“Who told you that?”
“I don’t remember. Is it true?”
“Yeah.”
“Why, Robin? He’s such an ass. Yet you won’t go out with me.”
“I know too much about you, Dillon,” I said.
Dillon was known for his admitted sexual adventures with large fleshy fruits, and it was just too weird to me, dating a man who had dated a watermelon.
After the slides and a short film on self-defense, the lights came up and Pete went to the blackboard and began writing platitudes down for us. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Be alert!
“Better safe than sorry,” he said about six times during his little lecture. Afterward, he asked for questions and I was so tempted to put up my hand and say, “Duh, is it better to be safe? Or sorry?”
What a waste of time this was, not that I had anything against wasting time. The more time I spent in this boring meeting, the less I spent with my boss, Jerry Spurdle, who was living proof that the people inside television are just about as nutty as those outside television, maybe more so.
Some of the biggest nuts in the business were, in fact, inside this very room. In the front row, Sawyer Lash, fresh off his overnight shift, was nodding earnestly at Pete’s every salient point and taking notes. Known as the network’s dumbest anchorman and biggest goody-goody, Sawyer’s star had risen for a while during our Time of Troubles at ANN a year earlier. But it had fallen again quickly, and now he was back in the netherworld of overnight news updates, where viewers were less likely to notice if he confused Liberian rebels with librarian rebels.
A few weeks earlier, someone had sent Sawyer a sick gift—a dead sparrow in a plastic hosiery egg. And that was from someone who claimed to like him.
Just in front of Dillon and me, Dave Kona was talking softly to Solange Stevenson. Solange was a huge security headache, not only because as a TV psychologist she attracted a deeply disturbed viewership, but also because she actually invited clearly insane people onto her TV show, with bad results on more than one occasion. Like the time she reunited all those adopted people with their birth parents on her show and a fistfight broke out. Or the time two rival girlfriends of an imprisoned serial killer got into a hair-pulling catfight on the show and gave Solange a bloody nose when she tried to intervene.
As for Dave Kona, he was just twenty-three, hadn’t been on air long, and so hadn’t really had time to attract a cadre of deranged fans.
Too bad. The supercilious pip-squeak was after my job.
“When I was guarding Barbra …,” Pete said, segueing into one of his war stories.
My attention wandered further. Pete’s other deputy, Franco, had just come into the conference room and was hulking by the door. He was bigger and stronger than Hector, but he didn’t inspire much confidence either. Franco was famous for getting lost while on patrol.
I’d never noticed it before, but Franco sure had a lot of hair in his ears. Big tufts of brown hair stuck out of his ears. I’d never seen that much hair in someone’s ears before. Where did it come from? It looked like it was growing out of his brain. His head must be full of hair, I decided. I hadn’t noticed his hairy ears before because he’d worn his hair over his ears, apparently for a reason. But Pete had ordered haircuts for all the company cops the day before and Franco, being a good Boy Scout, complied.
Maybe he didn’t get his hair cut, I thought. Maybe he just grabbed on to those tufts and pulled his hair down through his ears.
“Are you paying attention, Robin?” Pete asked suddenly, and I jerked my head and nodded guiltily. “We all have to be alert.”
“Yes sir.”
“These common household items can aid in your self-defense,” Pete said, listing a fine-toothed comb (run tooth-side under an assailant’s nose, it could slice right through the septum and cause a massive nose bleed), an umbrella, and a can of hair spray.
Kid stuff, I thought. I have a self-defense system that makes the DEW line look like a spite fence. In addition to the poison ivy I grow in my window boxes as a kind of burglary disincentive program, I keep a bottle of cayenne-spiked cologne, an automatic umbrella, and a number of small weaponlike appliances around, such as an Epilady hair removal system and a high-velocity glue gun with two settings, stream and spray, so I could give an attacker a face full of hot glue at ten feet. This last marked an escalation of the arms race for me. I wasn’t ready to join the masses and get a real gun.
“Be careful,” Pete said, dismissing us.
Wish I’d thought of that.
“Did you hear about the murder on the twenty-seventh floor?” Louis Levin asked me as I passed through the giant human pinball game that is the ANN newsroom. I was on my way to Special Reports.
Louis, a disgruntled news producer, was sitting in his wheelchair at the afternoon producer pod, a stationary island amid streams of people carrying armfuls of videotapes and news copy, pencils clenched in their teeth, rushing to get the news on the air.
“Yeah, I heard. I just came from the security meeting.”
“What was the mood of the room?”
“Scared,” I said.
“You know who’s really scared? Reb Ryan. He’s been on a tear about this murder for the last hour,” Louis said. “He thinks he’s a sitting duck here.”
“I wouldn’t believe anything he said.”
“Well, Reb’s crazy, but he has a point,” Louis said. “If someone has been able to get in to kill a gynecologist, what’s to prevent a crazy fan from getting in to shoot an anchorman, or a methodical terrorist group from getting in and taking over a broadcast beamed around the planet?”
“Don’t say that too loud. You know management is looking for ways to boost our ratings.”
I didn’t tell him that I was one of Kanengiser’s patients, or near-patients. Louis ran the oldest established permanent floating rumor file in New York—a locked file known as Radio Free Babylon, with constantly changing passwords— which moved around within the ANN computer system. Why invite controversy and sick jokes?
Besides, I wanted to avoid the whole subject of the murder as much as I could without arousing suspicion.
I changed the subject. “Any news from the executive suite?”
“Not yet,” he said, as an intern handed him some wire copy. He scanned it quickly and then said, “The meetings are very hush-hush.”
“Louis, here’s the AOA on the new school prayer bill,” an edit assistant said, handing Louis a tape.
(AOA stands for “Any Old Asshole,” known in more polite circles as MOS, “Man on the Street.”)
Louis took the tape and popped it into the monitor on his pod while talking both to the edit assistant and to me. He has the amazing ability to conduct two or three conversations simultaneously without losing the narrative thread of any of them.
“My best source is on the job, though,” Louis said, winking at me. Louis didn’t know it, but his best source was my best source, Phil the omnipotent janitor. Louis didn’t have any new information because Phil had been out with flu the day before.
The phone rang on Louis’s desk. “I’m listenin’,” he said when he answered. “No. Haven’t seen her.”
He hung up and turned to me. “That was Jerry. He wanted to know if you were in the newsroom. I lied.”
“Thanks.”
“Who’da thunk Jerry Spurdle would become such a big success? Great ratings, big moneymaker, and on top of everything else, he won that ACE award. Bet he really has a swelled head. How is it, working with him these days?” Louis asked.
“Oh … you know.”
Louis was goading me, expecting me to say something like, “He’s more fun than a flesh-eating virus.” But I clammed up. If you can’t say something nice and all that. Anything I said about Jerry was bound to end up in the rumor file, and I didn’t need the trouble because, as you know, my troublemaking days were over.
Louis gave me a sad look and shook his head.
“You know,�
� he said, “Jerry’s been bragging that he broke Robin Hudson, the rogue filly.”
“It’s more complicated than that,” I said.
“He says, like all women, you can be subdued by a strong hand, metaphorically speaking. I dunno, Robin. You gotta do what you gotta do, but your reputation is suffering with the troops. They think you’ve sold out to that sleazebag.”
“Why do I have to hassle with Jerry? The job’s being done without me. Tamayo drives him nuts and I can concentrate on my work. Besides, Dean Wormer has me on double-secret probation. Another mess-up and I could be working the cash register in the cafeteria for the duration of my contract.”
“You were the rogue filly,” Louis said, wistfully.
The Rogue Filly. I think he knew I’d like the sound of that.
Buy Nice Girls Finish Last Now!
About the Author
Sparkle Hayter has been a journalist for CNN and other news organizations, a stringer in Afghanistan, a producer in Bollywood, a stand-up comic in New York, a caretaker for an elderly parent in Canada, and a novelist of seven books. And some other things that are kind of a blur now. Her articles have been published in numerous newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Nation, and New Woman. She currently lives in Canada with her rescued Nepali street dog, Alice, and is working on a new book.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1994 by Sparkle Hayter
Cover design by Jesse Hayes
ISBN: 978-1-4976-7831-6
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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THE ROBIN HUDSON MYSTERIES
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What's a Girl Gotta Do? Page 26
