"Clayton Emery - Tyger Blake - Totaled" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emery Clayton)

......But so was I. Wrench held across both hands, I blocked the next kick. It raked his shin, peeling skin
to the bone. He howled.

......I scrambled up and went for him, swinging the wrench like a baseball bat. I'd have killed him if I
could. Shattered his skull and beat him bloody and kicked his brains all over the junkyard. I hit
something, probably his shoulder.

......A fist dimmed my lights. My back slammed the ground. Another fist tried to drive my head into the
dirt like a tent peg, but only sheared my cheek. I jerked aside and the next missed. But he was on top of
me and I couldn't get clear. I shot my fingers like claws and he walked right into them, a digit in the eye
socket. Then he was gone.

......So was I.

......I woke up, came to, whatever, to find mosquitoes drilling in my torn cheek.

......Everything was quiet.

......I stumbled to the Firebird, leaned a hand on the cold hood with its crinkled paint.
......"What is it," I asked the mosquitoes, "about this car?"

***

......My apartment is downtown over a hardware store. I walked straight to the bathroom, stripped my
work clothes into the hamper, showered, and smeared cream on my red, white, and blue face. Scar
tissue felt like furrows under my bruised fingers.

......I fed my fish, gerbils, turtle, and canary, and went to bed.

......After a double slug of blackberry brandy. Venturing into a hospital, with its white walls and smiling
nurses and bags of blood and shining scalpels, would have me drinking myself to sleep for a week.

......Anything to get past the dreams.

***

......A week went by.

......The police chief pulled in, yelled from inside the cruiser's air-conditioning, "You can release the
Pontiac! The insurance company's done with it!"

......"Release it where?" Manny lowered his head from the frame of a Mustang. "It wouldn't even make
good landfill!"

......"How's the boy doing?" I called.

......"Still in the hospital, eating solid food, last I heard! I gotta go!"

......I asked Manny, "Where do the St. Amour's live?"