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

A dark fat man with a pool cue steps out of the bar.

Beside him, a slender guy tall enough to play pro hoops for the Clippers shifts his grip on a beer bottle.

A very light-skinned young man with acne stands at the door of the porn store, his magazine open to a photo that shows an Afro-American male and a Caucasian female engaged in an act that would have been cause for lynching in the South a few decades back.

Two little girls carrying a jump rope between them, their pigtailed hair done up in dozens of bright bows, pause a yard away.

"Is whitey gone get cut?" one asks.

"Look to be," the other says matter-of-factly.

Talk fast to the barber. "Wait. You don't understand, Mr. -- Ace. This is a summons. Says Mr. Dill here owes somebody money." You feel sweat gathering in the wings of your nose and in the hollow beneath your lower lip. "I'm not here to collect the cash, don't get me wrong." You wave the paper, your other hand tight and damp about two dollars' worth of nickels. "Just delivering bills, like the mailman." Try on a grin, wondering what your lips are really doing. "You don't get mad at the mailman, do you?"

Ace leans forward from the waist, like a building about to fall.

"Don't give him that."

You look from Ace to Oscar.

The little man stares at the sidewalk as though an image of the Virgin is materializing there, in Technicolor. He doesn't say zip.

Give it one last try. "Believe me, brother," you say to the barber, "if I don't hand him this paper today, it'll be served by the sheriff. You don't want that, do you? It'll be more of a hassle. And it'll cost Oscar more in the end." Your shirt sticks to your back.

Ace flicks the razor with a quick motion. A glob of lime-scented shaving cream lands on your cheek.

The little girls laugh.

"Go away," Ace says, forming words carefully with thick lips.

You walk off, to impolite applause and catcalls. Let the law fool with them.

It goes smoother with Marta Ramirez, a fat young Hispanic woman with six or eight squalling, snot-nosed kids making a racket behind her. She lives in a rundown East L.A. apartment building that smells like it's survived a recent fire. "Que?" she says, thick eyebrows twisting as she turns the paper this way and that. "Que?"

The rest of the afternoon, weaving north through Monterey Park, Rosemead, Alhambra, Temple City, Arcadia, you meet with varying success, but catch a few welshers in Pasadena during the early evening, around dinnertime.

At last, there's only one summons unaccounted for. The one you've saved for last. The one you always save for last, like dessert, with the name on it almost as familiar as your own: Brent Wixom.

You'd been given Wixom's paper back when you first began as a process server, when you still felt bad about bringing people legal misery, when he only owed a few hundred to a loan company. You've dogged his trail ever since, following him to dozens of different ramshackle dwellings scattered around the city and surrounding suburbs. Each time, the amount of his debt grew, thanks to lawyer's fees and interest. Now, instead of hundreds, he owes thousands. You'd find his latest address. He'd be gone. You'd dig up a new lead.

From a former neighbor in Irvine, a white-haired man with a bulldog's face and an educated voice, still living beside a house Wixom once rented: "Brent? He hasn't lived next door in more than a year. If I recall correctly, he mentioned something about moving in with a friend in Pomona. Garey Avenue, perhaps?"

From the landlord of a fleabag hotel in Norwalk, a gaunt little guy with suitcases under his eyes: "S.O.B. sneaked out in the middle of the night last December. Owed two months rent. Left beer cans and pizza boxes piled two feet deep in there. Ants had a field day. Probably went to sponge off his sister, over to Tustin."

From a mail carrier with graying hair and walrus moustache:

"Here's the last address we got on him. Gimme the ten-spot."

You'd write down what you learned and turn in the paper for reprocessing. The lawyers would follow up through other channels, pin down a new number on a new street, and send you off again.