"07 - Burnt Offerings 4.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Laurell K)

Chapter 2



Larry sat very carefully in the passenger seat of my Jeep. It's hard to sit in a
car when your back has fresh stitches in it. I'd seen the wound. It was one
sharp puncture and one long, bloody scrape. Two wounds, really. He was still
wearing the blue T-shirt he'd started in, but the back of it was bloody and
ragged. I was impressed he'd kept the nurses from cutting it off of him. They
had a tendency to cut off clothing that stood in their way.
Larry strained against the seat belt, trying to find a comfortable position. His
short red hair had been freshly cut, tight enough to his head that you almost
didn't notice the curls. He was five foot four, an inch taller than me. He'd
graduated with a degree in preternatural biology this May. But with the freckles
and that little pain wrinkle between his clear blue eyes, he looked closer to
sixteen than twenty-one.
I'd been so busy watching him squirm that I'd missed the turnoff to I-270. We
were stuck on Ballas until we got to Olive. It was just before lunch, and Olive
would be packed with people trying to shove food in their mouths and rush back
to work.
"Did you take your pain pill?" I asked.
He tried to sit very still, one arm braced on the edge of the seat. "No."
"Why not?"
"Because stuff like that knocks me out. I don't want to sleep."
"A drugged sleep isn't the same thing as regular sleep," I said.
"No, the dreams are worse," he said.
He had me there. "What happened, Larry?"
"I'm amazed you've waited this long to ask."
"So am I, but I didn't want to ask in front of the doctor. If you start asking
questions of the patient, the docs tend to wander off and treat somebody else. I
wanted to know from the doctor who stitched you up just how serious it was."
"Just a few stitches," he said.
"Twenty," I said.
"Eighteen," he said.
"I was rounding up."
"Trust me," he said. "You don't need to round up." He grimaced as he said it.
"Why does this hurt so much?" he asked.
It might have been a rhetorical question, but I answered it anyway. "Every time
you move an arm or a leg you use muscles in your back. Moving your head and
muscles in your shoulders makes muscles in your back move. You never appreciate
your back until it goes out on you."
"Great," he said.
"Enough stalling, Larry. Tell me what happened." We were stopped behind a long
line of traffic leading up to the light on Olive. We were stuck between two
small strip malls. The one on our left had fountains and V. J.'s Tea and Spice,
where I got all my coffee. To our right was Streetside Records and a Chinese