Dancing With Werewolves Read Online Free PDF Page B

WTCH?”

                                                                                              * * * *

    At home that night, I thought about Fast Eddie’s mocking comment on having a life beyond WTCH. I stared into my faint reflection on the glass-topped coffee table. Achilles used to stretch out underneath it, dog under glass: safe, sleeping, and elegant in his wavy-haired, short-legged, sharp-toothed way.
    The sight of myself on Dead TV still haunted me. I picked up my cell phone to dial one of my few female friends, a street-producer for CSI Bismarck .
    “Hey! It’s Del. Listen, Annie, I need a copy of the latest Vegas CSI V episode. Yeah, it was a live feed here in Wichita.” Or a dead feed, to be precise. “No tapes available. I need the addresses of the producers and writers. Oh, just for a piece I’m working on. You know, always chasing the latest ‘in’ thing.
    “You have a digital recording? Really? Fabulous! Sure. Just Fed Ex it. Overnight? Thanks, you’re a doll.”
    Once I had the names and titles, my reporter self could call and find out what the hell was going on.
    Figuring out what was going on in my dreams was another matter.
    I didn’t wake up the next morning with the usual nasty fragments floating around in my head. Instead, I had a vivid scene right out the Wizard of Oz movie.
    I saw Achilles standing, wagging and waiting for me, on the yellow brick road. Only he was white instead of black like Toto, and the whole scene was black and white and gray, like the opening part of the film set in Kansas, not wildly Technicolor like the “merry old land of Oz” sections.
    I looked down to sparkly sequined pumps on my feet. Black and to die for. Maybe I was going somewhere unexpected. Soon. But not into Dorothy’s Oz. Someplace darker, a Wonderland all my own.
    And Achilles was waiting for me somewhere out there.

Chapter Six
    “Can that piece.” Fuck-up Freddy was standing by my desk at work, in blowsy mode with The Front Page shirtsleeves from the classic forties newspaper movie, a caricature in the flesh. The only thing missing was the green eyeshade and a garter on his flabby biceps.
    “The old dame is dead,” he said. “Pulled the plug on herself this morning. Cancelled the contract.”
    Oddly enough, I was sorry to hear that. “Maybe her death, the reason for it, is a story.”
    “Nah. The feature’s name is ‘Good Living After Death,’ not ‘Death After Death.’ I need someone downtown to do a stand-up for a Cub Scout camp-out in the main park.”
    “That’s about as exciting as filming an anthill.”
    “A good reporter can make a great story out of anything. Jeez, are you losing it, Street, or what?”

                                                                                              * * * *

    I drove home from the station that night with a dopey new assignment sked riding shotgun on the passenger seat of the Caddy, just as Achilles’ “documents” had accompanied me away from the vet’s office.
    It was beginning to feel like “loss” was my middle name. I had no other, anyway.
    What more could go wrong?
    I had not counted on the Revenge of the Weather Witch.
    I had some trouble finding my bungalow on Moody Road. Because it wasn’t there anymore.
    I got out of the car, slammed the heavy door shut, and stared at the empty, aching socket of dirt where my house had been. All that was left was my refrigerator, lying on its massive metal side, looking like a heavy-metal porcupine.
    I approached it over the lumpy ground strewn with toothpicks splintered from the wood and spine of my rental bungalow. It wasn’t merely a rental. It was my first real home. It was a lost relative, and it was totally gone, sucked up into some passing tornado funnel.
    Other houses of that era stood whole and