Chapter Eleven
Jason
I looked out the window, down at the traffic clogging the streets. It was only seven in the morning, and everyone in L.A. was already on the road. My room didn't have a balcony but the large windows opened. It was a good day, so nice I forgot for a second that it was almost Christmas. I had ordered room service and was catching up with the news on the TV. Well, I had wanted to catch up with the news when I had turned the TV on, but hadn't made much progress.
Shelby. Shelby and Davis Jacks; the shady article had been right. I grimaced at the thought of the two of them together, the way Davis had had his hands all over her. I could respect the guy as far as our shared profession went but come on: me versus him in every other way? We weren't fighting in the same weight class.
Did it even matter though? Shelby sure hadn't had a problem moving on with him from me. She hadn't had a problem rubbing up on him like a cat in heat in the middle of the damn newsroom. She had had one owning up about the baby. She hadn't given me any clues, but what if her kid was mine? Let's say that he was. That would mean that her secret wasn't just that; it was a lie too since I had asked her straight up whether the kid was mine and she hadn't confirmed that he was. Shit, that would have meant that I'd be missing time with my son. That was fucked up. If I had a kid then I wanted to know; I deserved to know; fuck, so did the kid too. Why would she deprive the kid of two parents just because she and the dad weren't on the same page?
I finished my coffee and got up, walking to the closet. Shelby and I had worked together for a year, but I had never pegged her as a liar. I was pissed, but there was this thing about secrets: they always had a way of coming out in the end. This was one that I was getting out of her, one way or another. I hadn't come here just to go back without closure. I took the towel I had tied around my waist off and started getting dressed. I'll wear her down, I thought. If it turned out that I was wrong, the kid wasn't mine, then fine, whatever, it wouldn’t be my problem anymore.
We could talk paternity over lunch today. She had been flustered after I told her that I knew about her kid yesterday when I had been at her station. She had tried to use the excuse that she was at work and couldn't be talking to me, so I had rescheduled to today. She had probably just said yes so she could get rid of me, but it didn't matter why she had agreed; it mattered that I'd get her alone. Hopefully, without any distractions, I'd be able to get the truth out of her.
I was actually looking forward to seeing her again. She had been under my skin for the year that we'd been apart, and it was actually great seeing her. She wanted almost nothing to do with me, but that was right on brand with the Shelby. All of that was happening later though. I wasn't on vacation. I was still working, and there was news everywhere, all the time. The only way I would have been allowed to travel would have been if I had wanted to chase a story, so I had found one.
I had heard about it back in New York. There was trouble with the port workers at San Pedro again. In my eight years reporting, there had been strikes at the Long Beach and L.A. ports at least twenty times, probably more. It had always been something: from union trouble to demands for lower emission cargo trucks because the pollution was getting bad. I was hoping that I'd be able to talk to the picketers, maybe get someone who had been around long enough to see what changes had or hadn't happened over the years for a human-interest piece. I had already communicated with a union spokesperson, and I was meeting my cameraman at the site.
I worked mainly from the studio, but sometimes I would still go out and report from different scenes. It was all part of the job, especially since I had traveled, but it was different from being in the studio. There was this automatic authority that the person sitting at the news desk got. I preferred the more controlled environment that the studio was. Nobody got in your shot when they weren't supposed to be there; you didn't have to worry about sun, wind, rain, anything like that. And the interviews? Let's just say it isn't everyone who has had years of on-camera training and knows what to do when one is pointed at them.
At the same time though, the interviews were valuable. I was the anchor, so everyone sort of just believed me when I said things, but a story just hit harder when you heard it from whoever it belonged to. I hadn't heard about the story on the news this morning or last night; maybe Davis and his people hadn't picked it up yet. Good. I mean, I was coming in from New York; what excuse did he have not to know what was happening right in his backyard?
The morning went by pretty fast after we got to the scene. People were picketing and chanting, backing up movement in and out of the port. After getting shots of the picketers, we got to work filming interviews. The complaints were generally that the guys who drove the cargo trucks were missing out on thousands of dollars a year because of misclassification and subcontracting from trucking companies. One man we talked to, fifty-year-old father of four, had been trucking for almost seventeen years and had nothing but complaints.
I couldn't really empathize since I had very little to complain about in my job, but hey, if they were being dogged, they had a right to shut it down till their demands were met. The city would actually suffer if they didn't come to work, even if people didn't give a second thought to their job day to day. It took the whole morning to film and shoot the segment, dialing into the studio. I felt pretty smug by the time I was going back to the hotel. It hadn't been that bad. More than the human-interest angle of reporting, I got off on the status, being the one with the knowledge. We could sway the public any way we wanted with our reporting, and it was a good thing there were so many people in a newsroom so that didn't happen.
It was after one when I got back to the hotel. I had asked Shelby to come by during her lunch break. It was already twenty minutes past one. I entered the lobby and scanned it for her, smirking when I saw her stand and walk towards me. She was in her usual work gear: blouse and fitted skirt, hair up. Her arms were crossed, and she could have turned me to stone with the look on her face. I was late.