Armageddon Rag Read Free Page B

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
.
    The second card was oversized, with metallic silver ink on pale purple paper, depicting the paper’s namesake symbol picking his teeth and diapered in an American flag. In the upper left it said, “Sandy,” and down under the cartoon, in slightly larger print, “I writes for da
Hog
.” That one had its uses too. It could open doors and loosen tongues in situations where the straight card would be worse than useless.
    Sandy slid a dozen of each into his billfold. Then he picked up his beer bottle and strolled downstairs.
    When she got home at six, Sharon found him seated cross-legged on the living-room carpet, surrounded by road maps, old clipbooks of stories from the
Hog
’s heyday, and empty bottles of Michelob. She stood in the doorway in her beige business suit, with her briefcase in hand and her ash-blond hair rumpled by the wind, staring at him in astonishment from behind tinted glasses. “What’s all this?” she asked.
    “A long story,” Sandy replied. “Get yourself a beer and I’ll tell you.”
    Sharon looked at him dubiously, excused herself, went upstairs and changed into a pair of designer jeans and a loose cotton blouse, and returned with a glass of red wine in hand. She seated herself in one of the big armchairs. “Go ahead.”
    “Lunch was a bummer,” Sandy said, “and the fucking elves didn’t write a word for me, but the ghost of hedgehogs past raised his corpulent head on my return.” He told her the whole story. She listened with the same pleasant professional smile she wore when selling brownstones and condos, at least at the start. By the end, though, she was frowning. “You’re not kidding, are you?” she said.
    “No,” Sandy said. He’d been afraid of this.
    “I can’t believe this,” Sharon said. “You’ve got a deadline, don’t you? Whatever Patterson is paying won’t make up for the novel. This is stupid, Sandy. You’ve been late on the last two books. Can you afford to be late again? And since when have you turned into a crime reporter? What’s the use of messing around in things you don’t understand? Do you