“THERE!” Alan Friendly belted. “The San Diego vampires are before us! Present Redeemers!”
Each crew member raised and leveled his stake-firing weapon and squinted down its barrel. Alan stood facing outward for the cameras, his arm extended like the commander of a firing squad. He was the commander of a firing squad, he realized with a confusing sort of delight.
“Send those mothersuckers back to hell, boys! Fire at will!”
The crew let loose a volley of stakes, a few of which hit but most of which sailed past the row of dummies on the other side of the field.
“Cut! All right, that’s good!” said Alan. “Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. You know we weren’t filming the targets anyway. We’ll get them later at close range.”
The targets were dressmaker’s dummies. The art department had scoured flea markets for old ones but eventually just bought a crate full of new models and spent an afternoon staining them with tea and roughing up the edges. Then they sewed a red velvet heart in the center of each. They’d tried paper targets on hay bales but it just looked too much like something you’d seen before.
Alan met his assistant Cheryl by the only dummy that had a stake lodged firmly in its stuffing.
“How was that?” he asked. “Did we get that?”
“It looked hot.”
“I said ‘mothersucker.’ Too much?”
“We’ll have to run it by Standards and Practices.”
“It just popped out.”
They looked in silence at the dummy, and the stake.
“Well, that’s not the heart,” said Alan. “What would that be?”
“The appendix,” Cheryl answered. “I have a scar there. Oh—Mike called from San Diego, wants you to call him back.”
“Ooh!” Alan rushed for the phone. “He has something? Never mind, he’ll tell me.” He dialed and rocked on his heels while the line rang.
“Alan,” Mike answered.
“Mike! Mikey Michael! Michael P. Pfefferneuse! I don’t know your last name, Mike.”
“It’s Storch.”
“Mike Storch! Big Mike Storch! Tell me you have a lead. God, we need a lead.”
In lieu of hiring a private detective agency Alan had left Mike and a few other staffers to keep canvasing San Diego after the hunt lost its momentum. They had a police sketch of the main vampire based on a description the girl Carrie Lawson had given, and at least one intern was wandering the Gaslamp Quarter, showing it around. Another was calling hospitals and begging for information about anyone complaining of bite marks. It was vitally important for Alan to show his producers that they could do things on the cheap at the moment, so everyone was doing jobs they hadn’t signed on for.
“I do have something,” said Mike, “a very little something.”
“Tell me. Tell me.”
“All right. I talked to this convention center security guard today who had a run-in with a kid, a teenage kid, who had very severe polymorphous light eruption.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” said Alan. “What?”
“A really bad skin reaction to sunlight. Kid had to hide under a poncho. It was so bad they let him and his friend in early, so he wouldn’t have to wait in line. Which is good for us, because they were the only two to pass under the CCTV cameras in the lobby at that particular time.”
“And you got a look at the security tapes?” Alan was grinning and drumming on the snack table with his free hand.
“I got a look at the security tapes. And I gotta admit, the shorter of the two kids could definitely be our guy from Panda TV.”
“Yes!”
“But here’s the thing: If it is him, then the sketch we have from party girl is bullshit. I think she was very generous with her description. He probably gets better looking every time she tells the story.”
“Bloody hell.”
“I’m having the sketch artist do a new portrait based on the security tapes, and I’ll start sending it around. But, Alan, we’re running out of money here.”
“Wait,” said Alan. “Why don’t we just put the security footage on next week’s show? Or online? But then, of course, someone else would find him before we do…”
“Also? It would be slander. We don’t know for certain the kid on the security tape has done anything wrong—the panda room was too dark for a positive match and the Red Cross people won’t return our calls.”
“Stupid, bloody, pompous Red Cross.”
“But, Alan, did you hear me? We need more money.”
“You’re breaking up, Mike. I’m passing through a tunnel.”
“I know you’re not driving, Alan.”