"P. N. Elrod - Vampire Files 08 - The Dark Sleep" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elrod P N)

Inside, I turned on a few lights, not that I really needed them, but so things would look right, then went
upstairs. Escott had done a lot of work on the place, knocking out walls here and there, making small
rooms big. The building was old and a couple decades back had been a brothel, and while a chamber
just big enough to hold a bed and a night table was all the management needed then, the new owner had
other ideas.

Escott had picked up a lot of carpentry skills during his acting days and put them to good use knocking
through walls. He made himself a princely suite at the far end of the hall with its own bath. My territory
was just off the upper landing, slightly smaller because the bath was the next door down, but more than
enough for my needs. The third floor he worked on when the mood struck and he had the time. I didn't
know what he eventually planned to do with it.

My room had two windows overlooking the street, a bed that I never slept in, and a pleasant mess of
magazines and books that had piled up during my occupancy. The closet and drawers were stuffed with
clothing, most of it new.

Two months back, in the course of trying to prevent a gang war, I'd walked away with a sizable chunk
of money that the mob didn't know existed. For all the crap I'd been through it seemed a fair enough
compensation. At just a hair over sixty-eight grand, I was a rich man for the time being and still figuring
out what to do with it. That kind of big cash could make for all sorts of problems.

There was Uncle Sam to be reckoned with for one. He didn't care how I earned my money so long as I
paid the taxes on it, which I intended to do. Honest. But until I came up with a way of legitimizing the
stuff, I pretty much had to sit on it. A part-time employee at an extremely modest investigations agency
doesn't just walk into a bank with that kind of dough and no explanation, especially in this town. So I
bided my time, bought a lot of pricey clothes, took Bobbi out to expensive restaurants, and generally
celebrated my good fortune, albeit quietly.

With the window shades safely down, I took a moment to vanish, which cured my head of any lingering
ache from the knock against the table. After that I changed into one of my two tuxedos. Yeah, I went
nuts and bought two. The one with the snow-white dinner jacket was at the cleaners. The black one
looked just as sharp, or so I'd been told since mirrors are as useful to me as a third thumb. Because of
this handicap I had to make my best guess whether or not my tie was straight. I'd never been especially
vain, but I did miss the satisfaction of seeing the final result once I was ready to leave.

The Nightcrawler Club was up on the north end of town and, museums, aquariums, and public parks
aside, was still fairly close to the lake. It really shouldn't have been in the area, but when it was built the
mobs were openly running things in this patch, and if they wanted something done, it got done.

It was both a showplace and a fortress, though most people would miss the subtleties of the latter. There
were grilles set in the walls on either side of the entry where armed goons could keep an eye on things.
The walls were angled to create a cross-fire area on the street and fitted with steel shutters. All the
windows in the joint also sported steel shutters on the outside, though whoever built them did a damn
good job of disguising them as ordinary painted wood. The glass was thick enough to be bulletproof.

The upstairs was sort of a free hotel to a few of the men working there, and sometimes a way station for
guys passing through town. The previous manager used to live there, but not Gordy. He preferred to
keep moving around. The basement had plenty of storage and a very well-concealed escape hatch
leading to an ancient brick-lined passage that eventually emerged in a building some distance away. We'd
used it once to avoid some crooked cops during a police raid.