"Coughlin, Patricia - Love In The First Degree" - читать интересную книгу автора (Coughlin Patricia)

Love in the first degree
by
Unknown


Prologue

Already the room smelled like blood.

Luke Cabrio felt the skin at the back of his neck prickle as he stared
down at the body on the floor at his feet. Nick Addison looked pretty
dead, all right. He also looked.. stunned, Luke decided. As if he
hadn't expected the bullet that had caught him square in the throat and
driven him onto his back between two Queen Anne chairs.

No reason he should have expected it, Luke thought. Seldom is a bully
attuned to when his victim has been pushed as far as possible before
lashing out in return. As far as Luke was concerned, Nick Addison was
a bully of the very worst sort.

The man's blood had splattered across the chair's ivory brocade seat
cushions and made a wide, dark stain on the pale carpet. It spread out
on either side of his head, reminding

Luke of the ink blots a shrink used. Butterfly wings. The inane
association came immediately to mind, and then, just as inanely, he
thought about how the hotel's housekeeping staff was going to have
their work cut out for them trying to clean up this mess.

Addison was a big man, at least six feet two and two hundred and twenty
pounds, and when he fell he'd knocked over a small, oval, cherry-wood
table, sending the lamp and clock on it flying. Using the hand not
holding the gun, Luke managed to right the table and the lamp. There
wasn t much he could do about the clock, however. Its black plastic
casing hadn't survived the fall. He replaced it on the table anyway
and watched for a moment to see if the time would change. He craved
some sign of normality, evidence that outside this room life was going
on just as routinely as it had a few minutes ago. The block numbers
remained eerily fixed on 9:17, however, and Luke finally looked away.

Chalk up another casualty for this night, he thought grimly, steeling
himself for what he knew he had to do. Four years as the security
manager for the Delta Queen Hotel and Casino and until now he'd never
been the one to check on a corpse. Ironic that his first should be a
corpse of his own making.

He went down on one knee and with his free hand carefully felt for a
pulse beneath Addison's left ear. He couldn't seem to let go of the
damn gun. Addison felt warm and slightly damp and very still. Luke
leaned closer, moving his fingertips a quarter inch one way, then