Serpent's Kiss Read Online Free PDF Page A

and wouldn't look at her.
        Oh, yes; oh, yes: something awful was about to happen.
        "Well," said Ron Pendrake, diving for his suit jacket and his briefcase, "I just remembered that I've got to go up and see Fenton."
        He was a little guy, Pendrake, always dashing and bouncing and diving, and for some reason she'd always wanted to call him Sparky. In fact, all news consultants should be called Sparky. There was something callow and adolescent about them, as if they'd always remain the smartest kids in high school, but would never grow up beyond that.
        "Well," Ron Pendrake said, managing to include both of them in the same glance. "You two have a nice day."
        And so, even though his cologne was decidedly still with them, Ron Pendrake himself was not. Now, he was just quickly retreating footsteps down the hall.
        She said, "So what's going on?"
        "Nothing. Why?"
        "I just get the feeling that something's happening."
        "Why would you say that?"
        He had yet to look up. He was pretending to be mightily busy looking for something in one of his desk drawers.
        Finally, when he'd got all the mileage out of the drawer he could, he said, "You really look nice in that blue suit, Chris."
        "How would you know? You haven't looked at me yet."
        "When you came in I looked."
        "Oh, I see."
        He said, "Why don't you go grab us a couple cups of coffee and then sort of hang around my office awhile. I want to talk to you a little bit." He smiled. "You really do look nice in that suit. You really do, Chris."
        By this time, she was trembling. Literally. And feeling a little queasy.
         My God. What was going on?
        Then he virtually jumped up from his desk-still not looking at her-flung an arm in the direction of the hall, and said, "Pit stop. Be right back."
        "Can't you just tell-" she started to say.
        But he'd already dived for the door very much in the manner of Ron Pendrake himself.
        She spent the next fifteen minutes sitting like a dutiful woman in the pea green armchair he kept for visitors. In the meantime reporters, men and women alike, came and went. Those assigned to regular beat-City Hall, the police precincts, the school board-came and went without saying much. They covered the same people every day, knew pretty much what to expect, and only occasionally requested more airtime for a story they felt would be of wide public interest (airtime, the number of seconds a story is actually on the tube, is the most precious commodity a TV reporter possesses). Other reporters really needed to talk to O'Sullivan. These were the folks who needed permission to follow certain rumours down-hints of corruption or some new information about an unsolved murder or the spectre of hard drugs at a posh health spa. These required O'Sullivan's specific approval to pursue and, if pursued, had to be done so on the reporter's own time-the rest of the day being too busy with breaking stories-fires, terrible car pile-ups, missing children. On the rear wall of O'Sullivan's office was this giant sized blackboard. On this was a line for each reporter and the story he or she had been assigned to that day. Careers were made and broken on O'Sullivan's blackboard.
        Some of the reporters who came and went spoke to Chris, some acknowledged her with little more than furtive nods; TV reporting being a singularly competitive enterprise, hard feelings in the newsroom were not uncommon. And it wasn't always just over who got the best story, either. A reporter named Dave Tuska, for instance, was still not speaking to Chris seven months later because Chris had requested Channel 3's neophyte camera person, Jenny Thomas. At the time, none of the other reporters had wanted Jenny and Chris was afraid that if no reporter requested her, the girl would get fired in one of the budget cuts always going on at the station. Well, Jenny