And, God help her, the compulsory “local story.”
She winced. At the moment, this meant watching Kirk’s proposed follow-up to the controversial “pooper-scooper” ordinance, just passed by City Council. She listened as his canned voice filled the claustrophobic booth.
“…leading to public uproar,” Kirk’s televised talking head intoned, “as residents face down the rising tide of canine waste. The passing of the legislation led to a ‘terrorist incident’ by anonymous pet protestors late Saturday afternoon, who set a bag of burning stools on the courthouse steps…”
“Okay,” he said, leaning over Laura’s shoulder, faintly brushing the fabric of her blouse. “Right here’s where we cut to the bag.”
Mike, in the edit chair, shifted between the Beta decks. The youngest cameraman on the team, he and Kirk were ‘PAL’s odd couple. He was twenty-two, with long stringy blond hair hanging over wire-rimmed aviator-framed glasses and a horsey, open face. On slow days, he did bong hits out in his van. So far, it had been a very slow day.
“Cutting to B,” he said, toggling the controls.
On the monitor, the image blipped, cutting from Kirk and his microphone to a close-up of a burning paper bag on the courthouse steps. Black smoke plumed off the flames. The color drained from Laura’s face.
“Jesus,” she whispered, aghast. “You got footage?”
“Actually, it’s a re-creation,” Mike said, smiling. “We shot it after everyone left.”
Kirk smiled. Laura didn’t. The psychological room temperature dropped twenty degrees. His voice-over continued.
“…while no one knows what the outcome will be, one thing remains certain: the fight for pooper-scooper repeal will go on for some time to come. From the county courthouse, this is Kirk Bogarde, WPAL Action News.”
A slo-mo close-up of the burning bag appeared on the screen, smoke wafting up as a foot came down to stomp it. It froze and held.
“Awesome,” Mike grinned, mostly to himself. Kirk looked at Laura expectantly.
“Well?” he said, beaming. “What do you think?”
Laura took a deep breath, exhaled wearily.
“Give me a minute to recover,” she said.
Laura Jenson was a tough, cool, competent woman in her middle thirties. She was dark-eyed, slim, and elegantly restrained. She was also smarter than almost everyone she knew, a simple fact that simultaneously shaped both her conscience and her cynicism.
The eldest daughter of New England liberal Democratic professionals, Laura had graduated top of every class she ever joined, from kindergarten through University of Atlanta. Her last job—with an Atlanta-based CBS affiliate—had ended when her husband’s job transfer had brought them north to the outbacks of Pennsylvania.
Laura had taken the change in grudging stride, mitigating the culture shock by parlaying it into an upward move in a lateral market. Weekend news director was a rung up the ladder, and she wanted to make the most of it.
She was ready for controversy; hell, she lusted for it. But this…
“Words fail me,” she said, resisting the urge to simply eviscerate him. “First, I don’t think bags of flaming shit will sit well with Chris or Tom. Or our audience.”
“Jesus, get real,” Kirk countered, standing his ground. “City Council was in session for a fucking week over dog turds, for chrissakes! Besides,” he continued, “it’s not even real shit. We soaked some rags in kerosene…”
“That’s not the point,” Laura said angrily. “We are a news department, Kirk! News!” She drew the N-word out for emphasis. “This isn’t America’s Most Wanted, okay? We don’t do reenactments! Am I getting through to you?”
Laura searched Kirk’s features for a glimmer of understanding. Not even. It was gonna be one of those days. She could already feel a headache building, the kind that would take up residence behind her sinuses and wang all the livelong day.
The kind with Kirk’s name written all over it.
Chris Crowley, the genius who’d hired Kirk, was off weekends. Chris was the news director, and her immediate boss, answering only to Tom Huntington, the station manager. In the immediate chain of command, that left Laura in charge and, hence, Laura’s butt on the firing line.
Super, she thought. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Tom. And thank you, Jesus.
“Alright, tighten it up, and lose that goddam bag,” she decided. “We’ll run it if nothing better happens.”
Kirk took the biscuit badly. Aw, thought Laura, pressing on. “What else have you got?”
The image blinked out on the monitor.
“Uh-oh,” Mike said. “Looks like brunch.”
“Oh, shit!” Kirk wailed as the Beta deck, in its infinite wisdom, gobbled his reenactment. “Shit, shit, shit! Can you fix it?”
Mike shrugged, hit “eject.” It groaned and locked up tight. He poked the cartridge with his pen, tried to jiggle it free, to no avail. It was jammed, tape bunching into the heads like an Escher ribbon.
“Nope,” he said. “I told you, man, these decks are hammered by the time they make it down here. There must be fifteen thousand hours on the heads. They’re ready for the tar pit.”
“Let’s go to Two,” Laura suggested, rising from her seat.
“Two’s down,” Kirk said, frustrated.
Mike nodded. “Maintenance.”
“Great,” she muttered, then turned to Mike. “Call Bob and tell him to get someone down here, ASAP!”
Mike got up to make the call, squeezing past Kirk and out the door. It left Kirk and Laura uncomfortably close to one another. She stood and went to press past him, and he grabbed her shoulder.
“Let go of me,” she said. A static charge of electricity sparked between them. Their eyes met and held, defiance and denial slam-dancing in the airspace between them. He disengaged pointedly, hands up in a gesture of ersatz supplication.
“So, fine,” he said, pouting. “You didn’t like it.”
She made a terse what can I say? gesture. “I didn’t like the bullshit…”
“Dog shit,” he corrected, still moping, though he took the time to slip a little bad-boy twinkle in his eye.
For some reason, that was all it took to push her over the edge.
“Listen!” she snapped; and before he could react, she was bouncing her knuckles off the top of his skull.
“Ow!” His hands came up. He backed off, startled.
“Hello!” she called out, rapping smartly on his scalp again. “Hello, Mr. Potato Head! Anybody home…?”
“HEY!” This time, he caught her hand and held it. “DON’T…”
“Don’t what?” she snarled.
He stopped in his tracks. She nailed his gaze. He let go of her hand. She drove the point home. Throughout it all, their eyes never left each other’s.
“Now you listen to me,” she growled, low in her throat. “If you want to keep your job, you just shut up and listen.”
She paused to make sure he got the message this time. He certainly seemed to. His eyeballs were huge.
“You’re good,” she continued. “And everybody knows it. You’re talent is not the problem here. But if you want to be taken seriously, you’ve got to cut the kiddie shit and bring me something real…”
“Well, fine,” he spat, defiant. “When are you gonna let me do some real news?”
“When you learn to distinguish your ass from your elbow.” She hoped that the words were as cold as she felt. “There’s a whole wide world of real news out there! When you bring me some, I’ll use it. Believe me.
“In the meantime, why don’t you just grow the hell up.”
Kirk’s gaze faltered; the eyeball war was, for the moment, won. She wanted to rejoice, but alas, there was still no joy in Mudville. He was making his wounded puppy face.
And, damn her heart, she felt guilty again.
Their affair was one of ‘PAL’s worst-kept secrets; studboy-reporter meets married boss-woman. Film at eleven. It was yet another piece of unfinished bu
siness; Laura wondered why she’d ever started it more often than she liked to admit.
It wasn’t just the age difference, or the point spread on the IQ scale, or the fact that he plugged some of the holes her marriage had left unfilled. In fact, she really didn’t know what it was. They certainly didn’t respect each other. She thought he was a harbinger of doom for a generation weaned on style over content. He thought she was a tight-ass, both literally and figuratively.
The first time they fucked, it was like worlds colliding.
And every time since, she swore it would be the last.
Here in the station, however, Laura held her ground. No retreat in battle. Ever. When his gaze dragged back up to lock with hers, she was more than prepared to fire his ass if she had to.
Then the police scanner went off, and changed their lives forever.
When the squad car came up against the first downed tree, Officer Hal Thoman was forced to hump the last leg of Toad Road on foot. All the while, he thought of Trina. As substitutions went, it left a lot to be desired.
Trina was the hot little blonde tending the night counter down at the Mister Krispy donut shop. Only twenty-two, and rumor had it her personal hygiene regimen included shaving where the sun don’t shine. Now, normally Hal hated smalltown gossip—small-minded people who knew too much about other folks’ business and not enough to mind their own—but in this case, he had to admit he was intrigued.
Their paths had been crossing for quite some time, as she went off shift and he came on; and lately, she’d taken to lingering way past quitting time. Hal both appreciated and drew encouragement from this, and in fact just this morning had hit Mister Krispy with every intention of asking her out.
Until, of course, the goddamned call came in.
Now he was slogging through puddles and mud instead, hot on the trail of hardened, squirrel-hunting desperados.
Courtesy of Bernard S. Kleigel.
Goddammit, it ain’t right, he thought as he rounded the bend, his cruiser disappearing, swallowed by woods. The whole damn county knows about Bernie Kleigel, between his letters to the editors and his goddam nine-one-ones. If ol’ Bernie said there was a drug war in the forest, Hal figured it just as likely he’d find Manuel Noriega duking it out with Bigfoot in the grudge match of the century.
Hell, even if he found the alleged perpetrators—most likely the Hinds boys, Ralph and Jimmy J.—Hal wasn’t about to do much more than waggle his finger. As a kid, he’d left more than his share of shell casings on posted land. The more powerful temptation was to write up Bernie, though Hal didn’t recall any specific ordinance prohibiting people from making flaming buttholes of themselves.
Hal climbed the rutted grade of the road, his sporty orange don’t-shoot-me vest resplendent over his uniform. Storm really tore the woods to shit, he noted; downed limbs and broken branches were everywhere. He put his trained police eye to work by itemizing all puddles more than twenty feet long or twelve across. Strange, but there were fewer of them the closer he got to the bridge.
In fact, in the short span ahead, he didn’t see any puddles at all. It was like the ground had sucked up all the excess moisture, turning the road’s surface into something soft yet not quite mud: a near-gelatinous continuum that squished and gave a little beneath your feet, taking the imprint of your shoe without ever quite breaking its skin…
Hal jumped; a wet crackle had sounded behind him. He whirled and caught the last glimpse of something sliding off an oak tree’s face. It was a magazine-sized hunk of bark; and when it fell, it left a gummy underpatch in its wake.
“Son of a bitch,” Hal said. His vision was excellent, but he was starting to wonder about the sights. There was something not right about the exposed stretch of tree skin. It made him want to do a quick reality check.
He stepped off the road, and realized at once that the grass felt wrong. The blades stuck fast to his soles; but when he peeled loose, with a scrinching Velcro sound, they held their roots.
Laying flat for a moment.
Then slowly, deliberately, pulling upright again.
“This is weird,” he informed himself. He stopped, thought about it for a second, decided that he was right. He turned—scrinch, scrinch—and hunkered down on his haunches, bringing his thumb and index fingertips together around a solitary blade of grass.
It bit him.
“Yowch!” he barked out, genuinely surprised. “Goddam!”
He checked his finger for cuts, saw only a pinprick of red, veneered by a tacky glaze.
His hand began to tingle.
Hal stood, apprehensive, and his gaze shot over at the oak. Now he could see what was wrong with this picture.
Now he could see the unnerving, infinitesimal array of undulating grub-things, burrowing blind through the punky, fibrous interior…
I’ve been in these woods a thousand times, he flashed, but I’ve never seen nothing like this. It was as if some plague had fallen, put a blight on the trees and on the earth itself.
He looked through the trees to the bridge.
And, for the first time, noticed the truck.
Hal Thoman felt nothing but wrongness now, a nasty sour ache in the pit of his stomach. The truck looked extremely fucked-up from here. If this was a pattern, it wasn’t a good one.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. “County, this is Adam-sixty. Do you copy?” he spoke into his handset. It bounced the signal back to the cruiser, which in turn boosted it back to County Control.
“Roger, Adam-sixty,” the dispatcher’s voice came back over the box on his hip, salted with dropouts and static. “What’s your twenty?”
“Roger, County, I’m out at Black Bridge,” he replied. “I’ve got an abandoned truck up on the structure. Looks like it might be that ten-seven vehicle reported this morning. Whoever took it left it pretty blasted,” he added. “I’m checking it out.”
“Roger, Adam-sixty. Approach with caution.”
“You got that right,” he said. “Adam-sixty out.”
Caution was not the word, Hal realized as he walked out onto the bridge. It didn’t quite capture the feeling. Dread was more like it. Oughta be a new code, he laughed nervously. Approach with dread.
The roar of the creek surrounded him, filling his head with thunder. The rails and rock bed were slick under his feet, sticky with waste oil. Tar. And worse. The tingle had spread up his arm, and lodged in his shoulder like a fat knot of tension.
But all of that paled in comparison with the sight of the truck.
“Blasted” is a severe understatement, he thought. They flat-out nuked the bastard. It looked like some giant psychotic toddler had taken his Tonka truck to hell. The driver’s door hung open, mangled; the windows no longer existed. Chunks of safety glass rimmed the frames like the stubs of broken teeth. The paint job was cracked and ashen, flaked down to the metal in a thousand places.
There were maybe a dozen barrels, on and around the truck. Not burned, he realized. Blistered. Like the truck. The tops were blown. Trace residues of a milky sludge leaked out of one, seeping into the rocky truck bed.
Hal picked his way through the mine field, careful to touch nothing. He came up on the passenger side, deciphered the lettering still visible on the door. “Aha,” he said, peering into the cab.
The keys were still in the ignition.
“Bingo,” he said. “I got you, you sons of bitches.” Thieves didn’t generally use keys. And Trina’s personal habits weren’t the only things buzzing on the gossip mills. The Pussers got their fair share, too; and unlike Trina’s, none of it was good.
Now sometimes lowlife hunks of shit had guardian angels that covered their asses. And sometimes you had to turn your back if you wanted to get along in the world. As a cop, he’d had to scarf that bitter pill at least a thousand times over.
But if you aimed to buck the odds and take a shot at real justice, you needed proof. As in physical evidence.
It took no rocket scientist to put this one t
ogether. Just the sight of all those empty barrels, the truck pulled up with its tailgate hanging over the side, made him so goddam crazy he thought he was gonna explode.
I ain’t sure exactly what happened here, he seethed, but I’m about to find out. And when I do, I will nail you to the fuckin’ walls. Believe it.
“Adam-sixty to County,” he said, reading the plates off the front. “Holding Pee-Aye license number Thomas X-Ray three nine nine three. We have a possible HazMat problem here…”
He looked at the toasted barrels again, paused to consider his words. “Uh, County, maybe we should switch to Echo-Four,” he said, only now thinking of the ears that might be listening in. There was a harsh bark of static in the handset. “Uh, County?”
His lips were tingling.
“Jesus!” Kirk blurted, mind racing. “Did he just say what I think he said?”
“God, let’s hope so,” Laura answered, pinning back the scanner’s volume and grabbing a pencil. She’d cranked the controls while they were in editing; when the call first came, it blew through the news department like a bomb blast.
Laura checked a map and scribbled. This was a godsend: a stolen truck was good for maybe a thirty-second fill—a full sixty, if it was really trashed. But this…this had possibilities. This could save her from pooper-scooper hell.
Kirk, for his part, was all but foaming at the mouth. The breakup had reduced the signal to mush, but not before he’d heard that magic word. It was his ticket to the stars, the big break he’d been waiting for.
HAZMAT. Hazardous Materials. The moonmen.
My God, he thought. If there’s been a spill…
“I’m on it,” he said, making for the stairs. In the background, Mike appeared in the camera bay doorway, saddled up and ready to roll.
“Wait, wait!” Laura called after him, notepad in hand. Her hair fell across her face as she tuned one ear to their tape of the scanner broadcast, nodding rhythmically and scribbling.
“Wait? Wait for what?” Kirk fidgeted, halfway out the door.
“For this,” Laura said, ripping the sheet of paper off the pad. “It helps if you have directions.”
The Bridge Page 6