"Charles L. Grant - Raven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Charles L)

They hated him for no other reason than that they thought him a coward.
That much he had figured a long time ago.
They hated him for what he was, because what he was now was a result of what he had once been.
A long while ago, not quite a lifetime and perhaps more than that, he had been a New Jersey State Trooper, seven
years right out of college, eventually and primarily patrol-ling the Turnpike and the Parkway. He hadn't been great; he
hadn't bagged millions in drugs or any of the FBI's most wanted; he had been okay, he had been competent. And
when, at the end of those seven years, he had been passed over for promotion for the third time in a row, he made an
appointment with his commander to complain and find out why. It hadn't taken very long. The senior officer, who liked
him well enough and knew his family, told him bluntly he was wasting his time, and the state's time and money, trying
to turn himself into something he didn't really want to be. Neil had been furious at the implied insult, then deeply hurt,
then filled with self-pity until the commander had said, gently, "Maclaren, face it, you're just not your father."
And he wasn't.
The bitch of it was ... he wasn't.
Mac Maclaren was dead, shot to death on the Jersey side of the Delaware Memorial Bridge. Smugglers. Two-bit
smugglers in an eighteen-wheeler, bringing untaxed ciga-rettes from Carolina for distribution in New York. Not guns.
Not drugs. Not white slavers. Lousy cigarette ban-dits, who shot Mac down when he tried to check their papers, while
Neil was still in school.
Until then, he hadn't known what he wanted to do with his life; eight months to the day after graduation he had his
first uniform on.
But the commander had been rightтАФwhen the passion had subsided, there was nothing left but the job.
Two weeks after the meeting, Neil was packed and gone, feeling like a miner just back in the sun after being lost in
the tunnels, not knowing what to do, not knowing which turn to take, terrified without admitting it that he'd die there,
in the dark.
Although his former profession was no secret in town, he didn't think he owed anyone a detailed explanation. A
few knew, like Nester and Julia, and Willie in his way. As far as the others were concerned, he had been a cop once;
now he wasn't anymore.
Simple as that.
Curt and Bally Holgate, however, decided there was a secret, decided he'd run away, deserted under fire, some damn
nonsense like that.
Stupid bastards.
His shoes were loud on the gravel, his balance not quite even, as he walked to the corner of the building and down
the easy slope toward the worn hard-dirt path that led to his home, thirty yards back, huddling against the trees at the
back of an oblong. Cautiously. Checking the shadows. Finally concluding, almost reluctantly, that the Holgates
weren't around.
By the time he reached the house, a clapboard cottage with wraparound porch, five rooms, an unfinished stone
cellar, his temper had grown foul, his footsteps more like stomping. At the front door he stopped and checked over his
shoulder one more time. Lights from the bar turned the dead grass grey, and there were no mysterious figures wait-ing
in ambush between the trees' twisted boles.
Nothing there.
Damnit, nothing there.
An owl called softly from across the creek.
He could hear water running over a tiny waterfall he'd fashioned himself two springs ago.
He knew what it was then, and was surprised he'd been so spooked.
Storm coming.
Visitors thought it almost magic, the way he and the others who lived here all the time could tell by the feel, the
scent of the air that rain, or snow, was on the way. But the sky had been clear all day, not a cloud, not a wisp, and the
last forecast he had heard had declared good weather until Monday.
But it was still thereтАФthe feeling, if not the smell.
Curious.
He stepped back off the porch and looked up, trying to locate the moon, found it glaring without haze or halo, and