Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01
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Authors: Trust Me on This (v1.1)
Trust Me On
This
Donald E.
Westlake
In
this hilarious send-up of tabloid journalism, cub reporter Sara Joslyn trades
her position at a respectable
New England
newspaper — and her professional standards — for a tripled salary at a notorious
Florida-
based supermarket tabloid. On the way to
her first day of work at the
Weekly
Galaxy,
Sara discovers a bloody body in an abandoned Buick. The body— and
its disappearance a short time later—are of little interest to her new editor,
handsome Jack Ingersoll. Instead, he has Sara and eccentric
Galaxy
colleagues covering more worthy
stories — like a birthday bash for 100-year-old-twins, and a television stars
secret wedding. Still, Sara can't help but remember the corpse in the Buick. In
her pursuit of sensational headlines, Sara finds murder, mystery, and romance
among the scandals.
G. K.
HALL & CO.
Boston
,
Massachusetts
1989
Copyright
© 1988 by Donald E. Westlake.
All
rights reserved.
Published
in Large Print by arrangement with Warner Books Inc. and The Mysterious Press.
G.K.
Hall Large Print Book Series.
Set
in 16 pt Plan tin.
Library
of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Westlake,
Donald E.
Trust
me on this / Donald E. Westlake.
p.
cm.—(G.K. Hall large print book series) ISBN 0-8161-4740-X (lg. print)
1.
Large type books. I. Tide.
[PS3573.E9T78
1989]
813'.54—dcl9
For
Paul Corkery, who is as amused by fact as I am by fiction, and for Dean and
Richard, who first sent us kids out to play.
A
Word in Your Ear
Although
there is no newspaper anywhere in the
United States
like the
Weekly Galaxy
, as any alert reader will quickly realize, were there
such a newspaper in actual real-life existence its activities would be
stranger, harsher and more outrageous than those described herein. The
fictioneer labors under the restraint of plausibility; his inventions must stay
within the capacity of the audience to accept and believe. God, of course,
working with facts, faces no such limitation. Were there a factual equivalent
to the
Weekly Galaxy
, it would be
much worse than the paper I have invented, its staff and ownership even more
lost to all considerations of truth, taste, proportion, honor, morality or any
shred of common humanity. Trust me.
Contents
One
Sara
drove out into the wilderness. The clean new road stretched ahead, empty and
white, four lanes of sun-baked concrete divided by a low gray cement barrier
curled into the surfer’s dream of the perfect wave. In the rented Chevette’s
rearview mirror, tinted slightly blue, the same empty road unreeled backward
toward the city, shimmering far off in the heat-rise like a clumsily swaying
backdrop.
It
was nine-forty on a Monday morning. The twelve-mile-long highway cut across
flat tan scrubland under a pale blue sky, absolutely alone and unused except
for the maroon Chevette with glittering windows, racing west at eighty miles an
hour, containing its pocket of air-conditioning and the person of Sara Joslyn.
Out ahead, still far off, the building gradually appeared, sand-colored, rising
up at the point of the highway. On the dashboard, the digital clock’s green
numbers read
9:42
. I
won’t be late after all, Sara thought.
Jack
Ingersoll said, “How long since I had a cancer?”
Mary
Kate Scudder flipped through her Rolodex. “Three weeks next Tuesday.”
Jack
shook his head, regretful. “Too soon,” he said. “Too soon.” He paced his
squaricle, thinking.
Sunlight
glinted on an object far ahead, then not far ahead at all. Sara had time to
register the dark blue car on her side of the road, parked way off on the
slanting shoulder, white light fragmenting from rear window and bumper. Then
her own little Chevette had shot past that place and it was only in memory that
she filled in the picture: The car was tilted, right side lower than left
because the shoulder fell away there toward the level of the surrounding plain.
The right front door hung open. A person was lying half in and half out of the
car.
A
what? Sara’s foot lifted from the accelerator, the Chevette slowed, she looked
in the rearview mirror. But she could barely see the parked car back there, it
was already no more than a tiny dark lump in all this flat world of beige and
whiteness.
What
should she do? Was the person hurt? Had she actually seen a person at all?
What
if it’s a story, she thought, and her foot moved to the brake. My first day,
and I walk in with a story. How’s that for starting with a bang?
But
how could she get through the central barrier into the eastbound lanes? She
slowed and slowed, still alone on the highway, and then it occurred to her she
didn’t have to get into the eastbound lanes. She had the road to herself. Even
the parked car was no longer visible in her mirror.
Fine.
A quick U-turn, spewing gravel when her tires slewed across the shoulder, and
Sara accelerated back the way she’d come, the morning sun now hot and painful
in her eyes as she pushed the little car up again to eighty. Be some joke if
another vehicle came along after all.
But
none did. The parked car grew ahead of her, increasingly distinct, and she
decelerated, seeing that it definitely was a person over there, half in and
half out of the car, dressed in dark clothing, head and shoulders and one arm
spread on the ground like an oil spill.
She
stopped just beyond the car, and when she opened her door a bundle of hot dry
air rolled in and lay on Sara like a wool blanket. “Jeez!” she said, and
climbed out of the car with movements that were all at once sluggish,
heat-oppressed. She moved under the sun, her clothes turning to wood, her shoes
making dry gritty sounds on the gravel.
The
car was a dark blue Buick
Riviera
, a year or two old, with
Dade
County
plates; or plate, since
Florida
cars don’t have a license plate in the
front. The rear seat was empty. A stocky man in his fifties lay sprawled face
down over the front seat and out onto the ground. The engine was off, but the
key was in the ignition. The car radio played salsa music, sounding like
crickets on coke.
The
man was dead. Sara hunkered down beside the body and touched his neck, and even
though the sun had warmed that flesh, it still felt dead. Then she noticed a
kind of soft-looking mound at the back of the man’s head, under thin gray hair,
and when she touched it she was repelled; it felt squishy under the skin. I’m a
reporter, she reminded herself, swallowing bile. I’m a reporter, I’m supposed
to do these things.
Hating
it, she put both hands on his shoulder, stiff under the dark gray polyester
jacket, and lifted enough to see his face. Gravel had embossed the skin. The
face was round, tough-looking, pale, not very well shaved. The mouth was slack,
the eyes closed. Above the left eye was a bruised hole, black and gray and red,
with tendrils of blood.
That’s
where the bullet went in. The squishy place in back is where the bullet broke
the skull but didn’t come out.
Oh,
jeepers, Sara thought.
Intrepid
editor Jack Ingersoll stopped pacing. “Legionnaires’ Disease,” he announced.
“It was guilt.” Secretary Mary Kate stared at him in repugnance.
“Guilt?”
“Sure.” Jack waved his arms about,
fingers fluttering for handholds in the air. “They were all vets, did things in
the war, never can forget, bad dreams, can’t forgive themselves ...”
Mary
Kate said, “Isn’t that like when Binx tried ‘Legionnaires’ Disease—It Was
Suicide’?”
Jack
frowned. “Too close? You think so?”
Mary
Kate said, “
Massa
didn’t like that other one.”
Turning
away, grimacing, Jack ran ink-stained
fingers
through thinning hair. “If only I could find the ice cream diet, the pressure
would be off.”
The
highway funneled to a finish at the building, which bulked four stories high in
the middle of nothing. Atop the structure, a monster two-story sign in red and
blue neon informed the Parking lots and the surrounding wasteland:
THE
WEEKLY GALAXY
“the
people, yes!”
Here
the four lanes became two, which passed to either side of a stucco-and-glass
guard shack.
stop
said the red
hexagonal on the front of the shack, and Sara stopped, rolling her window down
as a brown-uniformed guard emerged, a clipboard in his hand. The
Florida
heat lay on Sara’s face. “Hot!” she said.
The
guard, an older man with dark sunglasses and a deep tan, nodded agreement.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I already knew that.”
“Do
you know about the dead man?”
The
clipboard quivered slightly. Behind the sunglasses, the guard did something
distancing. “Which dead man would that be?” he asked.
“The
one back there on the road”—she checked the odometer—“exactly two point three
miles, westbound side, in a dark blue Buick Riviera, Florida license plate,
Dade County 277 ZRQ. He’s been shot!”
That
last part sounded more excited than she’d wanted, her effort having been to be
dispassionately professional throughout the entire report; still, she was
pleased with her overall delivery.
The
guard seemed less pleased. After frowning out at the empty road for a few
seconds, he said, “Are you sure?”
“Of
course I’m sure! Sure about what? That he’s there? That he’s dead? That he was
shot?”
Slowly,
the guard shook his head. “Ma’am,” he said, “I’m not questioning your
accuracy.”
“It
sure sounded like it,” Sara said. This wasn’t the reaction she’d expected.
“Only,”
the guard went on, “I don’t seem to know you, ma’am. How do you happen to be
out here?”
“I
work here,” Sara told him. “That is, I do now. I’m starting today.” With a
meaningful glance at his clipboard, she said, “The name’s Sara Joslyn.”
Back
on familiar territory, the guard relaxed into routine, consulting the clipboard
and saying, “Yes, ma’am, here you are.”
“My
first day on the paper,” Sara said, unable entirely now to keep the excitement
out of her voice, “and my first story!”
“This
dead man,” the guard said, sounding dubious again.
“He’s
there,” Sara said, sternly.
“Okay,
okay.” The guard held the clipboard up as a shield. “He’s there, and he’s dead,
and he’s shot.”
“In
a Buick
Riviera
.”
“Yes,
ma’am.”
“I
suppose you should be the one to call the police,” Sara said, “but I’ll report
it inside.” “Good idea,” the guard agreed. “But just hold on here.” Taking a
decal from the clipboard, he put the clipboard atop the Chevette, peeled the
back from the decal and, saying, “Excuse me,” leaned his head and upper torso
in through the open window.
“Anytime,”
Sara said, watching him slide the decal onto the lower left comer of the
windshield.
Withdrawing
from the automobile, the guard collected his clipboard and explained, “That’s
the temporary, so you get to park in the Visitors’ lot there. Once your
tryout’s over and you’re a regular staffer you’ll get the permanent sticker.”
“The
permanent sticker,” Sara said. “It even
sounds
romantic.”
Jack
paced, while Mary Kate sat watching him, fingers poised over typewriter keys.
Bob Sangster, one of Jack’s reporters, an Australian with a very large nose,
came through the door space into the squaricle and Jack flashed him a look of
mingled hope, despair, rage and submission. “Senator,” Bob said. “With a nose
job.”
Jack
frowned. “North or south?”
“Nose,”
Bob repeated, pointing to his own large one.
“What
part of the
country?”
“Would
I know? I’m a simple Aussie.” Consulting a small piece of paper crumpled in his
left fist, Bob said, “Where’s
Nebraska
?”
“Nowhere,”
Jack told him. “Forget it.”
There
were no other Visitors. Sara circled through the empty space, thick white lines
on blacktop defining where Visitors should park, beyond the jammed lots for
staff parking, and carefully placed the Chevette between the two white lines
closest to the main building.