Jack Cavanaugh - Death Watch

There were three workers inside the van. None of them had paid any attention to Hunz, their eyes glued to a monitor that was rewinding the videotape of Billy’s plunge. Between the workers’ bodies, Sydney glimpsed the video image of Billy Peppers midair, parallel to the ground, arms outstretched, but he was falling upward. His feet touched the ledge and he stood upright atop the building.

Rewind completed, the man controlling the playback punched a button. The tape began to play forward.

Everyone’s attention was on the monitor. One of the men shifted positions, blocking Sydney’s view, making it impossible for her to see from outside the van.

She glanced around. No one seemed to be paying any attention to her. She had to see the playback—the flames, the angels, everything—but to barge uninvited into another station’s van?

The first step was hard. After that, she didn’t remember any of the other steps. The next thing she knew, she was standing behind Hunz watching the playback monitor.

On the screen, Billy leaned forward and fell. Everything happened much more quickly than she remembered it. And to her astonishment, much differently!

Billy plummeted, his shirt and dreadlocks whipping, his deadly course straight and true and unhindered. The playback recorded no flames. No glow. No angels. No slowing. Nothing but air separated Billy from the ground, and not for long.

“Ooohhhhh!” The men in the truck echoed the earlier cry in the street.

“That’s gotta hurt,” one of them said.

They grinned at each another. That’s when they realized they had company.

“Hey, who are you? You guys cops or something?”

“That’s the chick on the roof!”

“Are you spying, man? That’s really low!”

“Get outta here!”

Without a word, hunched over, Hunz turned to follow Sydney. With curses hitting them in the back, they climbed out of the van. The door slammed shut behind them.

Sydney was stunned. Not by the crew’s outburst, but by what she’d seen on the replay. In a way it made sense, but then it didn’t. At least now she understood the crowd’s reaction. They saw Billy fall to his death. But she saw fire, angels, and what looked like pixie dust. They watched him die. She watched him…what? What did she see? Or had she really seen what she thought she saw? Had she imagined it?

“Something troubling you?” Hunz said.

The understatement of the millennia, she thought. Was she the only person who had seen angels rescuing Billy?

“Yes…yes, something’s troubling me!” Without explaining, she ran back to the sidewalk entrance to the Hotel Hilton, ten stories directly beneath Billy’s position on the ledge.

“There!That’s my problem!"sheshouted. “There’s no body. If Billy Peppers hit the ground, where’s the body?”

A uniformed police officer overheard her.

“They just carted it off,” he said.

“That quickly? Not likely,” Sydney said.

“How long do you think it takes to load a stiff into a truck?” the policeman said.

“But this is a crime scene!”

“A suicide. Happens all the time. That yo-yo tied up the hotel’s clientele way too long. You think we’re gonna leave him lyin’ around the rest of the night? We’d get calls up the wazoo from every guest on this side of the hotel. Not good for the city. Best for all concerned that he disappear quickly.”

Feeling desperate, Sydney scanned the area. The place where Billy’s favorite ceramic angel had met its doom had been swept clean. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “You’re covering up.”

The officer laughed at her. “You reporters are all alike. A guy jaywalks and you see a conspiracy. Sheesh.” He continued on his way, shaking his head.

Sydney turned to Hunz. “What did you see?”

“What do you mean?”

“Simple question. What did you see?”

She was in his face. She had to know. Never in her life had she doubted herself like this or felt this edgy. At the moment reality was a greased pig and she couldn’t get a grip on it.

Hunz wasn’t helping. He looked at her as though the cheese had slipped off her cracker.

“The video playback in the van?” he said. “That’s what I saw. Why? What did you see?”

Sydney sat at a polished wooden table in front of a large window overlooking O’Hare International Airport, her head in her hands. She moaned. Hunz had charged a suite at the Hilton to the station. He said he needed a quiet place to prepare for the upcoming broadcast, the one that would air his death scene live. With time running out, Sydney couldn’t help but think he wanted the suite so he didn’t have to die in a studio or on the street.

She glanced at a clock radio on the end table beside the sofa.

5:05 a.m.

Her heart lurched. It couldn’t be . what happened to the time?

She checked her watch.

3:05 a.m.

It took a moment for her tired mind to sort it out. There was two hours’ difference between Los Angeles and Chicago.

Well, that little scare got the ol’ heart pumping.

She considered changing her watch to local time, then decided against it. If she changed her watch, she’d also have to remember to adjust Hunz’s deadline—a word that had taken on a whole new meaning since Death Watch—from 8:47 a.m. to 10:47 a.m. Best to keep things simple.

8:47 a.m. The number to remember.

She urged her tired gray cells to do the math.

Hunz had five hours and forty-two minutes left to live.

Sydney let out a sigh. It was quiet, and she was drowsy. Not many flights landing or taking off at the airport.

Did Billy Peppers have control tower clearance when he took off on angels’ wings?

Aahhhh! Where had that come from?

A tired mind, that’s where. What do you expect? You’re half dead, dead on your feet, dead tired, dead asleep, dead to the world…

“Stop it,” she growled to herself and stood to wake up. She rubbed tired eyes with the palms of her hands. Maybe she was going loony tunes. When she opened her eyes, would she find herself standing outside on the sidewalk? Had checking into the hotel been a dream?

Tentatively, she lowered her hands. To her relief she found herself standing beside a table on the eighth floor of the Hilton Hotel overlooking the airport runway. She was alone. None of Mel Blanc’s loony friends were in the room with her.

With a sigh, she risked sitting down.

Hunz had gone to get coffee. None of that foil-packet hotel brew for him. He wanted the real stuff. He’d seen a coffee shop in the lobby, an all-nighter for true addicts, and went to check it out. He asked her if she wanted anything—a scone, cookie, brownie. What she wanted was forty winks, but she was pretty sure they didn’t sell winks by the cup.

Sydney tried calling the hospital to get an update on Cheryl. The only information the hospital would confirm to someone who wasn’t a relative was that Cheryl had checked in and that she didn’t have a phone in her room. Sydney tried Josh’s cell phone and got the standard automated voice message informing her that the phone was either out of range or turned off.

She slumped back in her chair and stared at the Chicago skyline on the horizon. She hated it when life was reduced to being alone and waiting. It wasn’t good to give an active and frightened mind that much freedom.

Billy Peppers’s shoe box lay on the table in front of her. The white Nike wing dominated a side that was slightly caved in. All four corners of the top were worn and cardboard gray. The box had obviously seen some mileage.

Sydney lifted the lid. Looking up at her was a ceramic angel on his back. Or was it a her? In all the stories she’d heard in Sunday school, angels acted and sounded male. Yet she seemed to remember hearing something about angels having no gender. This angel wore a pale blue unisex robe and he looked perturbed, if not angry. Maybe he was angry because half of his right foot was gone.