Lousiana Hotshot

only managed to get two, the brother and one of the ones she didn’t know.
    She dropped the film off at a one-hour-processing joint and hurried back to the office. Too late, she remembered she’d forgotten to change clothes. If Eddie was there, it was going to be embarrassing.
    Eileen Fisher’s bland features showed something, but Talba wasn’t sure what. Excitement, maybe.
    “Is he here?”
    Fisher nodded. “He wants to see ya.”
    Glancing into his office, Talba couldn’t bring herself to enter. Eddie was like a dragon in there, breathing so much fire she was afraid of getting scorched from the doorway. What in hell had she done?
    Well, plenty, but what that he could know about? Where to start? She decided on, “Eddie, I’m sorry I’m late…”
    He said, “Where in the
hell
do you get off?”
    I’m fired,
she thought.
Damn. I was liking it, too. Crazy little job, but never boring.
    “Listen. Eddie. I think I’ve got the guy.”
    He stood up and shouted her name. Shouted it. “Talba, sit down.”
    She was quite honestly afraid to. She hovered at the door, not sure whether to flee or what.
    “Goddammit, get
in
here.” He sat down and spoke a little more softly.
    Okay, he’d backed off a little. She took a tentative step into the room, but she wasn’t about to sit.
    “Sit down, goddammit.” The bags under his eyes were black. Nothing like her own skin, which was brown and smooth. These were darker, a mottled gray-black that she hadn’t associated with human skin. It crossed her mind that he was really very ill, that the headaches were either a cover story or a symptom of something much more dire than she’d imagined.
    She more or less slunk into a chair. “Are you all right?” she said, unable to focus on anything else.
    “Whaddaya mean am I all right? Do I look all right?”
    She opened her mouth to speak, but he said, “Or do I look like I’m about to kick your ass all the way to Canada?”
    She closed her mouth, thinking that this was no way at all she’d expect him to speak to a woman. Whatever she’d done, it was worse than she thought. Her mind leapt to the worst. Had she endangered Cassandra? It must be that. There must be some eventuality she hadn’t foreseen. Her skin was suddenly clammy. “Has something happened to Cassandra?”
    ***
    “Cassandra?” Eddie stared at her, absolutely blank. What the hell kind of monkey wrench was this? Who the fuck was Cassandra?
    The call had come half an hour before. He had simply picked up and the voice, a voice he didn’t recognize, had said, “Dad, it’s Anthony,” and there was a collision in his brain.
    It was the last goddam thing in the world he wanted to hear. And yet, all the turbulence, all the spiked, barbed, jagged, nasty, hateful projectiles flying around in his head had suddenly stopped their yammering and all was quiet in there, as if their motors had turned off and they were gliding now, gliding peacefully, simply sailing around between his ears in harmonious silence. He had listened to the silence for a while, not a thought in his head.
Shock,
he thought later.
It must have been shock.
    “Dad, are you there?”
    And that’s when the collision came. The motors that had turned off flicked on at triple speed, so that everything flying around in there, everything in that momentarily peaceful cavity, everything ugly and barbed and jagged, crashed into everything else, and threatened to blast his skull open. It sounded like a thousand ringing phones, a dozen roaring beasts, a season of hurricane wind. “I can’t talk to you,” he said to his son, and it was literally true.
    “I got an email from someone who works for you. She said you were out sick. I thought I’d call and see how you are.”
    Eddie couldn’t stand the noise, couldn’t take the roaring and the ringing, the cacophony, the stroke it was giving him, the apoplexy. He was going to be dead in a minute. His heart was going to stop from the strain of this.
    “I can’t talk to you,” he said again, and his voice was raspy, something like the sound a bear might make after a winter of hibernation— aggressive but none too alert.
    He hung up the phone, and when it rang again, he let Eileen Fisher take it and when she came into his office bearing a pink message memo, he said, “Where the hell is Talba Wallis?”
    He had sat there staring at the wall until his assistant came in, letting the debris inside his skull grind itself into particles, letting it grind