The Best in the West
Books by Kathleen Walker
Fiction
The Best in the West
A Crucifixion in Mexico
Life in a Cactus Garden
Nonfiction
San Xavier: The Spirit Endures
A Place of Peace: San Juan Capistrano
Desert Mornings—Tales of Coffee, Cactus & Chaos
The Best in the West
Kathleen Walker
Black Heron Press
Post Office Box 13396
Mill Creek, Washington 98082
www.blackheronpress.com
Copyright © 2018 Kathleen Walker. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
The Best in the West is a work of fiction. All characters that appear in this book are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
ISBN (print): 978-1-936364-25-1
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-936364-26-8
Black Heron Press
Post Office Box 13396
Mill Creek, Washington 98082
www.blackheronpress.com
“The great sadness of my life is that I never achieved the hour newscast, which would not have been twice as good as the half-hour newscast, but many times as good.”
—Walter Cronkite, CBS Evening
News anchor, 1962-1981
CONTENTS
Open
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Segment One
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Segment Two
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Weather
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Sports
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Segment Three
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Epilogue
OPEN
“Tits up!”
The shout hit her as the red light flashed on, the hand came down, and her lips began their rote movement. Son of a bitch.
“Good evening,” she said.
Son of a bitch.
“I’m Jean Ann Maypin.”
The son of a bitch did it again. Well, he wasn’t going to get her. Not this time.
He picked up the toss.
“And I’m Tom Carter. And this is the news.”
Back again.
“A major fire in our valley tonight. We’ll have a live report.” Her look was concerned, urgent, his equally so as he took it back.
“And the governor may have to call a special session of the legislature to help our highways.”
He allowed the faint hint of a smile to curl the corners of his mouth. They could see that Tom Carter knew the highways needed all the help they could get, that help better be on the horizon, and that the governor was not a favorite of his.
She let her eyes linger on his face for a split second of silence. They were in this together, partners. Together they had it under control. Together they cared.
“We’ll have that news and all the news of the valley and the state, coming up next.” She smiled gently, no wide flashing smile, only the assurance that they, together, would be back soon.
She had it under control without that son of a bitch trying to throw her with that tits up thing. They were watching her, loving her, trusting her, Jean Ann Maypin. That’s why they were watching The Best in the West.
She straightened slightly in the chair, legs crossed demurely at the ankles. She knew the moves. She was the star and the son of a bitch wasn’t going to be allowed to forget it.
No mistakes, no mistakes so far. She held the smile. No mistakes.
Thirty seconds gone, another twenty-eight minutes to go. She had it made.
With a flash of a hand, she and the son of a bitch disappeared. The screen would now fill with the music and clipped motion that announced what it was she did so well, the six o’clock news.
*
Ellen Peters did not have to look through the windows or walk past the patios of the other condos to know the news had begun. She didn’t have to see the blue-gray flickers of a hundred screens chopped, divided, quartered then boxed into eighths and finally sixteenths. She didn’t have to hear the buzzing music of the helicopter as it sliced through canyons or see the familiar worried faces of men and women rushing, typing, talking, running. All familiar, all worried.
They registered though, those flickers. They had registered in some way every night for over two years. They had to. That is what they were designed to do, to register. That thirty-second flash of movement and music had taken ten days to produce, to shoot, to edit, all to catch her ear and eye and mind.
She opened the trunk of the car. One last bag, one last trip to be made and it was done. She fumbled for a cigarette from the pack in her jacket pocket. She leaned against the car and smoked. There was no screen she could see, no masculine voice to be heard singing out like the town crier of old. Alone in the parking lot, she rested and she smoked.
“You know what I want to be?” Debbie had asked her. “I want to be this great reporter pounding out stories on an old typewriter, smoking a cigarette, my hair all messed up. You know?”
Ellen wondered then, as she did now, if Debbie realized that her dream was to be the person she was telling it to and it wasn’t much of a dream or all that original. It was, however, a strange vision for this tall woman with her soft blond hair and beautiful skin.
That is how Debbie first came into the newsroom, all soft and young, all ruffled and hot.
“Gosh, it’s hot,” she had moaned and they all laughed. It was only April.
She had a Garbo look, skin so white and clear you could almost see through it, with the barest hint of pink on the cheeks. She was twenty-four.
Ellen wondered that day if Maypin was watching from some corner or office, trying to see down the maze of cubicles to the young woman with the gentle blue eyes.
“Got a new reporter coming from Bakersfield,” Carter told them at the last meeting. No one rolled their eyes or sighed dramatically at yet one more proof of Carter’s insanity in hiring. They didn’t need to hear the story of how he heard her read the news or saw her report one story.
All he
