Nancy Patterson faced another weekend without news and she didn’t care. Between sick photographers, bored and surly reporters, out-of-commission vans, interviews who canceled or never showed up, she didn’t care. She would use what she had. That was the job of a weekend producer, to use what you had or could find. She had two newscasts today. She’d be out of the station, home free, really home free, in about ten hours.
She counted her possibilities. Two crews were out. That meant three stories, four if she was lucky. She could pull a few stories from the network feed. She had wire copy to rewrite and a package she could pull of the hold sheet. Add sports and weather and she had her newscasts. She opened the morning paper. She only needed two minutes of state news, tops.
As she read, the scanners clicked and chattered away. If something out of the ordinary came across she would hear it whether she was reading, writing or answering a phone. She could be in the bathroom and hear something that would make her run, if no one was looking, or walk quickly if someone was.
They all did that, reporters, photographers, producers. They heard the fire call, the shooting report, over the chaos of a working newsroom five screaming minutes before a newscast. They were tuned in that way, waiting for the big story.
Like Ellen would tell non-news people, “On slow days we sit there and pray for a plane crash.”
Nancy wasn’t praying for any tragedy today, not when she was alone with the scanners and the phones and the two crews who didn’t want to be wherever they were. She didn’t want anything to ruin a slow and simple day.
“Let me get through these two newscasts,” is what she prayed. “Let it be smooth.”
The call for Brian Rafferty, the helicopter pilot from Across the Street, came at three o’clock. She would remember that. She looked up at the clock thinking it was time to start rewriting the wire copy when she heard his name on the scanner. The Department of Public Safety wanted him.
DPS called him first for the rescues and the searches. Rafferty would fly upside down to get a story or a body. Reporters at The Best said Rafferty should wear a badge. That’s how tight he was with the cops. The Best’s pilot, Ken Davis, was lucky to be second on the scene, if at all.
The two-way on her desk buzzed.
“Nan, heard a call for Rafferty. Might want to check it out.” Cappy’s voice was emotionless.
“Yeah, I heard it. What’s your ETA?”
“Ten minutes. Rodriguez is on his way in. He got his own car. Over and out.”
“Ten-four,” she said to the dead mike. Crap. If DPS wanted Rafferty there was a problem and that meant she might have to find someone to cover it.
“Some problem up on Padre Peak,” the DPS dispatcher told her.
“Somebody lost or fell? What?”
“That’s all we got.”
“Come on,” Nancy insisted.
“We don’t have any information. Call back in a few minutes. We might have more then.”
Damn it. Rafferty was already up. She heard him clicking his own messages across the scanners while she was talking with the dispatcher. She would have to find Ken Davis.
She tried his pager and his home phone. No answer.
“News Base to Sky Eye. Base to Sky Eye. Ken?” she called on the helicopter radio.
Oh Lord, this would blow the whole day.
Cappy was back on the two-way.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Something on Padre Peak.”
“Want me to swing by? I’m right there.”
“Yes, do that. I can’t find Ken. Let me know what’s happening.”
Charles Adkins and Steve slammed into the newsroom. Adkins carried bags of hamburgers and French fries.
“What’s up?” he asked. “We heard a call for Rafferty.”
“Something on Padre.”
“Ken up?”
“Can’t find him.”
“Shit,” Adkins said before turning to his hamburger and the sports section, “that guy is unbelievable.”
“This is News Base to Sky Eye. Base to Eye,” she tried again.
“Any problem?” asked Jim Brown over the two-way. His voice was soft, disinterested.
“Some sort of rescue or something on Padre. Trying to reach Ken.”
“Rafferty up?”
“Yup.”
“Have you tried Ken at home?”
“Yup.”
“Try the airport. You’ve got the number for the hangar?”
She flipped through the first of the Rolodexes. Cards fell out, yellow with age and blue and black with penned notations.
“Let me know what goes on.” Brown clicked off.
Adkins stood over her, his fingers spinning through another Rolodex.
“Here, here,” he tossed a card at her. “Try this.”
“Unit Eight to Base. Eight to base.”
“Go ahead, Cappy,” she answered.
“Got some cops out here. Some hikers spotted something.” She could hear the excitement in his voice.
“What?”
“Don’t know. Ambulance here. Rafferty’s been called to do a flyover. Where’s Davis?”
“News Base, this is …” The call letters were lost in static.
“Sky Eye to Base,” it came again.
“Hold on,” she told Cappy. “He’s on now.”
“Talk to him,” she ordered Adkins as she turned to the speaker that gave her Ken Davis.
“What’s up?”
“Something up on Padre.”
“I’m there.”
“Hey, tell him to come here first and get me,” Adkins ordered
“You got a story ready?” she asked.
“Nothing out there,” he said. “Nothing to it.”
“I need whatever you have.”
“From a fucking puppet show?” he demanded. “Come on, Nancy.” Steve walked toward them with Mark Cunningham a few paces behind.
“He can pick me up,” said Steve. “Charles can drive out there and meet Cappy. That will give us someone on the ground and I can be shooting from the copter.”
“Hey, what’s going on?” Ken shouted on the speaker.
“Okay. Steve, get your equipment and get up to the pad. Charles, take a van and go out to Cappy,” she ordered.
“Ken,” she called over the radio, “get in here and pick up Steve.”
“Everything under control?” Brown was talking again.
“Should I take the live unit?” Charles Adkins shouted from the newsroom door. “We might need it.”
“Take it,” she yelled back. “Everything is fine,” she told Brown.
“What have you got?”
“Don’t know. Ken is up and is going to pick up Steve. Adkins is on his way out to meet Cappy.”
“Okay. I’ll be at home if you need me.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she mumbled. She had to build the newscast.
“What can I do?” asked Mark Cunningham.
“Edit when we’ve got something to edit,” she told him.
Tommy Rodriguez ambled into the room, a friendly smile on his face.
“Where have you been?” she demanded.
“I’ve been on my way here,” he said, the smile gone.
“What have you got? What stories?”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“I’ve got everybody and their brother out on a rescue or something and I don’t have a newscast. What have you got?”
“What kind of rescue?”
“Just tell me what you have!” she shouted.
“A couple of nothing pieces. I want to kill that day-in-the-dog-park thing.”
“We’re not killing anything. Get it together and give me the times.”
“Okay, but what’s going on?” He followed her to the wire machine.
“Get the stuff to Mark,” she ordered. She ripped the paper and marched back to the desk, a long stream of wire copy trailing behind her.
Tommy was right on her heels.
“Somebody dead or what?” he asked.
“This is Cappy to Base. Cappy to Base.”
Tommy beat her to the desk.
“Go ahead,” he said.
“Looks like somebody fell. We’ve got some witnesses here. Who is this?”
“Can I get a reporter out here?” Cappy asked.
“He wants a reporter,” he told Nancy. “Says he has witnesses or something.”
Nancy looked up from her typewriter. She frowned. Those witnesses would stay there until hell froze over if they thought they were going to be on television.
“Tell him Adkins is on his way.”
She turned to the sound of the helicopter beating the air above the building.
“Adkins’s on his way,” Tommy told Cappy.
“Tell him I’m in the park. The entrance is on the north side. He knows where it is.” He doubled-clicked off.
“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.