"Barker, Clive - Lost Souls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive)

rampant profiteering-"

"I don't follow."

"Tomorrow, turn Axel's Superette into a Temple of Charity, and you may
yet put some meat on your soul's bones."

She had begun to ascend, Eddie noticed. In the darkness above her, there
was sad, sad music, which now wrapped her up in minor chords until she
was entirely eclipsed.

The girl had gone by the time Harry reached the street. So had the dead
dog. At a loss for options, he trudged back to Norma Paine's apartment,
more for the company than the satisfaction of telling her she had been
wrong.

"I'm never wrong," she told him over the din of the five televisions and
as many radios that she played perpetually. The cacophony was, she
claimed, the only sure way to keep those of the spirit world from
incessantly intruding upon her privacy: the babble distressed them. "I
saw power in that house on Ridge Street," she told Harry, "sure as shit."

Harry was about to argue when an image on one of the screens caught his
eye. An outside news broadcast pictured a reporter standing on a sidewalk
across the street from a store ("Axel's Superette," the sign read) from
which bodies were being removed.

"What is it?" Norma demanded.

"Looks like a bomb went off," Harry replied, trying to trace the
reporter's voice through the din of the various stations.

"Turn up the sound," said Norma. "I like a disaster."

It was not a bomb that had wrought such destruction, it emerged, but a
riot. In the middle of the morning a fight had begun in the packed
grocery store; nobody quite knew why. It had rapidly escalated into a
bloodbath. A conservative estimate put the death toll at thirty, with
twice as many injured. The report, with its talk of a spontaneous
eruption of violence, gave fuel to a terrible suspicion in Harry.

"Cha'Chat..." he murmured.

Despite the noise in the little room, Norma heard him speak. "What makes
you so sure?" she said.

Harry didn't reply. He was listening to the reporter's recapitulation of
the events, hoping to catch the location of Axel's Superette. And there
it was. Third Avenue, between Ninety-fourth and Ninety-fifth.