Excerpted from: Where Angels Fear To Tread – Tales of Forbidden Love, Forgotten Pleasure and Sensual Macabre…
Available on Amazon.com
Clayton DeLancy hated his life and his job. It seemed that nothing ever went right for him any longer. He used to think that he was charmed. Now he thought that he was cursed. When he first became a reporter, right out of high school, he always found the most exciting stories, the accompanying pictures he took were always on the front page of the paper he worked for; The Globe Daily, and he was always ‘reporter of the month.’
Now, it seemed there were many others out there, young kids; at least that was how he felt, doing the job that he used to do, faster and better. He was obsolete at thirty-five, and his jobs were being given to twenty year olds with flashy smiles and model haircuts. He always knew that the day would come when he would be relegated to the stories about the local ladies club, and the bum that everyone gave handouts to that hung out at the lobby the Globe’s building—he just never thought that it would be so soon.
Now his boss wanted to send him to the Bermuda Triangle for a story. Now, anyone else with Clayton’s photographic talent might see that as an opportunity of a lifetime, but Clayton had been in the business for far too long to see it as anything but a disaster waiting to happen. He guessed that sending him to such a place was one way to get rid of a reporter, one that you wouldn’t want to fire and risk losing money because of all the stock payouts owed to them, not to mention severance pay and retirement.
Clayton had been on the job since he was seventeen years old and many of the older reporters had resented him and his brash enthusiasm. Like the kids now, he had stolen their stories from them and relegated them to the ladies club and the drunks. I guess it is just desserts, he thought bitterly. He would take the story. Why not? He had nothing better to do, and had no family, except his meddling mother, whom he despised. So what if he got lost in the Bermuda Triangle and never came back? Maybe he could find out what went on there once and for all and he could finally be allowed to live a peaceful and stress-free life. He could only hope.
He looked over at his boss’s office. Bastard. The man was talking to two girls who could dial telephones with their nipples, and a young man who looked like he’d stepped off the cover of a men’s fashion magazine. He would wreck their little ‘meeting.’ He smiled.
