Going to the Bad (2 page)

“Freddy, I think Teddy may need some assistance with that tie.” Leanore pointed across the newsroom. “He looks in danger of strangling himself.”

“Call him Ted,” I said. “He's talent now.”

“I better go give a hand to”—Freddy paused to raise his fingers like quotes—“‘Ted.'”

Leanore waited for him to cross the room, then said, “Is Rod spending Christmas in LA with his family?”

Rod was my boyfriend and KJAY's senior producer. He'd negotiated the new title—
senior producer
, not
boyfriend
—after some high-profile reporting the previous summer. His coverage of a deadly wildfire had earned him job offers from all the major networks. He'd chosen to stay in Bakersfield.

“Rod changed his mind about visiting his family,” I said. “He came back this morning unexpectedly. It's the first Christmas since his grandfather died and I think being at home was a reminder.”

Leanore didn't say anything. She kept the same friendly half smile on her face and waited for me to elaborate.

“Rod and his grandpa were close. I think their relationship was sort of like me and my uncle Bud.”

She continued her silence.

“We're having Christmas dinner with Bud tomorrow. He's still living with the little sick girl's mother. . . . Remember we used to do those tearjerker stories about the little girl who was going blind?”

Leanore treated this as a rhetorical question.

I tried to hold out. I didn't want to talk about what was really on my mind, but Leanore's silence was like a tractor-trailer hauling the truth out of me.

Finally, she raised one eyebrow.

It did me in. “I found an engagement ring in Rod's pocket.”

The spell broke. Leanore actually jumped as her hands came together in a clapping motion. “A Christmas proposal! It's so romantic.”

“It's only romantic if I say yes.”

Her hands dropped. “But, Lilly . . .”

I refused to look at her. “Don't ‘but, Lilly' me. I love Rod, but this is a huge step.”

She tensed. “Does he know you found the ring?”

“No. I put it back and then ran out of the house for work.”

“Good, then it's not ruined. You have to act surprised tomorrow when he asks you.”

I leaned forward. “Leanore, did you hear me? I'm not ready for this. Everything is changing and I hate it.”

“But you and Rod have been living together for over a year. He's handsome, smart, funny, and kind. What more could you possibly want in a man?”

“That's just it. He's perfect. When we met, he had flaws. He was terrified of going on camera and he let everybody walk all over him.”

“Maybe he was a little too timid,” she said. “But you're the one who helped him get over that.”

“I know I did, but that was pretty much the only thing wrong with him, and it's gone now.”

“Why is that a bad thing?”

I pointed at myself. “Because I've still got all my flaws. He's perfect, and I'm still me.”

She shook her head. “Okay, now you're just making stuff up.”

There was more to it than that, of course. I also worried that the still recent death of Rod's grandfather—whose loss had been sudden and painful—had driven Rod to take this big step.

In a few months when his grief receded and emotional equilibrium had been restored, would Rod regret proposing? That kind of rejection was excruciating to even contemplate. I had no intention of actually experiencing it.

“He's too perfect?” Leanore continued. “Lilly, I've heard of people sabotaging themselves, but this takes the cake. You're thirty-two years old. It's time to . . .”

Leanore continued, but I'd already stopped listening. The sounds of a voice under pressure had consumed all my attention. I tilted my head toward the scanner, but couldn't understand what was being said.

“Everybody quiet,” I yelled while cranking the volume to high. “There's something on the police frequency.”

Conversation in the newsroom abruptly stopped. Several people turned down the audio on their computers. All heads turned toward the small boxes behind me.

“Send ambulance and backup to my location ASAP. I've got a possible one eight seven with multiple gunshot wounds.”

A small ripple of excitement passed through the newsroom. Ted and Freddy both got up and hurried toward the assignment desk.

The dispatch officer answered, “What's your ten-twenty?”

I recognized the location request and quickly searched for a pen. At the same time I looked over my shoulder at the dry-erase board of stories.

“Oildale.”

I found a pen and scribbled
Oildale
while mentally doing the calculations of whom to pull off which story in favor of breaking news. It would be difficult because we were staffed so low for the holiday and already had the sludge crash.

“One seventy-three Jefferson Street.”

I froze.

“One seventy-three Jefferson Street,” the dispatch officer repeated back. “Ambulance was dispatched from original nine-one-one call, but it's been delayed.”

Everything slowed down. I took a breath, but the simple act of filling my lungs seemed to take forever. I finally managed to speak, but it came out in a mumble.

“What's that, Lilly?” Leanore frowned. “Are you all right?”

Freddy was the first to realize the truth. “Dude, don't you and Rod live on Jefferson Street?”

“It's my address,” I repeated, this time not in a mumble.

Leanore's voice rose. “You mean the shooting is at your house?”

I nodded.

“But Rod's in LA,” Ted said. “He's not home.”

Freddy nodded. “Isn't he visiting his folks for the holidays?”

“He came back this morning.” I finally released my grip on the pen. “He was home when I left for work.”

I started running and didn't look back.

Christmas Eve, 8:42 a.m.

I
don't own a car. As chief photog I'm required to take a
news van and gear home with me every night in case there's breaking news. I treat news van #4 as my own company vehicle. I've driven it from the station to where I live in Oildale more times than I can remember, but never faster or more recklessly than on that morning.

I slammed through downtown Bakersfield without pausing. The Christmas-themed store windows went by in a blur. I almost hit a car when I entered the Garces Circle without the right of way. I passed the Kern County Museum and the Bakersfield Drillers' ballpark going seventy-five. I slowed to fifty-five as I crossed the bridge into Oildale.

This side of the dry riverbed—the water long ago diverted for the irrigation of crops—is Bakersfield's rougher, less affluent sibling to the north. Originally constructed as company housing for the nearby oil fields, Oildale was where I grew up and where Rod and I had been living for the last year. We shared my uncle Bud's three-bedroom house, which Bud had inherited from my grandfather half a century earlier.

Two police cars were parked in the street. My last hope that Rod might be safe died when I saw his Prius in its usual spot out front. I abandoned the news van in park with the motor running and the driver's-side door open.

I ran toward the house. A uniformed officer walked out my front door and intercepted me at the bottom of the porch steps. “Hold on. This is a crime scene. It's not open to the press.”

“I'm not the press.”

“Do you think I'm blind?” He gestured to the van out on the street, then to me.

To be fair, I was dressed like a shooter in my sturdy hiking boots, jeans, and red KJAY polo.

He stepped forward trying to force me back. “Now do me a favor and wait out at the sidewalk.”

“This is my house. I live here.”

“You do?” His demeanor changed. “Do you have some kind of ID?”

I didn't. I'd left my wallet and everything else back at the station. Instead of explaining, I tried again to get around him. “My boyfriend lives here with me. Is he okay?”

I felt the inadequacy of the word
boyfriend
as I said it. Boyfriends were casual. There was no permanency or sense of commitment there. I wanted to add a qualifier. I wanted to tell him that Rod had a ring in his coat pocket.

“I'm sorry.” The officer had taken a step back, but still blocked the porch. “We'll try and get this sorted out. But in the meantime, I'm going to have to ask you to wait out on the sidewalk.”

Instead of arguing with him, I pushed. He was knocked off-balance and fell back on the steps. I used the opportunity to trample the rosebush and jump up onto the porch. I swung my legs over the railing and stumbled toward the front door. It opened and a second patrol officer emerged with his Taser out.

The one I'd shoved came up behind me with handcuffs. He sounded apologetic as he secured my hands behind my back. “You'll only be in the way in there. You could even make things worse.”

I managed to look through the dime-store lace curtains covering the front window. Through the web of white polyester, I saw the outline of two figures clustered around someone on the floor. “Rod,” I yelled as the two officers forced me down the porch. I continued to struggle as we crossed the lawn.

“You need to stop resisting,” one of the officers said as we
continued to the sidewalk. “I swear, they're doing everything possible in there to keep him stabilized until the ambulance arrives.”

Stabilize him! Everything possible!
My knees buckled and I sank down to the concrete. A noise in the street brought my attention to a second KJAY news van parking behind mine.

Ted got out and ran right for me. “What happened? Where's Rod?” The tie still hung loose in a deformed knot around his collar. “Why are you handcuffed?”

One of the patrol officers stayed next to me with his hand on my shoulder while the other one moved to block Ted's way into the house. “We need everyone to stay back. This is a crime scene. You'll have to move your news van. We're going to cordon off the street.”

Under stress, Ted reverted to the speech patterns he'd tried so hard to abandon since becoming on-air talent. “Dude, is Rod, like, okay?”

The officers looked at each other. Finally one said, “Everything possible is being done.”

Sadness, panic—those are words we can all relate to, but they don't begin to describe what I felt. It was as if my heart had been tied to a weight and then the weight dropped off a cliff.

“Where's the ambulance?” Tears were streaming down my face. “Why isn't it here yet?”

A Ford Taurus came to a screeching halt in the street. Out jumped our station's assignment manager, whose job I'd been covering all week. Callum is a big man with a big gut, and I wasn't used to seeing him move fast. I also wasn't used to seeing him with a week's worth of beard.

I looked at Ted. “You called Callum at home?”

“It wasn't me, dude. I followed you right out the door.”

Callum passed my news van, paused to turn the engine off, then rushed to join us. “The ambulance is close. Thirty seconds maybe.”

I recognized a small white cord running from the pocket of his
LA Dodgers jacket and up to his left ear. “You were listening to the scanners at home?”

He shrugged, but withdrew the portable radio from his pocket and adjusted something. “Traffic around the sludge spill delayed the ambulance. That's why they're not here yet.”

In the distance I heard a siren. I focused all my attention down the street, praying the ambulance would come into view.

Ted's voice barely registered as he said, “Dude, you're on vacation and you were, like, home listening to the scanners?”

While we waited, Callum convinced the officer to unlock my cuffs. As soon as they were off, I started toward the house again.

Ted and the officer were slow to react, but not Callum. His hand shot out and gripped my wrist tighter than the cuffs had. “Don't be an idiot.”

The siren reached a crescendo as the ambulance arrived. It parked and the noise abruptly stopped. Two more patrol cars followed the ambulance and blocked opposite ends of the street from traffic.

Callum still held me. “Right now you need to let the police and paramedics do their jobs. Your job is to wait with us. It's lousy, but that's what you have to do.”

I glanced at the officer. He still held the cuffs, waiting to see if he'd need them.

I crumpled in defeat and let Callum pull me into a rare hug. Fear and adrenaline, not to mention the cold winter weather, caught up with me and I began shaking. Ted went to my van and retrieved my blue coat.

The new officers quickly created a perimeter. Police tape was unspooled just in time to stop a rival station's live truck at the other end of the block.

That's when I saw the detective nicknamed Handsome Homicide. He was getting a rundown from a patrol officer. They both stopped at the porch steps to put blue bootees over their shoes.

“Please,” I begged him. “Tell me what's going on.”

Handsome had once asked me out on a date, which I'd turned down because, despite his good looks, he was basically a jerk. I'd only seen him a few times in the last year, and always at crime scenes.

“I've heard that he's alive, but it's bad.” Handsome continued up the steps. “I'll send someone out to brief you as soon as I can.”

Ted took out a cell phone and hit speed dial.

We all heard Freddy answer, “KJAY, we're on your side.”

Callum's eyes widened. “Freddy's covering the assignment desk? He doesn't even work at the station anymore.”

“We're short-staffed for Christmas Eve.” The usually easygoing Ted looked annoyed. He covered the cell phone's microphone. “And don't hurt on Freddy. He's better at stuff than you give him credit for.”