A few of Laurie’s coworkers from BNN were already gathered at a craft beer bar in the East Village when we walked in, but my attention was drawn to the cute, slightly tousled guy reading the New York Times alone at a table. Reading an actual paper? How old school. It made him look more interesting than the TV guys on their iPhones. When Charlie stood up to get a beer, my eyes followed him to the bar and then back to his table for one. It was clear he wasn’t one of those slick city guys who was trying too hard. In fact, he didn’t seem to be trying at all. He didn’t appear to own an iron—and it was possible he’d misplaced his comb. Later that night as we chatted at the bar and he described his recent trip to Argentina, I was transfixed. I wanted to hear more. About his trip . . . and him. Charlie Sterling. His name had such a nice ring to it, I couldn’t help trying it on for size. Amanda Sterling. Of course, I wouldn’t use that on the air. I already had a little name recognition as Gallo—even if it was just on New York’s smallest station.
Mom was relieved that my new boyfriend was an associate professor at NYU, rather than a drummer in a rock band. Mom was all for career success, of course—she was over the moon when I’d gotten a scholarship to journalism school—but lately she’d begun mentioning, not so subtly, how wonderful it was that women today could “have it all,” which I knew was code for have a successful career and produce some grandchildren.
The flashing blue lights of police cruisers told me we’d found the right corner, and I pointed Charlie to the middle of the block and a small brick building with three crisp American flags waving in front. And there, across the street, sat a sole hulking satellite truck, vibrating loudly, with BNN written in big royal blue letters on its side. I could already imagine Laurie inside that truck, notepad in hand, prepping Gabe “America’s Premier Newsman” Wellborn to go live. Those two were unbeatable. I looked around for their live shot setup but didn’t see a tripod, or even a cameraman pulling cables. Was the story already over? Maybe the gunman was already in custody. For a second, my heart sank. Maybe the hostage situation was resolved and this wasn’t my moment after all. I put my hand to my breastbone to slow the beating.
I marched up to the BNN sat truck, Charlie right behind me, and was about to climb its metal mesh stairs when the door swung open with a loud creak and Laurie blew out, shouting over her shoulder, “If they won’t let us shoot through the window, just spray the scene!”
“Hey!” I said.
“Hey,” she answered, then asked, “Who do I have to fuck around here to get some B-roll?”
That made me laugh and realize the whole thing must be over. Laurie’s fotog would probably just shoot some video wallpaper to be used in a reporter package later when the evening anchor recapped top stories.
“Is it over?” I asked. “Did they get the guy?”
“No, he’s still in there. Nine hostages, they think.”
“Oh, good,” I accidentally said. “Who is he?”
“Don’t know. The cops aren’t saying. There’s a presser at eleven, but that’s too late. I gotta start getting elements for a package now. Where’s your crew?” she asked, looking down at Charlie and me from the stairs.
“The desk hadn’t even found a fotog yet when I called. I have to do a phoner as soon as I get some details.”
She nodded at my legs. “And just out of curiosity, where are your pants?”
“I don’t have any! I thought we were just going to the beach!”
“Well, okay then!” she said, like I had won that point. “By the way, I’m starving. If this thing is wrapped up by lunchtime, I hear there’s a great burger place down the road. Anyway, come into the truck. I’ve got to start crashing this piece.”
I stared up at Laurie swinging into breaking news mode and remembered the first time I ever saw her: the first day of my very first TV job as a desk assistant at BNN seven years ago. I felt so lucky to have scored such a plum job right out of college, at a network no less! That first day, as I fidgeted with the rest of the desk assistants, clutching our pens and notepads, looking around for clues on where to stand and what to do, I noticed a young woman, game face on, already hard at work, sitting at a Beta machine logging a stack of tapes. Her long red hair was pulled up in a messy bun with a pencil stuck through the middle holding it in place. I heard one of the guys on the desk say, “You’re kicking ass, Laurie.” It took me a week to realize she’d started the same day as the rest of us but had gotten there earlier and was already running the joint.
We were just twenty-two years old, but somehow Laurie wasn’t intimidated by Gabe Wellborn, and she didn’t audibly chortle, like one kid did, when Gabe told us to refer to him as “America’s Premier Newsman.” Our first month at BNN, while I tried to cajole cameramen into shooting stand-ups for my résumé tape, Laurie convinced a famous money manager turned Ponzi-scheme swindler to give Gabe an exclusive one-on-one interview. From that moment, she was Gabe’s right hand.
Weirdly, Laurie never wanted to be on camera. She had all the right ingredients—tenacity, brains, great looks—yet she only wanted to make Gabe look good. I didn’t get it. Why wouldn’t she want her own face and voice recognized by millions?
“On camera? Oh, God, no,” she’d said when I asked her about it once. “All that hair and makeup stuff. Everybody’s eyes on you. Having to eat rice cakes to fit into clothes. No, thanks.” I was pretty sure Laurie knew I didn’t eat rice cakes, but I didn’t press the point because explaining why I wanted recognition and stardom and the adulation of strangers made me feel shallow and in need of a shrink. Of course, Laurie was famous, in the business, among other producers, who considered her a powerhouse. And she didn’t seem to mind when viewers sent fan mail to Gabe about a stellar piece or great interview he’d done, though it was Laurie who made those happen. I didn’t get it, but I admired it.
“Is Gabe here yet?” I asked her now, as she stood on the stairs of the sat truck.
“God, no. He’s at some golf tournament in Virginia. I called him, but he said he’s not coming back unless a lot of people are killed.”
“Gross,” Charlie said.
“Yeah, they’re going to send some other correspondent. Gabe doesn’t go to mass shootings anymore unless the body count is more than ten.” Laurie rolled her eyes, but I could tell she was proud that Gabe was such a big star he could call the shots, so to speak. “Remember when six people were shot at that office building last month?” she asked. “Gabe said, ‘Not good enough!’” She imitated Gabe’s authoritative voice and raised a hand like he was Julius Caesar or someone.
I shook my head and let out a chuckle at Gabe saying out loud what my news director would only whisper: that mass shootings had become so commonplace, unless it was another Virginia Tech or Newtown, maybe they weren’t worth the cost of hopping on an airplane to cover them.
“That’s disturbing,” Charlie said, and I quickly forced my smile to go flat. Oh, that’s right, normal people don’t find newsroom humor funny. And they don’t root for breaking news to be big and bloody. Even on a typical day, Laurie had a tendency to treat covering tragedy as a routine part of her job description, like morning conference calls or last-minute travel.
“I’m going to go look for some coffee,” Charlie said. “Do you want some breakfast?”
“I’d love that,” I told him. “And if you see a Walmart or something, can you grab me some pants?”
That’s when the sound of three gunshots sliced through the air. Bang! Bang, bang! I involuntarily ducked and screamed. “Oh, my God! What was that?”
“Goddammit!” Laurie yelled into the truck, “Petey, get our shot up now!”
I turned to see a line of four guys in black SWAT gear with guns drawn run toward the building.
“I need everyone to clear the area,” a police officer barked, using his arm to push us back off the sidewalk.
“We’re journalists!” Laurie yelled at h
im. “BNN and Newschannel 13!” Even in the anxiety of that moment, I loved Laurie for putting us together like that, as if Newschannel 13 were in the same category as the network.
“I need to see your credentials or you need to clear the scene,” he said, eyeing my bare legs.
I rooted around in my purse for the lanyard string that held my ID and office key, holding it up for him, forgoing an explanation for my lack of pants.
“I’ll head out,” Charlie told the cop, and again, I felt a ping of pride at Laurie’s and my privileged positions.
“We need to secure this area. All live shots have to be behind this line,” the cop said, stringing yellow tape from one street pole to the next. Another squad of police cruisers raced past us to the corner, and I spotted Detective Pultro in the crowd, conferring with another officer.
“Detective!” I yelled and started jogging toward him. “Detective Pultro!”
He saw me and looked annoyed, then turned away.
“Detective! Just one second,” I yelled, using my hand to summon him toward me.
He held up a finger to the other cop like he’d be back in one second.
“Make it fast, Amanda,” he told me.
“What’s happening in there? Has anyone been hurt?” I asked, using a euphemism for killed because it was too upsetting to think people were lying dead yards away from us.
“Don’t know yet. Our guys aren’t inside. We’ve got eyes on the guy from outside. But we don’t know who’s shot.”
“Who’s the gunman?”
“I told you on the phone we haven’t confirmed that yet.”
“I know, but surely you’ve got something. Have you run all the plates in the parking lot?”
He exhaled. “Amanda, you know you gotta go through my PIO.”
“I know, I know,” I said. “I was just thinking maybe you have something I could work with. And, well, I was also thinking how great it is to have Lester Kravec behind bars.”
He gave me a look and his lips tightened. “Yes, Kravec was a very bad guy.”
It seemed like he was about to walk away, so I went on. “You know, it’s so rare to be able to feature one of those cold fugitive cases on the news. News directors only want fresh stories. I mean, obviously I was able to convince mine to cover the Kravec case, even though it was fifteen years old, because I knew how important it was.” That’s when I saw the inverted V on his sleeve and remembered. “And it was really great that you got promoted to Detective Sergeant after Kravec was captured, I mean after all your hard work, you know, staying on the case all those years. But mostly it was great that we got Kravec.” I smiled at him.
“You’re a pain in the ass, you know that?” he said.
“So are you,” I told him.
He turned his head away from me, like he was looking down the street and said, “Richard Betts.”
“B-E-T-S?” I asked.
“Two t’s.”
“What else?”
“Fifty-seven years old. Pennsylvania plates. You might check Facebook,” he said.
“Thank you. You’re the best,” I told him.
“You’re still a pain in the ass,” he told me, then turned and walked briskly back to the cluster of cops. I ran back to the BNN truck and up the precarious steps, ripping open the door. “I got some info,” I told Laurie. Just then, I heard a loud rumble from down the road and saw another satellite truck rounding the corner, a yellow-lettered logo on the side.
“Shit! That’s ABC,” I said.
“Fuck!” Laurie said, “I need my fucking talent to get here. I will not let ABC beat us.”
“Can you pull something up on your laptop?” I asked her. “I’ve got to do this phoner.”
“I saw you working your cop over there,” she said, and I got an unexpected ego tingle from Laurie’s lingo. She was the person famous for working sources, not me. “What’d he give you?”
“He gave me a name and said to check Facebook.”
“That’s it?” she said, and I realized what a rookie I was compared to her. Laurie would have gotten more.
“When are they sending you a reporter?” I asked, looking around, half expecting some big-time BNN correspondent to suddenly pop out of the edit bay, microphone in hand, and elbow me out of the way to do a live shot before my phoner. But all I saw were two coffee-stained Styrofoam cups on a tabletop and a half-eaten box of Little Debbie donuts, its lid still open. Laurie’s fotog had telltale white powder on the front of his T-shirt and incriminating crumbs on his console.
“Petey, you know my friend Amanda. Newschannel 13’s finest,” Laurie said, taking a seat on a rolling chair and starting to type into her laptop. “What’s the name?”
“Richard Betts. Two t’s.”
“Shit, there’s a hundred of them,” she said, looking at the screen.
“Look for one from Pennsylvania.” I told her.
“Here’s one,” she said. “He has some sort of blog post. Says, ‘Let’s go ahead and invite as many Rapefugees in, then kill them. The Government = THE DEVIL.’”
I started reading over her shoulder. The text ran down the page with no paragraph breaks but plenty of ALL CAPS, misspellings, and grammatical oddities. WAKE UP SINNERS U CANT SAVE YOURSELF U WILL DIE AND WORMS SHALL EAT YOUR FLESH, NOW YOUR SOUL IS GOING SOMEWHERE. TIME FOR REVOLUTION.
“Oh, my God. Does it say how old he is?” I asked.
“Fifty-seven.”
“I think that’s him,” I said and leaned closer. “Look at the next part. TURN ON THE TV AND LISTEN. GOVERNMENT DESTROYS. WELCOMED FOREIGNORS, GAVE THEM OUR JOBS, AND THEY TAKE OUR FREEDOM TO PROTECT OURSELVES FROM THEM. AMERICA FIRST. LEAD THE WORLD OUT OF SODOM AND SIN. THE EMPIRE WON’T BE DESTROYED. WE’RE NOT GOING ANYWHERE FOLLOW US!”
I stared at the oxymoronic brilliance of that last sentence, then looked up from the laptop at Laurie. “I’ve got to call the PIO and get her to confirm all this. We need a second source. And I need to get on the air! I need a crew. And a truck! I gotta break this story!”
Laurie was still scrolling down his blog post, when she stopped and looked straight up at me.
“Petey, set up for a live shot,” she ordered.
“But we don’t have a correspondent yet,” he said.
“We do now,” Laurie said.
“What?” Petey asked, turning toward me and pointing with his thumb. “We can’t put a reporter from Newschannel 13 on our air.”
“You’d rather have ABC beat us?” Laurie said. “Set it up.”
My head started swimming. This was the moment I’d been waiting for, but it was even bigger. If Laurie put me on BNN, people not just in New York but around the country would wake up, turn on their TVs, and I would be on their screens, the first to tell them the news.
“Oh, my God,” I said, covering my mouth with my hand, eyes popping at Laurie. “Can we do this?”
“I don’t see why not,” she said, pressing numbers on her cell phone. “I’ll tell our desk I just hired you as a one-day stringer. They’ll be psyched if we get on before ABC. Call your desk. Tell them you’re the first reporter here and you need to be the first on the air. Give them our coordinates. They can pull it off the bird. Petey, get off your ass.”
“She can’t go on air like that,” Petey said, cocking his head at my bare legs, flip-flops, bed head, and hangover, which I was pretty sure was now visible.
“He’s right,” I admitted. “I need your shirt, Laur.”
Laurie gave a quick nod and started unbuttoning her wrinkled white blouse, then stopped. “Turn around, Petey. You can’t handle seeing a set of tatas like these.”
“Shit,” Petey muttered, turning away to face the monitors on his edit bay.
Laurie’s shirt reeked of stale cigarette smoke.
“Your shirt stinks,” I told her.
“Late night,” she mumbled, pulling my pink T-shirt over her head.
“Do you have another notepad?” I asked.
“Wow. A reporter without a notepad, a laptop, a sat truck, a shirt, or pants,” Laurie said. “You must be a helluva reporter.”
“Hey, I got the gunman’s name!” I reminded her.
“So,” she said, theatrically putting her first finger to her lower lip and tapping, “what will you owe me for all this?”
“My life!” I said fast, my heart pounding.
“Not very creative,” she said.
“My firstborn,” I tried, grabbing the notepad from her.
“A baby?” Laurie pulled her chin in toward her neck and looked like she might throw up. “No, thanks.”
Then I got it. I knew the right answer. “My Peabody, when I win it for breaking news coverage.”
At that, Laurie touched her first finger to her nose and pointed the other one at me. “Now you’re talking.”
That was our Everest. The elusive Peabody, the apex of awards that forevermore signaled we were at the top of the journalism mount. In a field that says you’re only as good as your last story, where news directors forget the killer package or awesome live shot they complimented you on just yesterday, the Peabody was forever, the credential of top-notch news chops that no one could ever take away. For me, it would be a golden calling card that would make network doors fly open. And for Laurie, well, I guess it would stand triumphant on her shelf, in front of her collection of Emmys, announcing her place as the best producer at BNN.
“And in lieu of that,” I said, in case I couldn’t deliver, “how about a lifetime supply of Moscow Mules?”
“That’ll work,” she said.
Amanda Wakes Up Page 2
