"Gardner Dozois - Flash Point" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

down in the basement and beat the crap out of them." Sussmann sighed. "Anyway, Riddick wouldn't stop
to piss on me if my hat was on fire, that's for sure. Good thing I got other ways of finding stuff out."

Jed Everett came in while Jacobs was ordering coffee. He was a thin, cadaverous man with a long
nose; his hair was going rapidly to gray; put him next to short, round Sussmann and they would look like
Mutt and Jeff. At forty-eightтАФEverett was a couple of years older than Jacobs, just as Sussmann was a
couple of years youngerтАФhe was considered to be scandalously young for a small-town doctor,
especially a GP. But old Dr. Barlow had died of a stroke three years back, leaving his younger partner in
residency, and they were stuck with him.

One of the regulars had moved away from the trough, leaving an empty seat next to Jacobs, and
Everett was talking before his buttocks had hit the upholstery. He was a jittery man, with lots of nervous
energy, and he loved to fret and rant and gripe, but softly and goodnaturedly, with no real force behind it,
as if he had a volume knob that had been turned down.

"What a morning!" Everett said. "Jesus H. Christ on a bicycleтАФ'scuse me, Myna, I'll take some
coffee, please, blackтАФI swear it's psychosomatic. Honest to God, gentleman, she's a case for the
medical journals, dreams the whole damn shitbundle up out of her head just for the fun of it, I swear
before all my hopes of heaven, swop me blue if she doesn't. Definitely psychosomatic."

"He's learned a new word," Sussmann said.

"If you'd wasted all the time I have on this nonsense," Everett said fiercely, "you'd be whistling a
different tune out of the other side of your face, I call tell you, oh yes indeed. What kind of meat d'you
have today, Myna? How about the chopsтАФthey good? тАФall right, and put some greens on the plate,
please. Okay? Oh, and some homefrieds, now I think about it, please. If you have them."

"What's got your back up?" Jacobs asked mildly.

"You know old Mrs. Crawford?" Everett demanded. "Hm? Lives over to the Island, widow, has
plenty of money? Three times now I've diagnosed her as having cancer, serious but still operable, and
three times now I've sent her down to Augusta for exploratory surgery, and each time they got her down
on the table and opened her up and couldn't find a thing, not a goddamned thing, old bitch's hale and
hearty as a prize hog. Spontaneous remission. All psychosomatic, clear as mud. Three times, though. It's
shooting my reputation all to hell down there. Now she thinks she's got an ulcer. I hope her kidney falls
out, right in the street. Thank you, Myna. Can I have another cup of coffee?" He sipped his coffee, when
it arrived, and looked a little more meditative. "Course, I think I've seen a good number of cases like that,
I think, I said, ha'd to prove it when they're terminal. Wouldn't surprise me if a good many of the people
who die of cancerтАФor a lot of other diseases, for that matterтАФwere like that. No real physical cause,
they just get tired of living, something dries up inside them, their systems stop trying to defend them, and
one thing or another knocks them off. They become easy to touch off, like tinder. Most of them don't
change their minds in the middle, though, like that fat old sow."

Wilbur Phipps, who had been leaning on the counter listening, ventured the opinion that modern
medical science had never produced anything even half as good as the oldfashioned mustard plaster.
Everett flared up instantly.

"You ever bejesus try one?" Phipps demanded.

"No, and I don't bejesus intend to!" Everett said.