"Goodwin-SmallChange" - читать интересную книгу автора (Godwin Parker)

"You got. Oh, baby, just one teensy thing. Come midnight, don't bug the delivery
man, okay? By twelve he's worked his buns off and in no mood to klatsch. Just
let him do his thing, then go in and start counting. Ciao."

By way of farewell, J.B. simply imploded. A hole opened in the air, sucked him
in and away. Minutes later Lemming heard a muffled poof! above, then movement
and the sound of much bulk set down heavily about the floor and furniture. Then
another pool and silence.

Elated but unnerved, Lemming crept upstairs to listen outside the bedroom. After
a timorous five minutes he opened the door cautiously and snapped on the lights.
No sulfurous smell, only the rank locker room odor of heavy physical exertion
and -- perhaps his stressed imagination-- a sourness beyond the olfactory in the
air, as if someone had left bitter curses in his wake like the reverberation of
a slammed door.

A moment's impression, no more. On the bed, chairs, nightstand, stacked on a
side table, sprawled over the floor, was a small fortune in neatly rolled
pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and Kennedy halves, pyramids of coins on the
table, other piles collapsed under the sheer weight of their worth, spilling
into the adjoining bathroom. Tucked into a sheaf of grimy bills, in a hand
precise to the point of fussiness, was the accounting in each denomination and
the day's total: seven hundred dollars and thirty-six cents.

Lemming trembled and gibbered, sinking to his knees and fondling the bills,
groping through rolled quarters, stroking like a lover's breasts the solid half
dollars. One day, just one, and seven hundred clams! Speculation ran riot: times
seven was forty nine hundred a week, near twenty thousand a month. In a year
over two hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars, to say nothing of potential
bank interest.

Speak of miracles. Like a child at the beach, Lemming piled the coins about him
in a high bastion of currency. He'd done it, dreamed the impossible dream and
made it real. At two A.M. his play fortress had attained the embellishments of a
late Norman castle. With a nihilistic cackle, Lemming destroyed it with a sweep
of his arm. He yawned, deciding henceforth to sleep here in his Collection room
where cold cash could warm his heart. He cleared the bedspread of lucre, and the
sound of it clunking heavily to the floor was the benediction of manna pattering
down upon his parched soul.

"And it's legal," Lemming chortled into darkness and the unlimited future
overhead. "No eternal price, just day for day. Can I cut a sweet deal?"

What price after all? Forty, fifty years. No more than alternate service, he
thought blissfully as his eyes closed, like joining the Peace Corps to avoid the
draft.

If the faceless Collector slaved unceasingly, Lemming toiled as well. He grew
accustomed to the midnight ritual on the last stroke of the hour, and poof!
scrabble, clunk, and thump overhead, muffled muttering poof! again . . . and