I opened the driver’s door with my old-fashioned key—direct interface, imagine—I sat in the interior shade and played Slo-mo Eddie’s treasure trove of scenes.
I watched his recording of my stand-up report on the dark country road by the cattle mutilation scene earlier that spring … as if from years later or a planet away. It was a good story, told without glitches, but I seemed so young and polite and parochial-school girl.
I’d reeled off the bit-role lines Hector Nightwine had given me on CSI V in Vegas a week ago with a new edge that came naturally. The portly producer was hoping my performance would either lure my double, Lilith, back to the CSI fold, or establish me as her replacement. I hoped it would lure Lilith too. I wanted to know how long she’d been doing her twin act in my life before I’d spotted her on CSI.
The image of the old, WTCH-TV Delilah made me rerun leaving Wichita two months ago. My first fill-up stop for Dolly at a remote Colorado gas station had forced me to fend off a trio of creepy backwoods guys and burn rubber out of there.
Having to dodge booty bounty hunters going after my “CSI-autopsy-star” twin the moment I left Kansas had made me a lot warier and assertive. And way less polite. Not to mention that certain confidence I derived from finally getting a sex life. Knowing how the other 99 percent lived sure increased one’s daily savoir faire.
Sighing as my sweet innocent self disappeared from the small screen, I soon was snickering at Undead Ted as he practiced resting his supposedly “supplemented” fang-tips on his lower lip before going “live” on camera.
When he was caught touching up his tinted lip gloss, I fast-forwarded past, my own recent passion-pit adventures with lip gloss making me blush like a schoolgirl again. Damn! Would my pale skin always make me a patsy for the unwanted flush? Probably.
I made a fierce face at the telltale screen, then slowed it to normal.
Seeing Undead Ted and Sheena lip-locking against the station blue-screen was like watching the Christmas Chipmunks with their braces in gridlock. There was enough bleach on those teeth to off Sheena. At least, I assumed, witches remained human enough to off. But then, my idea of a happy ending was Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel. Or, more apropos to the current location, The Wizard of Oz.
While cruising the snips of my old news reports, I realized that I’d definitely grown by leaving my once-safe niche at WTCH. Eddie had ended my trip down bad-memory lane with Sheena’s later interview with the Sunset City resident of the new management’s choice.
Sheena was an anorexic blonde with inflated bust and lips. Unlike a lot of “weather gals” who’d forged the way for weather witches to take their places, she was more about her looks and attitude than making “dry” weather statistics fascinating and relevant to the viewers.