My Hero Read Free

she'd get better sound bites, each of them guaranteed to play forever in broadcast archives. Other times she'd invent murders or scandals or disasters, but the creative effort of doing that usually got her so jazzed that she couldn't fall asleep at all.
    Sometimes the voiceover in her head was in Charles Kuralt's plummy tones. Sometimes it was in Jane Pauley's crisp, Midwestern, no-nonsense voice. Most of the time, though, it was Holly's own voice, minus any residue of drawl.
    Tonight she had Rufus panning Honeycomb High School, a single story, distinctly ugly, Texas-Danish modern building of fake stone and glass erected in the '50s to replace the old, red brick two-story school that had stood on the site since 1896.
    As Rufus panned in on the portable marquee in front of the building—
Honeycomb High School, Home of the Hornets
—Holly voiced over.
    Despite appearances, tradition runs deep at Honeycomb High, where the great-great grandchildren of…
    Cut.
    She flopped over on her side, swore softly, and jammed the pillow under her ear. There probably was no Honeycomb High. Not anymore. It had probably gone the way of Sandy Springs High, consolidating with Gardenville and Cholla and Roper and Spurge, to become the Bi-County Consolidated High.
    Okay.
    Rufus panned Main Street, closing in on the limestone court house in the town square. Holly voiced over, maybe with the merest hint of a drawl for effect, assuming she had any hint of a drawl at all.
    Heroes are hard to come by here in Honeycomb. In 1874 they hanged Horace McGinty for stealing two horses, one for himself and one for his neighbor's wife. Sixty years later, in 1934, the notorious Bonnie and Clyde stopped just south of here…
    Cut.
    Wait. A person could make a pretty cogent argument that Bonnie and Clyde were heroes in their own perverse fashion, which made heroes even harder to come by, assuming they existed at all.
    Holly sighed as she punched her pillow and kicked the covers off her feet.
    Rufus, yawning, panned over a vast, flat landscape, roughened by mesquite and prickly pear and the occasional live oak. A pickup truck spewed dust in its wake. An armadillo bumbled along the side of the road. And nary a hero in sight.

Chapter Two
    C al Griffin hated it when Ramon hired a new bartender, and this kid with his hay-colored hair, pierced ears, and erupting skin didn't even look old enough to work at a lemonade stand, much less at a rundown tavern in Honeycomb, Texas. Cal took another swig from his beer bottle, idly watching the baby barkeep wipe the counter again and again, nearly rubbing the cigarette burns right out of the Formica. Well, hell. It was pretty obvious the kid was working up the courage to start a conversation. Might as well get it over with, Cal thought.
    “What's your name, kid?” he asked him.
    “Ricky. Well…Rick.” He shrugged and passed the rag across the bartop again, not quite able to make eye contact. “Say, I was just wondering, aren't you that Secret Service guy who was such hot shit a while back?”
    Cal almost laughed. “Yeah, but I'm lukewarm shit now.” He drained his bottle and set it down with a dull thump. “You want to reach back there and get me another one of these?”
    “Sure.” Young Rick used the rag to twist off the cap before he put the cold, wet bottle in front of Cal. The kid swallowed, making his Adam's apple bounce off the collar of his shirt. “So, what was it like?” he asked.
    Cal cocked his head. “What was what like?”
    “You know. The White House. The President. All that.”
    “It was okay.”
    He lifted the bottle and let the chilled lager slide down the back of his throat. There. He had conversed, goddammit. He hoisted himself off the bar stool and carried his beer to a table on the far side of the glowing jukebox, pulling out a chair and settling in for a long, liquid day. Alone.
    Nobody had to tell him that he wasn't very good company these days, or that his knack for small talk, if he'd ever