Kill the Reporter by Marc Olden

Author:Marc Olden [Olden, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784087586
Publisher: Head of Zeus Ltd
Published: 2012-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

10

MY HAND SHOOK AS I snatched at the telephone on the first ring and knocked it to the floor. When I finally got the receiver to my ear, Loni’s voice sounded amused. “What was that all about?” she asked.

“Loni?”

“Got your message. Anything wrong?”

“No.” I wasn’t even convincing to myself.

“You sure? You sound like Santa Claus just died.”

“Everything’s fine. I’m in town, wanted to say hello, see how you’re doing. These little dramatic pauses you hear every so often come along only when I feel the need for a new career.”

Her sexy voice was a feather gently scraping my bare back and making soft, easy circles around my ear. “How goes the world of letters?”

“It goes. You sound beautiful.”

“Clean living and the power of prayer.”

We both laughed.

She said, “Read your series on union pension funds. A-one, as usual. And they never found those two men, right?”

“Never did. They made illegal loans from pension funds, took their kickback from the boys, but couldn’t leave well enough alone. Promised bigger loans, and on the strength of that promise, the boys go ahead and commit themselves to a few million in construction. But the union money doesn’t come through. The board of governors clamps down, so now the boys are left hanging. Which means trouble for our two union biggies, who are probably buried in the concrete foundation of some nice new Chicago building. Or maybe they’re lying under a cactus out in Arizona.”

She sighed, and the sound went through me like a mild electric shock. “You do good work.”

I almost said: So do you.

I loved her, hungered for her, remembered the smell and taste of her every day of my life. She was my obsession; I was her past history. Loni was twenty-eight, beautiful and intelligent, slim, with shoulder-length light brown hair and green eyes that were as clear and bright as emeralds in a two-million-dollar necklace. She lived her own life, neither explaining nor complaining, and this made her as attractive to me as any of the things she could do to my body and mind on a water bed. She was a call girl because she wanted to be. That’s what she’d been doing when we met, and that’s what she’d gone back to when my ambition and jealousy had killed our two-year marriage.

My determination to be important had pushed Loni and me apart. I traveled and worked long hours to put a story together, and during that time, I never told anyone what I was working on. My stories were going to remain a secret until printed. I had it all figured out. No one was going to betray old Harker and steal his ideas and stop his march to glory. Oh, no. “No one” meant “everyone.” I didn’t notice at the time that this also included my wife. And I didn’t do it halfway, folks. I put all of my energy into tearing my marriage into little pieces.

When I would return from three weeks in Saigon or ten days

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