Carl Hiaasen – Lucky You

“You’ll see,” Bode told him. “You’ll see I’m right. Now, where the hell’s Grange, Florida?”

Chub muttered, “Upstate.”

“Big help you are. Everything’s upstate from here.”

From his studded belt Chub took a Colt Python.357 and shot several holes in David Koresh’s cheeks.

Bode Gazzer leaned back from the dinette. “What’s your damn problem?”

“I don’t like the way I feel.” Chub tucked the gun in the waist of his trousers, the barrel hot against his thigh. Without flinching he said: “Man wins fourteen million bucks, he oughta feel good. And I don’t.”

“Exactly!” Bode Gazzer charged across the room and seized Chub in a clammy tremble of an embrace. “Now you see”—Bode’s voice dropping to a whisper—”what this country of ours has come to. You see what the battle is all about!”

Chub nodded solemnly, withholding his concern that a battle sounded like damn hard work, and hard work sounded like the last damn thing a brand-new millionaire ought to be doing.

The downsizing trend that swept newspapers in the early nineties was aimed at sustaining the bloated profit margins in which the industry had wallowed for most of the century. A new soulless breed of corporate managers, unburdened by a passion for serious journalism, found an easy way to reduce the cost of publishing a daily newspaper. The first casualty was depth.

Cutting the amount of space devoted to news instantly justified cutting the staff. At many papers, downsizing was the favored excuse for eliminating such luxuries as police desks, suburban editions, foreign bureaus, medical writers, environmental specialists and, of course, investigative teams (which were always antagonizing civic titans and important advertisers). As newspapers grew thinner and shallower, the men who published them worked harder to assure Wall Street that readers neither noticed nor cared.

It was Tom Krome’s misfortune to have found a comfortable niche with a respectable but doomed newspaper, and to have been laid off at a time when the business was glutted with hungry experienced writers. It was his further misfortune to have been peaking in his career as an investigative reporter at a time when most newspapers no longer wished to pay for those particular skills.

The Register, for example, was in the market for a divorce columnist. Sinclair had made the pitch at Krome’s job interview.

“We’re looking for something funny,” Sinclair had said. “Upbeat.”

“Upbeat?”

“There’s a growing readership out there,” Sinclair had said. “You ever been through a divorce?”

“No,” Krome had lied.

“Perfect. No baggage, no bitterness, no bile.”

Sinclair’s fetish for alliteration—it was Krome’s first exposure.

“But your ad in E&P said ‘feature writer.’ ”

“This would be a feature, Tom. Five hundred words. Twice a week.”

Krome had thought: I know what I’ll do—I’ll move to Alaska! Gut salmon on the slime line. In winters, work on a novel.

“Sorry I wasted your time.” He’d stood up, shaken Sinclair’s hand (which had, actually, a limp, slick, dead-salmon quality), and flown home to New York.

A week later, the editor had called and offered Krome a feature-writing position at $38,000 a year. No divorce column, thank God—The Register’s managing editor, it turned out, had seen nothing upbeat in the topic. “Four-time loser,” Sinclair had explained in a whisper.

Tom Krome took the feature-writing job because he needed the money. He was saving for a cabin on Kodiak Island or possibly up near Fairbanks, where he’d live by himself. He intended to buy a snowmobile and photograph wild wolves, caribou and eventually a grizzly bear. He intended to write a novel about a fictional actress named Mary Andrea Finley, based on a true person named Mary Andrea Finley, who in real life had spent the last four years successfully preventing Tom Krome from divorcing her.

He was packing for the Lotto story when Katie returned from church.

“Where to?” Her purse hit the kitchen table like a cinder block.

“A place called Grange,” Tom Krome said.

“I’ve been there,” Katie said testily. A place called Grange. Like she didn’t even know it was a town. “That’s where they have the sightings,” she said.

“Right.” Krome wondered if Katie was one of the religious pilgrims. Anything was possible; he’d known her only two weeks.

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 *