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

could've had a brand-new eyeball, cloned and grown in a vat, but Paul was not a rich man, despite being a
sorcerer. He was a teacher, and teachers do it for the love of teaching. It sure as hell ain't for the money. The
best he could do for me was a prosthetic eyeball, made of turquoise. It was a stone he'd had around,
intending to get it made into a ring someday, but he gave it to the vet, who cut it and set it nicely in my eye
socket.
Frankly, I liked it a lot better than some fancy, cut-glass eye. It's a Chinese turquoise, of a beautiful,
robin's-egg-blue shade, with a fine, vertical matrix running through it that almost resembles a feline pupil. I
thought it gave me character, and the other felines in the neighborhood agreed. A foxy, little alabaster Persian
by the name of Snowball dubbed me Catseye, and the handle stuck. Catseye Gomez I became,
unregenerate hardcase and all-around troubleshooter.
I never did become a pet. Paulie was an all-right guy, but I was just too damned set in my ways to change.
You want some servile creature that gets all excited when you come walking through the door, rubs up
against your legs and has an orgasm when you stroke it, go get yourself a poodle, man, that ain't my thing.
But Paulie understood that. We were both loners, in our way, and we just sort of took up with each other,
both of us coming and going pretty much the way we pleased. Paulie had his career, I had my wandering
ways.
Every now and then, Paulie'd have a bunch of students from the college over for some Java and late-night
conversation. One time, one of them left behind a book. Something he'd been reading for a pre-Collapse
literature class. I found it on the floor. The ability to read had been bred into me, but up to then, all I'd ever
read were labels on greasy, thrown-out cans of tuna I'd picked out of the garbage, and the oil soaked
newspapers fish heads were wrapped in. This was something new. I read the tide. I, the Jury, by some guy
named Spillane.
It was a tale about a private eye named Hammer. Mike Hammer. Tough guy who packed a .45 and took no
crap from anybody. Once I'd started it, I couldn't stop till I had read it all. This Hammer was a guy after my
own heart, an hombre I could really understand. It was like coming home. This guy Spillane knew about the
hard life. He knew the streets and alleys, the shadows where the lizards lurk, the baser side of human
nature-of all nature, for that matter- and the never-give-an-inch attitude it takes to make it through the cold,
dark night. Man, I was hooked.
When Paulie got home, all I could talk about was this guy Spillane, and the stories he told about Mike
Hammer, and I wanted more. Paulie'd never heard of him, but he found that kid's professor and asked him
about this writer named Spillane. It wasn't easy, and it took a lot of searching through the antique bookshops
of the city, but Paulie eventually brought home everything this guy Spillane had ever written. My Gun Is
Quick. Vengeance Is Mine. One Lonely Night and The Big Kill and Kiss Me Deadly and the rest of them.
Man, this guy could write. It was as if he knew all about the kind of life I'd led, only Mike Hammer was a
human, not a cat. Not much difference beyond that, though. Give either of us any shit and we'd rip your throat
right out.
I got through all the Spillane books, and Paulie found me more. He brought home books by Ross MacDonald,
stories about a private eye by the name of Lew Archer, maybe not as tough as Hammer, but just as
uncompromising in his way. That led to Raymond Chandler and his hero, Phil Marlowe, and then to Dashiell
Hammett and Sam Spade and the Continental Op. Maybe things were different back in the days they wrote
those books, but I realized one thing. Not all humans were the same. Some were just like me. Tough and
feral creatures of the night, hard-bitten scrappers who fought the good fight, grabbed life by the throat and
shook it, wringing out each precious drop of blood and letting its hot fire flow coursing through their veins. I
would've understood those guys, and I would've been proud to know them. And in some ways, Paulie was like
that, only a lot more civilized.
I found that out the way I've learned everything else. The hard way. You'll remember when I said that if most
people knew what magic was really all about, they'd lose their cookies? Well, here's how I found out.
A murderer was on the loose in Santa Fe, a vicious serial killer whose victims were found horribly mutilated
and drained of their life energies, their very souls sucked dry. This could only mean one thing. The killer was
an adept, a necromancer. A wizard who killed to drain his victim's life energy and absorb it, like a vampire.