"George R. R. Martin - Armageddon Rag" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

Sandy laughed raucously. “Shit, no. In-depth, you said. I want as much time as I need on this. Maybe I’ll
have it in within a month. Maybe not.”

“The news peg will go stale,” Jared whined.

“So what? A short piece in your news section will do for now. If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it
right. Those are the conditions, take ’em or leave ’em.”

“Anybody but you, I’d tell ’em to get shoved,” Patterson replied. “But hell, why not? We go way back.
You got it, Sandy.”

“My agent will call and get everything in writing.”

“Hey!” Jared said. “After all we been through, you want things in writing? How many times did I bail you
out of jail? How many times did we share a joint?”

“Lots,” Sandy said. “Only they were always my joints, as I recall. Jared, seven years ago, you gave me
three hours’ notice and bus fare in lieu of severance pay. So this time we’ll get a written contract. My
agent will call.” He hung up before Patterson had a chance to argue, turned on the answering machine to
catch any attempted call-backs, and leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head and a faintly
bemused smile on his face. He wondered just what the hell he was getting himself into this time.

Sharon wasn’t going to like this, he thought. His agent wasn’t going to like it, either. But he liked it,
somehow. No doubt running off to Maine to muck around in a murder was a silly thing to do; the more
rational side of Sandy Blair knew that, knew that his deadlines and mortgage obligations ought to come
first, that he could hardly afford the time he’d have to expend on this for the relative pittance that
Hedgehog would pay. Still, he’d been restless and moody lately, and he had to get away from that
damned page thirty-seven for a while, and it had been entirely too long since he had done anything silly,
anything spontaneous or new or even a tad adventurous. In the old days, he’d been just wild enough to
drive Jared crazy. Sandy missed the old days. He remembered the time that he and Maggie had driven to
Philly at two in the morning because he wanted a cheese steak. And the time Lark and Bambi and he had
gone to Cuba to harvest sugarcane. And his attempt to join the French Foreign Legion, and Froggy’s
search for the ultimate pizza, and the week they’d spent exploring the sewers. The marches, the rallies,
the concerts, the rock stars and underground heroes and dopesters he knew, all the off-the-wall stories
that had fattened his clipbook and broadened his horizons. He missed all that. He’d had good days and
bad days, but it was all a lot more exciting than sitting in his office and rereading page thirty-seven over
and over again.

Sandy began to rummage through the lower drawers of his desk. Way in the back he kept souvenirs,
things he had no earthly use for but couldn’t bear to throw away—handbills he’d written, snapshots he’d
never gotten around to sticking in a photo album, his collection of old campaign buttons. Underneath it
all, he found the box with his old business cards. He snapped off the rubber band and extracted a few.
There were two different kinds. One, printed in deep black ink on crisp white cardboard, identified him
as Sander Blair, accredited correspondent of the National Metropolitan News Network, Inc. It was legit
too; that was the real name of the corporation that published Hedgehog, or at least it had been until
Jared sold out to the chain. Sandy had come up with the corporate name himself, reasoning—quite
accurately, as hindsight demon-strated—that there would be occasions when a reporter for the National
Metropolitan News Network, Inc., would have a much easier time getting press credentials than a
reporter for something called Hedgehog.