Wicked Game (3 page)

I shrug. “Too many commercials.”

“And?”

“The music is boring.” I pull my MP3 player from my purse. “At least with this, I know I’ll hear something good.”

“Exactly. All the music sounds the same, because big corporations take over stations and make everyone play the same vanilla-flavored crap.” He leans forward, voice low and calm. “You won’t find crap of any flavor at WMMP. Here the DJs play what
they
want, not what some CEO or record promoter tells them to play. Do you know how rare that is?”

“I’ll take a guess: extremely?”

He slides the top book from the stack—
The Rock Snob’s Dictionary
—and caresses the worn edge of the spine. “This place is a gift to people who love music. I don’t take credit for it. It’s all them.” He points to the floor. “But people
don’t know about them—yet. The owner just spent a fortune boosting our signal strength to reach listening areas in D.C., Baltimore, and Harrisburg.”

“That’s good, right?”

“Maybe not.” He taps the spine of the book against the table. “She did it to make the station more attractive to buyers. A communications conglomerate called Skywave has spent the last decade gobbling up hundreds of radio stations.”

“And WMMP is next.”

He nods. “Our owner says if ad revenue doesn’t quadruple by Labor Day, she’ll sell to Skywave. And we’ll all be out of work.” He tosses the book back on the stack. “Frank needs another set of legs for our last-ditch marketing campaign. Based on your course work, your portfolio, and your energy, I think you’d be perfect.”

Again, no pressure. I glance at the books. “Those are for me?”

“You have to know your product.” He says the last word with a twist of his lips. It must pain him to speak of music as a commodity.

“You never answered my question about the future.”

He looks away, face pinched. “If Skywave is the future, maybe we’re all better off in the past.”

Dubious but desperate, I reach for the stack of books. “Get the door.”

“Wait.” He holds out his hand. I reach for it to seal the deal, but he brushes my hand aside. “Uh-uh. Give me that.” He points to the MP3 player protruding from my purse.

“Are you kidding?”

“Spend two weeks listening to the radio instead. With
your first paycheck I’ll give you a bigger player, with more memory and more songs, courtesy of the station.”

I hand it over. “One with video would be great.”

He laughs and slides the player into an empty slot on the bookshelf. “See you at eight-thirty tomorrow morning.”

I lug the books out to the parking lot, trying not to stagger too much.

“And lose the suit,” David calls after me. “This is a radio station, not a savings and loan.”

I send him a grateful grin as he waves and shuts the door.

The parking lot’s tiny pebbles crunch under my feet, loud in the summer-night stillness. No traffic noise reaches me, since the station lies ten minutes outside the small town of Sherwood, Maryland, separated from the highway by a quarter mile of dense woods.

I balance the books against the fender of my worn-out car and fish for my keys. My purse feels light and roomy without the player, which I already miss. Maybe I could borrow my friend Lori’s—

Footsteps scrape the gravel behind me. David with more books, no doubt.

“Honestly,” I tell him as I turn around, “this is more than—”

The word
enough
dies in my throat.

No one’s there. The only light bleeds from an orange porch lamp near the station’s front door, turning my half of the parking lot a dull amber. The radio tower looms above, its winking red eye too high to provide illumination.

The other side of the parking lot lies in shadow, and
that’s where I look—muscles frozen, eyes darting, like a baby rabbit hoping the predator won’t see me if I just stand still.

Yeah, right. Anyone stalking me might think I’ve been replaced by a mannequin. Good strategy.

Since there are no other buildings within yelling distance, I should either drive away or run back into the station. The thought of whimpering to my new boss about a scratchy noise in the parking lot makes my decision easy.

Without turning toward the car, I fumble for the trunk lock, then insert the key. The trunk pops, and I shove the books inside before slamming it shut. My feet stumble backward to the driver’s-side door.

A breath at my ear, too cold for a summer breeze. I spin to face—

Nothing again.

I stifle a squeak, open the car, and slip inside with a quick check of the backseat. My elbow mashes down the door lock as I start the car and slam it into reverse. Gravel spins from under my tires and clatters against the undercarriage.

The driveway forms a long, headlight-bright tunnel in the leafy darkness, and it’s not until I reach the main road that my lungs release their pent-up breath.

No wonder Frank hates working at night.

My hands have stopped shaking by the time I arrive in downtown Sherwood. After checking my side street for suspicious characters—more than the usual, anyway—I grab half of David’s books from my trunk and head up to my apartment, over Dean’s Pawn Shop. It really is the best
in town, as evidenced by the large red-and-white sign in the window:
NO STOLEN GOODS.
Dean might as well have written
WINK WINK
at the bottom of the sign.

I enter through a double-locked, street-level door next to the shop, then clomp up a dark stairwell—I’ve been bugging Dean for weeks to change the unreachable lightbulb—to another door, also double-locked, leading to my apartment.

The stale hot air chokes me. I hurry three steps down the hall to the bedroom, where my only air conditioner perches in the window. Soon my suit lies crumpled in the corner and I’m standing before the AC in my underwear, letting the frigid breeze dry every drop of fear-infused sweat.

Once cooled to the point of shivering, I switch on my computer and connect to the Internet, then run to the kitchen to avoid the modem’s eviscerated-android screech.

I open the fridge to see one lonely beer looking for company. It finds its ideal mate in a piece of leftover pizza.

Back in my bedroom, my e-mail has finished downloading. At the top of my in-box sits a message from David, sent a few minutes ago:

“Yeah yeah yeah.” I switch my alarm clock to the radio function and search for WMMP’s frequency. (Do they know that their call letters sort of spell
wimp
’?) I scan the dial until a harmonica purrs from the tiny speaker.

Returning to my e-mail, I notice that one of the
in-box’s subfolders is bolded. It looks like this: “M (1),” which means I have one message from a person who gets filtered into her own subfolder “M.” She must have convinced the guards to give her computer access again.

The message crouches safely behind a wall of mouse clicks. After a few moments of stomach-churning hesitation, I leave it there.

Just before midnight, I send my last “I finally got a Job!” e-mail, this one to my former foster parents. Stretching to crack my vertebrae over the back of the chair, I notice the radio’s gone silent. Did the signal die? I grab my beer and cross the room to make sure the plug hasn’t slipped out of the ancient, fire-code-violating outlet.

Then a voice, soft and low, says, “I’ll never . . .
never
get out of these blues alive.” For a moment I wonder if the voice belongs to Monroe the DJ—I haven’t paid enough attention to know what he sounds like. Then a guitar eases in, followed by light applause. The words must have been the name of the song.

A slow, insistent drumbeat joins the hushed guitar, mesmerizing me even before I hear the first lyrics. I sit on the bed, gingerly, as if an abrupt movement could break the spell.

His voice sweeps over me, crooning of black coffee, cigarettes, and the futility of trying to sleep in the face of heartache.

An impassioned piano joins in, defying the lyrics’ doom. I close my eyes and I’m there, in a dim, smoky bar where loners sway, heavy-lidded, wrapped in thoughts of those they’ve lost. I swallow the last warm sip of beer and wish I had another.

The song ends. Applause erupts. I click off the radio
before another voice can take the singer’s place. His contagious restlessness prickles my skin and shatters my sleepiness. I can’t lie down. Even the soft cool sheets would scour my nerves.

I draw up the shade and peer out my window. The quiet streets of Sherwood beckon, begging me to make one last run before this normal life tightens like a strait-jacket.

I tap my nails against the wooden sill in a quickening rhythm and wait for someone, anyone. But in a small town at this hour, the sidewalks and alleys are empty of prey.

Besides, I always hunt far from home.

My office desk is empty, inside and out. I shouldn’t expect too much from my first day of work, but how can I achieve the American dream of enhanced productivity without a computer or, say, a pen?

David seemed relieved to see me when I showed up a few minutes ago, but then he had to run back downstairs to the studio to switch a program, leaving me aimless and penless.

A metal cabinet sits on the other side of my desk, supporting the antique fax machine and a box-framed fretboard from a busted Pete Townsend guitar. I head for the cabinet, my sandals slapping against the rough hardwood floor.

The cabinet door creaks open to reveal shelves full of supplies. Score. It’s like shopping without paying.

As I paw through empty boxes, my enthusiasm dims. Now it’s like shopping in Soviet Russia.

Footsteps trudge up the stairs behind me. “You can have any color pen,” says a languid voice, “as long as it’s black.”

I swing the cabinet door aside to see a pale, pudgy blond man approach the other desk. He tears off the top page of the Oscar Wilde calendar and reads today’s quote. “Hmph.” Apparently not one of Oscar’s funnier bon mots.

“You must be Frank.” I walk over to him as businesslike as I can, considering the sandal-slapping, and extend my hand.

The corners of his mouth turn down, which looks like their natural configuration. “It’s Franklin, actually.” He sets down the calendar. “Everyone calls me Frank, even though I don’t want them to.”

“I have the same problem.”

He looks at me directly for the first time. “Everyone calls you Frank?”

His delivery is so deadpan, the joke thuds through the floor and into the basement before I remember to laugh.

“I mean, they say my name wrong.”

Frank(lin) scans my resume, which David must have left on the desk. “What’s so confusing about ‘Ciara’?”

He says it right:
keer
-ah. We’re going to be great friends.

Franklin finally shakes my hand. He’s taller and younger than I first thought; the slump threw off my perception. He’s about six feet, in his midthirties at most. His clothes are sharp enough—a business-standard dress shirt and gray jacket with a blue-and-black tie—but they lie listlessly on his form, as if he came to inhabit them by accident. Maybe he just needs caffeine.

“Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

He sighs and rolls his eyes. “Sit down.” He gestures to the chair in which I was interviewed last night, then sinks into the seat behind his desk.

“Did I say something wrong?”

“Fine, don’t sit.” He looks up at me with gray eyes that combine a basic benevolence with a soul-deep ennui. “Ciara, you’re here to learn about marketing and sales, and help this station avoid oblivion. You’re not here to serve anyone.” His slight drawl pegs him as a local. “You fetch coffee for no one but yourself, you make copies and send faxes for no one but yourself. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“If one of those disc jockeys—” He points to the floor as if they live under the building. “—asks you to so much as loan them a pen, let me know. After you tell them to fuck off, of course.”

I sit in the chair and scoot it closer to Franklin’s desk. “So what’s their deal? Do they dress like that all the time?”

He leans forward to reply, then clamps his mouth shut. “Did you read the books David gave you?”

“No, I just got them last night.”

Franklin studies my face for a few moments, drumming his fingers slowly on the arm of his chair.

“Hang on.” He gets up, then shuffles down the stairs, managing to look both perturbed and apathetic.

I barely have time to snicker at today’s Oscar Wilde quote (
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable
) before David bounces up the stairs.

“Ciara.” He nearly turns my name into three syllables before covering his mistake with a quick chin scratch. “Have you at least skimmed the materials?”

Right now the books are lying in my hallway where I dumped them last night. “Why is it so important?”

He crosses his arms and shifts his feet. “You need to understand what we are—I mean, who we are, and the challenges we face in today’s, er, business climate.” He rubs the side of his neck. “So you can be one of us.”

I’m not one of them. I’m an intern. But I’ll agree to anything to make him stop twitching.

“Which book, which page? I’ll look it up when I get home tonight.”

“Now.” He nods at my empty desk. “Your computer won’t get here until Monday, so go home and start reading. Call me when you find out—when you finish.”

I picture the three-foot stack of text. “Finish all of them?”

“You’ll know when.”

Even David’s cryptic comments won’t make me turn down a paid day at the pool.

I’m halfway out the door when I remember something I wanted to ask him. “David, who does that song, ‘I’ll Never Get Out of These Blues Alive’?”

He turns a proud-papa smile on me. “John Lee Hooker. Monroe plays it last thing every night. You like it?”

I shrug. “It’s all right.”

David’s smirk says he sees through my understatement. “You’ll love your job.”

I love my job. I’ve never been able to say that before, but now, lounging by the pool at my best friend Lori’s apartment complex and sipping a peach iced tea, I love my job.