"Taking a vacation isn't going to jeopardize your chances.

That job'll still be up for grabs when you get back."

She easily inferred the meaning behind that sly remark.

Miffed at him for homing in on the real reason behind her reluctance to leave work for any period of time, she had grudgingly consented to going away for a week. The reservations had been made, the trip scheduled. But every schedule should have a little bit of flexibility built in.

And if flexibility was ever called for, it was when Russell Dendy's daughter was allegedly kidnaped.

Tiel held the pay phone's sticky receiver pinched between the pads of her thumb and index finger, loathe to touch any more of the surface than necessary. "Okay, Gully, I'm here. Well, near, at least. Actually, I'm lost."

He cackled. "Too excited to concentrate on where you're going?"

"Well, it's not like I've missed a thriving metropolis. You said yourself, the place isn't even on most maps."

Her sense of humor had worn off about the time she'd lost all feeling in her butt. Hours ago, her posterior had gone numb from sitting. Since talking to him, she had stopped only once, and then only out of extreme necessity.

She was hungry, thirsty, tired, cranky, achy, and none too fresh because she'd been facing into the setting sun for a long portion of the trip. The car's AC had gone humid from overuse. A shower would be bliss.

Gully didn't improve her mood any by asking, "How'd you manage to get lost?"

"I lost my sense of direction after the sun went down.

The landscape looks the same from every angle out here.

Even more so after dark. I'm calling from a convenience store in a town with a population of eight hundred twenty-three, according to the city-limit sign, and I think the chamber of commerce fudged that number in their favor.

This is the only lighted building for miles around. The town is called Rojo something."

"Flats. Rojo Flats."

Naturally Gully knew the full name of this obscure hamlet.

He probably knew the mayor's name. Gully knew everything. He was a walking encyclopedia. He collected information the way frat rats collected coeds' phone numbers.

The TV station where Tiel worked had a news director, but the man with the title conducted business from inside a carpeted office and was more a bean counter and administrator than a hands-on boss.

The man in the trenches, the one who dealt directly with the reporters, writers, photographers, and editors, the one who coordinated schedules and listened to sob stories and chewed ass when ass-chewing was called for, the one who actually ran the news operation, was the assignments editor, Gully.

He'd been at the station when it signed on in the early fifties, and had mandated that they would have to carry him out of the place feet first He would die before he retired.

He worked a sixteen-hour day and begrudged the time he wasn't working. He had a colorful vocabulary and countless similes, an extensive repertoire of yarns about bygone days in broadcast news, and seemingly no life beyond the newsroom. His first name was Yarborough, but only a few living persons knew that. Everyone else knew him strictly as Gully.

"Are you going to give me this mysterious assignment or not?"

He wouldn't be rushed. "What happened to your vacation plans?"

"Nothing. I'm still on vacation."

"Uh-huh."

"I am! I'm not canceling my week off. I'm just postponing the start of it, that's all."

"What's the new boyfriend gonna say?"

"I've told you a thousand times, there is no new boyfriend." He laughed his phlegmy, chain-smoker's laugh that said he knew she was lying, and that she knew he knew.

"Got your notepad?" he asked suddenly.

"Uh, yeah."

Whatever germs had been teeming on the telephone were probably living with her now. Reconciled to that, she propped the receiver on her shoulder and held it there with her cheek while she removed a notepad and pen from her satchel and placed them on the narrow metal ledge beneath the wall-mounted telephone.

"Shoot."

"The boy's name is Ronald Davison," Gully began.

"I heard that much on the radio."

"Goes by Ronnie. Senior year, same as the Dendy girl.

Won't graduate with any honors, but he's a solid B student.

Never in trouble until today. After homeroom this morning, he boogied out of the student parking lot in his Toyota pickup with Sabra Dendy riding shotgun."

"Russ Dendy's child."

"His one and only."

"Is the FBI on it?"

"FBI. Texas Rangers. You name it. If it wears a badge, it's working this one. Waco all over again. Everybody's claiming jurisdiction and wants in on the action."

Tiel took a moment to absorb the broad scope of this story. The short hallway in which the pay phone was located led to the public rest rooms. One had a cowgirl in a fringed skirt stenciled in blue paint on the door. The other, predictably, had a similar silhouette of a cowpoke in chaps and ten-gallon hat, twirling a lasso above his head.

Glancing down the hall, Tiel spotted the real thing coming into the store. Tall, slender, Stetson pulled down low on his forehead. He nodded toward the store's cashier, whose frizzy, over permed hair had been dyed an unflattering shade of ocher.

Nearer to Tiel was an elderly couple browsing for souvenirs, apparently in no hurry to return to their Winnebago.

At least Tiel assumed the Winnebago at the gas pumps outside belonged to them. Through bifocal eyeglasses the lady was reading the ingredients of ajar on the shelf. Tiel heard her exclaim, "Jalapeno pepper jelly? Good lord."

The couple then joined Tiel in the hallway, moving toward their respective rest rooms. "Don't dally, Gladys," the man said. His white legs were virtually hairless and looked ridiculously thin in his baggy khaki shorts and thick-soled athletic shoes.

"You mind your business, and I'll mind mine," she retorted smartly. As she moved past Tiel she gave her a men-think they're so smart but we know-better wink. Another time, Tiel would have thought the senior couple cute and endearing. But she was thoughtfully reading what she'd taken down almost verbatim from Gully.

"You said 'riding shotgun.' Strange choice of words, Gully."

"Can you keep a secret?" He lowered his voice significantly.

"Because my ass will be grass if this gets out before our next newscast. We've scooped every other station and newspaper in the state."

Tiel's scalp began to tingle, as it did when she knew she was hearing something that no other reporter had heard, when she had uncovered the element that would set her story apart from all the others, when her exclusive had the potential of winning her a journalism prize or praise from her peers. Or of guaranteeing her the coveted spot on Nine Live.

"Who would I tell, Gully? I'm sharing space with a fresh-off the-range cowboy buying a six-pack of Bud, a sassy granny lady and her husband from out of state-I'm guessing by their accents. And two non-English-speaking Mexicans." The pair had since come into the store. She'd overheard them speaking Spanish while heating packaged burritos in a microwave oven.

Gully said, "Linda-"

"Linda? She got the story?"

"You're on vacation, remember?"

"A vacation you urged me to take!" Tiel exclaimed.

Linda Harper was another reporter, a darned good reporter, and Tiel's unspoken rival. It stung that Gully had assigned Linda to cover such a plum of a story, which rightfully should have belonged to her. At least that's the way she saw it.

"You want to hear this or not?" he asked cantankerously.

"Go ahead."

The elderly man emerged from the men's room. He moved to the end of the hall, where he paused to wait for his wife. To kill time, he took a camcorder from a nylon airline bag and began tinkering with it.