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to kill blue mold on tobacco."
    "Emergency Response team situation?"
    "Yeah. They just hosed the stuff into the ditch."
    “Maybe we’ll get some weird mutant life forms to go with the green lights.”
    “Green lights?” Dennis adjusted his tie as Robert got up and gave him the chair.
    "Long story,” Robert said, waving to the sound console. “If you want the UFO beat, let me know."
    Dennis waved him away and spread his news copy out on the desk. As the "On Air" sign lit up, Robert went out back. The rain had started as a soft trickle. A spasm of lightning lashed across the murk of the horizon. A couple of seconds later, it was followed by a booming bass line of thunder.
    Robert worked his way through a Camel Light. Tamara would soon be heading down the mountain for her afternoon classes. He shouldn’t have been such a jerk last night. But she was driving him crazy lately. At first her little premonitions had been cute and quirky, because she was quick to search for rational explanations based on her knowledge of psychology. But lately she had become obsessed, taking them seriously, growing distracted and distant.
    Gloomies. What a bunch of crap .
    Still, her skin had felt wonderful last night. He should have kept his mouth shut and his hands busy and maybe—
    Robert’s pulse sped up. Then he heard Betty’s brittle laughter erupt from the far end of the building and his mood crash-landed like the Hindenburg, only without the climactic explosion.
    For the hundredth time, he cursed himself for his moment of weakness, the one blotch on his marital record. It had occurred at the station Christmas party three months ago. Tamara had to give a final exam to her night class and hadn't been able to make it, so Robert endured the party alone, chumming around with people he already saw too much of at work. They stood around the catered buffet spread trying to make conversation over the roast beef and rye, but shoptalk seemed to be the only thing they had in common.
    After Melvin and his frosty-haired trophy wife left, Jack Ashley, the morning man, brought a couple of bottles of Wild Turkey from under the seat of his truck and started them around the room. Robert hadn’t been much of a drinker since becoming a family man, but he thought a few sips might keep him from dying of boredom. He had intended to have only enough to get warm faced, because he knew what would happen if he got the old ball rolling.
    Warm faced came and went, and then he was starting to get a little thick lipped. Drink just enough to chuck up that clam dip , he'd told himself, then you've had enough .
    But the clam dip stayed down, and so did a good pint of eighty-proof whiskey. Somewhere along the way to getting wobbly headed, damned if Betty Turnbill didn't start looking good . If Robert squinted just a little bit, she resembled a younger, if slightly seedier Reba McIntyre.
    And those wrinkles in her pink wool sweater just might have been breasts, and there could have been a real smile beneath her painted one. She corralled him in a corner after most of the staff had left, her whiskey-and-Cheez Whiz breath on his neck and her hands roving over his ample flesh. And the next thing he knew, they were in the backseat of his car, bumping like a couple of awkward high schoolers.
    More than once, if he remembered correctly, but he couldn't be sure.
    He'd driven home at three in the morning with a fuzzy tongue and his clothes smelling like a French whorehouse. Tamara was already in bed, snoring gently. He peeked into the kids' rooms. Kevin had been fast asleep under the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck on his ceiling and Ginger was somewhere in the middle of a pile of stuffed bears and aardvarks and frogs. Betrayal cut through the alcohol haze like a scythe.
    He crept into the bathroom and took a shower, trying to wash Betty's raw scent off his skin. By the time he'd lathered up, he'd almost convinced himself the night had never happened. But then he looked down at