Dead-Line

With a shrug, he mumbled that it was no use. That he'd been dead a couple hours already.

With that, the chubby one wiped his sweaty brow and turned to me.

"Must've been a heart attack," he speculated quietly.

I shrugged, still in shock from all this.

The morning had certainly not turned out as planned. I had come in extra early to finish my piece for this week's edition, a typical UFO bit, old news of sightings in some distant Maine woods a few months back. Hoping to get out of there by nine, my plan had been to drive up the coast and rent a beach house near Melrose, a few miles north of Cocoa Beach. There, I would spend the weekend alternating between writing short stories and tanning on the beach where the girls wore skimpy bikinis. Now all that seemed lost.

"What?" I finally asked.

"Heart attack." The big-jowled paramedic was tapping at his own thick chest. "Your friend here. Killed him instantly."

With that, there seemed little else to say. Forrester was dead. Heart attack. Easy come, easy go.

I went over and sat on the old swivel chair at his messy desk as the Cuban left the newsroom and returned moments later pushing a cart with a squeaky wheel. Grunting in unison, he and his partner lifted Forrester's body onto it, and began wheeling him out. To the morgue.

At the front door, the Cuban stopped a moment and looked back at me with a crooked grin.

"When it's your time," he called back with a shrug, as if to console me, his accent thick and dark, "it's your time."

Just as they were carting Forrester's body out the door, Cassady came rushing in. His face was flushed, and his thinning gray hair streaked every which way over the top of his head. His pants, and shirt and sport coat were uncharacteristically mismatched.

He marched straight over to me at Forrester's old desk.

"What the hell happened?" he wanted to know, glowering, as if it was my fault that Forrester was dead.

I looked up at him and, after a sigh, told him how I had found Forrester's body slumped across his typewriter. That the fat paramedic said it must have been a heart attack.

"Heart attack?" Cassady sighed disagreeably, scowling. He plucked a fat cigar out of the top pocket of his shirt, and grumbled, "Well, that's just great." After lighting the cigar with a wooden match that he scratched across the bottom of his shoe, he began pacing around Forrester's desk.

Cassady did not seem the least bit sorry over Forrester's death. No doubt, he was already wondering how he was going to replace his most prolific reporter. Forrester had been the grand master of finding and cleverly describing "weird," but vaguely "true," pulp tales for the titillation of a small but growing audience.

Of more immediate concern, of course, was Forrester's missing article for this week's edition. The paper was due to be printed that very afternoon, a Friday, then shipped to hundreds of grocery store chains on the east coast for the Monday morning checkout racks with the other leading tabloids of the day, The National Enquirer and The Globe.

"So what is it, Mr. Cassady?" I asked, genuinely pissed off by his obvious lack of sympathy. The venom in my voice stopped him in his tracks.