“The nerve of that thoughtless son of a bitch Metheny,” Sally was muttering to herself the next morning. “He’s evil; he should be rubbed out like a bug.”

The way yesterday turned out still burned her. Against her better judgment, Janice admitted later, she had agreed to give Metheny an interview. Sally and Rick watched from the back of the studio as it had been taped, getting to know each other a little. The interview had been a good one, not revealing much in detail, but friendly and candid.

But when Metheny’s story ran that night at five, then again at six, it would have been hard to tell that they were talking about the same story. She should have expected it. She knew that given any chance at all, Metheny would take a story through the pits, dragging down the reputation of anyone he could touch. When a story of his started, “Police are without a clue in trying to come up with the identity of the mysterious masked woman dressed as an Amazon who broke up a holdup in North Toledo Sunday night,” Sally knew that it would go downhill from there. He played the security camera tape again, and several pieces of the tape from the interview with Corporal Watkins—but all chopped up, out of order, and out of context, really making her and the rest of the department look like incompetents.

What made it worse was that Sally knew that Janice was Charlie’s sort-of girlfriend. She didn’t know the Corporal well, but had met her briefly on several occasions. There hadn’t been anything she could do but call Janice and apologize. “I should never have brought it up,” she told her brother’s girlfriend. “I should have known he’d butcher anything worthwhile.”

“Don’t beat yourself up on it,” Janice told her. “I’ve always known he was a prick, and I figured he’d prick it up somehow.”

“Hey, I owe you one sometime,” Sally told her. “I have to work with the bastard, and he doesn’t have to be like that.”

“You’ve got the tough one,” Janice said. “I just have to deal with crooks and criminals, guys we can often put away when they’re assholes.”

Even Sally had been dragged into the story, loosely and incorrectly. “A local fencing expert contacted by First to Know News said that the Amazon appeared to be skilled with a sword, but was also unable to give any idea of the masked woman’s identity,” he’d said. Wrong or sloppy on several counts, beginning with the fact that First to Know News hadn’t contacted the local fencing expert, the police had. If there was anything he could do to make himself look good and someone else look bad in the process, he did it. Why in hell couldn’t Ben see what an asshole he was?

So what was her reward for sweet talking Corporal Watkins into giving an interview she didn’t have to give, and then having it totally torn up and the meaning of it changed? A word of thanks? No, this morning, all she got out of Metheny was snide remarks, like “How’d you wind up in something as off the wall and as sick as fencing with toy swords, anyway? Couldn’t make the cheerleading squad?”

By the time the staff meeting was over with, Sally was about ready to go along with the idea for a feature story the sports department had come up with, to get one of their guys to do a story on fencing, and try it out in a sort of “Out Of Their League” thing—and get ripped to shreds, only to discover that the ripper was First to Know News’ own Sally Parker. That wasn’t the kind of fame Sally wanted to have, and worse, it wasn’t the kind of image that she wanted done of a sport that she’d put half her life into. On the other hand, if she could get Jason on the strip as the “rippee” … even the best padding and plastrons had their chinks …

It was maddening. Sally reached into her desk and pulled out a handful of rubber balls and started them going in a simple fountain. It did help her relax, concentrate, organize her thoughts—and was good hand-eye coordination practice, which was the real reason she did it. After she got halfway established in the news business, she’d had the idea of getting serious about competition again.

“Playing the clown again, Parker?” Metheny snorted from his desk. “That’s just about as childish as playing around with swords.”

“I enjoy it,” she said, not missing a beat. “And it’s something I can do that doesn’t hurt anybody.”

“It just seems like such a waste of time,” Metheny sneered, “When you could be doing something useful.”

“I figure it’s at least as useful as golf,” she replied as nonchalantly as she could manage. She brought the fountain to a halt, gathering the balls in her hands as they fell. “Besides, there is one advantage,” she added in a hard voice.

“What’s that?” Metheny replied, not liking the tone of her voice.

“If anyone ever wants to challenge me to a duel,” she replied, in a voice cutting like a steel sharp and devoid of any humor, as an evil thought hatched in her mind, “I get to choose the weapons.”

Charlie Parker wasn’t real close with his little sister. Twelve years’ age difference had a lot to do with that. She’d still been just a little tyke when he’d left for college, and there were some years since that he just hadn’t seen her much at all. As far as he was concerned, she’d grown up in flashes with a lot of dark space in between. He knew a lot about her reputation as a fencer, for example, but he’d only watched her once, back when she was still in high school at a local club meet.

He’d been proud when she’d said that she planned on following in his steps in journalism, but that pride had been diluted a lot when she announced that she was going into electronic journalism. It pretty much died totally when she told him she would be working for Channel 5 Worst to Know News.

But they were still brother and sister, and that counted for something. Even he rationalized that everybody has to start at the bottom, and he made a point of often telling his sister that was exactly where he thought Channel 5 did its feeding for reporters and oftentimes even for news. A couple years, a few good lines on her résumé, and maybe she could get out of that alleged newsroom and into something maybe halfway respectable—which, as far as he was concerned, was anything but local TV news. But Sally was a game little cuss, and she’d always been able to give his own right back at him. He knew that she was taking a lot of crap at Channel 5, but from what he could tell she was trying to do a reasonable job of staying respectable, not that he’d admit it in her presence very often. After all, he had to maintain his own reputation as the family’s head journalistic curmudgeon.

So it was a complete surprise when he got a call from her late that morning. “Hey, babe, want to do lunch?” she asked, quite cheerfully.

“After what Panty Raid Metheny pulled on Janice yesterday, I’m not sure I want to talk to any of you Channel 5 lowlifes,” he replied—but with enough of a smile in his voice to make it clear that he was joking. Sort of.

“That ties in with what I want to talk to you about.” Charlie could tell from just the way she said it that she must be calling from the newsroom, so the walls presumably had ears. “I’d like to talk to you,” she went on, “but I can’t get away until after one or so. We could do dinner instead if you like.”

“I could go late,” he said. “Say one-thirty, the Packo’s out in Sylvania? I’ve got a couple things I want to look at out that way, anyway.”

“Works for me.”

A couple of hours later, Charlie was waiting in a corner booth at the Tony Packo’s on West Monroe when his sister came in and sat down across the table from him. “You look like you’ve got something on your mind,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said with a grin. “I was just sitting here thinking that it’s not good when the Toledo restaurant known best nationwide is a glorified hot dog stand.”

“Worldwide,” she corrected. “I once told a guy on the French Olympic team that I was from Toledo, and he said, ‘Ah! Tony Packo’s.’”

“That’s even more disgusting,” he said with rancor. The heck of it was, he thought, was that it was the truth. Accidental, but the truth. Once there was a Toledoan by the name of Jamie Farr who got signed to a bit part in an ancient television series called M*A*S*H. There was some background needed for the character. The writers got lazy and used some of Farr’s real-life details, including his love for Toledo and Packo’s Hungarian Hot Dogs. Who would have thought the show would have stayed in reruns for three decades in many countries, many languages, and still be going strong? The restaurant had been a big local chain when Farr was on the series, and the owners of the chain didn’t mind a bit. Farr was still considered a major local hero, which also was a hell of a note, as far as Charlie was concerned.

“At least they do well on Restaurant Roundup,” she said with a shrug. “In spite of Metheny’s best efforts.”

“What you got on your mind, Sis?” he asked, drawing himself out of his reverie.

“Blow off steam, mostly.” She frowned. “Look, I’m sorry about what happened with Janice’s interview yesterday. I should never have asked her to do it. I called her up and apologized.”

“Her own damn fault,” Charlie laughed. “I told her not to go out there and see you. It wouldn’t have been any trick to have seen you somewhere else. She’ll be okay. She knows Panty Raid Metheny is an asshole; she should have known better.”

“I sure am getting tired of that son of a bitch,” she said. “He is absolutely the worst excuse I’ve ever seen for a reporter. He never saw a low road he didn’t like and grabs anyone else’s work and claims it for his own. He thinks he is the world’s expert on everything, and really resents the fact that a woman might know more about something than he does. He plays suck-up to Ayres all the time, and Ayers doesn’t seem to realize what a jerk he is.”

“He is pretty bad,” Charlie agreed. “Actually, they used to have a guy over at 13 who made him look pretty good. I don’t know why arrogant assholes like him seem to wind up in local TV news. Maybe they can’t do anything better. What he’s been doing is seagull journalism at about its worst, no more, no less.”

“There’s a term I hadn’t heard before,” Sally frowned.

“Seagull journalism?” Charlie laughed. “It’s where some young punk flies into town, shits all over everything to get a name for himself, then flies away, leaving someone else to clean up the mess.”

“That’s Metheny in a nutshell,” she agreed. “He pisses me off. I mean, he really pisses me off.”

“He’s good at it,” Charlie nodded. “I don’t think there are many people who know him and would disagree. But what can you do about it?”

“Not much,” she nodded. “But Charlie, I got an idea. If you and I work it right, I think we can make him look a little stupid, and if we can set it up right, maybe I can yank his chain a bit.”

Charlie shook his head. “Hey, Sis, I agree the guy is an asshole, but I don’t want to get involved in your newsroom politics.”

Sally got an evil-looking grin on her face. It wasn’t the first time Charlie had seen it—that had been when she was maybe five, plotting a heroic raid on a cookie jar. “That’s no way to talk to your sister,” she chided. “Especially when she’s getting set to go behind her boss’s back and give you a lead on a story that all of the media in town would fall over themselves to have.”

“You holding something out on Ayres?” Charlie asked. “That’s not nice, you know.”

“Yes, I am,” she said flatly. “I don’t think it would play right on air, would work better in print, and besides, if Channel 5 were to do it, it’d have to be filtered through Metheny, who would proceed to screw it up, royally. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction, and he wouldn’t believe it anyway. You’re in the perfect position to break the story and yank his chain.”

“Treachery and skullduggery, I can understand,” Charlie laughed. “You’re right, it would be a public service to yank his chain a little. What you got in mind?”

“I have to be absolutely anonymous,” she said. “You can’t say that the story came from me. Not even to Janice.”

“Janice?” he asked. “What’s she got to do with this?”

“Quite a bit.” Sally glanced around to make sure no one was listening in, then leaned forward across the table. “How’d you like to do an interview with Hippolyta?”

“Hippolyta?” he frowned. The name wasn’t familiar—then it struck him. “Oh, that ‘Poleeta,’ the Amazon, who—”

“Yeah,” she broke in. “It has to be absolutely anonymous. You can’t give her real name, not even to Janice—especially not to Janice. If that’s going to cause you any trouble with her, we can let it ride.”

“Janice said she talked with you about whether you knew who that gal was, and she said she didn’t think you did.”

“That’s the impression I wanted her to have. I didn’t lie to her, but I was very fuzzy about the truth. Look, Charlie, nobody finds out but you and me. Nobody.”

“I can go along with that,” he said. “By the way, all the media are calling her Poleeta, but you used a different name. What was it?”

“Hippolyta, usually pronounced Hip-POL-it-tuh from classic Greek mythology, not HIP-poe-light-tuh like most Americans would say it, though of course opinions differ, considering other languages and cultures.”

“Interesting, thanks. Anyway, it’s probably a good idea that this Hippolyta wants to lay low. Did you know that Ferguson character was a WarLord?”

“No, I don’t hear that kind of drug- and gang-related stuff. You go places I wouldn’t on a dare.”

“I don’t even know if Janice knows it,” he replied. “I will pass it along to her when I see her. I know a guy who’s in the WarLords. I was talking to him before I came here. They’re pissed that this Hippolyta dissed a brother. Ferguson was just a peon, so not drive-by-with-Mac-10s pissed, I don’t think, but pissed.”

“Then it’s just all that much more important that Janice doesn’t find out who Hippolyta is. Let it get into a police report, then Metheny uses the Freedom of Information Act to get his hands on it, and the next thing is it’s the lead story.”

“You got that right. I can square it with Janice, knowing about the WarLords. Her bosses, well, we haven’t had a good test of the Ohio shield law in some time,” Charlie said, referring to the statute that protected reporters from being required to reveal their information sources. “And I don’t think it’s important enough that the department would go to the mat with it. But how does an interview with Hippolyta yank Panty Raid Metheny’s chain?”

“Forgive me my convoluted thinking,” she said. “He’s real protective of this story. It’s his story, and anyone else doing anything on it is poaching on his exclusive. I mean, he’s gotten real paranoid. When he sees an interview with Hippolyta come out in the Daily, he’ll be so pissed that he’ll have to steal some of it. Maybe you and I can work on the story together and make sure we get the right slant on it, get some real zingers in there that he can’t help but steal. If the only possible source is your interview with her, you’ve got him against the wall for copyright violation. In any case, he’ll be pissed enough to do something that could be just as stupid. I should be able to stay enough ahead of him to string wires for him to trip over.”

“You have an evil mind,” her brother said with a fierce grin, displaying some convoluted thinking of his own. “Yeah, I’d love to shove a copyrighted interview with that gal down several throats, including a couple people at the Daily. You realize this is going to be a risk for her, don’t you?”

“If we keep quiet and work together, we ought to be able to control it,” she said. “You’re in on it? Just you and I know, nobody else, right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s been kind of dull lately. A little shenanigan would be fun. I’m in, just you and me ... and, of course, Hippolyta.”

“No problem there at all,” she said with a huge smile. “Start interviewing.”

“Uh …”

Charlie’s eyes got big. All of a sudden he had trouble speaking, not sure he’d heard his sister correctly, or if so, if he believed what she had just said. “You’re …” he began to say with huge disbelief after reality finally grabbed his mind by the short hairs and pulled. He realized now that the sword had made her a candidate in his mind from the instant he’d heard about the holdup. Yes, the Amazon had long thick red hair, but there were wigs. Yes, the Amazon was pretty well equipped in the hooter department, but there were falsies. Yes, his sister could be “… You’re Hippolyta?”

“Shhhhh—keep your voice down! Yes, I play her once in a while, when I want to,” she replied with a shrug, followed quickly by a conspiratorial grin.

“Answer me one question,” he said, his mind racing hard. He knew a few facts that hadn’t been released to the media. “What car were you driving Sunday night?”

“Daddy’s Shay.”

“My God,” Charlie frowned with alarm. “He lets you drive that monster?”

“It’s not that bad, if you take it real easy,” she said. “You can’t even think the word ‘turbo,’ but it’s the coolest car he owns that he’ll let me drive.”

Charlie shook his head. Their father had a hobby, actually more of an obsession, of his own: he was a classic car collector and restorer, with a special passion for Fords. There were a number of old cars sitting out in the barn behind his house, some showroom pristine, some virtual wrecks in various stages of being restored. The Shay was something special, though—while technically old enough to be an antique, it was a quarter century younger than the youngest cars Tom Parker usually messed with. It was a very good replica of a 1929 Model A roadster, built on a Pinto chassis.

The only problem was that the guy their father bought it from cheap had wanted a classic sleeper street rod, and had been smart enough not to louse up an original Model A, so instead he stuck a turbocharged and warmed-up 351 Ford “Cleveland” engine under the hood. It was way too much engine for the puny frame and suspension, and the one time Charlie had driven it, he’d learned that it was an overpowered, unforgiving bitch that could bite hard. His dad’s plan was to turn it back into a real Pinto-powered Shay someday, but there was a 1938 Lincoln V-12 Phaeton to be dealt with first … and a ’55 T-bird … and … damn it Charlie, get your mind back on the subject!

“Proves it for me,” he said reluctantly, but there it was. “One of the things the department didn’t release was Janice and Rick’s descriptions of the Amazon’s vehicle. She thought it was a white hot rod, while Rick thought it was some kind of a classic, maybe a Duesenberg or Packard or something.”

“Too bad we can’t tell Daddy. He’d get a kick out of that.”

“It’s just as well we’re not telling Janice,” he laughed. “Right now, she’d be ready to kill you. This morning, she and Rick pulled the registrations for every nineteen twenties and thirties model open car in northwest Ohio and are trying to figure an angle. The Shay is what, a ’79?”

“A ’78. I went to a FantasyCon in Detroit last weekend, and I wanted to show up with a special car, not just the Mustang.”

“Is this one of those costume things?”

“Yeah,” she she said and giggled. “We’re supposed to be in costume all the time, so nobody knows who anyone really is. Hippolyta has been to several of them over the years in various stages of costume development. There are some really weird people running around at those things.”

“Yeah,” Charlie snorted. “Like some little sister of mine I know.” He tapped his fingers on the table for a minute while he stared off into space at the collection of autographed plastic hot dog buns on the wall, signed by various celebrities. This was already worse than he imagined, and he was sure he hadn’t gotten near the bottom yet. But, yeah, this could be interesting … and life had been dull recently. “Let’s not talk about it anymore right here,” he said finally. “This isn’t what you call real, real secure.”

“We could go someplace.”

“Let’s put it off till tonight,” he said with a smile, an idea surfacing. “I got a bunch of questions I’d like to ask you, and maybe we can get around to them sometime. But right off the top of my head, I think I need to interview Hippolyta, not you. Get a good photo, too, not something off a security camera.”

“What … ?” she frowned, then enlightenment hit her. “Yeah, that would work. Great minds think alike, Charlie.”

“You know,” he frowned at his little sister. “That’s what really scares me.”

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