"Steven Gould - Jumper 02 - Reflex" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gould Stephen Jay)

one stop in Atlanta. It left fifteen minutes late and there was another delay in Atlanta, putting her into
Reagan National over an hour late. Her appreciation for teleportation had risen to an all-time high by
the time she touched down in D.C. She'd spent the flights trying to sleep but all she could do was
worry. Is he dead? Is he hurt? Where the hell is he?

By the time she stumbled out of her taxi at the State Plaza Hotel, she was truly exhausted.

The room they gave her was on the seventh floor facing north, away from the mall and the
brightly lit landmarks of the Washington Monument and the Capitol building. She could, however, see
what interested her far more: the sprawling mass of George Washington University Hospital, and the
streets near it, where Davy had been snatched.

She ordered a light salad from room service and ate with the curtains open. Tomorrow, she
promised the lighted streets.

Tomorrow.



She started early, buying a portable breakfastтАФegg-and-bacon-on-a-roll and coffeeтАФthen
sitting on the stoop of a copy shop fifteen feet from where they'd found Brian Cox, dead on the
sidewalk.

It was morning rush and she watched the crowds with unfocused eyes, trying not to filter
anything, to absorb it uncritically. What surprised her were the number of homeless people out,
working the crowd for change. A lot of them were women.

I thought we were getting a handle on this. She shook her head. Maybe in Stillwater.

The temperature dropped steadily through the morning and a thin gray fog drifted up the streets,
dampening the sidewalks and the walls, and leaving drops of water hanging in her hair. She'd seen the
forecast so she was wearing her powder blue raincoat. She pulled up the collar of the thick
hand-knitted sweater she wore below the raincoat and sunk her neck into it, feeling like a timid turtle.
She was grateful she'd chosen her Merrell Chameleon hiking bootsтАФeven though they make my
feet look like boulders.

She kept wiping her glasses off with her handkerchief.

Traffic, both wheeled and footed, lightened, and the number of homeless on the street seemed to
increase, but she suspected there weren't more of them than this morningтАФjust fewer "normal" people
on the street to hide behind.

Hide? They're not hiding. You were just looking at the normal people instead of them.

She edged closer to the balustrade, using it to shield her from the mist. She felt cold, but it wasn't
from the weather.

How cold are they?

There was a group of four men talking at the mouth of the alleyway across the street, leaning