Excerpt from "Talk Of The Town " Chapter 1

Mandalay Florentino

    There is that famous moment in Casa Blanca, when Bogart looks at Bergman, and in that steely way of his delivers a penetrating question about life, about circumstance and fate.
 
     Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, why did she have to walk into his?

     Boggie’s question was in my mind the moment I laid eyes upon the tiny town of Daily, Texas.  Of all the places in all the world, why did I have to end up here?

     I had a disquieting sense of something dark and life-altering hovering just beyond the sleepy, sun-drenched main street.  The only explanation for my being sent on assignment to this middle-of-nowhere little berg was that my boss was setting me up for a full-scale F-5 disaster, so she could fire me.  Ursula would do something like that.  Ursula breathed in human suffering the way most people breathe oxygen.  Which made her a great reality TV producer and a lousy boss.  Now that she’d finished toying with the underlings on the staff, she was sniffing around me, searching for signs of weakness, honing in on a point of attack.  Ursula delighted in messing up other people’s lives, just when they were supposed to be the happiest