Carl Hiaasen – Lucky You

Then the woman who covered the police beat came to Sinclair’s office with a xeroxed report he found highly disturbing. The windows of Krome’s house had been shot out by persons unknown, and there was no sign of the owner. In the absence of fresh blood or corpses, the cops were treating the incident as a random act of vandalism. Sinclair thought it sounded more serious than that.

He was pondering his options when his sister Joan phoned from Grange. Excitedly she told Sinclair the latest rumor: The Lotto woman, JoLayne Lucks, left town the night before with a white man, supposedly a newspaper writer.

“Is that your guy?” Joan asked.

Sinclair felt clammy as he fumbled for a pen and paper. Having never worked as a reporter, he had no experience taking notes.

“Start again,” he implored his sister, “and go slowly.”

But Joan was chattering on with more gossip: The clerk at the Grab N’Go had skipped out, too—the one who’d originally said he sold the winning lottery ticket to JoLayne Lucks and then later changed his mind.

“Whoa,” said Sinclair, scribbling spastically. “Run that by me again.”

The shaky store clerk was a new twist to the story. Joan briefed her brother on what was known locally about Shiner. Sinclair cut her off when she got to the business about the young man’s mother and the Road-Stain Jesus.

“Back up,” he said to Joan. “They’re traveling together—the clerk, this writer and the Lucks woman? Is that the word?”

His sister said: “Oh, there’s all sorts of crazy theories. Bermuda is my personal favorite.”

Sinclair solemnly jotted the word “Bermuda” on his notepad. He added a question mark, to denote his own doubts. He thanked Joan for the tip, and she gaily promised to call back if she heard anything new. After hanging up, Sinclair drew the blinds in his office—a signal (although he didn’t realize it) to his entire staff that an emergency was in progress.

In solitude, Sinclair grappled with his options. Tom Krome’s fate concerned him deeply, if only in a political context. An editor was expected to maintain the illusion of control over his writers, or at least have a sketchy idea of their whereabouts. The situation with Krome was complicated by the fact that he was regarded as a valuable talent by The Register’s managing editor, who in his lofty realm was spared the daily anxiety of working with the man. It was Sinclair’s cynical theory that Krome had won the managing editor’s admiration with a single feature story—a profile of a controversial performance artist who abused herself and occasionally audience members with zucchini, yams and frozen squab. With great effort Krome had managed to scavenge minor symbolism from the young woman’s histrionics, and his mildly sympathetic piece had inspired the National Endowment for the Arts to reinstate her annual grant of $14,000. The artist was so grateful she came to the newspaper to thank the reporter (who was, as always, out of town) and ended up chatting instead with the managing editor himself (who, of course, asked her out). A week later, Tom Krome was puzzled to find a seventy-five-dollar bonus in his paycheck.

Was life fair? Sinclair knew it didn’t matter. He was left to presume his own career would suffer if Krome turned up unexpectedly in a hospital, jail, morgue or scandal. Yet Sinclair was helpless to influence events, because of two crucial mistakes. The first was allowing Krome to quit; the second was not informing anybody else at the newspaper. So as far as Sinclair’s bosses were aware, Krome still worked for him.

Which meant Sinclair would be held accountable if Krome died or otherwise got in trouble. Because Sinclair had neither the resourcefulness nor the manpower to find his lost reporter, he energetically set about the task of covering his own ass. He spent two hours drafting a memorandum that recounted his last meeting with Tom Krome, describing at length the severe personal stress with which the man obviously had been burdened. Sinclair’s written account culminated with Krome’s shrieking that he was quitting, upending Sinclair’s desk and stomping from the newsroom. Naturally Sinclair had refused to accept his troubled friend’s resignation, and discreetly put him on excused medical leave, with pay. Out of deference to Krome’s privacy, Sinclair had chosen to tell no one, not even the managing editor.

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