"Jack L Chalker - - G.o.d. Inc 1 - Labyrinth Of Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

to fail, finally couldn't help but notice and did a little personal detective
work. The first thing he found out was that the report cards he'd seen had been
stolen blanks. She had more absences than days present, and although he thought
at sixteen she was in high school, the fact was that she was still in the ninth
grade.
Just as bad, her closest girlfriend had been dead on arrival from an overdose of
drugs and pills, and never mind the two abortions. The guilt hit him like a lead
weight. I kind of feel sorry for him at that point, torn between trying to force
her to the straight and narrow and his guilt at letting her go off in the first
place.
I'll never know what that scene was like, but somehow a compromise was reached.
She didn't want school and he wanted her out of that crowd, that was for sure.
She dropped out and went to work for him at the agency as his secretary,
receptionist, and assistant. She had promised him she'd get away from the bad
crowd, stop fooling around, and in a year or so get her GED high school
equivalency and even go to college. She never did, though. Of course, she was a
good reader, a fast typist, and she knew the basics of math, and she was smart
and could learn whatever she needed to learn. The fact was, her reading alone
made her better educated than half the people I know who are college graduates,
but her lack of formal schooling did have an unfortunate side effect in that she
has the same inferiority streak in her that a lot of folks who never finish
school have, and had an inordinate respect for anybody with a lot of education,
even if they don't deserve it and know less than she does. If she ever runs into
an ax murderer who is also a college professor, we're in deep trouble.
The cure, at least, worked. She loved the work, had his files straightened out
in no time, found out how little money they really had, but the cases he got she
worked on, too, and became good at stakeouts and at making endless phone calls
for data. She also went on a diet and took judo and karate lessons at the "Y"
and from one of those Korean karate mills that have popped up all over. She got
to brown belt, which makes her formidable and gives her confidence in the
streets, anyway. All those black-female-avenger films, I guess. She's also a
very good shot, although even now she's only licensed to carry a pistol when
performing a task for a client, and then only when hired as essentially a guard.
She saw herself in much the same way her father had seen himself and the
business. He had spent his life battling prejudice and doing the best job
possible, and she saw herself as showing that not just a black but a black woman
was as good in this profession as any man.
Then, one day, the case of a lifetime walked in the door in the form of a chief
aide to the Reverend Billy Thomas. Thomas was one of those superman typesЧyoung,
personable, golden-voiced degrees in divinity and law, a family whose power in
the black community came from decades of fighting for equal rights and justice.
.. . Well, you know the sort. He was in Philadelphia, and he was about to run
for city council in a district that was about fifty-fifty in racial makeup but
had always been represented by an Italian. He was convinced that his opponent
had organized-crime ties, and that to break him loose from his sixteen-year seat
they'd have to get something on him they could use in the papers. They could
have hired a bunch of big shots, but they wanted to use somebody who was black
and totally independent of any larger companies. If the colonel came up with
something really useful, it was worth twenty-five thousand dollars to the
campaign, and he got a grand as up-front expense money.