"Simon Hawke - The Nine Lives of Catseye Gomez" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

He walked back to the desk slowly, and carefully replaced the picture. It looked like a fairly sturdy frame, but
he handled it gently. I didn't think it was because he was afraid of breaking it.
"She was killed in a drive-by shooting," he said. "Stupid. She wasn't the intended target. She just happened
to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."
"Did you get the guy who did it?" I asked.
Solo looked down at the floor. "No. They were never caught."
He stood staring out the window for a long moment. I didn't know what to say. There really isn't anything you
can say in a situation like mat. I'd already said I was sorry, and when you lose someone you care about,
sorry just doesn't seem to cut it. I knew how he felt. I'd lost Paulie to a killer, too. Only I got the son of a
bitch. I tore his fucking throat out.
"She was only twenty-two," said Solo, staring out the window. He turned around and touched the framed
photo on the desk. "We were only married for about six months. Forever didn't last too long."
"And you never married again?" I said.
He shook his head. "I still love her, you know. She's been dead fifteen years, and I still think about her. I've
tried dating a few women since then, but... it's just not the same. Silly, isn't it?"
Silly was one thing it wasn't. It was romantic to the point of pain. Most people get over something like that in
time, but a few never do. I guess when you find something like that, if you're lucky enough to find something
so rare, everything else seems like a pale, bloodless substitute in comparison.
"Sounds like you had a hell of a six months," I said. "Some people go through their whole lives and never find
anything like that."
"No, I guess they don't," said Solo. "Why don't you tell me about Paul?"
We spent most of the night talking about our old friend. I told him about the Paul Ramirez I had known, the
respected Dean of the College of Sorcerers at the University of New Mexico in Santa Fe, and the local bureau
chief of the BOT, and he told me about the younger Paulie he remembered, the gifted student warlock whose
scholarship had been arranged by Merlin Ambrosius himself, the uncompromising idealist who had no
thought of making it in the big-time league of corporate sorcery and who only wanted to learn everything he
could, to perfect his art so he could return to his native New Mexico and teach. And he told me about Paulie's
broken heart, about how Paulie had met and fallen in love with his sister, a young woman Solo didn't seem to
care for very much, and how she'd led him around by the nose because she thought it was amusing until it
broke up, he was never quite sure how, only that Paulie took it pretty hard and would never talk about it.
I could've told him what had happened, but I didn't, because as he spoke about it, I realized that I knew who
Solo's sister must have been. Paulie had never mentioned her by name, but back when he was in college, he
had fallen hard for some girl and done the one thing he had promised himself he'd never do. Paulie had a gift,
a very unusual gift he had inherited from his Indian mother. He was a sensitive, a powerful empath who could
look into other people's minds and see them as they really were. He had become aware of this ability during
his adolescence and, over the years, it had developed and grown stronger. It had caused him a few problems,
and he had sworn to himself he'd never use it, not only out of respect for other people's privacy, but out of
concern for his own emotional well-being. However, in college, he had met this girl, and he had fallen for her
hard, and his resolve had weakened.
He had wanted to look into her mind and discover her fondest desire, so that he could give it to her if it was at
all within his power. So he broke his promise to himself and probed her secret soul, and what he found there
was a twisted, ugly, bitter thing, the heart of an emotional vampire whose fondest desires were centered on
cruelty and decadence and using people up, then hanging them out to dry. That brief contact with her mind
had so shaken and repelled him that he never got over it.
For all his powers as an adept, Paulie was a very gentle man and, in some peculiar ways, very naive. He
genuinely liked people, and his heart was good. Intellectually, perhaps, he knew that there were sharks out
there in life's often murky waters, but to know something on an intellectual level isn't quite the same as having
it hit you in the gut. People are a lot like animals, and some of them are just plain bad to the bone. Some of
them kill in order to survive, and some kill just because they like it. I've seen both sides of that coin, myself.
There were times I killed because I had to, because the alternative would have been to starve, and there were