Bioterror

by Tim Curran

  A guy like him only wanted a woman like her for one reason. Even now, she was certain, he’d picked up some other woman to take back to his upscale condo downtown to show her the stunning view of Lake Michigan…amongst other things. A woman that would be suitably impressed by his wallet, if not his sexual prowess. The thing that made Shawna really bitter was that she couldn’t even make an anonymous call to his wife. A revenge call. His wife was probably carrying on with one of her lovers. No doubt in the beach house in the Canaries.

  He used me, Shawna told herself. And I loved every minute of it. He used me, dumped me, and the very next day... well, the very next day I lost my job.

  Richard hadn’t been the first rich man she’d dallied with.

  There was Jonathan. He’d taken her to nice restaurants on the Gold Coast and banged away at her in his lavish summer lake house on the tip of Michigan’s thumb. Jonathan owned six factories and two investment brokerages. Eventually, he dumped her. But if Richard and Jonathan had ended somewhat peacefully, then Tom and Adam had not. Tom was a tax lawyer. Very nice. Very rich. His wife had caught on, though, and her PI had videotaped the two of them having sex. Divorce. Adam was a stockbroker. Very powerful. His wife had caught on, too. They’d been photographed as well. Out there, somewhere, there was enough tape to make a nice little porno, Shawna often thought. Adam had not only dumped her, but he’d tried to beat her up for ruining his marriage. Then he’d tried to take his life.

  Suffice to say, Adam never called anymore.

  Ugly, ugly, ugly.

  Shawna could hear her mother’s voice in her head: strident, disapproving, holier-than-thou. God gave you the looks to go as far you wanted, too bad he’d didn’t give you the brains to manage them, Shawna.

  You’re right, Mom, goddamn you.

  Well, enough of this. Harry had stood her up. He wasn’t going to show and that was that. She’d been shit on by better, right? But not like this. Not when she really, truly needed someone.

  “Fuck you, Harry,” she muttered.

  About the time she was ready to leave, a vintage luster-black 1967 GTO pulled up. The windows were tinted. It was huge, a monster. Nothing like it had prowled the streets since the early seventies.

  It either belonged to Harry Niles or a pimp from 1969. In a way, she often thought, there wasn’t much difference.

  “Well, well, well,” Harry said as she approached, “what have you gotten yourself into this time?”

  3:47 P.M.

  Harry guided the GTO effortlessly onto Long Avenue, picking up speed. A newer car would have bumped and jolted unmercifully over the numerous frost-heaved dips, but the GTO just floated over them. “I’m listening,” he said. “Let the lurid confessions begin.”

  Shawna glared at him. Her chocolate eyes one shade darker. “I’m in trouble. Isn’t it what you expected?”

  He smiled. “Nothing moves me like a woman in trouble.”

  “You’re an asshole, Harry. Do you know that?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll take it. Even an insult is a backhanded compliment.”

  Shawna lit another cigarette and brooded darkly. “Why do I bother.”

  “Still smoking, I see,” Harry said. “Those things’ll kill you. Haven’t you heard?”

  “Something’s gotta. Haven’t you heard?”

  Harry nodded. “How true.”

  They drove and Shawna smoked in melancholy silence.

  It was too bad, Harry often thought, that Shawna was such an unhappy girl. She had a lot going for her... save her choice in men. She was forever reaching for something she could never have. It always ended in disappointment. He had already decided that that’s what this meeting was about. Whenever she was in trouble, she called him.

  Harry merged with traffic on West Irving. “Well, spill it, my dear. What did you get yourself into this time?”

  Her lower lip trembled. “Trouble.”

  She told him all about Richard. She was genuinely hurt by it all despite her claims that she’d seen it coming and that it was just a fling that meant absolutely nothing.

  “Poor little thing,” he said. “You fall so easily.”

  “I wasn’t in love with him.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “I wasn’t!” she snapped.

  Harry lifted an eyebrow. “Are you telling me that or yourself?”

  Shawna stared sullenly ahead. She was dressed in a black velour business suit, cut short to show off plenty of leg. Her glossy chestnut hair was pulled into a tight French braid. She wore no make-up. Her skin was pale and blotchy. Dark half-moons had settled beneath her eyes.

  “I wasn’t in love with him,” she maintained. “I wasn’t.”

  “No, and I don’t want to nibble on your thighs, either.”

  She looked at him, lips pursed tightly. “You’re a prick, Harry. You’re a dirty, sexist prick of a pig.”

  “Are you coming on to me, Shawna?”

  She growled low in her throat, staring out her window.

  “Tell me what else happened,” he said. “I know you’re not this upset over another rich man. What else did you do?”

  “Nothing. It isn’t what I did... it’s what was done to me.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I was fired,” she said, folding her arms. “They fired me from the Trib.”

  Harry didn’t say anything for a moment. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, because he did. It was just that he didn’t regard her position at the Chicago Tribune with any degree of seriousness. Dead-end stuff, in his thinking. The journalistic equivalent of working the deep-fryer at Burger King. No more, no less.

  “Well, shit happens.”

  Shawna looked ready to chew glass. “Is that all you can say?”

  “C’mon, my love, it wasn’t much of a job anyway. It was holding you back.”

  “It was a good job. An important job.”

  He grinned. “You were an assistant to the assistant editor of gardening for chrissake.”

  “I wrote some good pieces!” Shawna snarled. “Some important pieces!”

  Harry laughed; he couldn’t help it. “Yes, you sure did. I couldn’t sleep for a week after I read the one about the festive autumnal floral boxes. And that hard-hitting expose´ on the cultural history of the eggplant... it was positively chilling. Good God, there’s social implications in that one I’m afraid to even contemplate.”

  Shawna punched him in the arm. Three times. “Bastard,” she said, fighting back a smile. “At least... at least I don’t write about dead celebrities and Mongolian Death-Worms.”

  “Now wait a minute, you self-righteous little bitch. My series on the Death-Worm was provocative journalism. I write what others only dare dream.”

  “Yeah, my ass.”

  He offered her a spicy grin. “What about your ass? Does it need a good spanking?”

  “Fuck you, Harry.”

  He sighed. “I love it when you talk like that. One of these days you’ll say it and mean it and I, of course, will turn you down.”

  “Harry, please,” Shawna said, sighing heavily. “I was fired. I have no job.”

  “Well, what did you do or not do?”

  “I was late a few times.”

  “A few?”

  “Fifteen times in two months.” She was proud and it was hard for her to admit this. “I missed a few deadlines.”

  Harry had met her when he himself had worked at the Trib. At the time, she had been doing little more than running errands, getting sandwiches, checking copy, showing lots of leg and giving the boys on the metro desk the most sinful fantasies. Shortly after she’d started, they’d let him go for drinking. That had been six years ago. They’d stayed in touch ever since. Sometimes Harry wasn’t even sure why.

  It’s certainly not because she needs another lover. Your bank balance would hardly get you past first base. Father confessor? Big brother? Attentive uncle? Dear God.

  “Listen, Shawna. Don’t get worked up about this. You know how many
papers I’ve been fired from?” She didn’t hazard a guess, so he told her. “I’ve been fired from the Trib. The Times in LA. Twice, in fact. The Globe in Boston. The Times in New York. Shit, the list goes on and on and on: Vegas, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Washington, Milwaukee. You name the rag, they’ve fired me.”

  None of it cheered her up much. He rather doubted there was anything that could other than time. Time and a new job. A real job. He himself had rebounded each and every time after getting canned. The last time, from the Trib, had probably been the worst, though. His drinking had been at an all-time high and his life at an all-time low. He bottomed out. There was really nothing left and he knew it. With his track record, nobody was going to hire him. He’d barely weaseled his way into the Trib. He was a drunken trouble-maker with absolutely no respect for authority and everyone knew it. He supposed the last straw at the Trib had been when he’d come back from that three-hour lunch with Jim Beam and Captain Morgan, suitably pissed to the gills, and decided to relieve himself into a potted fern on the receptionist’s desk.

  After that, crash and burn.

  He was nearly on skid row when Gabe Hebberman had found him. Gabe had been a friend of his father’s. Gabe had cleaned Harry up, dried him out, and given him a job. Gabe was the publisher of the Weekly World Examiner, one of those black and white rags you find so amusing in the supermarket checkout lane. ELVIS WAS ADOLF HITLER’S LOVE CHILD. RUSSIAN PRESIDENT IS ANTICHRIST. NOSTRADAMUS WAS RAISED BY WOLVES. The 1970s through the 1990s had been a boom time for the tabloids. Then around 2003, the bottom had fallen out. One after the other, they failed. Sensationalism died. For the first time in over thirty-five years, the Weekly World Examiner no longer appeared. Even the Internet version tanked. Then Gabe Hebberman—always smelling a buck—had brought it back to life, tapping into foreign editions and the lucrative emerging Asian and Latin-American markets. These days, the American version barely broke even, but the foreign editions brought in unbelievable profit. Along with several gossip rags, crossword and Sudoku mags, and a bevy of skin magazines, Gabe was a very wealthy man.

  Harry had worked for him ever since and hadn’t looked back. Yeah, so he was writing about alien abductions and vampire plagues instead of corrupt politicians and corporate sleezebags. What of it? The pay was five times as much as he’d ever earned before, so fuck legitimacy and journalistic ethics. People wanted shit so he wrote shit.

  Things were okay now. He still drank, but it was under control. He had eased over the line into his forties last year and it hadn’t hurt too bad. Of course, his belly was expanding and his hair line was receding. His hopes of looking like Sean Connery in his declining years weren’t panning out. He worked out three times a week, but one look in the mirror told him it was a dismal failure. Yet, he was not unhappy. Things were okay.

  “I just don’t know what to do, Harry,” Shawna said as they cruised up North Ashland Avenue past St. Boniface Cemetery and into Ravenswood. “All I’ve ever wanted to do was write. I always thought I was pretty good. Now... I’m just not so sure.”

  Harry gave her arm a squeeze. “You are good. Listen, Shawna. I’m the last person to be giving advice, but I’m going to anyway. You have to get some priorities here. Quit with the rich guys already. Concentrate on your career. Go after men because you like them, not because they’re loaded. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.”

  “Do you like what you do, Harry?”

  He shrugged. “Pay’s good. Hours are easy. Yeah, I guess I do. I mean, I spent years digging up the dirt on politicians and the federal government. I played my part as a good little investigative journalist. I was even pretty good at it. I know this because I still have lots of enemies.” He laughed as the faces of more than a few paraded through his mind. “But I’m done with that. You might make a name for yourself being legit. You might even get the Pulitzer. But more likely than not the stress’ll kill you. You’ll end up with ulcers, a drinking and/or drug problem. Maybe a heart attack or a nice debilitating stroke. Beyond that, if you’re really lucky, maybe a book contract. But you’ll never have a family. You’ll never have a real life. Take it from me, it ain’t what it’s cracked up to be. Nothing is.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know if I could write stuff like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I do. It’s because you want to work for one of the majors. But listen to me for a minute. Just one minute.” He cleared his throat and helped himself to one of her cigarettes. “The rag I work for has ten times the circulation of any city paper. Its writers make a helluva lot more money. And the stress level is practically nil. Think about that.”

  “But you make that crap up.”

  “No, no, no,” he said, shaking a finger at her. “We make up only a small percentage. Most of that stuff is actually true. Really. True in that people report these things to the police, to their governments, to the legitimate press. We’re the only ones, however, who follow it up. The cover stories are generally always bullshit. They’re teasers to interest the reader, but the rest... well, we elaborate and condense and fictionalize to a certain extent, but the basic story is what someone else claims is the truth.”

  “Seriously?”

  He nodded. “Yes. It’s a weird world out there, my pet. Weirder than you can imagine. We don’t have to make the shit up. Our part is basically just perception management. We steer the articles in one direction or another.”

  “Even the Elvis shit?”

  He smiled. “All right…we do make that up. Elvis and Michael Jackson and Marie Osmond’s latest diet sell tons of papers in the third world. Don’t let anyone kid you.”

  After a moment to chew on that, Shawna said, “Do you believe any of that junk? Sasquatch? Aliens? Government cover-ups?”

  Harry laughed until he coughed. “I’m as cynical as you. As skeptical as you. If I wasn’t, I’d turn into Gabe, my editor. He believes in most of it. He’s got a child’s sense of wonderment and belief. He’s also the sweetest man I’ve ever met. I mean, you don’t want to get between him and some hard cash, but other than that…oh, absolutely fatherly.”

  Shawna sat there in silence.

  She was thinking about the legitimate press. Its promise. Its failings. It didn’t matter that it was the 21st century, it was still a male-dominated world. Women were generally judged by their looks rather than their credentials. It didn’t matter that she’d gone to Columbia. All that mattered was that she had a nice pair of legs. And she hadn’t consciously tried to play that down. And what had it ever really gotten her? Not a goddamn thing, thank you very much.

  “Harry?” she said, brightening.

  “Yes, my plum of delight?”

  Even that didn’t bother her today. “Do you think this Gabe would give me a job?”

  4:40 P.M.

  Harry dropped her back at Portage Park. They’d had a nice long chat. Very intriguing. Interesting. Informative. Harry had told her that, yes, Gabe would probably hire her. And if Harry himself put in a good word for her, it was almost a sure thing. A Columbia grad. Trib staff. Gabe would like that. But he told her to slow down. To take a few days and think about it. To be very sure it was what she wanted. Working for a tabloid was fun and it paid well, he told her, but... it also could seriously ruin any aspirations she might have for serious journalism. Legit editors had a habit of looking down their noses at the tabloids and anyone connected with them.

  So, she was thinking about it. Hard.

  At least there were options. That was good.

  As fucked up as everything seemed to be, at least there was a way out. An escape route. If she chose to take it. But would she take it? She turned it over and over in her mind. Part of her said, yes, Shawna, go for it, it’s a good thing. It’s stability. Income. But, another part of her, maybe the legit part, said, no, dammit, it’s a tabloid, Shawna. Do you wanna spend the rest of your life writing about celebrities cheating on their wives and househ
old appliances possessed by demons? That last part left her cold.

  There were big stories out there. Big, legitimate stories waiting to break. This year. Next year. Five years from now. If she joined the staff of the Weekly World Examiner, she’d never write them; she’d just read them. If the President was assassinated tomorrow, this Gabe would have her doing a piece on how subversive Martian elements were to blame or how the whole goddamn thing was predicted by Edgar Cayce or some other charlatan.

  Then again, the Trib would never let her near a story like that. Not unless the President had been killed by an errant houseplant or buried in somebody’s petunia bed. At least this Gabe would let her tackle it... creatively, at any rate. In her mind she just kept seeing her by-line beneath those tabloid stories. I WAS ARTIFICIALLY INSEMINATED BY ALIENS. OVERWEIGHT HOUSEWIFE DEVOURS TRIPLETS IN CANNIBAL RAGE. DEMONIC BLOOD FEASTS OF CAPITOL HILL. It all made her very ill.

  “At least I have a choice,” she said under her breath. “He sure as hell doesn’t.”

  She was watching some guy meandering through the park. He was picking through garbage cans and stuffing odds and ends into the pockets of his flannel jacket. His hair looked like it had been brushed with a Braun Hand Blender, his face streaked with grime. She noticed he wore a raggedy pair of desert camouflage pants, the kind soldiers wore in Iraq and Afghanistan. That and one combat boot. His other foot was bare.

  Now why do they let someone like that wander around? she wondered. He needs supervision.

  But she knew the answer. America didn’t have a very good track record of taking care of its vets. Federally-funded programs for the mentally ill were already dangerously overloaded. They’d just closed the V.A. Hospital in Chicago Heights for God’s sake.

  Thanks for serving, buddy, but now, fuck you.

  The baseball game had broken up and the guy was heading over there now. He’d found part of a sandwich and was eating it, much to Shawna’s dismay. Over at the ball diamond, he looted the cans happily. A white van cruised through the park very slowly. It made its way over to the bleachers. Two men in dark rain slickers hopped out. They walked over to the bum and were apparently talking to him. It was all so far away, it was hard to say what was going on. Shawna wondered if the two men were from mental health or something.