course, it was that regal couple of phenomena, the Queen and King of murderously bad weather, the spinning, twirling, shimmying, livestock-sucking, clothes-stripping, tree-hurling, house-splintering, Dorothy-napping, witch-smashing ... tornado.
I actually took a certain perverse pride in having been the worthy victim of one, even if it had been an intensely personal strike from a weather witch on my TV "team." A minor, secondary-city weather witch didn't aim a teensyweensy sixty-foot-circumference "twister" at just ... anybody. I had to have really pissed her off.
Why? Not just jealousy.
Sheena was becoming as much a mystery to me as Lilith.
That couldn't be allowed to continue.
I turned on Dolly's engine and checked the rearview mirror before pulling beyond the safety screen of the station news van. Dolly was idling backward when my foot stabbed the brakes.
Good girl! Dolly didn't let out so much as a squeak.
Speak of the devils you know. I recognized Undead Ted's and Sheena's profiles through the tinted side windows of an impeccably washed black Lincoln Town Car also idling in the parking lot.
A moment later the swarthy capped driver got out to open the back passenger door.
I watched a hose-sheened, long, lean leg thrust out to place a scarlet platform spike shoe on the asphalt. Ugh. Sheena always dressed like the head bitch on a seventies nighttime TV soap opera. The short skirt of a slim red suit followed, along with her red-taloned fingernails, swollen-sphincter crimson lips and "done" blond hair.
The same old Sheena, only much more expensively dressed.
Undead Ted crawled out after her, gazing like a love-sick puppy at the lady in bloodred.
Everybody at WTCH had known Ted took injections to resist daylight so he could do pre-sunset newscasts. A George Hamilton product pumped melatonin into his skin, giving him that golden glow. Now his vampy complexion looked just plain sallow, freckled with a carefully cultivated thirty-six-hour brown beard smudge. He was a liver-spotted puppy.
His dried-blood-color designer suit - I'd seen Lightdays pads more attractively shaded - was much more posh, but only two-thirds up to Ric level. Standing next to Sheena, Ted looked ... drained. Who was the vampire here?
The driver had moved around to the car's opposite passenger door.
I grabbed my cell phone and twisted my head over my shoulder to film the unhandsome couple and wait for a glimpse of their obvious lunch date. At first the Lincoln's roofline just gleamed in the sun. Then I glimpsed something black rising over the hot metal horizon.
A hat. A wide black-leather brim somewhere between a flat-crowned Western hat and the razor-sharp oversize fedora affected by seventies pimps. It was almost a hat a woman might wear ... if she were Janet Jackson onstage.
Under the sinister brim surfaced a furrowed, seamed brow the mahogany-deep color of a Greek island suntan and peaked, scowling Satanic black eyebrows. The nose was long and bulged in the middle like a digesting boa constrictor. The tip narrowed and dipped so delicately it made the nostrils into thin upward-slanted slits you might see on a serpent's face.
In contrast, the mustache had a ragged upper line and drooped down over sloppy lips almost as obscenely full as Sheena's collagen-pumped beauties.
I kept filming, thinking this moment was like watching a strike-ready royal Egyptian cobra rear its fanned head.
The man's suspicious, slitted dark eyes scanned the building and lot so intently I felt sure he'd seen me. Luckily, Ted and Sheena moving around to the car's rear stopped his gaze before it passed the parked van that concealed Dolly. Black is beautiful ... camouflage.
I watched the three passengers wait while the driver came around to open the popped trunk. He handed out two exotic-skinned wooden briefcases, presenting the black one to Sheena, the brown to Ted.
The stranger with the bad-and-the-ugly eyes was shorter than my ex-colleagues, maybe five-eight, like me. Despite his dark mustache and beard stubble, I guessed his age at sixty or so. His suit and shirt may have been expensive, but both seemed wilted by the intemperate intensity of his expression and stance. His business was not being telegenic. I sensed his business was about not being seen at all.
My fingertips felt cold on the cell phone now that he'd been captured inside it. The driver was already ushering him back into the rear seat, sweat beading in a salty dew line under his cap band as he came around to drive the boss away.
Undead Ted blinked in the sunlight when the driver's door slammed shut.
The big black modern luxury car glided away, a shadow of