The Blue Light Project by Timothy Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

producing what the news needed, the news then delivering it back to the waiting world.
    “This Ganesh,” Eve said. “Have you met him?”
    “Talked to him on the phone.”
    “He described Geneva as suffering and justice.” She started laughing again.
    “May I finish?”
    She made her eyes wide. Yes.
    “You continued the race despite the fact that by any reasonable estimate you were done, finito, kaput.”
    “Finishing is just what you do. I imagine it takes more courage to quit.”
    “Okay. I give up. Zero courage.”
    The news broadcast was back inside the studio. Man anchor. Woman anchor. Serious expressions. Eve was glad the sound was off. Maybe she could sit out this news item and never have to know the details of where in the world things were going poorly at the moment.
    She looked over at Nick, voice and spirits suddenly brightening. “I saw the most incredible thing today.”
    He was closely reading the label of the wine bottle. Soil densities. Organic practices. She told him about seeing the young man jump. Late twenties. Lean frame, muscular. But how shocked she’d been at his power. How he exploded right off the edge of the roof, across the alley, and then flipped at the top. “Which is crazy. Right over my head.”
    Nick raised his eyebrows, twisting the bottle. “You’re not saying that was courage, I hope. That’s just daredeviling.”

    “It’s called Parkour,” Eve said, who’d been looking for the word the entire afternoon, then got it just as she was pulling in the drive. Parkour: from a show she’d seen on Discovery Channel.
    Nick shook his head. No, he had no idea about Parkour.
    “It’s a sport. They jump off very high things. Run creatively.”
    “They run creatively.”
    “It’s French,” Eve said, but she knew there was no point. Nick had a particular expression, a holding expression. Like he knew he shouldn’t interrupt, but that he was already wholly occupied with the next thing he was going to say.
    He said it now: “Let me just say this.”
    Lights continued to flash on the television. Fire trucks. Police cars. Blue and red halos in the blackness. Orange flares and white headlights, familiar as Christmas. The camera just now bucking at some nearby shock or noise, the light sources spinning. Pinwheels. Sparklers. Someone was shooting, Eve realized, recognizing it in the shape and shift of the images. Here we had something going badly, somewhere, and it involved guns. One of those stories they had all become tragically used to seeing and hearing about. The man with a gun in his workplace. The kids in trench coats wandering into a school. Eve thought how utterly horrible it was that the news would be shaping up again around one of those stories.
    “Let me just say that your father was never a daredevil,” Nick continued. “As a journalist he took more risks than most. But he was calculated. Still, of course . . .”
    “Improvised roadside device,” Eve said. “You can say it. He was one of three journalists killed in three separate incidents on the same day.”
    She ate the rest of the omelet in a flattened silence. She drank wine. Then tried again: “I don’t look at everything in me now and see my father. And I didn’t end my term with UNICEF because he died either.”
    “What about the weather announcer gig. Why’d you quit that?”

    “I didn’t mind doing the weather, actually. I liked going up in the helicopter.”
    “But you were always conscious of the cliché.”
    “The jock on TV,” Eve said. “Talking low pressure systems from a beach somewhere. You’re right. I mostly found it embarrassing.”
    More shots, Eve guessed. The camera operator was seeking cover, his picture all skewed. And now something else appeared to have gone up. The camera operator was running, lens on the pavement. Then back up and shooting. In front of a high building, glinting metallic in the grainy light, another car lay spectacularly on its side, engulfed in rolling black