As soon as MacKay heard the doorbell ring, he bolted up the stairs in a panic, stumbling toward the top and falling face-first onto the carpeted landing of the second floor hallway.
“Son of a bitch, McKay was heard to scream,” he yelled.
When last we left Jack McKay, the TV news anchor was struggling to understand why he could only speak as if reading a news story. McKay was on his way home, hoping his wife would have some answers.
McKay drove straight home, scrapping plans to stop at the cleaners and pick up his suits and shirts, for fear someone would say hello, or try to engage him in conversation. He tossed aside the idea of stopping to fill up the tank on the leased Mercedes for the same reason.
Jack McKay knew something was wrong as soon as he opened his mouth to order lunch. It had been a long morning of anchoring the news. There were thirty-seven minutes on air narrating a slow moving police chase, officers were pursuing a man driving a stolen John Deere riding mower through a suburban neighborhood, and there were twenty-one minutes of continuous coverage of a storm that was still two days away. As he knew all too well by now, the storm was expected to bring either drizzle, or rock-sized hail to the area.