"I think that would be good."
❚❚
THEY SAT AT the bar, drinking too-sweet Sazeracs, watching KBNO's sister 24-hour news channel. Annie's pony tail had come undone, sticking out from the purple elastic like frayed wires. Beside her perspiring Old Fashioned glass, she'd ground a small pile of peanuts into the scuffed, dark wood. She plucked another nut from the bowl, cracked it open, and smashed its insides under her glass.
Eddie Bing's death occurred two weeks before the theater premiere of his latest comedy special. A dramatic series had just been greenlit with him in the lead role, he'd been reuniting with his ex-wife, and communicating with his estranged children again. All signs pointed toward a renaissance in Bing's career, in his life, until--
"Suicide." Kyra shook her head at the big screen TV over the bar. "No one could have predicted that. Just a whole lot of bad luck, Annie."
"It happened at the same time..."
A troubled look crossed Kyra's face before settling on a sympathetic smile. "Coincidence."
"Hung himself, just like--"
"Like?"
Annie simply shook her head and crushed another peanut. The anchor repeated that more would be revealed about Eddie Bing as it was discovered, then threw to the 11P.M. news. Annie's standby was the first piece.
"Turn this up," Kyra told the muscular bartender. When the segment ended, she turned to Annie, their faces washed in blue light from the TVs. "No matter how you feel about it, that's a hell of a package you cut." Annie said nothing, merely sipped her drink. "Hey, it took me eight years to make the top story," Kyra told her. "You did it in six days."
"Are you trying to make me feel better, or worse?"
Kyra shrugged. "Little of both, maybe. I'm totally jelly."
Annie allowed herself a grin. Her companion nudged her with an elbow.
"There's that smile." She turned toward the bartender's gleaming bald head. "Bartender!" When he turned, she shook her glass. "Another two Sazeracs, por favor."
"It really is good, isn't it?" Annie asked when her companion's attention wandered back from the bartender's tight jeans.
"Too good," Kyra agreed with narrowed eyes. "I better watch out. You might make a standby of me, and take my job."
Annie slugged her in the shoulder. Kyra cackled, rubbing her arm.
"I'm totally kidding!"
"It's not funny." Dead serious, Annie scowled until Kyra could no longer keep a straight face, and the two of them busted out laughing. The bartender gave them a peculiar look, only making them laugh harder.
❚❚
ANNIE CAME IN hungover the next morning, the licorice taste of absinthe still on her tongue.
She stood in the doorway to her edit suite--it was hers now, no denying it--and peered in at the equipment. Green lights flickered in the dim room, lighted by the overheads in the hall. Nothing particularly menacing about anything. And yet...
A groan from behind shook her from the edge of psychic distress. Krya shambled toward her, baggy eyes and hair a mess. "I am so tired."
"Me too."
Kyra stepped past her into the dim room and flopped down in Annie's chair. Annie imagined latches clamping down on Kyra's wrists, the chair swooping her toward the desk, the twin monitors turning themselves on like the eyes of a malevolent animal rousing from sleep. But the monitors remained dark. Kyra looked up at her in mild curiosity. "Whatcha doin'?" she asked, drawing out the words in singsong.
Annie shook her head, temples throbbing. "Nothing."
She following Annie's gaze toward the monitors. "Annie, it was a coincidence. It's just a bunch of--" She plucked the mouse off the table, set it back down. "--harmless junk." She flicked on the monitors, one after another. They brightened to their wavy backgrounds and tiny icons, not malicious eyes, not a cackling malevolent demon trapped behind the twin screens.
Annie nodded. Of course it was a coincidence. Of course. She hummed the Twilight Zone theme. Kyra squeezed her aching temples while the two of them laughed.
A metallic jingle moved toward them. They both turned with identical looks of dulled shock.
"Annie, we need a standby for Eleanor Harrison," Hillary said, not daring to meet Annie's eyes. "You guys look like shit."
"What happened?" This was Kyra. Annie couldn't speak.
"You guys didn't hear? She's on the news right now."
Kyra changed the input on the small monitor beside the VTR. Without sound, all they saw was a black man in his mid- to late-fifties speaking somberly from behind a podium. Behind him was Eleanor herself, fifty-three, a tad overweight but otherwise healthy, hugging her grown children, who in turn hugged her grandkids. The story swept along the bottom of the screen: PASTOR AND CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER ELEANOR HARRISON CANCER DIAGNOSIS SHOCKS FAMILY AND FRIENDS, CELEBRITIES LEND SUPPORT...
Shocked into action, Annie got to work, scouring old library tapes for clips of Harrison in sermons, interviews and debates, protesting another black youth gunned down by white police officers, shaking hands with Maya Angelou and Queen Elizabeth. Watching the highlights of this uncompromising woman's life, Annie couldn't help but feel genuine sorrow. Harrison was one of her parents' heroes and her own. She cut a suitable tribute for the woman, "sweetened" it with somber music, and had Phil Macready sit for a voiceover, all the while bothered by the look on Hilary the P.A.'s face when Annie handed the Bing standby to her.
After work, she puttered around the apartment for hours, trying to get the Harrison standby off her mind. Couldn't happen twice, she told herself, a mantra on repeat. Inevitably, she ended up opening one of a stack of photo albums. A photo of her parents made her smile, young and in love in the '80s, Orville with his short jheri curl, her mother's blonde hair in Bo Derek cornrows that dangled over her dashiki dress. Exhausted, Annie finally fell asleep on the sofa with the book in her hands, missing the 11P.M. news by eleven minutes.
She woke early the next morning, but still had to rush to get to work on time. Driving in dense traffic with the news on and a cool breeze coming from the open windows, the words "Eleanor Harrison was found dead..." shocked her so badly she stepped on the brakes in the middle of the road. Horns bleated by on either side, vehicles swerving to avoid collision. Annie sat rigid behind the wheel, breathing shallowly, unable to think beyond those terrible words--found dead--let alone make the movements required to signal and pull off onto the soft shoulder of the road.
She couldn't go back to work. Couldn't face that room, those monitors. Fear got her moving again. She pulled into the Raising Cane's lot, told the on-call scheduler she was ill and wouldn't be able to make it in for her shift the next day, then speed-dialed Kyra's cell.
"Hey, sweetie." There was compassion Kyra's in her voice. Still at work, she'd obviously heard the news. "You okay?"
"I'm fine," Annie said. "You wouldn't happen to know Burt Ellis's home address, would you?"
"That old creepazoid? Oh yeah, me and him were tight."
"Kyra, I'm serious."
A moment's silence. "There's a master list in Scheduling. Let me go see if he's still on it."
"Call me back."
"I will," Kyra said, responding to the urgency in Annie's voice. "Are you coming in today?" Annie told her she wasn't. "Probably a good idea. People are really creeped out about that standby, especially after Bing's. Although I think most of them are just jealous you made top story twice in two days."
Annie sat in the car, peering out at the red and white blur of passing traffic. Twice could still be a coincidence, she told herself. Couldn't happen again.
Her ringtone startled her. "Got it." Kyra rhymed off Burt's address. "Be careful, Annie. He's one odd duck. I'm not entirely sure he's not a serial killer."
I'm not entirely sure I'm not one, Annie thought. She offered thanks instead of voicing her concern.
Burt Ellis lived in a boathouse in the West End. The next morning, Annie parked beside his truck in the small lot up the road, gold metallic paint with a cap on the bed
and a bumper sticker declaring EDITORS DO IT NON-LINEARLY.
Burt's twiggy mail-order and/or stripper girlfriend answered the door in a kimono. She shouted into the dim house in a thick eastern European accent--as if the couple lived in a multi-story house rather than what was essentially a double-wide trailer on the water--then lit a cigarette and slinked away inside, but not before shooting Annie a scathing look.
Burt came to the door in a grimy robe he was still tying over boxer shorts and scrawny, hairless legs, blinking rapidly before putting on his prescription sunglasses. "Well, I can't say I'm surprised to see you, except for maybe that it took you so long to show up."
Dishes clanged in the sink inside, deliberately loud. Burt peered toward the kitchenette. Annie couldn't see from where she stood, but she could imagine his girlfriend or wife doing the dishes in a fit of jealousy. "Guess we should pro'ly take this outside. Let me get some pants on."
A few minutes later they sat down at a picnic bench in Breakwater Park, overlooking Lake Pontchartrain. The dark scudding clouds from earlier had moved off toward the east without rain. In hurricane season, the city would surely have felt their wrath. Nearby, children shouted and scurried while their mothers gabbed.
"You're scared, aren't you?" He stuck an unlit smoke between his lips with a sheepish grin.
"Why did you leave so suddenly?"
"I take it you're not ready to talk about this."
Annie held her tongue while Burt lit his smoke. "It was the '70s when I started at Channel 5," Burt told her, "back before all that Five Means Live bullshit, when we still called it KBNO. We were still smoking in the studios, and everybody, I mean everybody, was on coke." He dragged on his smoke. "That's what I passed it off as, at first: some paranoid dope fantasy."
Annie didn't ask what he meant. There seemed to be no point in pretending she wasn't scared out of her wits.
"The Serling standby, the one we worked on last week? That's the one that really got under my skin. The first handful, it was easy enough to pass them off as coincidence. With Serling's, I couldn't shake that feeling--"
"Like standing on a live wire," Annie said.
Burt agreed with a solemn nod, blowing smoke as he squinted out at the clear, flat water. "How are you sleeping? Any nightmares?"
"I don't sleep well."
"No, I wouldn't imagine. That'll change. You'll get used to it."
"I don't want to get used to it." Annie watched a little girl in a polka-dot dress chase two boys around the swing set. "I keep thinking it can't be real, it couldn't be me causing this to happen..."
"Except for that feeling." Burt butted out his cigarette on the picnic table. "I used to think the film caused it. When Serling died, KBNO still had a lot of old footage on film. We had to transfer to video with a process called Telecine before we could cut it for air. They probably taught you about it in school. They did? Good. I thought maybe it was the silver gelatin--you know, silver's been thought to have magical properties for centuries. Personally, I think it's a bunch of bullshit, but back then I was grasping at straws. And hell, this was Rod Serling we're talking about. The guy practically invented shit like this.
"June 26th I cut that obituary. Serling was my third standby. We knew he had heart troubles. By then he was already in the hospital. Docs were talking about open heart surgery. These days that's nothing, but in those days, it was a huge risk. It took him two days to die from that last heart attack on the operating table, but I knew... I mean I knew...that last one was because of me."
"But you must have done hundreds of obituaries since then. Every one of them died?"
"Only the completed standbys seem to do it. Think of it like casting a spell. It ain't gonna work without reading the last few words, will it?"
"But you did it again?"
Burt raised his t-shirt--Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell--to reveal a long white scar from his right hip to the middle rib on his left side.
"Ouch."
"You said it. I flew the coop after Serling died." He mimed a plane taking off with his right hand, an unlit cigarette poised between his fingers. "I wanted to get as far away from the Big Easy as possible, but I knew I couldn't stand those New England winters. Miami seemed like a good start. Took the Airlift flight from New Orl'ns International--this was long before they changed the name--on a rickety old DC-8."
Annie didn't know where to begin. She couldn't imagine why he would have come back, burdened with the curse she now bore herself, and told him so.
He grinned. "Guess you never heard about Airlift International Flight 208."
Annie admitted she hadn't, but she was starting to feel as though she knew what happened.
"I swore to myself I wouldn't do another standby. Not a single one. I mean I quit without a day's notice, just up and left. Packed a bag, hightailed it. I got on that plane feeling... blessed relief. About as close to whatever you want to call a religious experience as I'd ever felt. I mean, I was twenty years old. I didn't know shit about God. But when that plane took off, I felt like I could join the seminary and be perfectly content for the rest of my life."
He lit the cigarette. Took a long drag, long enough for the ash to curl. "Weren't up in the air ten minutes before the trouble started. There was this loud boom, and suddenly the plane is leaning on its side. Not just women and children screaming but grown men. Hell, I was screaming. Those of us who hadn't fell into the lap of their neighbor or into the aisle were hangin from our seat belts. They told us later that an engine blew. But I knew different." He narrowed his eyes at her. "It was pulling me back. It wouldn't let me leave until I was done."
Annie merely shook her head.
"I prayed, I mean I prayed like I never have in my life. I promised I'd go right back to work if whoever was in charge of all this would spare my life. I meant it, too. And just about the time I'd finished promising, the pilot managed to get that bastard horizontal again by some force of sheer luck, and we water-landed in the Gulf just past Chandeleur Sound. If we'd been any closer to shore, no doubt the gators woulda been eatin leftovers for weeks. Out of a hundred and twenty-seven passengers fifty-three of us made it, including two stewardesses, without whom we all woulda drowned. Everyone in the cockpit died. Everyone in the front of the plane died. Miserable, groveling excuse for a sack of shit me made it out alive to kill again. And God help me if I didn't think that someone like me had already cut the story for the late news. That someone had, through the same sort of magic or what-have-you that made me cut the Serling obituary, caused that DC-8 to drop out of the sky."
"That's..." Annie didn't know how to describe what he'd told her so she merely said, "Wow."
Burt uttered a morose chuckle. "Honey, that is the understatement of the goddamn century. And you know, there isn't a day goes by I don't wish I'd died in that crash. That it ended, whatever the hell it is, with me on that plane in 1975."
"Cut to forty years later," Annie said sardonically.
"More like a long cross-dissolve. All told I've killed thirty-eight people. I wish like hell I'd had the guts to kill myself."
Annie's father might have Amen-ed to that. Of course having sent an innocent man to the chair in 1990, and having later discovered the deceased's innocence through DNA evidence linking the murder-rapes to a man already doing time for aggravated assault, Judge Orville Watkins had hung himself from the bannister in the Watkins family home.
Executioner was her family legacy.
"Why me, Burt? Why did it have to be me?"
"It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it." He favored her with a dour smile, crushing another smelly butt on the table. "I wish I knew. I'm sorry, but I didn't choose you anymore than I was chosen."
"That's what Walt said. I think there's more to it than that."
Burt shifted uncomfortably, wiping away bits of cut grass that had blown up onto the table. "It wasn't a choice, you gotta understand that. You ever see someone for the first time and swear you've met before? It's like that. First time I
saw you, day you brought in your resume, I passed you in the foyer and knew--I knew--you were the one. I gave my notice that same day. Then when we shook hands..."
"The spark."
"Passing on the torch. Old Jewish fella by the name of Ham Gottlieb ended up blowing his brains out with an antique Ruger after passing on the hex or whatever it is to me. I mean this guy survived the Holocaust, and he couldn't hold another week with what he'd done."
"You think it's a curse?"
"Annie, I wish I knew. This is powerful shit you're dealing with. I mean, this thing survived film, videotape, all the way into the digital age. Who knows, it could have existed before film, maybe the guy who passed it on to Gottlieb wrote obits for the Times-Picayune. All I know for sure is you don't just quit on it. I learned that the hard way."
He slipped the end of a cigarette out of the pack.
"Not another one," Annie said. "Please."
Burt shrugged, tapping the butt back inside. She thanked him. Her lungs thanked him.
"I still don't get how you knew they'd pick me. They could've picked anybody for the job."
"Same way I knew my time was up, and for the same reason old Ham Gottlieb picked me out of every kid who put in an application, I suppose." He traced out the symbol for infinity with a finger on the table. After a moment, he looked up at Annie again. "Way I figure, they don't know they're doing it. Probably think the decision was theirs, when they hired you. When they hired me. But it's not. They're just playing into the hands of fate."
Annie shook her head. "So there's nothing I can do. I just have to--what? Wait thirty years for that feeling to hit me? Pass it on to the next poor kid who drops off her resume?"
"I honestly don't know." Burt smoothed his mustache. "I feel for you, kid, sincerely, I do. But... and this might sound insensitive... but have you considered keeping the balance?"
"Like what? Yoga? Fucking meditation?"
Burt snickered. "Hell no! I mean, you make a standby for someone who might actually deserve it. Maybe get some serial killer's death penalty put on the fast-track." He shrugged. "Make some scumbag scam-artist like Madoff get his just desserts."
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