"Ewing, Jack - Serves You Right" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ewing Jack)

"What have you got for m-- her?"

"I can only give it to Colleen."

"Can't you tell me what it is?"

"Nope. Sorry. Not unless you're Colleen."

"Why? Is it a secret or something?"

"Let's just say it's a surprise."

Her heavily shadowed eyes light up. She brushes a lacquered curl that immediately springs back into place. "I love surprises. Give me a hint."

"Okay. Maybe I've got a residual check for Colleen. Maybe I found something she lost. Maybe--"

Her face goes through a series of changes, starting with hope and ending with suspicion. "Maybe you're full of crap." She shuts the door in your face, looking as though she wants to bite you.

You break for lunch at a fast-food chain, eager to get back into action, to plow through the day's chaff and get to the kernel: the paper at the bottom of the pile. After downing a tasteless burger and bitter iced tea, you head out again.

Next target is one Oscar Dill, who works at Ace's Barbershop in Compton. You find the place sandwiched between a porn store and a bar, and walk in, feeling the comforting weight of a roll of nickels in your pocket. It's a hedge against the only real difference between the rich and the poor: people with nothing to lose are more unpredictable in the face of adversity.

To the right, four young black dudes, all wearing mirrored shades and tats and pants slung low so their underwear shows, slouch in high-backed chairs. You feel their eyes as you approach the first of two black barbers. A tall, thin, light-skinned guy, he is running electric clippers over a teen's gourd-shaped head.

"Excuse me," you say to him, "Oscar here?"

He waves the clippers towards the back.

You start that way, passing the other barber, a very dark man built like a NFL football lineman. He has a straight-edged razor and is giving side-walls to an elderly black gentleman asleep in the chair. The second barber tracks you without moving his head.

A small, chocolate-colored man with graying hair emerges from a room in the rear of the shop. He wears coveralls and carries push broom and dustpan.

Ask him: "You Oscar Dill?"

He looks at your mouth. The whites of his eyes are bloodshot and yellowish, like Tabasco-laced egg yolks. He nods.

"Mind stepping outside with me, Mr. Dill? Like to speak in private with you a sec."

Oscar's head tilts up and down. He props tools against a wall, shuffles towards the door leading outside. You follow, glad to be away from the silver-eyed customers and wooden-faced barbers. On the sidewalk ten feet from the shop the little man faces you, eyes fixed on the knot of your fifty-dollar tie.

"Mr. Dill," you say, pulling out the paper, "I'm here to deliver this sum--"

The door to the shop opens and the larger barber glides over. He still holds the open razor in a fist the size of a coconut. Sunlight glints off the foam-flecked blade. "Don't give him that." His voice is so soft you have to strain to hear. Over his breast pocket, at your eye level, is embroidered ACE.

Take a step back, your heels crunching broken glass, give him the line, the load of B.S. "Sir, I'm a duly empowered process server, legally serving this paper on Mr. Dill, and--"

"Don't give him that," Ace whispers, his breath all minty.

Take another backward step, suddenly aware of black faces pressed against the insides of shop windows and gathered along the sidewalk to watch the action.