My Hero (27 page)

After that, still in hopes of some decent B roll, she and Chris made a visit to the emergency room eight blocks away where Cal had been rushed that day. But Hicks' Law prevailed once more when they discovered the place locked down tight with signs posted that it was temporarily closed while undergoing renovation.

“Good thing it wasn't closed last September, huh?” Chris said. “Your hero would probably be a goner.”

Holly pretended she didn't even hear that. She wished she
hadn't
heard it because her emotions were so conflicted where Cal was concerned that in a tiny, cobwebby, cruel corner of her heart she almost wished he were dead or at the very least that she hadn't met him.

In the end, all the trip to Baltimore had yielded was a halfway decent crab dinner at the company's expense, and that forlorn moment of thinking about Cal before she once more banished him from her head.

Her trip to Washington a few days later didn't go much better. She had set up an interview at the Treasury Department with the Secret Service's public liaison guy, Special Agent Timothy Tull, who turned out to be about as forthcoming as a tree stump. What Holly basically needed to know was what extra qualifications, both physical and mental, were required for an agent to be selected for duty on the President's protective detail. What it was that Cal had that few other men did. What it was he'd lost and was struggling so hard to regain. And she'd been hoping for an anecdote or two to enliven her production. Something along the lines of
And then there was the time that Cal…
or
Wait'll you hear about the time when he…

But Secret Agent Tull seemed to take the Secret part of his title a bit too seriously, and he spent the better part of the interview politely but firmly refusing to divulge the simplest of details, all the while regarding Holly as someone who was trying to weasel highly classified information out of him, or as if she were the front woman for Murder, Incorporated.

When she finally closed her still-blank notebook, shook his hand and said with obvious sarcasm, “Thank you, Agent Tull. You've been
so
helpful,” the guy didn't even crack a smile. It only made her appreciate Cal's wonderful sense of humor all the more.

For a few moments every day, usually when she was about to drift off to sleep, Holly would allow herself to think about him—not as the storybook, stoic hero whose biography she was producing, but as the very real and vulnerable man she'd fallen for during her brief stay in Honeycomb. She'd picture him at a distance, dressed in his gray sweats, doggedly circling the track with his faithful companion, Bee. She'd picture him up close, allowing herself to drift in the blue depths of his eyes, to shiver beneath the touch of his palm, to wrap herself in the subtle Lone Star cadence of his voice.

It was a voice she hadn't heard since her first night home because Cal hadn't called her back. On the other hand, Mrs. Calvin Griffin had called her at least half a dozen times, inquiring about the shooting schedule, offering suggestions about wardrobe and lighting and location. Always the location.

“Why film in that awful little town?” the woman kept asking. “It means nothing to my husband, after all. It's simply where he's from, you know. Just an accident of birth. Why bother with Honeyville when there are such lovely settings in Washington? Our condo has a divine balcony and I've just redecorated.”

“Honeycomb,” Holly had corrected in the first few calls.

“Excuse me?”

“Honeycomb. The town's called Honeycomb.”

“Oh, that's right,” Diana always said before getting it wrong again.

Holly stopped correcting her. Diana obviously wasn't interested in facts.

Each call from Mrs. Griffin concluded in a similar fashion. Holly, weary of gritting her teeth and nursing a headache, would abruptly inform her that she had another call, after which Diana would say, as if she hadn't said it numerous times before, “Oh, and I told you I have the tapes of my appearances on
Good Morning America
and
Larry King,
didn't I? There are a couple rather nice sound bites if I do say so myself. Whenever you'd like to look at them, just let me know. You've got my number, right?”

Holly had her number, all right. The woman craved the spotlight and seemed thrilled to bask in its reflected glow whenever her husband was in it. That explained the lovely Diana. But what Holly couldn't even begin to comprehend was not just why Cal had married her in the first place, but why he'd chosen to reconcile with the bitch.

Against her will, against her better judgment, she kept thinking about all those boxes stacked against the wall in Cal's room. Diana had just crammed her husband's life into cartons and shipped them off to Texas, including their wedding picture and that sad, sawed-off gold band that signified their union.

She'd be damned, Holly vowed, if she'd give this selfish, egocentric, blood-sucking chick anything more than a passing mention in her production. If she mentioned her at all.

Cal deliberated two long weeks over what to do about the bogus bills. He shouldn't have taken so long in his capacity as an officer of the law, whether his status was active or not, but he was reluctant to simply turn the money over to agents in a field office and then be told to go home to his rocking chair. Fuck that. He needed a little action, something more than just lifting weights and hobbling around the track, otherwise he'd go nuts thinking about Holly, who was back in New York and presumably happy as a clam in a bowl of Manhattan chowder.

During those two weeks, he stopped in Ye Olde Print Shoppe a couple times, ostensibly to copy some documents for Ruth and Dooley. Hec Garcia had seemed happy enough to see him, but there was a wariness in the guy that Cal couldn't overlook. There was an edginess that had nothing to do with the fact that the two of them had been adversaries in high school. As far as Cal could tell, Hec looked guilty as hell.

He finally decided to take the bills to the field office in Houston where they created an instant buzz.

“Have a seat, Griffin,” Mike Squire, the Special Agent in Charge of the office said, pointing to the chair across from his desk.

The man's military bearing was straight out of the Marine Corps, vintage Viet Nam. He was probably only a year or two from retirement, Cal guessed. His credenza was loaded down with framed portraits of kids and hunting dogs, and his desktop was stacked a foot high with manila files.

“Good job with the President last year,” Squire said almost gruffly.

“Thanks.”

“Now give me the quick skinny on how you got these bills.”

All the while Cal spoke, Agent Squire nodded as if he already knew the details. And when Cal stopped, the man opened a drawer and tossed a rubber-banded stack of currency on top of his littered desk. Cal only had to glance to know that they were identical to his two.

“I'll be damned,” he said. “What's up?”

Squire stared at him hard. “What's your status, Griffin? I haven't had time to call personnel yet, and I'd rather not waste time with those paper pushers if I don't have to.”

“I don't blame you,” Cal said, striving for the perfect tone—a bit of healthy
Semper fi
mixed with confidence and enthusiasm. “I'm just using up the last two months of my mandatory medical leave, then I'll be going back to Washington on active duty.”
Maybe. I hope.

Squire bought it, thank God, because the next words out of his iron-clad mouth were, “Okay. Sounds good to me. We could use an extra hand with this operation.”

That operation, as the Special Agent in Charge detailed it, was a pretty big one, even though it wasn't centralized. Because he'd been on leave, Cal hadn't been privy to the investigation of a counterfeiting ring that had set up fairly recently in the border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. The key players had managed to distribute some fairly decent threaded paper to willing print shops in the southwest, usually places about the size of Hec Garcia's shop. The printers got a buck or two for every fifty they produced, and the bills were collected and then distributed at or near border crossings, where the recipients, fresh from Mexico, weren't all that familiar with U.S. currency.

According to Agent Squire, the counterfeiters had crossed the million-dollar mark in April, and were well on their way to their second million. A million here, a million there, and pretty soon they'd be talking about some real money.

The Secret Service had been reluctant to move in on the operation until they had pinned down a substantial number of print shops. But now that they had identified at least eight in each of the four states, they were ready to make their move, as well as make a big splash in the news.

“Seems we haven't had much good press since you took that bullet for Jennings,” Squire said. “Washington wants this operation to make the front page so it's going down on the Fourth of July. Kind of our own little fireworks display. I'll make sure Garcia's place is on the list. We'll keep you posted.”

“Great,” Cal had said, trying not to sound too eager, or like a man desperately in need of some real fireworks as opposed to the female variety. “I'll be looking forward to it.”

On Holly's last half day at the office, before she was due to fly back to Texas late that afternoon, she wondered what else could possibly go wrong because it seemed as if everything already had.

The Al Haynes bio for Hero Week was excellent and nearly in the can. The Neil Armstrong segment, on the other hand, was a complete and unqualified mess with so little original content that a high school sophomore could have put it together with some paste, a pair of blunt scissors and a modicum of research on the Net. Mel would have fired the producer, Harriet Hyde, but the woman had outfoxed him by tendering her resignation along with her skimpy script and ninety-seven minutes of file footage for the forty-eight-minute piece.

If things kept going like this, Mel wasn't going to have any hair left for that stupid comb-over of his.

“Can you fix this?” he asked that final morning when he slapped Harriet's script on her desk.

“Got a match?” Holly asked.

Mel didn't laugh, but Holly did. God, if she didn't laugh, she'd cry.

She fiddled with the script for a couple hours and then, just as she was straightening up her desk prior to leaving for the airport, another grenade got lobbed into her office when she got a call from Wesley Cope's agent, informing her that the Country and Western star had received a last-minute invitation to headline the Independence Day celebration on the Mall in Washington, and thus wouldn't be available for filming in Honeycomb until the first week of August.

When Holly passed that tidbit along to Mel his face turned so purple she thought he was going into cardiac arrest. One of her boss's claims to fame was being able to say “fuck” in twenty-three languages, and he covered at least nineteen before he growled, “We'll sue him to Nashville and back. We'll sue his country ass off.”

That sounded good to Holly, but it didn't do much to solve her problem of what the hell she was going to do in the meantime without her narrator.

“Maybe I'll just cancel my flight,” she suggested, trying not to sound half as hopeful as she felt.

The longer she could put off seeing Cal again, the happier she'd be. Well, not happy exactly. Just less miserable.

“Not much we can do in Honeycomb without Wesley Cope and it's probably too late to bring anybody else on board,” she said. “I'll just stay here, re-tool the Griffin script, get rid of all the Fourth of July stuff and…”

“You're going,” Mel said, adding another expletive in a twentieth language. “You've just been promoted to narrator.”

“Mel! I can't…”

He swore again. “Don't give me any of that I can't crap, Holly. Let's not forget I've seen all those tapes you sent to CBS and ABC and every media outlet east of the Mississippi, the ones where you do the writing, the video, and the narration all by your little Lone Star lonesome self.”

“Well…” She wasn't going to deny that she was pretty good, but still…

“And now that I think about it, if we're gonna be cutting back on this Fourth of July segment for the piece, you might as well do the video, too. No need to take Chris Keifer with you.” He almost grinned. “Wait'll I tell Arnold and Maida we're saving them about ten thousand bucks. We'll probably both get bonuses this year, kid.”

“Oh, good,” Holly moaned. “That's great. That's just wonderful. I can use my bonus to change my name after this low-budget bio—written, directed, filmed, narrated, produced and all the popcorn you can eat provided by Holly Hicks—gets laughed at all over the industry.”

“I've got confidence in you, kid.” Mel looked at his watch. “You better get going now or you'll miss your plane.”

If Hicks' Law had been consistent, Holly's plane would have crashed somewhere between Newark and Houston. The worst thing that happened, though, was when she spilled some coffee on Mel's laptop. Its screen fluttered and blipped for a few seconds. Holly's heart stopped. But then both the screen and her heart resumed their normal rhythms.

She'd been using the computer in an attempt to watch the footage of the assassination attempt. The tape had sat on her desk for four weeks, during which she'd merely stared at its black plastic casing, telling herself she'd view it tomorrow. Or tomorrow. Today, however, she'd run out of tomorrows. She had to watch the tape in order to figure out how to fit it into her piece—whether to use it as prologue or to feature it chronologically in Cal's life story.

One of the guys in Technical had transferred it to a CD-ROM for her this morning and she was determined to use part of her two-hour flight to watch it. When she'd spilled the coffee, she was already on her fourth attempt.

Each time it was the same. She'd watch the gaggle of press and onlookers gathered outside the hotel door, then the door would open and out would come those stern-faced men in gray suits with their little yellow Secret Service pins on their lapels and their earpieces planted firmly in their ears. First came two, and then came Cal. Each time she saw him come through that door just ahead of the President, her heart would start beating harder, a lump would lodge in her throat, and a feeling of dread would settle in her chest like a lead weight. Each time he came through the hotel door, Holly would hit the computer's pause button, freezing Cal's image on the screen.