"Block, Lawrence - CMS - Gentle Way" - читать интересную книгу автора (Block Lawrence)

After a while he said, "Well, we haven't had one of these for six months. I suppose we were overdue."

"This has happened before?"

He looked at me. "I keep forgetting how young you are."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It may have sounded nastier than I meant it. I guess I'm feeling nasty, that's all. Yes, it's happened before, and it will happen again. Kids. They come over the fence and kill something."

"Why?"

"Because they want to. Because they'd like to kill a person but they're not ready for that yet, so they practice on an animal that never knew there was evil on earth. One time, two years ago, a batch of them killed fifteen chickens, the whole flock. Chopped their heads off. Left everything else alone, just killed the chickens. The police asked them why and they said it was fun watching them run around headless. It was fun."

I didn't say anything.

"It's always kids, Eddie. Rotten kids from rotten homes. The police pick them up, but they're children, so they run them through juvenile court and it shakes up the kids and terrifies the parents. The kids are released in their parents' custody and maybe the parents pay a fine and the kids learn a lesson. They learn not to break into this particular barnyard and not to kill these particular animals." He took the cellophane from a cigar and rolled it between his palms. "Some of the time I don't call the police. There's a gentler way to go about it and it works better in the long run. I'd rather do it that way this time, but I'd need your help."

"How do you mean?"

"Catch him ourselves." He took his time lighting the cigar. "They always try it again. We can stake out the place as easily as the cops can, and when we take him we can operate more flexibly than they can. There's a method I've worked out. It lets them understand our operation, gives them a better perspective."

"I think I understand."

"But it means staying up all night for the next night or two, so it's a question of whether you want to give up the time."

"Sure."

"Won't be more than two nights, I would say. He'll be back."

"How do you know there's just one of them?"

"Because there was only one dead animal, son. If you got two there's going to be a minimum of two dead animals. Everybody has to have a turn. It always seems to work that way, anyhow."

We staked out the place that night and the night after. We took turns sleeping during daylight hours, and we were both planted behind cover in the barnyard all through the dark hours. The killer stayed away two nights running. We decided to give it three more tries, but one was all we needed.

Around one in the morning of the third night we heard someone at the fence. I could just make out a shape in the darkness. He would climb halfway up the fence, then hesitate and drop back to the ground. He seemed to be trying to get up the courage to climb all the way over.

I had a tranquilizer dart pistol and I was dying to try dropping him then and there while he was outlined against the fence. I was afraid he would sense our presence and be warned off, but I forced myself to wait. Finally he climbed all the way up, poised there on the balls of his tennis shoes, and jumped toward us.

We had our flashlights on him before he hit the ground, big five-cell jobs that threw a blinding beam.

"Hold it right there," Will boomed out, striding toward him. He had a dart pistol in his right hand and was holding it out in front of the flashlight so that the boy could see it. All it could shoot were the trank darts, but you couldn't tell that by looking at it.

Either the kid panicked or he figured nobody would shoot him for climbing a barnyard fence. He was quick as a snake. He got three-quarters of the way up the fence when Will put a dart into his shoulder, and he hit the ground the way Rex had hit the floor of his cage.

Will hoisted him easily onto his shoulder and toted him into the office. We turned on a desk lamp and propped the kid in a chair. He was about thirteen or fourteen, skinny, with a mop of lifeless black hair. In the pockets of his jeans we found three clasp knives and a switchblade, and on his belt he had a hunting knife in a sheath. There were stains in the hunting knife's blood groove, and in one of the clasp knives we found bits of bloody wool.

"Just follow my play, Eddie," Will told me. "There's a technique I worked out and you'll see how it goes."