"M. John Harrison - Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

Rita laughed too. 'I'm ready,' she said. 'I'm ready, ready Eddy.'
It turned out Rita was right.
Two hours later they were still there.
'Doesn't this just suck?' said the woman from the pink Mustang parked a couple of cars in front of
Ed's Dodge.
She looked in at Rita тАФ who had pulled down her skirt and adjusted her garter belt and was now
examining herself with a kind of morose professional intensity in the pull-down vanity mirror тАФ and
seemed to lose interest. 'Oh hi, honey,' she said. 'Just freshening up there?' Everyone had turned their
engines off. People were stretching their legs up and down the pavement, A hot dog guy was working the
queue, moving west ten or a dozen vehicles at a time. 'I never knew it this bad,' said the woman from the
Mustang. She laughed, picked a shred of tobacco from her lower lip, examined it. 'Maybe the Russians
landed.'
'You got a point there,' Ed told her. She smiled at him, stepped on the butt of her cigarette, and went
back to her car. Ed turned on the radio. The Russians hadn't landed. The Martians hadn't landed. There
was no news at all.
'So. This Brady thing,' he said to Rita. 'What are they saying in the DA's office?'
'Hey, Eddy,' Rita said. She looked at him for a moment or two, then shook her head and turned back
to the mirror. She had her lipstick out now. 'I thought you'd never ask,' she said in a matter-of-fact voice.
The lipstick didn't seem to suit her, because she put it away with an irritable gesture and looked out the
window at the river running by.
'I thought you'd never ask,' she repeated bitterly.
That was when the big yellow duck started to push its head into the car through Ed's open
side-window. This time, Rita didn't seem to notice it, even though it was speaking.
'Come in, Number Seven,' it was saying. 'Your time is up.'
Ed reached inside his baseball jacket, the back of which read Lungers 8-ball Superstox, and took out
one of his Colts.
'Hey,' the duck said. 'I'm joking. Just a reminder. You got eleven minutes' credit to run before this
facility closes down. Ed, as a valued customer of our organisation, you can put more money in or you can
make the most of what's left.'
The duck cocked its head on one side and looked at Rita out of one beady eye.
'I know which I'd do,' it said.
 SEVEN

The Pursuit of God




When Michael Kearney woke it was deep night outside. The lights were off. He could hear someone
breathing harshly in the room.
'Who's there?' he said sharply. 'Lizzie?'
The noise stopped.
A single minimally furnished space with straw-coloured hard-wood floors, galley kitchen, and a
bedroom on the second floor, the apartment belonged to his second wife Elizabeth, who had moved
back to the US at the end of the marriage. From its upper windows you could see across Chiswick Eyot
to Castelnau. Rubbing his face, Kearney got out of the armchair and went upstairs. It was empty up
there, with a drench of streetlight across the disordered bed and a faint smell of Elizabeth's clothes which
had remains d to haunt him after she left. He went back down again and switched on the lights. A
disembodied head was balanced on the back of the Heals sofa. It was wasted and ill-looking. All the
flesh had retreated to the salient points of its face, leaving the bone structure prominent and bare beneath