The Means Read Online Free Page B

and he’s giving her the story background. A retired mailman and his wife living in the Bronx claimed the single winning ticket for the $1.2 billion lottery three hours ago, making them the largest single-ticket lottery winners ever. They’re active in the local church, have one son and one grandson.
    â€œYellow Ledbetter” by Pearl Jam comes on the radio and the driver turns up the volume. “Pearl Jam rules.”
    Samantha laughs and says, “Don’t say anything rules. You sound stoned or twelve years old. And anyway, they don’t rule.”
    â€œThen they dominate.” He smiles. He balances cocky and unoffensive.
    â€œDon’t tell me you’re one of those surfer geeks who feels an obligation to love Pearl Jam. You realize how ridiculous that is?”
    â€œOkay, old lady. Who’s bigger, Pearl Jam or the Who?”
    â€œThe Who, by far.”
    â€œWrong. Please. I can tune my Sirius Satellite Radio to a Pearl Jam channel,” he says. “Can I do that with the Who? I don’t think so. Case closed, Your Honor.”
    Samantha’s enjoying this. “You can’t go by that.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œBecause the passage of time and taste matters. To Sirius, that matters.”
    â€œSo what?”
    â€œThere’s no Beethoven channel either. Anyone bigger than Beethoven? In his day. The Who was doing comeback tours in the eighties. Pearl Jam is still out touring with a following that tunes in to Sirius. You can’t compare.”
    â€œElvis has a channel. He’s dead.”
    â€œI will stipulate that Elvis is bigger than the Who.”
    â€œThere’s no arguing with lawyers.”
    The van pulls up to a six-story white brick apartment building just as a GBS News van is pulling up across the street. It will be a race to get to the story first.
    â€œHow fast can you parallel park this thing, Ron?” the writer calls up to the driver.
    â€œScrew that,” says Samantha and she opens the sliding side door while the van is still rolling. Ron hits the brakes and they come to a full stop. Samantha steps out onto the pavement and turns back and points in the van at the person she thinks is the cameraman. “Come with me. What’s the apartment number?”
    â€œFour G,” someone yells from inside the van.
    â€œThe rest of you meet us there.” Samantha looks at the GBS van and sees faces pressed to the side windows like kids at an aquarium. She and Alex, who is in fact the cameraman, jog into the lobby of the apartment building. “Stairs!” she yells.
    Alex takes this like a jolt of adrenaline. He’s no longer taping a package for a morning show, he’s deployed to a forward position. He moves ahead taking stairs three at a time with only one thing in mind. Get to 4G first.
    The elevation of the heels on Samantha’s shoes won’t allow her to take more than two steps at a time. As she rounds the third-floor landing she hears a knock on a door above her. As she makes the fourth-floor landing she hears the clamor of dropped equipment and shouting from the lobby below. Her team and GBS arrived to the lobby at the same time. She imagines a dozen people bouncing off each other and pulling each other back as they go up the stairs like football players after a fumble.
    She looks down the hall in time to see the door of 4G swing open, and her colleague bends an arm to her like a waiter presenting wine. “This is Samantha Davis with UBS.”
    A little, round, gray-haired man in a cardigan sweater and slacks is at the door with an arm around his wife’s waist, who is of matching shortness. They both look to be early seventies. Her hair is nicely combed in a short perm and she’s wearing a pink blouse. It’s clearly her best and has been for twenty years. “A pleasure to meet you,” Samantha says during an exhale that she can’t yet control.
    â€œCome in, come in!”