Jane pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to ward off a headache. “They’ve given you pain medicine, haven’t they?”
“My state of medication does not make them any less scary. Tiny, angry little birds.”
He was talking about the ancient catholic nuns of Mercy Hospital. They were one of the few things on the planet that actually frightened Hal. She suspected he would be even more cavalier about getting hurt if there was a hospital other than Mercy to go to in Pittsburgh.
“Please, please, please, please, please, please,” Hal whimpered. “You’ve got the Fortress of Solitude. All those empty beds! Please!”
“Fine. You can stay at my place. I’ll come get you.” She slapped down her hand, cutting the feed.
The two men were staring at the display with surprise and amusement.
“Who was that unfortunate fellow?” Nigel asked.
“That’s the host of Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden, Hal Rogers. We had a rough shoot this morning.”
Taggart was clearly confused by the answer. Obviously he thought PB&G was a simple landscape show.
Nigel raised a finger in question. “Speaking of beds, where are we staying?”
The two men trailed Jane to Ginnilee Berger’s desk which was alarmingly clean, as in not only was the desktop cleared of every yellow post-it note, all the pictures of England and peaches-and-cream-complexion people were missing from the cubicle walls.
Jane caught hold of Louis Robinson, the station engineer. “Was Ginnilee fired?”
“No, she’s on pregnancy leave. Has been for a month.”
“She was pregnant?”
Louis stared at her a moment and then said, “Vespers.”
She shuddered as unwanted memories tried to surface. “What?”
“You and Hal were off doing that show on vespers when we had the party for her. Yeah, she was like five months pregnant and planned to have the baby here so it would have Pittsburgh citizenship, but her ultrasound came back showing that the baby was breech. She had to go home; Mercy won’t handle high-risk pregnancies for people with visas.”
“Home? To England?”
“Yes. England. She’ll be back—if she can work out a visa for the baby. She’s hoping for joint citizenship, England and Pittsburgh, but it’s unlikely.”
“But who is doing her job until she gets back?”
“The intern.”
“Where’s the intern?”
“I think he went home too; it’s summer break at the University.”
“So who is doing the housing?”
Louis shrugged and backed away. “Not me.”
Nigel looked slightly confused and concerned but Taggart immediately grasped the situation.
“So we don’t have any place to stay?” Taggart asked. “Network said you would handle our accommodations.”
“We would have if we’d had more than,” she checked her watch, “fifteen minutes’ warning that Network didn’t do shit about preparing for your trip. Just to be clear, that includes not letting us know last Shutdown to prepare for you showing up yesterday.”
Nigel jumped in to prevent a fight. “We tried checking into a hotel last night after we crossed the border.”
“No luck, huh? Welcome to Pittsburgh. Strange thing about disappearing to another planet for a month at a time; really kills the tourist trade.” What few hotels remained were booked solid in the summer months.
“We’ve just spent the last,” Taggart paused to count back hours, “seventy-four hours in our truck, sitting in traffic, taking turns sleeping, pissing into a bottle. Three days.”
She’d heard that getting across the border was hell on Shutdown. At least it wasn’t winter. Taggart certainly looked like he’d slept in his clothes for three days. Nigel must have had a splash bath in the men’s room and put on clean clothes.
“Doesn’t the University and the EIA have people that stay just for the month?” Taggart asked with desperation in his voice. The man probably just wanted to fall over and sleep in a real bed.
“They have dorms,” Jane said. She wondered if their morning of positive karma with the EIA could allow her dumping the two onto them.
“We can stay with you!” Nigel cried with the delight of a nine-year-old being told they were having a sleepover. “Your raccoon fellow says you have lots of beds. We’re going to be working together. It would be so convenient!”
Taggart merely watched, knowing the persuasive powers of a TV host. He couldn’t keep the smirk out of his chocolate-colored eyes. She really needed to get him into a high-stakes poker game.
“I have a really big dog,” Jane said.
“Oh, I love dogs!” Nigel said with all sincerity. “And dogs love Taggart. It’s his special talent.”
Which apparently annoyed Taggart to all end, judging by the wince.
Housing was plentiful in Pittsburgh but not necessarily safe. They could pick any empty house and squat. Finding a safe place before nightfall would be tricky. She knew better than anyone what could be hiding in an abandoned space. The memory of vespers pushed into her mind and she shivered again.
“Okay, fine, but only for one night. Tomorrow we find you someplace to live.”
She’d missed their production truck earlier because Juergen had it in the garage on some pretense so he could climb all over it and drool. Taggart had state-of-the-art cameras to go with it. Everything from battery life to resolution was all a hundred times greater than her camera. It put her ancient truck and ten-year-old gear to shame. Sheer jealousy made her want to kick the truck or something. She could see why, though, Dmitri assumed that they’d be driving the network vehicle all over Pittsburgh: her truck was too old to support their cameras.
The thing had a giant-sized logo of their affiliated network painted on its side as well as Chased by Monsters, which apparently was the name of their show.
“Award-winning nature documentaries?” Jane pointed to the show’s sharp-toothed logo.
“It wasn’t our first choice of names.” Taggart obviously hated it.
Nigel, however, was a half-full kind of person. “The name isn’t important, it’s what we film that is. It is kind of catchy.”
Jane didn’t want to agree. She hated this sense of being railroaded into babysitting. It opened old wounds. She was going to have nightmares tonight for sure. “I have supplies in my truck that need to be moved to my SUV.”
That required a careful introduction of Chesty. He was too well-mannered to growl at them but he gave the men a look that let them know he would cheerfully tear their faces off if Jane asked him to.
Nigel clapped his hands together in sheer joy. “An elfhound! Oh, how wonderful. They’re on our list.”
“This is Chesty. Don’t move while I’m getting him used to you.”
“Chesty? As in Lieutenant General Chesty Puller?” Taggart got points for seeming unfazed by having something the size of a bear sniff him over. Even the most avid dog lovers were unnerved by Chesty’s size.
“Yeah. My dad was a Marine.” He had been a scout sniper to be exact, but she’d found men to be unnerved by the fact. Actually, almost everything in Jane’s life unsettled strangers.
Nigel obviously was restraining himself from a petting orgy. “He’s a beautiful animal. How old is he?”
“He’s seven. The elves say that he’ll live to be about a hundred, but he’s full grown.” She took Nigel’s hand and let Chesty know he was to suffer the touch. “Just because he knows you, doesn’t mean he trusts you. You have to earn his trust.”
“Like his owner’s?” Taggart asked.