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money for it. This is America. If I want a pig in my yard, I should be able to have a pig in my yard!” She gathered her housecoat and said,“Now I gotta get inside because
Wheel of Fortune
is ’bout to start.”
    “Thank you for your time,” Ray said. He and Beaker turned and walked back toward the news truck. Beaker was suppressing one chuckle after another.
    “I don’t complain about Petey’s mailbox leaning to the left, do I?’” Beaker let out a laugh. “It was all I could do to hold the camera steady.”
    Ray opened the van door. “Don’t you find that the least bit sad?”
    Beaker loaded his equipment into the van. “What?”
    “That. Back there I mean, she does have a point.”
    “A point? She’s got a literal pigsty in the middle of her backyard, Ray. The smell about knocked me over, and we were on her front porch.”
    “She really believed in her right to own her property. There’s something to that. Maybe there’s no common sense in raising pigs in the middle of a neighborhood, but it’s the principle of it.”
    “So you’d want to live next door to her? I’m sure Petey would sell you his house.” Beaker rolled his eyes as he wrapped the cords around one arm. “She’s an old woman who doesn’t have a clue about the real world, Ray.”
    Ray sighed and Beaker crawled into the van’s compact editing bay.
    Jim, the live truck operator, glanced back and said, “They want this live from in front of the house.”
    “Why doesn’t that surprise me,” Ray groaned. He checked his watch. He had thirty-five minutes to edit and memorize his notes.

Chapter 4
    I n a quiet corner of the control room, with everyone abuzz, Hugo reviewed the anchors’ script for smirk pitfalls. Nobody quite understood how important this task was, but then again, nobody knew Tate Franklin like he did. Chad had believed that Hugo had scored big by landing this playboy-looking anchor at a busboy price. But the other price he was paying for the good looks and the charming smile was probably going to send Hugo to an early grave.
    Tate looked the part and certainly practiced all the skills of a well-established anchor. Hugo had never seen anyone perform the eye-bounce as well as Tate. While many people didn’t see how this detail mattered for an anchor, Tate understood. He never cut his eyes sideways to his coan-chor or to another camera. He always looked down, then looked up and focused on whatever it was he was supposed to look at. Anything other than that makes an anchor look awkward, even shifty.
    There was also a lot to be said for Tate’s intelligence. Not just a talking head, Tate seemed to understand what he was reporting. If he were given the chance, Hugo knew the young man could add some insight into certain topics. If only he didn’t have that smirk. That one, uncontrollable little smirk. Hugo wasn’t sure if he would hire Tate again, knowing what he knew now. Of course, desperate times called for desperate measures, so he supposed he didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. But still, in all his years in the news business, he had never gone to such extremes to make a show work.
    The smirk first appeared on Tate’s fourth broadcast. Gilda took a four-car accident story, because it was a more recent event and involved a lot of detail. When it came time for a plane-crash story, Tate read theprompter like a pro. The script ended with, “And tonight, two families grieve the loss of two extraordinary men who were simply out for a nice day in the sky.”
    And then he smirked. Hugo had not noticed it until that story.
    Tate’s smirk was unbelievably detrimental to any kind of tragic news story. Hugo had spent hours with the kid, trying to help him realize that he smirked after his segments. But no matter how much they worked, the smirk always appeared. Tate tried his best to frown, to look serious, to capture the tragic moment in his expression, yet it was useless. The smirk always followed, and Hugo knew it