Authors: Jan Hudson
“Ah, yes. The Scorpions. Let’s go
by the station and pick up some video equipment. In case our young punks agree
to be filmed, we’ll save the time needed for an extra meeting.”
* * *
They drove to the port section
north of the city where tankers and cargo ships frequently entered the harbor,
bound for the refineries or docks along the water. Huge oil storage tanks,
grain elevators, and warehouses covered the blocks surrounding the channel.
Ordinarily the port was busy with activity, but it being Sunday afternoon a few
minutes after
five o’clock
, the area was virtually deserted.
They turned off
Harbor Street
and bumped over potholes and railroad tracks until they came to the warehouse
region, where she was to meet members of the Scorpions. Noting the state of the
ramshackle buildings and the absence of another living soul, Sunny was glad
Kale has insisted on coming along to meet with B. J. Johnson and his buddy.
Kale parked the car near the
designated place and they got out. “Why did you decide on this area?” he asked.
“Because B.J. wouldn’t agree to
come to the bar at the Marriott, as you would have preferred,” she said
sarcastically.
“I don’t like it. I don’t like
it a damned bit. You wait in the car with the doors locked. I’ll talk to the
punks.”
“Honestly, Kale.” She rolled her
eyes. “You can be such a pain. I can handle myself. After all, it’s daylight
and we’ll be out in the open in a public place. What can happen?”
“Plenty.” He scowled and
retrieved a bush jacket from the trunk and pulled it on.
“Isn’t it warm for a jacket?”
Sunny asked.
He shrugged. “I’m used to
wearing it on assignments. The pockets are handy for my gear.”
He took something from the trunk
and quickly slipped it into one of his deep side pockets. Sun-ny’s eyes grew
wide. “Was that a . . . gun?”
“Yes.”
“But, Kale, these are just boys.
Posturing adolescents.”
“How well do you know these ‘boys’?”
“I don’t know them all, but B.J.
seemed nice enough on the phone. He’s the nephew of the next-door neighbor of
one of the engineers at the station.”
“Sunny, my love, you are incredibly
naive. I’m taking the gun. I don’t plan to use it, but I’ve learned the hard
way to be prepared.” He slammed the trunk. “I’ll leave the video equipment here
and come back for it if we need it.”
As they walked the short
distance to the rendezvous point, Sunny said, “Something feels funny.” She
sniffed the air. “Do you smell that?”
Kale sniffed. “Only the usual
port smells. Why?”
She shrugged and laughed. “Nothing.
Maybe it’s just the anticipation of the interview that’s making my nose twitch.”
He smiled indulgently, hugged
her to his side, and tweaked her nose. “Is that like your ear clues you to the
weather?”
“Sort of. But it’s not just my
ears that signal the weather to me. Sometimes it’s my toes or my spine. And I
get the weirdest feeling right here,” she said, splaying her hand across her
abdomen, “when a hurricane—”
He stopped and frowned down at
her. “Wait a minute. Are you serious about your nose?”
“Sure. It’s my nose for news. I
thought all good reporters had it. Don’t you?” She tried to keep a straight
face, but the conspicuous play of emotions on his, from mild consternation to
total disbelief, made her giggle.
His face relaxed into a smile. “You’re
pulling my leg.”
“Nope.” She briskly rubbed under
her nose with the back of her index finger. It was itching like crazy. “Are you
sure you don’t smell something?”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “A
rat, maybe.”
“Oh, look, these must be our
guys.”
Two teens, big burly fellows
with necks thicker than railroad ties, ambled toward them. They wore what seemed
to be the uniform: low-riding jeans and red tank tops with a scorpion stenciled
across the chest. One wore earphones and snapped his fingers to a beat only he
could hear. They both walked with a swagger, their heads, topped by odd-looking
haircuts, waggling like the bobble-headed dogs given as carnival prizes.
The one without the earphones
looked Sunny up and down. “You be the one on TV. You’re ba-aad.”
She felt affronted. “Bad?”
“Yeah, ba-aad. That’s good.”
“Oh, that kind of bad. Thanks.
Are you B.J.?”
“That’s me.” He looked Kale
over. “Who’s this dude?”
She bit the inside of her lip to
keep from laughing. “He’s my assistant.”
“This is Jeffery. We call him Meathook.”
B.J. turned to his cohort, who was still snapping his fingers, and whopped a
forearm across Jeffery’s chest. “Say hello to the lady, Meathook.”
He inclined his head briefly. “Do.”
“Meathook don’t talk much.” B.J.
said. “And you’ll have to pardon him. He ain’t much on manners either.”
While Kale eyed the pair with
his stone-faced intensity, Sunny briefly explained the story she was doing and
asked if they would consider doing an interview on camera. “We’ll blot out your
faces and disguise your voices before it goes on the air.”
B.J. took Meathook aside to
confer.
Sunny sniffed air again. “Kale,
I’m positive that I smell something burning. Over there.”
At the precise moment she
pointed to a warehouse half a block away, the front windows blew out. Smoke and
flames shot out the opening.
Without a word, both Sunny and
Kale broke for the car, their reporter’s instincts taking over. As soon as the
trunk was open, Sunny grabbed her phone and punched the emergency number. Kale
hoisted the camera and was running back to the scene as she was still reporting
the fire.
She snatched up a mike and waist
battery and sprinted after him. When she reached B.J. and Meathook, she thrust
the phone at B.J. “Dial the station for me. Five, five, five, thirteen hundred.”
She shoved the mike and cord at Meathook. “Hold this. Come on, guys.”
She took off at a trot, strapping
the battery belt as she went. Great black clouds of smoke poured from the
warehouse. She could hear the whoosh and roar of flames, feel the searing heat
as she neared.
“This is B. J. Johnson here.
Hold the phone for the weather lady.” B.J. handed her the phone.
“Tina? Sunny. Kale and I are on
the scene at a fire in the port area. It’s a bad one. Send a mobile unit and
crew immediately. Plan on a live report for six.” She gave Tina directions,
then stuck the phone in her pocket and grabbed the mike from Meathook.
“You guys direct traffic,” Sunny
shouted over her shoulder. “Try to keep people back out of the way.”
Kale was filming as she reached
him. “It’s spreading fast,” he yelled. A series of explosions inside the
building blew out other windows and sent long fingers of crackling fire into
the air, spawning flashing sparks and acrid, lung-searing black smoke. “God
knows what’s stored along here. You’d better get back.”
“Like hell I will!”
“Sunny, dammit! This place is
dangerous. Get out of here!”
“Forget it, Hoaglin. Put that
camera on me and keep it steady.”
She plugged in her mike and
stepped in front of the camera. With wailing sirens in the background and a
roaring conflagration belching flames and smoke behind her, she said, “This is
Sunny Larkin, KRIP, reporting from the scene of a fire that started just
moments ago in this warehouse in the port area. As you can see, there are oil
storage tanks only a short distance from the blaze and firemen are on their way
at this moment.”
They moved aside as trucks and
firemen began pouring into the area. Assisted by the mobile crew that arrived a
short time later, they continued to film, feeding live coverage to the evening
news and following the story until the potentially disastrous fire was finally
doused several hours later.
The caustic smell of charred,
smoldering rubble and the pungent odor of wet ashes hung heavy in the air as
Sunny and Kale trudged back to the car. Both were sweaty and streaked with
soot.
“Tired?” Kale asked.
“I’m pooped.”
“You did a good job. Thank God
we were able to report the fire in time. If the flames had spread unchecked and
reached the the oil storage tanks, we could have had a real disaster on our
hands.”
When they reached the car, B.J.
and Meathook were leaning on the fender of the Cadillac.
“Man, that was something, wasn’t
it?” B.J. asked. “Are we gonna be on TV?”
Sunny laughed. “I think Kale got
a shot of you directing the fire trucks.”
“Cool.” Abroad grin split his
face. “Man, did you see all them trucks? They were flash. And all them dudes
running around with hoses and stuff. They were ba-aad. Me and Meathook decided
we might like to be firemen.” He elbowed his friend. “Idn’t that right, Meathook?”
Meathook only smirked.
After Kale stowed the equipment
in the trunk, B.J. said, “You still want to interview us?”
“Sure,” Sunny said, “but could
we make it another time? I’m done in.”
“No sweat. Say, I like this TV
business. You think maybe me and Meathook could go over to the station sometime
and look around?”
“How about one afternoon next
week? I’ll show you the place, and we can do the interview in a studio.”
They set a date, then waved
good-bye to the boys and headed home. Sunny was ready to be rid of the grime
and stench of the fire, but suddenly she discovered she was famished.
“I need a bath in the worst way,”
she told Kale, “but I’d sell my soul for a cheeseburger.”
He smiled at her. “I think I can
locate one for a cheaper price than that. I could manage a couple of big ones
and a beer myself. It’s almost
midnight
, and we missed dinner. Popcorn will hold you for only
so long.”
They found a little hamburger
joint still open, and while their meat was grilling, they washed their hands
well enough to allow them to handle their food.
When they sat down at the
scarred Formica table, Sunny leaned over and said, “Why didn’t you tell me I
look so awful? I almost frightened myself when I saw my face in the mirror. I
look like I’ve been stoking coal.”
“You don’t look awful. You look
like a hardworking reporter who’s just finished doing a hell of a job.”
She brightened. “We did do a
good job, didn’t we? We make a good team.”
“A damned good team.” He caught
her hand across the table. “In more ways than journalistically.”
Before she could comment, their
food was delivered by a bleary-eyed man wearing a stained apron and whose
appearance was only marginally better than those of the derelicts who hung
around City Hall. Judging by his state, she wondered about the quality of the
food, but when she took the first bite of her juicy cheeseburger, she sighed. “This
is ecstasy.”
“That’s the same thing you said
about me in the wee hours of the morning. Is a cheeseburger beating my time?”
She laughed and tossed a french
fry at him.
He picked it up and popped it in
his mouth.
As they ate, Kale seemed unusually
quiet. Perhaps he was simply hungry, but from his distracted expression, she
thought it was more than that.
“Is something bothering you?”
she asked. “I can almost see wheels turning in your head.”
“I’ve been thinking about the
fire. Don’t you think it’s odd that it started when it did?”
She shrugged. “I suppose all
fires have to start sometime. It’s lucky we were there.”
“Lucky? I don’t know. It’s too
much of a coincidence for me to swallow. Coincidences make me suspicious.”
“What are you insinuating?”
“I doubt if it can be proven,
but I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that those two young thugs set the
blaze just to show off and get a rise out of us.”
Shocked by his suggestion, she
said, “You think they’re
arsonists
? Oh, Kale, you’re such a cynic. Those
boys seemed normal to me—a little full of themselves and feeling their male
hormones, but basically okay kids. They might make a little mischief, but I can’t
imagine them doing something so destructive on a lark.”
“A little mischief? Oh, love,
you’re a real Pollyanna. Don’t be suckered in. Those kids are hoodlums. Haven’t
you been paying attention to your own research? Don’t you realize what kinds of
things gangs are involved in?”
“But they were very polite to
me. I’m sure all that stuff is exaggerated. They’re just misguided kids. Didn’t
you ever do something foolish when you were young—like steal a watermelon from
a farmer’s patch or wrap somebody’s house in toilet paper? Don’t be such a
misanthrope.”
* * *
Kale smiled down at Sunny, who
was curled against him sound asleep, the epitome of innocence.
Stealing watermelons
and wrapping houses with toilet paper.
Remembering her words, he shook his
head. He’d bet his last dollar that the Scorpions and the Tarantulas were into
dope and theft and a dozen other destructive pursuits. With those rose-colored
glasses she wore, she didn’t have a clue about the real world—which was just as
well. He hated to think of life’s garbage soiling her, spoiling her sweet
compassion and bright optimism.