"Bowes-ShadowAndGunman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bowes Richard)

ear rang. "Big commotions here last week," he said. "Morn let it slip about some
guy looking for you. Shithead, keep your freak friends away from her and Tay.
Understand?"

I nodded but he smacked me anyway. "Understand?"

"Yes, yes I understand . . . please don't!"

"And while you live in this house, which won't be for long, you keep your hands
off what doesn't belong to you. What did you do with that .38?"

"Nothing." I braced for another blow.

It didn't come, though he didn't believe me. "There's other stuff missing.
Papers. More. . . . She forgets. Mom took your mother's death hard. Me too. I'm
not letting you get like your mother." Reflectively, Jim banged my head against
the fence a couple of times.

He pushed me toward the car. "Get in. We got to do something about you." I
noticed Mrs. Reardon next door, a delivery boy from Snyder's among others,
observing with great interest the public display of my fall. Word would get
around Queena Heaven.

The afternoon seemed flat and metallic, unreal even while it happened. Jim drove
to Field's Comer and brought me into his bar. We went back into his little
office. "You could save us both trouble, if you knew about those documents." My
mind was frozen. I really didn't remember taking them. He gave me a whiskey and
made me sign papers. The whiskey numbed the pain in my mouth. "You got nothing
on under your coat. What the hell's wrong with you?"

He made me put on a white shirt a few sizes too big. Then he took me to a barber
who was an old army buddy. "Kevin is going in the service," he announced as
clippers ran over my temples.

Afterwards he stopped in another place to drink and place a couple of bets. I
sat beside him in shock. The face in the bar mirror was no longer mine.

Jim's beating was professional. The face was unbruised. But swelling had turned
the eyes into narrow slits. The hair was gone except for a half-inch-high swath
on top of the head. It was the face the Shadow had worn in the dream the week
before.

Jim saw my expression. "Any further thoughts on what happened to the .38?" he
asked. Once I remembered the dream, I knew where the gun was. But I just shook
my head and he didn't press me. Jim knew just how to put someone over the edge.

At the recruiter's office, the sergeant was another of Jim's pals. I signed
papers there too. The sergeant said it was good doing this now and that they'd
take me right after school. He gave me something for Tay to sign as my guardian.
By then none of this mattered.