Elimination Night - By Anonymous Page 0,95

in Europe and South America. Someone had started to bang on the door while at the same time holding down the buzzer. The phones were still ringing.

So much noise.

But I couldn’t move.

“… and comes just as Project Icon has finally seen the first sign of a turnaround in its ratings, after seeming for months to face certain cancellation. A spokesman for Mr. Lovecraft could not be reached for comment at this hour, although Honeyload bandmate Blade Morgan has taken to Twitter this morning, saying this doesn’t come as a…”

The news had now cut to a three-way shot. On the left: the anchor, all tight leather and gold jewelry, still talking. Below her, a scrolling caption: “SHOWBIZ WEBSITE CLAIMS ICON JUDGE HOSPITALIZED—FANS AND COLLEAGUES FEAR DEADLY OVERDOSE. STATEMENT IMMINENT.” And to the right, the feed from the helicopter—which, if you looked carefully enough, displayed the outline of a sixty-two-year-old man, unclothed and in an unambiguous state of sexual arousal, screaming from behind tinted glass.

28

Chaz Chipford’s Greatest Hits

May

“BILL, MEET DICK.”

This was at Greenlit Studios, a few days before the season finale.

Len had just led me into his backstage office, where a tall, heavyset man with a look of barely suppressed rage in his eyes was sitting neatly at a circular table.

“Uh… hi, Dick,” I said.

Dick blinked twice. Cheap tie, I noticed. Collar too tight. A bull on a leash.

“Dick here is a licensed private investigator,” Len revealed. “And yes, before you point out the obvious—that literally makes him a private dick.” Len laughed at this for—oh—a full minute. Then, turning to Dick: “That is your real name, right?”

“Correct,” said Dick, unpleasantly.

“Please, Bill—make yourself comfortable,” Len resumed, pulling out chairs for both of us. (A worrying sign: Len never wanted me to be comfortable.) “Dick is now going to tell you exactly what kind of dicking he’s been doing for us over the past few weeks.”

Dick stood up.

I’d already guessed the reason for his presence, of course: To investigate the source of all those “Project Icon exclusives” that had been appearing on the ShowBiz website recently. It had started with the news about Joey’s admission to Mount Cypress—resulting in the spectacle of a nude grandfather parading on live TV at ten o’clock in the morning (for which the news channel had been fined for both invasion of privacy and indecency)—and had just gotten worse from there. A new scandal was breaking every day, it seemed. Sometimes twice a day. It was a wonder Chaz Chipford’s tubby little fingers could type fast enough to keep up.

None of which had harmed us in the ratings, of course. Precisely the opposite. After the first two weeks of revelations, we were back in the top spot across all networks. The week after that, the numbers from the Jefferson Metrics Organization came in at over twenty million for the first time since the season twelve finale. The following week: Twenty-five million. And now, well, it was hard not to laugh: We were closing in on the big three-zero. People had even started to vote for the contestants again. I mean, okay, so the landline volume was still down. But if you counted text messages, Facebook “likes,” and the Rabbit website survey, more Americans had participated in season thirteen of Project Icon than in the last two presidential elections combined. It was incredible.

As for Sir Harold: still very much in Germany. Things weren’t looking too good over there. Big Corp had practically moved its entire HQ over to Berlin in an effort to get the bingo crisis under control. Meanwhile, all non-bingo-related issues were being left to the divisional chiefs to handle, which in our case meant David Gent and Ed Rossitto—who seemed delighted with the way things were going. They’d even stopped mentioning Nigel Crowther’s name every other sentence.

There was no doubt about it: Those “bingo betrügers” over at Rabbit Deutschland—each now facing twenty years in federal prison for their epic scam—had bought Project Icon enough time to save the franchise. This wasn’t of much comfort to Sir Harold, however. Having caught the fraudsters, the German prosecutors were now going after Big Corp—relentlessly and with overwhelming popular support, thanks largely to the cheerleading of rival news organizations. It was beginning to look as though they wouldn’t stop until they’d driven the company out of business, or at least inflicted a lot more damage.

Thankfully, the scandals appearing in ShowBiz every day weren’t criminal in nature. They were mostly to do with the contestants’ personal lives—and, of course, Joey, who