Carl Hiaasen – Lucky You

“May we stipulate that your ‘memo’ is pure horseshit?”

“Yes.”

“OK. Now I have some questions. One: Do you have any idea why Tom Krome’s house was torched?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you have a clue why anyone would want to harm him?”

“Not really,” Sinclair said.

“Do you know where he is?”

“The rumor is Bermuda.”

The managing editor chuckled. “You’re not going to Bermuda, Sinclair. You’re going to the last place you sent Tom, and you’re going to find him. By the way, you look like hell.”

“I’m sure I do.”

“Another question: Does Tom still work for us?”

“As far as I’m concerned, he does.” Sinclair said it with all the conviction he could summon.

The managing editor removed his glasses and began vigorously cleaning me lenses with a tissue. “What about as far as Tom is concerned? Any chance he was serious about quitting?”

“I… I suppose it’s possible.”

Woozy with apnea, Sinclair thought he might be on the verge of heart failure. He’d read many articles about critically ill patients who had eerie out-of-body experiences in ambulances and emergency rooms. Sinclair felt that way now—floating above the managing editor’s credenza, watching himself being emasculated. The sensation was neither as painless nor as dreamlike as other near-death survivors had described.

“The arson guys are going through the rubble tonight,” said the managing editor. “They want to know if the fire could be connected to a story Tom was working on.”

“I can’t imagine how.” Sinclair gulped air like a hippo. Slowly the feeling returned to his fingers and toes.

The managing editor said: “Suppose you tell me exactly what he was writing.”

“A quickie feature. Hit and run.”

“About what?”

“Just some woman who won the lottery,” Sinclair said. Impulsively he added: “A black woman.” Just so the boss would know Sinclair was on the lookout for feel-good stories about minorities. Maybe it would help his predicament, maybe not.

The managing editor squinted. “That’s it—a lottery feature?”

“That’s it,” Sinclair asserted.

He didn’t want it known that he’d rejected Tom Krome’s request to pursue the robbery angle. Sinclair believed the decision would make him appear gutless and shortsighted, particularly if Krome turned up murdered in some ditch.

“Where is this Lotto woman?” asked the managing editor.

“Little town called Grange.”

“Straight feature?”

“That’s all it was.”

The managing editor frowned. “Well, you’re lying again, Sinclair. But it’s my own damn fault for hiring you.” He stood up and removed his suit jacket from the back of his chair. “You’ll go to Grange and you won’t come back until you’ve found Tom.”

Sinclair nodded. He’d call his sister. She and Roddy would let him stay in the spare room. They could take him around town, hook him up with their sources.

“Next week they’re announcing the Amelias,” said the managing editor, slipping into his jacket. “I entered Krome.”

“You did?”

Again Sinclair was caught off guard. The “Amelias” were a national writing competition named after the late Amelia J. Lloyd, widely considered the mother superior of the modern newspaper feature. No event was too prosaic or inconsequential to escape Amelia Lloyd’s sappy attention. Bake sales, craft shows, charity walkathons, spelling bees, mall openings, blood drives, Easter egg hunts—Amelia’s miraculous prose breathed sweet life into them all. In her short but meteoric career, her byline had graced The New Orleans Times-Picayune, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Tampa Tribune, The Miami Herald and The Cleveland Plain Dealer. It was in Cleveland that Amelia J. Lloyd had been tragically killed in the line of duty, struck down by a runaway miniature Duesenberg at a Masonic parade. She was only thirty-one.

All but an elitist handful of newspapers entered their feature sections in the annual Amelias, because it was the only contest that pretended fluff was worthwhile journalism. At The Register, staff entries for such awards came, as policy, from the Assistant Deputy Managing Editor of Features and Style. Sinclair had chosen not to submit Tom Krome in the Amelias because his stories invariably showed, in Sinclair’s opinion, a hard or sarcastic edge that the judges might find off-putting. In addition, Sinclair feared that if by cruel fate Krome actually won the contest (or even placed), he would physically attack Sinclair in front of the staff. Krome had been heard to remark that, even with its $500 prize, an Amelia was a badge of shame.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *