“I’ve never seen you work so hard before,” said Betty, shaking her head.
“Things are hot, babe. Real hot!” He turned back to the keyboard and started pounding. After a moment, he sensed that she was still there. He squeaked his swivel chair around, took the Camel out of his mouth. “What are you gawking at, sweetheart!”
“You haven’t made any lewd suggestions or asked about my sister all week, Jake. What’s going on? The doctor putting you on ‘human’ instead of hormone shots?”
She was a bottle-blonde, with sufficient figure and a cute enough nose to merit Jake’s scattershot approach to nabbing women. He’d nailed her sister, Ann, from Tampa on a visit last year, and that was close enough. But he kept trying anyway. He figured she’d be hurt if he didn’t. However, ever since he’d come back from Las Vegas, he hadn’t given any women the usual Jakey business.
There were more important fish to fry.
Jake smiled at the jibe. “I know you miss the attention, kiddo, but what can I say? The saucer men aimed a work-ray at me. I’m dancing at the end of extraterrestrial strings! I gots to lets mah fingahs dance on duh keyboard!”
“Hey, I’m not complaining, Jake. Don’t get me wrong. Goodnight.” She started to leave.
Jake rifled through the messages, suddenly remembering who might have called.
A return call from MUFON. Something from the Air Force public relations branch. The usual cranks with their stories of flying saucers shorting out their television reception.
But nothing from Everett Scarborough, nothing from anyone associated with Scarborough.
Jake got to his feet, working out a crick in his neck. Half of his rumpled Dacron blue mangos and green-parrots Hawaiian shirt dangled out from his Sears Sta-Prest pants, half was sort of tucked in. “Betts! Just a second! Yo!”
She turned away, warily keeping her distance, looking uncomfortable against the panorama of empty desks, chattering AP and UPI machines, and scattered papers that composed the boiler room of The Paper That Cannot be Avoided. Jake’s office was little more than a cubbyhole against a wall, formed of nose-high painted sheet-metal and cheap tinted glass. All hail Kozlowski, generous all-Father, and cheap ruler of the Intruder. Actually, Camden was grateful for what little privacy he got—especially in the present situation when he needed it.
“What?”
“Nothing from Ed Chaney?”
“You keep on asking that, Jake. If you got a call from Ed Chaney I’d have put him through, per your instructions. Now can I go my liege? I do have a boyfriend, and he is aware of the sleazy reputation of a certain snake I work with!”
Jake smiled, pleased to have the admiration of his male peers. “And Kozlowski! What about Kozlowski? He say anything about my articles?”
“Nada, Adios, Jake.”
“Thanks, sweetheart. Say hello to Billy-boy for me. Tell him I’m sorry I threw up on his golf shoes at the barbecue!”
Betty’s Nikes were already squeaking down the Formica Five Hundred, her rear wiggling prettily. Jake could not help but watch the view for a moment, sucking his teeth appreciatively.
Jake Camden thought of himself as Spencer Tracy reborn in a scaled-down version of Tom Selleck, but the general, movie star associations pinned to his appearance and manner suggested that he was the bastard son of an unholy dalliance between Mickey Rourke and James Woods. What the hay, anyway! All those guys got laid regularly, and so did Jake, with a comely variety of the wimmens ... That was what mattered, wasn’t it?
Camden had a sallow, unhealthy face, saved by a narrow chin and high cheekbones and eyes that could shoot a bird off a branch at fifty yards—when he was sober. When he wasn’t though, the eyes got all half-lidded and bedroomy, and the chicks liked that, too. He had mousey brown hair starting to recede in a widow’s peak, and a mesomorph body beginning to bloat up a bit in the midsection from his drinking. Camden didn’t worry though—he could take it off in a few weeks of racquetball. Right now, Camden looked like hell, stubble on his face, rumpled, his hair disheveled. But he always looked like that after a hard-day’s work, and he was proud of the evidence that he’d actually spent more than the obligatory couple of hours behind the typewriter.
He went back to this desk, popped the cassette, and put a B.B. King tape on, fitting the earphones over his head snuggly, thumbing up the volume.
Sing to me Lucille! Sing me dab blues!
He tapped a Camel unfiltered from a crumpled pack and fired it up, downing the dregs of cold black coffee from a Styrofoam cup. Then he glanced over the last story he’d worked on and gotten stuck on yesterday. He wanted to hack out an ending real quick, so he could leave it for Kozlowski’s inspection the next day.
DO UFO’S STEAL YOUR GARBAGE?
Mounting evidence all across the United States has begun to paint a harrowing picture of a new and frightening trend to emerge from the UFO scene. Increasing evidence of aliens invading the privacy of American citizens again and again, from Bangor, Maine, to San Pedro, California, has recently come to the attention of this reporter, making him ask a simple but profound question:
Do you know where your trash goes?
Do extraterrestrials abscond with the cast-off minutiae of your everyday existence for their own inscrutable purposes?
Harold Budkey of Omaha, Nebraska, tells an unnerving, but increasingly prevalent, story:
“It was about three-thirty in the morning and I was sleeping when I heard the most confounded banging noise. I thought it was cats or dogs getting into my garbage cans, which /’d put out in the front yard for the trash man to pick up the next day. I put on my bathrobe and I looked out the front door, and damn if I didn’t see this little bald guy, about four feet high, rootin’ through the can. And hovering overhead was a flyin’ saucer!”
The question is, What do men from other planets want with coffee grounds, TV-dinner packages, and empty, smelly cat food cans...
Yeah, thought Camden.
Just exactly what did creatures from other planets want with people’s garbage?
He leafed through his pages of notes. Actually, he had about three reports of this particular saucer phenomenon, culled from his six years of investigations in the field. A little exaggeration never hurt business though. Besides, he had to crank out some reserve stories some good stories, rife with middle—
American paranoia, to tide him over while he went out to do the stuff that Scarborough needed him to do ... And to dig for the information his hard-hitting expose needed.
That, and to talk to Maximillian Schroeder.
An idea suddenly struck him like lightning. Maybe there was some kind of DNA remnants of human beings that aliens dug out of the garbage! Yeah, and they used this to form clones of people in their saucers ... No ... no. On the Dark Side of the Moon! That’s where they did it. Appropriately inspired, Camden began to scribble out his volley of thoughts on a legal-sized pad of yellow paper. This was what he was doing when Kozlowski found him.
Camden almost jumped out of his socks when the Old Man tapped him on his shoulder. He pulled off his headphones and wheeled around to stare up at the squat, round man, peering down at him through thick glasses, the ever-present foul cigar jutting from big lips like an accusing finger.
“Sir!” said Camden, his surprise forcing unusual civility instead of wisecracks. “I didn’t know you were still here.
“Gotta work hard to keep this mill grinding, Camden!”
Kozlowski said, scratching a particularly ugly and prominent mole on his neck. “Just took an important meeting. Bit of a problem with that business about the Reagan White House Orgies story. Looks like I’m going to have to tell Blake to tone it down some.”
Camden leered. “Too bad, Koz! That was one hot story!”
“Why don’t you give me an orgy story, huh? Yeah. Orgies on flying saucers! We shoulda thought about it earlier.”
Kozlowski’s corpulence was of the greasy variety, the sort reserved for those truly ugly souls of the bus
iness world who wore their iniquities upon their bodies like cartography. He smelled of Old Spice defeated by fungoid growths in the damp parts of his body, and of the onion-stocked grinder he must have just snacked on during that meeting with Joe “the Carnivore” Donohue, the Intruder’s lawyer who was rumored to moonlight in Jaws movies. Kozlowski spoke with an accent from the wrong side of the East River, and he was rumored to be destined for a cement raincoat-grave in that body of water if he ever ventured back north.
“Sure, boss. I’ll get on it right away.” Camden kept the smile pasted on his face. “Those other stories I gave you couple days ago ... Whatcha think?”
“That’s what I stopped by to talk to you about, Camden,” Kozlowski chewed on his cigar a moment, letting his reporter squirm for a few moments. “Not bad. Not bad at all. I see that our little talk about your performance here rattled some sense into your head. Or maybe a little inspiration into your typewriter, huh. I especially liked the story about compact disks containing secret messages from extraterrestrials. I think we can run that, and then use it again with secret messages from Elvis Presley next month. Whatcha think!”
“All yours, boss! Thanks.” Camden cleared his throat. “So, if you, er, liked the stories, Koz ... Well maybe ... I thought ... uhm ... “Geez! He was hemming and hawing! Camden usually never did that—Koz really had him rattled. “Maybe some kind of bonus might be in order.”
The eyes immediately become slits. “What ... you want more money?”
No, you idiot! I want a box of your cigars!
“Sure! I find myself a little overextended. An extra bit of cash would sure help me out.”
Kozlowski was quiet for a moment, the wet, slobbering cigar
working around in his lips and teeth like a dog chewing on an eel. Christ, though, this was a change, thought Camden. He wasn’t spitting out an immediate “No, you asshole!” like he usually did. What kind of evil plot was cooking up there in that foul kettle of worms Kozlowski used for a brain?
The beady eyes wandered over the piled-high desk, to the old IBM rattling by its side.
“Watcha writing there now, Camden?” he said, craning over to read.
Camden’s first reaction was to hide his work from his boss, but he cancelled the impulse immediately. That would excite Kozlowski’s interest. He had to be cool. Besides, the Old Man couldn’t read print unless it was write up against his nose. “Oh, just finishing up this piece right here.” He shoved the first part of the Trash Can piece at the fat man, who rattled it close to his face to check out the headline.
“Hah! Great, Camden. Good stuff! Yeah, that’s personal, all right, just like I want. That’ll get John Doe checking his backyard for the critters from Jupiter.” Then his thick eyebrows squirmed together like mating caterpillars. “But what’s the reason, Camden? Why would ET’s wanna steal garbage?”
“DNA, Koz!” said Camden, rejoicing in the serendipity of his recent musings on the very same subject.
“Dee En Ay? What the H is that?” Koz chuckled.
Camden considered a quick genetic lecture, but then decided against it, bringing into playa more recognizable word. “Clones, Mr. K. The stuff they make clones out of. Maybe the aliens are making clones of average American citizens upon in space--or on the Dark Side of the Moon.”
“Yeah!” The cigar waggled enthusiastically, “Yeah, I like it a lot.” He tapped the paper with a thick forefinger. “Hey! You think that’s where Elvis has been hidin’ ... the Dark Side of the Moon?”
“Could be, Koz. Could be. But then, maybe he’s on one of the moons of Jupiter too ... maybe Callisto. Lots of UFO activity around Callisto.”
“Great. A whole series. I want you to have a meeting with our Elvis editor, as soon as he gets back from doing that piece on the Graceland sewage system.”
“Sure, Koz, no problem.” He didn’t bring up his impending trip. Koz would probably forget all this, anyway. But there was one subject that Camden didn’t want his boss to forget.
“Really, though. What do you think? This stuff deserves a little extra green to keep the author happy and flowering!”
Koz leaned against the desk precariously, and dug a finger into a nostril thoughtfully. He examined what he’d dug out, pulled out a handkerchief, and deposited his prize amongst the day’s collection. “Money, huh, Camden? You’re really somethin’, you know? A week an’ a half ago, you were just happy to keep your job after I almost tossed your tail into the parking lot. Now, you want some gravy.” He nodded to the typewriter and tapped the beginning of the Trash Can piece on the desk, slightly smearing it with snot. “This stuff—it’s okay. I like it. But you ain’t gonna win no Putz Seltzer prize for it!” The Putz Seltzer prize was Kozlowski’s mythical award for best supermarket tabloid journalism of the year.
“Yeah, Koz, but come on! Week after week, year after year, I gotta churn this stuff out! I gotta thin it a little to stretch it out.”
“I ain’t told nobody, and maybe I shouldn’t be tellin’ you, Camden. But the Enquirer and the Star pulled another million ahead of us last year. We ain’t lost no readers ... There’s just more that we can get. That’s why I’m on you for some hotter pieces. We want those extra readers.” Kozlowski grew quiet. Camden thought for a moment the man was contemplating some deep philosophical announcement, but then a sudden eructation, redolent of oregano, pepperoni, and oil, issued from his jowly face. “Tell you what, Camden. Don’t ask me why I’m doing this, after that business with you and my daughter. Your balls should be on my wall, I guess, but I’m a forgiving man. I’ll make a deal. You come up with somethin’ earthshakin’ ... some great story that will make those million readers pass over the other rags and stick the Intruder in with their milk and eggs and bread, and I’ll give you that bonus, to the tune of ten thousand smackeroos.”
Camden blinked. “What’s the going exchange rate on smackeroos, boss?”
“Last I looked, it was one American dollar per ... I see you’re surprised. Didn’t think I was that generous, huh? Well, it’s gotta be good, Camden, so I probably won’t have to give it. And the way I judge its good is I get that million circulation increase, the issue of the Intruder it’s in. That tantalize you?”
“Sure. But that doesn’t do me any good now.”
“I see a possible, Camden, it’s an instant two thousand, cash, no deposit, no return. How’s that grab you?”
“Well, I guess I’ll start working on it, Koz.”
Kozlowski patted his employee on the arm. “I knew you’d get real motivated when you heard that, Camden. And I wouldn’t be making you this offer if I didn’t think I could squeeze an incredible story out of you.” He stood up and began to waddle off, leaving a pall of cigar smoke behind him. “You know where I am, Camden. Dig me up some great stories; I dig you up some significant green.”
Camden dropped down into his chair. He reached for the coffee cup for a drink, but it was empty. His heart beating quickly, he got back up and headed for the refreshment station, a little nook on the other side of the room.
Twelve thousand dollars, with two upfront. Snap! Whew, he sure could use that money!
The thing was Camden knew that he had just the story. And he was sitting on it!
The refreshment station sat recessed in an alcove, a Coke machine was humming in a corner, and a Mr. Coffee machine was sitting on an imitation mahogany shelf. There was about half-an-inch’s worth of deep black liquid left in the kettle, and when Camden poured it, it slopped out thick and burned. He barely noticed. He was too busy thinking.
Geez, what would be the harm? He didn’t have to give the Intruder the full story. He could make it a series of articles, yeah ... The first few, vague and unspecific. The first wouldn’t hit the stand for a few weeks ... By the time the series was over, he could have sold the real piece to a respectable paper, along with book rights, and he’d be outta this dump! And Scarborough would have found Diane by then, surely, and this would be allover ... What was the harm?
/> He sipped the bitter coffee and cringed at the dreadful taste.
He diluted it with some water. Still bad, but drinkable at least. The caffeine quickened his heartbeat as he thought; and then came the memory of Scarborough’s hands on his collar, Scarborough’s face in his face: “I better not see word one of this in the Intruder, Camden. If I do, all deals are off. No exclusive. No collaboration on a book. And remember, I’m wanted on suspicion of murder now. You print a hint of this in that shitty paper of yours, my friend, and maybe I’ll come visit you sometime and make good on that suspicion!”
Unlike Dr. Everett Scarborough to make threats of violence like that, but then Camden had never seen a man change so quickly from a civilized sort to a driven creature. Of course,
having a best friend killed. getting your daughter kidnapped by an outlaw branch of the CIA, and learning in the bargain that you’ve been a patsy for over twenty years wouldn’t put anybody in a good mood.
Naw, thought Camden. Maybe that’s not such a good idea.
Anyway, he liked Scarborough, he really did. A nice daughter too, a real fox. What’s more, he’d actually gotten along very well with Diane Scarborough’s boyfriend. Timothy Reilly. A good guy. What with Tim and Diane imprisoned somewhere, undergoing God knew what, it probably wouldn’t be a real good idea to rile the bad boys of the Company Annex up.
Camden sighed. Oh well, he was getting out of town soon enough—he had a seven-thirty USAir evening flight out of Orlando tomorrow for New York. Maybe he wouldn’t need that quick cash after all. This business with Max Schroeder might payoff.
The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy Page 44
