"Foster, Alan Dean - Smart Dragons, Foolish Elves" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

glow that comes only when a car has been well cared for.
The upholstery was respectable, the radio was in working
order, the engine was -- as far as he could judge -- okay, and
a test drive had been smooth and easy. The car seemed to be
a reasonably late model, too; it had shoulder-harness safety
belts and emergency blinkers.

There was only one small thing wrong with it. The trunk
didn't open. It wasn't just a case of a jammed lock, either;

somebody had fixed this car so the trunk couldn't open.
With great care the previous owner had apparently welded
the trunk shut; nothing was visible back there except a dim
line to mark the place where the lid might once have lifted.

What the hell, though. The car was otherwise in fine
shape, and he wasn't in a position to be too picky.
Overnight, practically, they had transferred him to the Los
Angeles office, which was fine in terms of getting out of
New York in the middle of a lousy winter, but not so good
as far as his immediate finances went. The company didn't
pay moving costs, only transportation; he had been handed
four one-way tourist-class tickets, and that was that. So he
had put Ellen and the kids aboard the first jet to L.A.,
cashing in his own ticket so he could use the money for the

AS IS 3

moving job. He figured to do it the slow but cheap way: rent
a U-Haul trailer, stuff the family belongings into it, and set
out via turnpike for California, hoping that Ellen had found
an apartment by the time he got there. Only he couldn't trust
his present clunker of a car to get him very far west of
Parsippany, New Jersey, let alone through the Mojave
Desert. So here he was, trying to pick up an honest used job
for about five hundred bucks, which was all he could afford
to lay out on the spot.

And here was the man at the used-car place offering him
this very attractive vehicle -- with its single peculiar
defect -- for only two and a half bills, which would leave
him with that much extra cash cushion for the expenses of
his transcontinental journey. And he didn't really need a
trunk, driving alone. He could keep his suitcase on the back
seat and stash everything else in the U-Haul. And it
shouldn't be all that hard to have some mechanic in L.A. cut
the trunk open for him and get it working again. On the
other hand, Ellen was likely to chew him out for having
bought a car that was sealed up that way; she had let him
have it before on other "bargains" of that sort. On the third