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“Ah, hell.”
The whole damned crew stood around Dev’s desk, with the note out of the drawer and showing signs of being passed from one sweaty hand to another.
“Sorry, but this is just too good.” Doug Pinton slapped him on the shoulder while Devlin resisted the urge to punch him in the head.
He should have known, of course.
Mr. GreenJeans, which was what everybody called Ed Milliken, grinned voraciously. He was the editor and sole reporter for the Garnerville Gazette, circulation three thousand but an additional two thousand went out as mailbox stuffers in the surrounding rural areas. Mr. GreenJeans loved the production area and spent a lot of time out there, but he laid out his own paper and Park did their flagship, the News.
“I’ll bet she’s a big fat sloppy thing, all sweaty, with hairy armpits and ever-so-desperate for your body.”
Pinton and Milliken laughed, and high-fived each other.
Ed Milliken, ‘Mr. GreenJeans,’ had bypassed the company dress code, which was, in a word, ‘no jeans,’ by wearing tan work boots, green work trousers and the matching farmer’s work shirt with two pockets from day one. The pocket on the left had a plastic protector and two or three pens and pencils sticking out of it at all times. Ed was the only one who had a mini tape-recorder, for example. He’d gone to the extent of having a pin-on plastic tag made up with his name, and The Garnerville Gazette on it. He wore it on his shirt pocket.
Dev didn’t even have a cell-phone. Although polite hints had been dropped, he just didn’t have the cash to even consider it. So far, he’d managed to do the job without one.
Devlin’s mom had bought him a whole shit-load of clothes, putting it on her credit card when her boy left town for the big new career. She was so damned proud of him. With his grey Italian-made blazer, dark blue shirt and hot pink silk tie, usually a pair of charcoal trousers and black shiny leather shoes, he was arguably the best-dressed guy in the whole town. He had a couple of other pairs of shoes as well.
Maybe that was part of the problem. At his height, and in that get-up, he was the best thing to hit town in ages.
Lately he’d been getting some weird vibes out the place. It was like he stuck out like a sore thumb.
END
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