"Himes, Chester - The Real Cool Killers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Himes Chester)

There was movement in the crowd. The morbid and the innocent moved in closer. Suspicious characters began to blow.
Sonny and his two friends turned startled, pop-eyed faces.
"Where they come from?" Sonny mumbled in a daze.
"I'll take him," Grave Digger said.
"Covered," Coffin Ed replied.
Their big flat feet made slapping sounds as they converged on Sonny and the Arabs. Coffin Ed halted at an angle that put them all in line of fire.
Without a break in motion, Grave Digger closed on Sonny and slapped him on the elbow with the barrel of his pistol. With his free hand he caught Sonny's pistol when it flew from his nerveless fingers.
"Got it," he said as Sonny yelped in pain and grabbed his numb arm.
"I ain't--" Sonny tried to finish but Grave Digger shouted, "Shut up!"
"Line up and reach!" Coffin Ed ordered in a threatening voice, menacing them with his pistol. He sounded as though his teeth were on edge.
"Tell the man, Sonny," Lowtop urged in a trembling voice, but it was drowned by Grave Diggers's thundering at the crowd: "Back up!" He lined a shot overhead.
They backed up.
Sonny's good arm shot up and his two friends reached. He was still trying to say something. His Adam's apple bobbed helplessly in his dry wordless throat.
But the Arabs were defiant. They dangled their arms and shuffled about.
"Reach where, man?" one of them said in a husky voice.
Coffin Ed grabbed him by the neck, lifted him off his feet.
"Easy, Ed," Grave Digger cautioned in a strangely anxious voice. "Easy does it."
Coffin Ed halted, his pistol ready to shatter the Arab's teeth, and shook his head like a dog coming out of water. Releasing the Arab's neck, he backed up one step and said in his grating voice: "One for the money.. . and two for the show. .
It was the first line of a jingle chanted in the game of hide-and-seek as a warning from the "seeker" to the "hiders" that he was going after them.
Grave Digger took the next line, "Three to get ready. . ."
But before he could finish it with "And here we go," the Arabs had fallen into line with Sonny and had raised their hands high into the air.
"Now keep them up," Coffin Ed said.
"Or you'll be the next ones lying on the ground," Grave Digger added.
Sonny finally got out the words, "He ain't dead. He's just fainted."
"That's right," Rubberlips confirmed. "He ain't been hit. It just scared him so he fell unconscious."
"Just shake him and he'll come to," Sonny added.
The Arabs started to laugh again, but Coffin Ed's sinister face silenced them.
Grave Digger stuck Sonny's revolver into his own belt, holstered his own revolver, and bent down and lifted the white man's face. Blue eyes stared fixedly at nothing. He lowered the head gently and picked up a limp, warm hand, feeling for a pulse.
"He ain't dead," Sonny repeated. But his voice had grown weaker. "He's just fainted, that's all."
He and his two friends watched Grave Digger as though he were Jesus Christ bending over the body of Lazarus.
Grave Digger's eyes explored the white man's back. Coffin Ed stood without moving, his scarred face like a bronze mask cast with trembling hands. Grave Digger saw a black wet spot in the white man's thick gray-shot black hair, low down at the base of the skull. He put his fingertips to it and they came off stained. He straightened up slowly, held his wet fingertips in the white headlights; they showed red. He said nothing.
The spectators crowded nearer. Coffin Ed didn't notice; he was looking at Grave Digger's bloody fingertips.
"Is that blood?" Sonny asked in a breaking whisper. His body began to tremble, coming slowly upward from his grasshopper legs.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed stared at him, saying nothing.
"Is he dead?" Sonny asked in a terror-stricken whisper. His trembling lips were dust dry and his eyes were turning white in a black face gone gray.
"Dead as he'll ever be," Grave Digger said in a flat toneless voice.
"I didn't do it," Sonny whispered. "I swear 'fore God in heaven."
"He didn't do it," Rubberlips and Lowtop echoed in unison.
"How does it figure?" Coffin Ed asked.
"It figures for itself," Grave Digger said.
"So help me God, boss. I couldn't have done it," Sonny said in a terrified whisper.
Grave Digger stared at him from agate hard eyes and said nothing.
"You gotta believe him, boss, he couldn't have done it," Rubberlips vouched.
"Naw, suh," Lowtops echoed.
"I wasn't trying to hurt him, I just wanted to scare him," Sonny said. Tears were trickling from his eyes.
"It were that crazy drunk man with the knife that started it," Rubberlips said. "Back there in the Dew Drop Inn."
"Then afterwards the big white man kept looking in the window," Lowtop said. "That made Sonny mad."
The detectives stared at him with blank eyes. The Arabs were motionless.
"He's a comedian," Coffin Ed said finally.
"How could I be mad about my old lady," Sonny argued. "I ain't even got any old lady."