The sin wasn’t unforgivable, but it would make for boring journalism. What Mr. Roberts didn’t know—more accurately, didn’t care to know—was that about twenty minutes before the segment shot, I had gone up to the clubhouse and knocked. I saw several bikes in the area, so I knew there had to be people inside.
But not a soul answered. I knocked. I knocked hard. I knocked softly. I called for Satan—an act that drew more than a few eyeballs from people walking down the street.
I got nothing.
The only options at that point, with the limited time we had, was to get a man-on-the-street interview or to just run without quotes. Unfortunately, everyone in Phoenix seemed to think the mere act of getting on TV and providing a quote about the Devil’s Patriots was akin to setting oneself up for punishment.
Never mind that the Devil’s Patriots hadn’t been charged with a crime worse than disorderly conduct in nearly fifteen years. Yes, back then, some ugly violence had taken place—violence I never lived through, having come from Northern California—but I would have thought that the memories of such chaos would have faded.
Apparently not.
“This is Hailey Cook, happy to report another month of peace and quiet.”
And then the camera cut back to the anchors at the news desk, and the sound went mute. Mr. Roberts had seen what he needed to see. He had, regrettably, not forgotten that I was in the room.
“What do you think our ratings were before that segment?”
I bit my lip. I knew where this was going.
“If it’s like a typical Friday afternoon, maybe thirty thousand or so people?”
“And of those thirty thousand, how many do you think signed off when they didn’t see a tatted, white-bearded, grumpy middle-aged white dude behind a mic getting bleeped out?”
Mr. Roberts always liked to understate the positive and overstate the negative. Whatever viewers we lost were probably just because kids came home, the wife yelled for the TV to be turned off, or because SportsCenter had come back from commercial. But in Mr. Roberts's view, even going from thirty thousand to twenty-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine was a death rattle for the station.
“You see, Hailey, we are in the news business, but no one consumes the news like a robot,” he said. “People need to both be informed and have some measure of entertainment. Information is the vitamins that we fold into the delicious food that is entertainment.”
I hated these analogies. He whipped them out so often, thinking he was smart, but mostly he just sounded clumsy and foolish.
“Why didn’t you get anything for this segment? Not even a man-on-the-street quote?”
Since he usually followed up these questions with more remarks, I said nothing. But awkward silence permeated the air, and I finally answered.
“I went up to the door and knocked. No one said anything. I…I don’t know. Everyone on the street that we approached had no interest in talking to us, and you can ask the camera crew—”
“There’s no need to cover your ass when it’s as visible as the sun,” Mr. Roberts said in another awkward metaphor. “Besides…”
He grabbed the remote and rewound one of the TVs that was recording our show. He got to the segment, let it play for about fifteen seconds, and then paused it. He leaned forward and pointed over my left shoulder.
“How the hell do you explain that, Ms. Cook?”
I gulped.
It was Satan.
And I felt a rush staring at him. The way those eyes bore into my body from behind, the way his gaze seemed to lock me in place—not the me on camera, but the present me. I just…
He’d trimmed his beard some, making him look younger but still grizzled. His eyes weren’t scrunched like they were judging in anger, but more amused curiosity. Never did Satan look like a man who was surprised or thrown off; even if I’d turned around and screamed at him to emerge, I doubt he would have so much as blinked at me.
“Ms. Cook?”
“Oh, yeah, I, umm, I don’t know, sir,” I said, flustered and wondering if Mr. Roberts picked up on my lust for this man. “I definitely knocked. I definitely tried to get his attention. But…”
“Well, this will not suffice, not when our ratings plummet like beans out of an open can,” he grumbled. “I need you to go back and get follow-up quotes before tomorrow’s five o’clock show. I don’t care how you do it or when you do it, but if I don’t have footage to use on the afternoon show, Ms. Cook, the only thing you’ll be cooking is a new resume.”
As bad as that was, the implications were as clear as could be.
“I’ll have it for you, sir, no question about it.”
