"Guardino, Louise - Feels Like Dignity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Guardino Louise)

Feels Like Dignity
by Louise Guardino
Copyright й 2001


"You can't make love," she said, pulling away in anger. "Sex, yeah, but
not love."
She was right. I couldn't. I couldn't get Allen's bloated body, caught
on a rotting branch at the edge of the river, out of my head. A dead man
in a river wasn't new. I'd seen it all before. Smelled it, too. But not
here; not in my backyard. Elsewhere, with Allen. Long ago, in the
jungles and backwaters where death and decay were as common as maggots
on meat. Where we fought for whoever paid the best. Allen used to say it
didn't matter who the paymaster was, do the job right and we'd have
dignity.
Touching Laura didn't banish the feel of Allen's skin slipping from his
body, peeling away like rotted fruit. Again, I saw the bloated face. But
for his trademark Washington Grey's "K" belt buckle, almost hidden in
the bulging folds, I wouldn't have been so sure it was Allen at first.
All doubt left when I saw the thin gold chain entangled in his swollen
fingers. Attached to the chain was a gold skull's head engraved with the
numeral three. Even in death he'd been the thinker; probably hiding it
in a fist now relaxed in death.
Deciding to take Allen up on his offer, I'd dropped by unexpectedly. Not
soon enough it seemed. Having found his truck parked outside, his door
unlocked, and his three-legged walking stick lying on the bathroom
floor, I'd known something was wrong. I'd found him snagged a half-mile
downstream from his property. It was clear that Allen, recuperating from
a fracture of his good hip, hadn't fallen into the river behind his home
by accident. The golden skull told me who had put him there. I told the
cops. There'd been just five of us in the unit-Allen, twenty years our
senior and our leader and master of stealth. We'd all gotten skulls,
each engraved with our position in the unit. "Three" was -Renny
"Renegade" Hamilton. I'd given the cops his name. What they did with it
was their business.
I got up, got dressed. Time to leave. Laura had turned away. There was
nothing left to say. It was still dark out, heavy with humidity. The
pick-up came alive with a deep-throated rumble. A new muffler forgotten
in the aftermath of finding Allen.
He hadn't drowned in the river, just been dumped there. It had cost to
get a copy of the autopsy report. And it would cost Renny, now that I
knew how he'd killed Allen--drowning him in his own toilet. To die like
that- without dignity--was unforgivable.
Allen's death was my business now. If the cops got there first, so be
it. If Renny was still in country, my bet was he was in Miami, living it
up. I went home, threw some clothes in a bag, and put funeral clothes
and dress shoes in the truck. The tools I might need were already
stashed. What I didn't have could be found at the local home maintenance
superstore.