“Hi, how’s it going?” Scott Reynolds was standing next to her. Dependable and pleasant, he was the perfect weekend anchor.
“Oh, God, Scott. I don’t have anything done. Would you check on the feed? Pick something up for the ten o’clock. Something is going on. A rescue, I think. That might be my lead, but I am going to need a few things off the feed. Something hard, something soft.”
“Okay,” he smiled.
Five minutes passed before the next interruption.
“Live to Base. Live to Base.” It was Charles Adkins’ voice.
“This is Base. Go ahead,” Tommy answered.
“We’re going to do some interviews with the people who think they found a body,” Adkins said. Other voices interrupted.
“Oh, yeah, well,” Adkins continued, “They saw what looked like a body and called the cops.”
“Somebody dead, alive, what?” she demanded as she tore a script page from the typewriter. “Geez!” she cried. “I’m going to need an engineer. Tell him we’ll send out an engineer in case we go live.”
She was breathing hard, like a runner. What if there wasn’t an engineer in the station? Those guys were never around. But, there had to be one, had to be. Sports usually had a live’er on the weekend and they had to have another engineer in the station to make sure everything was working.
“Would an engineer please call the newsroom,” she called over the public address system.
“And?” came the quick telephone response. “What can I do you for?”
“I need an engineer out to my live unit. I may want to send something back and I might need a live’er tonight on the six.”
“Why don’t you send somebody out to pick up the tape?”
“I don’t have any time or any people,” she shouted. “I want an engineer out there.”
“I am supposed to do a live shot for sports,” he reminded her.
“I don’t care. Go out there and send the stuff back or bring it back.”
“No can do right now,” was the singsong reply. “Nobody else in right now and I have that sports live’er from the arena. You can’t cancel that.”
“Then find another engineer!” she yelled.
“Double time,” he sang.
“Pay it, damn it.”
She slammed down the receiver. You couldn’t argue with an engineer. They did exactly what they wanted.
“So, what do you need?”
The short man who belonged to the telephone voice now stood over her. Damn, he must have been only a few feet away when he called.
“I need,” she said through gritted teeth, “an engineer to go out to the live unit at Padre Peak.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” He grinned.
She stared at him. This is what she needed now, an engineer’s moronic sense of humor.
“They’re in that park on the north side of the mountain,” Tommy told him from the seat he had taken at the assignment desk. “You know where that is?”
The engineer nodded and stepped back as Nancy stood up and grabbed the pile of script papers. He followed her to the long empty table in the front of the room. He watched as she began to lay the lines of the newscast. Where a script page was missing, she inserted a sheet of yellow paper. Her movements were slow and deliberate.
“You can’t get a live shot from there, you know,” he said from his position behind her. “Mountain’s in the way,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back.
She ignored him and stared at the lines of white and yellow paper.
“Your show,” he commented as he walked away.
“How long is your story?” she called to Tommy Rodriguez.
“That thing on the park will be about fifty seconds but you should toss it,” he said. “I also have that piece on the new sewage plant. I figure it at about one-thirty.”
“Fine. Write the intros.” Her mind was now on her times. After a long stare at the table, she began to rearrange the sheets. She threw two yellow sheets to the floor. Like she needed this. Depending on what Adkins got, she would be standing here shuffling the script, exchanging yellow papers for white, right up until the last five minutes before the newscast. One yellow sheet headed the top of the first vertical row. That was her lead.
“This is Sky Eye to Base. Sky Eye to Base.”
“Go ahead, Ken.”
“We got Rafferty lowering some guy on a rope. We got the body coming up on a stretcher.”
“Body? You said body?”
“That’s an affirmative. No doubt about it.”
“Dead? What?”
“I don’t know.”
Great.
“Get in as fast as possible,” she ordered. “We need that tape.”
She turned to the two-way.
“Cappy, you there?”
“We got what we can out here,” Charles Adkins responded. “What do we do now?”
Oh, crap, did she need that live’er now?
“An engineer is on his way. Wait for him and trade units, then come in.” She gave two clicks on the receiver button. What the hell was the engineer’s name?
“Could the engineer please respond?”
“You mean me?” the voice asked.
“Right. Trade units with Adkins and head out to the sports thing.”
“Like I said,” the voice sang. “I’m doing a live’er tonight for sports.”
She could imagine the smirk on his face. Who cared? So far, so good. Sports was covered. She’d have Cappy’s footage and Steve’s. She had her lead, whatever it was. Good, she’d get out of here yet.
48
“Everything set up?” Rick Whalen, weekend sportscaster, stood at her desk.
“If you set it up, it’s up,” she answered.
He handed her script sheets.
“This is pretty much how it’s going to go. I’ll wing it, but make sure they’ve got the scores.”
He handed her another pile of sheets with the numbers and names that would appear on the screen.
“You got anything good going?” he asked.
“A hiking accident, maybe, something.”
“Nice,” he said.
It would be a good newscast, not that he cared that much. What he cared about were the big-money men who were in town during the winter months. All those guys from New York and Chicago were right now sitting around the hotel pools tanning their
