"Brooks, Terry - Magic Kingdom of Landover 01 - Magic Kingdom for Sale -- Sold! 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brooks Terry)

His grin broadened. This was crazy! He was actually contemplating doing something that no sane man would even think twice about!

The scotch was working its way to his head now, and he got up again to walk it off. He looked at his watch, thinking of Miles, and suddenly he didn't want to go to that bar meeting. He didn't want to go anywhere.

He walked to the phone and dialed his friend.

"Bennett," the familiar voice answered.

"Miles, I've decided not to go tonight. Hope you don't mind."

There was a pause. "Doc, is that you?"

"Yeah, it's me." Miles loved to call him Doc, ever since the early days when they went up against Wells-Fargo on that corporate buy-out. Doc Holiday, courtroom gunfighter. It drove Ben nuts. "Look, you go on without me."

"You're going." Miles was unflappable. "You said you were going and you're going. You promised."

"So I take it back. Lawyers do it all the time-you read the papers."

"Ben, you need to get out. You need to see something of the world besides your office and your apartment-however lavish the two may be. You need to let your colleagues in the profession know that you're still alive!"

"You tell them I'm alive. Tell them I'll make the next meeting for sure. Tell them anything. But forget about me for tonight."

There was another pause, this one longer. "Are you all right?"

"Fine. But I'm in the midst of something. I want to stay with it."

"You work too hard, Ben."

"Don't we all? See you tomorrow."

He placed the receiver back on the cradle before Miles could say anything further. He stood staring down at the phone. At least he hadn't lied. He was in the midst of something, and he did want to stay with it-however crazy it might be. He took a drink of the scotch. If Annie were there, she would understand. She had always understood his fascination with puzzles and with challenges that others might simply step around. She had shared so much of that with him.

He shook his head. Of course, if Annie were there, none of this would be happening. He wouldn't be thinking about escaping into a dream that couldn't possibly be.

He paused, struck by the implications of that thought. Then holding his drink in his hand, he crossed back to the sofa, picked up the catalogue, and began reading once more.

Ben was late getting to the offices of Holiday and Bennett, Ltd. the next morning, and by the time he arrived his disposition was less than agreeable. He had scheduled an early appearance on a merger contest and gone straight to the Courts Building from home, only to discover that somehow his setting had been removed from the docket. The clerks had no idea how this had happened, opposing counsel was nowhere to be found, and the judge presiding simply advised him that a resetting would be the best solution to the dilemma. Since time was of the essence in the case in question, he requested an early setting-only to be told that the earliest setting possible was in thirty days. Things were always busiest with the approach of the holiday season, the motions clerk announced unsympathetically. Unimpressed with an explanation that he had heard at least twenty times already that November, he requested a setting for a preliminary injunction-only to be told that the judge hearing stays and pleas for temporary relief was vacationing for the next thirty days at some ski resort in Colorado, and it hadn't been decided yet who would bear his docket load while he was gone. A decision on that would probably be made by the end of the week and he should check back then.

The looks directed at him by clerks and judge alike suggested that this was the way of things in the practice of law and that he, of all people, ought to realize it by now. He ought, in fact, simply to accept it.

He did not choose to accept it however, did not care in the least to accept it, and was, by God, sick and tired of the whole business. On the other hand, there was not very much he could do about it. So, frustrated and angered, he went on to work, greeted the girls in the reception area with a mumbled good morning, picked up his phone messages, and retired to the confines of his office to fume. He had enjoyed less than five minutes of that when Miles appeared through the doorway.

"Well, well, just a little ray of sunshine this morning, aren't we?" his friend needled cheerfully.

"Yeah, that's me," he agreed rocking back in his desk chair. "Joy to the world."

"Hearing didn't go so well, I gather?"

"Hearing didn't go at all. Some incompetent took it off the call. Now I'm told it can't be put back on until hell freezes over and cows fly." He shook his head. "What a life."