Nice Girls Finish Last Read Online Free PDF Page A

that sometimes. Met someone at a cocktail party, got drunk with him, and the next thing you know, he’s head of security, or of the Documentary unit, or, in the case of my boss, Jerry Spurdle, of the Special Reports unit. Jack stood by his capricious hires to the bitter end, too damn proud to admit to making mistakes. That meant we were stuck with Pete for a long time.
    So Pete’s reassurances rang hollow.
    â€œWe all have to be aware and keep an eye out for each other. If you see anyone suspicious lurking around, you have to let us know immediately. Hector, get the lights,” Pete said, and one of Pete’s deputies, the one we knew as Barney Fife, flicked the switch.
    What followed was a slide show of some of our most dangerous known fans. Most of these we knew by name, like Donald Forcus, an ex-con who was carrying a very big torch for Bianca de Woody (a bad bit of luck, him being an arsonist and all). Donald had what my Aunt Maureen would call an “unfortunate” face, reminiscent of a cartoon duck, which made his given name all the crueler.
    Also easily recognizable was Hank, the fan who was stalking Dillon Flinder. Hank was an unemployed drifter who had lost a series of jobs because he would only walk backward.
    â€œHow does he stalk you?” I whispered to Dillon. “With a mirror? Or does he just walk backward until he bumps into you?”
    â€œI’ll see Hank coming a mile away,” Flinder conceded. “By the way, I hear you’re going out with Fenn Corker when he comes to town.”
    â€œWho told you that?”
    â€œI don’t remember. Is it true?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œWhy, Robin? He’s such an ass. Yet you won’t go out with me.”
    â€œI know too much about you, Dillon,” I said.
    Dillon was known for his admitted sexual adventures with large fleshy fruits, and it was just too weird to me, dating a man who had dated a watermelon.
    After the slides and a short film on self-defense, the lights came up and Pete went to the blackboard and began writing platitudes down for us. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Be alert!
    â€œBetter safe than sorry,” he said about six times during his little lecture. Afterward, he asked for questions and I was so tempted to put up my hand and say, “Duh, is it better to be safe? Or sorry?”
    What a waste of time this was, not that I had anything against wasting time. The more time I spent in this boring meeting, the less I spent with my boss, Jerry Spurdle, who was living proof that the people inside television are just about as nutty as those outside television, maybe more so.
    Some of the biggest nuts in the business were, in fact, inside this very room. In the front row, Sawyer Lash, fresh off his overnight shift, was nodding earnestly at Pete’s every salient point and taking notes. Known as the network’s dumbest anchorman and biggest goody-goody, Sawyer’s star had risen for a while during our Time of Troubles at ANN a year earlier. But it had fallen again quickly, and now he was back in the netherworld of overnight news updates, where viewers were less likely to notice if he confused Liberian rebels with librarian rebels.
    A few weeks earlier, someone had sent Sawyer a sick gift—a dead sparrow in a plastic hosiery egg. And that was from someone who claimed to like him.
    Just in front of Dillon and me, Dave Kona was talking softly to Solange Stevenson. Solange was a huge security headache, not only because as a TV psychologist she attracted a deeply disturbed viewership, but also because she actually invited clearly insane people onto her TV show, with bad results on more than one occasion. Like the time she reunited all those adopted people with their birth parents on her show and a fistfight broke out. Or the time two rival girlfriends of an imprisoned serial killer got into a hair-pulling catfight on the show and gave Solange a bloody nose when she tried