"Andy Duncan - The Executioners' Guild" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duncan Andy)

Both he and the stranger made satisfied drinking sounds. Disgusting! Mrs.
Blackburn thought. The stranger pulled from his pocket a handful of coins, which
he studied.
"That'll do," Mrs. Blackburn said, snatching a dime. The affable old man in the
suit was setting her nerves on edge, and she wanted him gone.
But he just smiled his sad-eyed smile and said, "Thank you."
Stumpy Turlis, meanwhile, was grinning rottenly, evidently feeling he had made a
friend for life. He crossed one foot over the other and jiggled it. "Hey, you're
all right, mister," he said. "Y'know, I think my headache may be some better,
now that you mention it. Not all gone," he added, glancing at Mrs. Blackburn,
"not yet, but it's getting there. I'm obliged to you, mister."
The Sunbeam clock showed no more time for this foolishness, yet Mrs. Blackburn
was unwilling to leave the stranger alone in the hardware section-alone, because
Stumpy Turlis, of course, didn't count. "You sure you don't want to look at
anything?" she asked.
"Well," said the stranger. "Now that you mention it." He pointed over her head,
at the wall behind. "Might I examine a length of that rope?"
Was his finger trembling?
"All righty," Mrs. Blackburn said, feigning jauntiness. She turned to the
individual twenty-foot coils of rope, dozens of them hanging in ranks from
ancient nails. In the back of the store were longer lengths, of course, and one
immense wheel from which any length could be cut, but the short ropes suited
most people these days, when so many had decided they were too good to keep
horses and mules anymore. She reached up, lifted down a coil, and turned to set
it on the counter, but the stranger beat her to it, lifting the rope out of her
grasp, bearing it the length of Stumpy Turlis, and setting it down on the
counter near the soles of Stumpy's boots. He pulled free a few feet, flexed it
experimentally, then tied a knot in it so swiftly that Mrs. Blackburn
blinked-this was inch-thick, store-bought rope, hadn't even thought about being
broken in, and while Mrs. Blackburn's daddy had taught her a good deal about
knot-tying, she didn't recognize the one that the stranger'd just made, nor the
one he was setting about making now.
"A good rope," the stranger said, mostly to himself. "Not the best, but a good
one, nevertheless."
Something about his twisting, dancing fingers and the rope slithering between
them made Mrs. Blackburn remember that night when she was little, when she had
followed her daddy and several other men into the woods, wondering where they
were going with all that rope. Fighting her way back to the present, back to the
store and the stranger and the heat and the fans shaking their heads all around,
and the newspapers fluttering in the artificial breeze, she remembered the
headlines she'd been looking at all morning, the headlines that had made her
expect an even bigger lunch crowd than usual, and, just as her throat was
seizing up, she managed to say, in a voice barely above a whisper:
"Withium."
Mr. Blackburn, who was unused to hearing his first name, immediately bestirred
himself in the back room he called an office. His grandfather's chair shrieked
as he rolled it backward. Mrs. Blackburn heard the curtain whip aside, and then
she heard her husband lumber forth, the jingle of coins as he hitched up his
pants. He was beside her, his breath audible, his tobacco-tinged sweat awful but
welcome. The Blackburns looked at each other, and then at the stranger, who