Blood Magic
An Exerpt
Jack Cosar could silence neither the shadow promise nor the shadow warning he felt at the plane crash. It hovered at the edge of his reason. Jack could normally sleep walk through this story. His experience in the news business had faithfully proven the poet's truth. A plane crash is a plane crash is a plane crash.
But this one was going to be different. His headache promised it. As Jack and Randy waited for dawn, his head began to pound. It was a portent. A quiet promise that said this story had a hidden element that everyone was going to over look.
He'd gotten the headaches all his life. Good news or bad, they always prepared the way for insight. His mother said the pain was the price he paid for "the talent", a talent she called bog wisdom. Jack preferred not to connect his intuition with anything his mother could explain.
Jack put that blarney in the same pot with reincarnation and the rest of her cloud peddling. Her view from the mental institution was one he gave little credibility to. Still, he knew she was right. Even though he would rather think he earned his awards with good pick and shovel journalism. And the brilliant eye of demon photographer, Randy Cox.
"We're hot, Jack. Smile for the kiddies back home. And they need a mic check." Randy pushed back his long straight blond hair which immediately fell back over his eyes as he prepared the shot for the morning news.
"Testing. Test. Test. Tom, Jillian..." Jack said to his tie as he clipped on the mic. "There's a sign, not twenty feet away from me, that warns of a one hundred dollar fine for littering..."
"That's good," Randy said smiling. "We're about two minutes away." Creative mic checks were the call sign of every reporter. After working with Jack for three years, Randy thought Jack's mic checks were about the most disgusting he'd ever heard. Still, humor was the best defense.
Jack scanned his reporter's notebook to run the first several sentences by his mouth to test if it was working. He'd had about three hours sleep between this and yesterday's assignment; an avalanche in Colorado that buried a skier.
"Stand by." Randy announced.
Jack's earpiece relayed the anchors' tinny voices reading the lead in to his story and their asking him for the details.
"Tom and Jillian, it's a miracle that anyone survived the crash, but apparently as many as 34 of the over 100 passengers walked, crawled or were dragged out of the wreckage alive. Flight 223 roared in fast and low toward Salt Lake City, according to the radar screen at Sky Haven Air Traffic Control. At 3:13 a.m., the plane dropped severely in altitude. Twenty minutes later it exploded over a wealthy section of Hillcrest Estates, raining shrapnel from the mid section of the plane over several blocks of the elite neighborhood. The tail section, where most of the survivors were seated, flipped upside down and came to rest here, where I'm standing, in this nearby field. The death toll has risen to 78 since this morning, that's including a number of people killed on the ground, but all the passengers are not yet accounted for as the wreckage is strewn over a seven block area. Rescue workers are continuing the grim business of cleaning up. Tom, Jillian?"
"Jack, I know its early, but what do they think caused the crash?"
"Tom, investigators are a long way from firm answers to the cause of the crash. With the bits and pieces of information coming in, survivors reported a bright flash of light. Still others said it was as if the air just came out from under them. The investigators expect to recover the flight recorders later today or tomorrow and we'll have that for you, Jillian."
"Thanks for that report, Jack. And in local news..."
"We're clear," Randy said, taking off his headphones. He popped the tape from the recorder and handed it to Jack. "Good job, Hot Dog," he said as he unclipped the camera from it's tripod and set it lovingly on the ground. "But I'm surprised. I didn't think you knew so many words."
"It was nothing," Jack said, turning his back to his photog, "I used some of them twice."
"Only twice?" Randy said to Jack's back.
"I thought twice was enough for you to get them." Jack said without turning around, heading for KXTA's satellite truck.
The chief engineer witnessed the exchange between the two and laughed as he hefted the big cables back into the truck. Leon had been an engineer with the station for fifteen years and the "live" chief for six. In that amount of time, had seen everything twice. Both the live crew and the news crew would probably be on the story for another day, maybe two. "Where's Joey? That kid's never where he's suppose to be. Joey! Let's put this show to bed." The senior engineer walked around the far side of his truck and went looking for his new recruit.
The kid was standing at the police barrier with one hand in his pocket and the other holding the lapel of his jacket over his face. It was Joey's second field assignment. And it was a baptism in blood.
Feathery tendrils of smoke scented the air with a mixture of engine fuel and the too sweet smell of burnt flesh. The tail section had dug a black trench into the grassy field and the scorched surroundings were dotted by colorful bits of clothing. Spotless pieces of white paper, spilled from an executive briefcase, were wind scattered across the burnt grass like confetti. A distant generator kicked on and a series of silver domed lamposts oozed dull yellow incandescent light over the wreckage. Two workers, sweat streaked with soot and grime, were hitching onto the trailer of one lamp to move it to another area, but Joey's attention wasn't on them. The young man was transfixed by the descending silhouettes, clouding the sunset. Birds, hundreds of them; sparrows, starlings, blackbirds, others he couldn't name... picking at things... indistinguishable.
Jack Cosar watched Joey, who only two weeks on the job, was getting his first introduction to the war zone feel of news. Veterans tended to forget those first impressions. Jack didn't. His first taste of it was a four car pile up. That was fourteen years and a couple thousand stories ago. The stories used to touch him; but now he hardly felt them, and when he did it was only briefly and lightly. He simply didn't have the time; he was always on deadline. He feared that if he ever quit the business...the scream would last for days.
"Hey Joey," Jack called, "We're all gonna get laid tonight, wanna come?" Laughter had become a habit. Joey looked at Jack with haunted eyes that stole the laughter from Jack's face.
Through Joey's innocent eyes, Jack saw the horror of his surroundings. He could feel the spectral terror of the passengers as the plane tumbled to the ground. The fleeting moments of knowledge that they were about to die. Heard their echoing screams. Knew their helplessness. Their sorrow. Their hope. Felt himself slip over the edge of madness. And something else... Something... Something like...justice?
Jack's heavy heart beat sent crashing waves of pain through his skull.
Brows knit together in pain and concentration, he scanned the field of smoldering rubble with the prescience he hadn't let himself feel for a long time. He gave himself over to it.
Justice. It wasn't a question, but an answer... Duty. Retribution. Resolution.
Jack pulled himself away, suddenly. He felt a small, cold pinprick of fear. Jack fought his way through the maze of wordless thoughts that rose as thick and dark as the clouds of smoke over the crushed airplane. This plane crash wasn’t an accident.
With his heart pounding up his throat, his hands clammy and cold, Jack forceably shook off Joey's aching gaze, and the attending prescience.
"C'mon guys, let's file this story and get back to the living," Jack said, then turned his back on the crew.
~*~
Morning broke with gray indifference. Jack and Randy sat cramped in the editing bay of the satellite truck going over every inch of Randy's video. Randy scanned for a shot he wanted Jack to use in this day's story. His unlit cigarette bobbled to the rhythm of his words. "Here's a better one, look...look at the expression on this guy's face. After 22 hours, he's numb."
"Perfect," Jack said rubbing his hands together and pulling the turtleneck collar of his sweater up over his nose." The only new information the F.A.A. released at the news conference was that the crash didn't appear to be pilot error. Today's story would include the latest death toll, the press conference, and community reaction to the tragedy.
The eye of a good photographer not only sees the centered focal point of a picture, but everything in the corners as well. In fact, the corners of the picture is what made the difference between a shooter and an award winning photo journalist. Randy was the best. His mastery of the mechanics left him free to explore the depth of his subject. Some of the shots he got on this story had him flirting with Pulitzer.
Jack's eye wasn't as good as Randy's, but his was the first to catch sight of the woman. She was a blur of color and movement. Then the camera quickly slid off her to wobble around shooting the ground as Randy scurried to get in closer. When the camera stabilized again, the eye catching woman was gone. The hair stood up on the back of Jack’s neck. "Wait! Go back...there! No, too far. There."
"What is it?" Randy asked.
"Something. I don't know."
The foreground of the picture was crowded with two rescue workers struggling to carry a black body bag from the gaping mouth of the plane's midsection. The woman was tucked in the lower left corner of the screen, near the tip of the tail section, talking to a several firemen. One thin sunshaft pierced the gray clouds, spotlighting the place where she stood. She was a stunner with long, dark auburn hair that alternately looked like spun copper and polished mahogany as it moved in and out of the light. She wore a navy wool skirt and a natural bulky wool sweater. She held a clip board and wrote something down without taking her eyes off the talking fireman.
The air held it's breath in expectation, but the eerie stillness belied the urgency of the rescue workers recovering the last of the dead.
Suddenly, a rogue wind lifted the woman's long full skirt, high enough to flash the camera a good length of thigh. The shot lasted only seconds.
"Ooo, baby! Where'd you come from?" Randy shuttled the picture back, slowed it down and hit play. The skirt drifted frame by frame up the length of the woman's leg.
"You didn't do this?" Jack asked.
"No! Honest, I'd love to take credit for her, but she's a happy accident."
All photogs are paid voyuers. All the young ones maintained a video scrapbook filled with shots of beautiful women. There was even a ratings system that photogs competed for with savage disreguard for serious journalism. Randy was only 26, and a veteran at news gathering by anyone's definition. He rarely missed.
The woman's long red hair swept up and over her shoulder to obscure her profile. As she turned to tame her flying skirt, and for the briefest moment, she faced the camera.
"Stop!" Jack said, leaning forward.
In that frozen moment, standing in the golden sunlight, one hand hugging the clip board to her chest, one hand buried in the folds of her skirt, her hair floating across her cheek, her clear blue eyes possessed the camera. She was a radient spirit shimmering in a dark sea of smudged faces and gray debris.
"That's a 10; the shot lasts exactly three seconds. I'm going to get a bonus for this one," Randy said.
"I wonder who she is."
"FAA investigator, probably."
"You think? She's not like any "suit" I've ever seen."
"She's not a reporter. I would have noticed her at the news conference," Randy said.
"She interviewed that firemen like one. God, she's beautiful."
"Naw, she's not your type at all, Jack. She's a real woman. Not your standard Barbie doll babe. She's more my type... robust."
She appeared to be in her early thirties; medium height, patrician, straight backed, self possessed, yet still managed to look soft. Maybe it was the small streak if soot that stained her cheek. Maybe it was the unusual play of light or the flirtatious breeze, but Jack realized that he'd stopped breathing. His attention got tangled in her glorious mane of hair.
"The most beautiful woman I ever saw," Randy interrupted, "was being pulled off a stearing wheel. You could hear the bones go back into place and the air being sucked back into her lungs. I can still hear the sound of her body hitting the pavement like a sack of wet groceries. Remember, I got that killer shot of the graduation tassel from inside the car, swinging in the breeze that blew through the hole in the windshield? That shoot was a seatbelt commercial... Well, so much for scenery."
Randy shuttled past the picture of the woman to footage of the plane's crippled wing jutting from the charred remains of someone's house. "I thought we might use this one to cover you saying, 'Wallowing through the debris strewned area of Hillcrest Estates...'"
Jack wasn't listening. As the wreckage played across the monitor, all he could see was a pair of blue eyes that could tempt the Devil to convert.
~*~
Jack’s nap on the plane trip home charmed the edge off his need for sleep. Back at his apartment, he didn't want to read. He didn't want to watch CNN. He didn't want to write tomorrow's story. He wanted to think of her. His head hurt again. He poured himself a scotch, turned off all the lights and slid open the glass door of his balcony to let the night in. The autumn breeze played winter's prophet. It was too cold to be pleasant, but Jack liked the sharp edge of anything. The street sounds were sleepy and distant. Several doors down, a tiny glass windchime sang a private song. He sat on the couch sipping his scotch; propped his feet on the cluttered coffee table, and threw an old army blanket over his legs for warmth.
The past two days were a blur of contrasts. The concrete reflex of churning out the work and...the other stuff. The headaches, the feelings. They lined the shadowed walkway of his mother's defective path. He hated his bog wisdom, but knew better than to ignore it. He'd gotten the passenger list, and quickly verified that there was no one of notoriety on the plane.
During the three weeks following the plane crash, Jack covered a nursery school fire in Tucson, a 26 car pile up in Virginia, a helicopter crash in San Diego, and a ten hour stand off at a Radio Shack in Palo Alto. Dreams of the redhead punctuated his insomnia. She didn't always star in his nightly fantasies, but she was there. Always…
~*~
The 911 page on his beeper was the que for Jack to grab his jacket, keys and sun glasses. He was hanging over the front railing of the L shaped apartment building in time to see Randy coming out of his ground floor apartment and get into their unit. Before he closed the door of the brightly painted van, he yelled up to Jack. “Let’s hit it, Hot Dog!”
"What's up?" Jack asked. He took the stairs two at a time to reach the parking lot.
Randy closed the door of the van, turned the starter several times until the engine caught and quickly shifted into reverse to halve the distance to Jack. He let the passenger window down. "Hotel fire in Louisiana. We're not going."
"Then what's the rush?"
"We're buying someone else's story, and re packaging it "in house". The raw video is coming down now. The story's about an hour cold. Apparently middle management can't see the expense of our going only to mop up."
"Tell me Gonzo doesn't seriously want this on the morning show?"
"We've got forty minutes," Randy said with mock confidence. He quickly changed lanes. "Seatbelt."
"Shit." Jack said putting on his seatbelt. "You can always tell a producer who's never been in the trenches. Forty fucking minutes to do a story I know nothing about. I'll barely have time to confirm the damn facts. Forget time to write!"
"Well, Hot Dog. He doesn't have to've been in the trenches with Cosar and Cox on the job. If you want him to stop asking for miracles, stop walkin' on water." Randy slid through a yellow light at the last intersection before the station.
"Yeah? Well, flattery won't work this time, lover." Both men leap out of the van. Jack punched in the four number code on the newsroom's eletronic doorlock and was halfway through when Randy grabbed the door as it began to swing closed.
Jack walked up to the assignment desk to log in, when his heart slammed into his ribcage. The woman was no more than three feet away from him. Her dark alburn hair draped over her shoulder obscuring her face, then suddenly she flipped it off her shoulder. Her full face was upon him. A deep smile. Even white teeth. A small dimple in each cheek. A delicate sprinkle of golden freckles fell across her nose. Her lips...not too full, not too thin...very kissable. But her eyes...her eyes...no eyes could be so vived, so electric blue, and looking closer he could see they were centered with bright golden sunbursts of light...and closer still...in her right eye...amid all the glitter, from the pupil downward, a dagger of red...it's tip about to pierce the dark royal blue that banded the colors together.
"It's you."
"Do I know you?" she asked.
"No, but..." He reached over the desk to wipe the soot of her face. When she backed away from his touch. Her face began to blurr and distort. Jack blinked. No. It wasn't his redhead. She was too young. Her hair was too bright. How could he think...?
"Who are you?" Jack tried to blink the last tendrils of the vision from his mind.
"I'm your new assignment editor, whacha need."
It wasn't her.
"He needs directions to the feed coming in with the hotel fire on it," Randy said walking up from behind.
"I've got it routed into editing booth six,” she said, “I punched the record button myself.
Jack was embarrassed about his mistake and slipped away in search of his story as Randy flirted with the newcomer a moment longer.
Randy found Jack with his legs stretched out in front of him, his arms wrapped tightly across his chest and a thoughtful frown on his face, watching the feed come down. Without looking back, Jack said, "Start with twenty seconds of the sexiest stuff at the top. Keep the nat sound up for the first three seconds. The roar of this baby is excellent." He pulled the first tape and slammed the second tape in the machine and hit record. "As soon as the bites with the fire marshal come down, we're in business."
Randy took the tape and went into booth seven to begin editing the story. The two of them worked so well together that they rarely had to sit over each other's shoulders to put a good story together. The pictures were rock steady and framed beautifully. Each shot was in succession of importance, the first being the best. Randy didn't have to scan the whole tape to choose his edits. Even the crowd shots were...
"Holy Freakin'..." Randy stopped himself. "...Moses," he whispered. He scanned through the crowd shot to be sure. Jack was going to have a dairy farm.
"What's up?" Jack called from the next booth.
"Shit, Jack. You’re not going to believe this. Come see…" Randy scanned the video to the crowd shot and slowed the picture...I'm not sure it's good for you."
"Randy, you're beginning to sound like my mother." Jack murmured an audible loss of breath at seeing the image on the monitor…
"No. You're beginning to sound like your mother."
The clack and clatter of the newsroom faded to insignificance..with the sight of her . "I know." He raked his fingers through his hair. "Why is she doing this to me? I know that sounds crazy…but…It’s not just me…there's a story here."
"That's why I'm showing you this. Just stay on the fence, okay?" Randy placed a fatherly hand on Jack's shoulder. "Figure it out, and show me where to aim my camera." Randy stepped out of the editing bay. “I’ll be at the desk.”
Jack couldn't resist the pull of the scene. He floated on a cool breeze that was comfortingly solid. His hungry eye probed every square inch of video tape. In a crowd of about a dozen people, everyone gazed upward at the burning hotel; everyone but her. Her back was to the fire as she talked to a cop.
...She was turned away from Jack. Her hair was molten metal; gold, silver, copper and bronze. Jack touched the video monitor. He felt it would burn his hand if even one strand of that liquid fire should splash across his arm. She wore a loose white shirt, unbuttoned at the throat. Jack could see the curve of her breast as the wind caught the open edge of the fabric and lifted it slightly away from her skin. She wore a pair of deep royal blue slacks. Her hair was captured by a thick knot at her neck, the ends spilling down her back in a river of fire. Tiny flames escaped capture and danced around her face in celebration of their freedom.
She turned slightly. Her clipboard was there and her clean unmannicured hand pushed a pencil across its yellow note pad, recording the words of an ambulance driver. Jack could hardly see her face; only the high curve of her cheekbone and her strong jawline.
When the wind shifted, the crowd drew a collective breath. The wind had been carrying the flames away from the building, toward the highway. Now it was shifting, back on the building. In that moment, she turned to observe the change and the camera recorded her full face.
Jack blindly reached out his hand to hit the still button on the editing machine.
It was definately her. Her crystalline blue eyes stole into the darkest part of his heart. Those shameless eyes that poisened his mind with possibilities. Eyes that promise...
None of his sources could find her. The F.A.A. didn't know her, and now he understood why. If she was covering a fire, she wasn't attached to aviation. If she was a reporter she had to have serious credentials to get inside the police barriers. She had evaporated after the plane crash. You'd think anyone who'd ever seen her would remember her...
"Randy, do we still have the raw from Utah?" Jack yelled in the general direction of the desk.
"Yeah, why?" Randy answered as he walked back to Jack.
"I need to study some faces."
"What for?" Randy was over Jack's shoulder again. "I think you've got her memorized by now."
"If I'm ever going to find her, I have to talk to the people she talked to." Jack's pupils were dialated with excitement and the half light of the editing booth. "Tell me, Randy, could you forget that face?"
"No, but …she gives me a bad feeling, Jack."
"There's something...about the plane crash...and, now, she’s at this fire. Something else... Something...making my alarm go off.
"Aw, man, I hate it when it does that. It means we're winning another award, and I have to wear a tux, and I will start getting ragged about the length of my hair again..."
"Randy?"
"Yeah?"
"Shut up, and get me the plane crash video?"
© 2004 Leigh McCormick
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