Last Call

by Libby Kirsch

Stella hid her smile behind the camera. Four dead sheep were no doubt a loss to the farmer, but she couldn’t help wondering what her college roommates—many of whom had just started law school, teaching jobs, or banking and real estate careers—would think of her story today. In a few minutes she’d get video of Jake, the guard llama that protected most of his flock from a wild coyote.

  “And I’m sorry, but can you explain why the sheriff’s office is involved in livestock deaths on Margaret and Steven Dorner’s farm?”

  “How long’ve you been here, now, Stella?” Carlson squinted at her, and she got the feeling he was annoyed to be explaining basic government operations for the state of Montana.

  “Well, this is the end of my first week on the job, so that makes it my…” she looked up at the sky, “Yeah, my sixth day in Montana.”

  He blew out a noisy sigh. “Well, Miss Stella. Here in Gallatin County, we coordinate the response from the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation.” He spread his arms wide. “This is federal land, but the Dorner’s have a grazing lease for his sheep. If we have a coyote poaching farm animals off federal lands, we want to help the farmer. The local DNRC office closed a few years ago due to budget cuts, so we gather information for the office up in Helena and report back to them. Then they let us know what kind of resources they might have to help the farmer. We also don’t like wild coyotes getting too comfortable near civilization.”

  She raised her eyebrows and scanned the horizon. They were about as far from civilization as she’d ever been; on top of a mountain at the edge of a farm in the middle of nowhere. Squinty eyes dared her to ask a follow up question when she turned back to the Sheriff. “Ah, just one more, ah… just one more question…” But her mind went blank. “Ah... never mind, I guess that’s it.”

  Carlson grinned and hitched up his brown, standard issue uniform pants. Even at their adjusted height, they still didn’t cover his potbelly. His sandy blond hair stuck to his head with sweat from the mid-August sun, and uniform looked uncomfortably tight.

  Stella turned back to her camera and got some shots of the barn and the surrounding farmlands. When the sheriff started walking, she slung the camera and deck over one shoulder, then grabbed the tripod with her free hand and followed. Her heels sank into the soft earth with each step.

  An unwelcome surprise waited for them inside the barn.

  “John, glad you could join us.” Carlson smiled and clapped the other man on the shoulder. “We were just about to get started.”

  John Stevenson was unarguably the most attractive man Stella had ever laid eyes on. His smartly tailored suit couldn’t hide his muscular body, and his handsome profile looked ready for network. A lock of dark brown hair fell across his forehead and his blue-gray eyes studied her with interest.

  Unfortunately, he was the competition—the reporter from the only other TV news station in town.

  He smiled at her, but spoke to Carlson. “Sheriff, thanks for including me.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to do this twice, so I figured I’d call all the local media so we could knock this out.”

  Stella’s gut clenched. The sheriff had called John? She’d had to twist his arm to get him to agree to this interview—then he’d gone and called the competition? She glared at the ground. So much for her exclusive.

  John lifted the heavy deck from her shoulder and laid it on his own. He was also a one-man-band reporter; they both shot video, and then wrote and edited their stories for air—however John got to do it all with a much smaller, much lighter camera. His station had upgraded equipment just two years earlier, and he shot on an easy to carry DVC-Pro camera. Her shoulder tingled where he’d brushed against her, and she shrugged the feeling away.

  “Let’s set up over here. There’s great light coming in from the east windows.”

  She was annoyed to have to follow John—both literally—a cord ran from the camera on her shoulder to the deck on his—and figuratively. This was her story, she shouldn’t let John call the shots! She opened her mouth to say as much, but John spoke first.

  “How’d you get Bill James to talk?”

  “Oh,” Stella took the deck from him and started setting up her shot. “I just got lucky.” She didn’t feel like going into the particulars of how the day before yesterday, on just her third day as a TV news reporter, she’d knocked on the accused criminal’s door. Or how she’d nearly thrown up when Bill James flew down off the porch swearing at her. And she certainly didn’t want to tell him how she’d forgotten to put a tape in the deck the first time round, or how James had been so nice about doing the interview over again. How she’d managed to calm him down and convince him to do an on-camera interview in the first place, she still didn’t know.

  “Hmm,” John continued to stare at her, and under his unwavering gaze, she felt blood rush to her cheeks. “Detective Sharpe thinks they’ll dismiss the charges against him.”

  “I heard that, too,” Stella said. “Sounds like he has an air-tight alibi. The whole thing is weird.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was accused of breaking into a woman’s house when she wasn’t home and trying on her panties!” She snorted. “I mean, if no one was home, how did anyone know who did it, right? That’s weird.”

  “People are weird, Stella.” The Sheriff looked over and frowned. John lowered his voice. “I didn’t really think about it that day, but yes, things obviously didn’t add up.”

  “Well.” Stella shrugged and adjusted her audio levels. Sheriff Carlson wouldn’t comment on the case against James, but she had a call into Detective Ronald Sharpe, and hoped she’d get an update for the evening news on the case.

  “Will you be live with this breaking news tonight?” John’s arm swept across the barn, his smirk somehow coming across as sweet.

  “I don’t think so.” Her stomach fluttered at the thought. Her first live shot had been a disaster. Her boss told her that he’d be introducing this one from the anchor desk.

  “Maybe for the best,” he said, then at her disgruntled expression he added, “You never know what can happen at these small stations. You should have seen my first live shot here. The studio cam lost hydraulic power, so it slowly sank down to the floor. In the middle of my live shot! I crouched down to stay in frame, then kneeled—and when the camera kept sinking, I realized I was in it for real. Eventually I was lying on the floor to finish what I was saying. Disaster.”

  Stella burst out laughing. “John, you just made that up!”

  “Swear to God. It was awful. Welcome to a small market, right?” He turned to look at her with a swoon-worthy grin.

  Carlson walked over with the farmer, Mr. Dorner, and they got back to business. In the end, John was right—there was great light coming in the barn’s east windows. Jake the llama would be bathed in a hero’s golden light.

  It would be the lead story on both newscasts that evening, and for the first time since arriving in the state, Stella thought that maybe working in a small market wasn’t going to be so bad.

  * * *

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