"Gordon Eklund - CrossRoad Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eklund Gordon)

"So who cares? Get up off the floor. Sit straight. You look like a dead turd
down there."

He stands, swaying over her, scowling like a goose, wagging a bony finger. "Get
the fuck out of my--"

"Your home?" She laughs, spraying glee like a lizard. "Leary, you crazy shit.
You've got to be --"

He bellows: "It's still my home!"

She lets her big brown eyes flutter. "And that's not Robert Johnson either. He
never played electric guitar. And he died in 1938 -- '39. A jealous girlfriend
poisoned him."

"That's one version," says Leary.

"There's another?" she asks, eyes wide with interest. Chapter Zero and One-half
-- Sweet Little Angel (11/1)

"So how come you're here, Sunny? He sways, taking a swig from the mescal,
wishing he would stop swaying. (It's so goddamn undignified.)

"You really want to know?"

"Uh-uh. But you're going to tell anyway."

She nods like a puppet on a loose string. "The guys downtown wants you to take
out Rathbone," she tells him.

Chapter One -- Dust My Broom (11/1)

Leary isn't much interested in hearing Sunny out. But he doesn't want her to go
away anytime soon either. (Maybe he's in love now or maybe he's horny as a hog
or maybe he just hasn't spoken to another human being for over a month.)

He thinks he should probably explain the facts for her, fill in some
prerequisite background: "Rathbone and I came up through the ranks together like
brothers, him taking a bullet in the thigh for me one time, me a knife in the
groin for him another, you look hard you can see the movie playing in front of
your face like it was real life. Which it was. And the Central Zone was our
bailiwick, nobody else knowing how to keep it from blowing night after boiling
night, both of us crazy as the niggers but knowing the whole fucking time any
one of them could take us both out any time and not spit snot over it."

"I don't like that word,' she says.
"What word?"

"Nigger."