"Alice Hoffman - Turtle Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Alice)

outside Chuck and Karl's, waiting to be caught. He had a bowie knife
hidden in his left boot and a hundred and fifty dollars in quarters,
which would have seemed suspicious even if all the parking meters on
West Main hadn't just been smashed open with an axe. It was May of
course, and the temperature hadn't fallen below one hundred for days,
and before June came around, Julian would be apprehended five more
times, although he was never officially charged with anything.

Those were the days when the Verity police force was made up of two
men, and one of them was a Cash through marriage, not that he, or any
of the Cashes, had spoken to Julian since the night of the accident.

They sent him away, to the Boys' School of Correction in Tallahassee,
and that was where he first got interested in dogs. There was a
hundredand-twenty-pound bloodhound named Big Boy whose job it was to
track down anyone courageous or stupid enough to scale the barbed-wire
fence. Big Boy stank, and his ears were infected, but appearances
didn't mean much to Julian. His own mother had fainted the first time
she saw Julian and she gave him away that very night. As a little boy
he was so ugly that tree frogs would go limp with fear in the palm of
his hand. So Big Boy's red eyes and fleas didn't put Julian off in the
least. He stole pieces of meat from the dining hall and started
hanging around the kennel after lights out. It didn't take long for
Julian to discover that if you looked a dog straight in the eye and
thought real hard, you could get him to come to you and lie at your
feet without ever having to say one word. By the end of the year, just
before Julian got his high school equivalency, the director of the
school got rid of Big Boy. They could hold the sweat-stained shirts of
escaped boys under the dog's nose for as long as they wanted, but Big
Boy would just calmly set off and track down Julian Cash every time.

In all his years of working with dogs, at the army base in Hartford
Beach, and now with the Verity police, Julian has come to believe that
there are two kinds of dogs that go bad. The kind that go bad slowly,
whether from inbreeding or being beaten it didn't much matter. And the
other ones, good dogs who suddenly turned on a night when there was a
full moon, hauling themselves up from the living room rug and a
peaceful sleep, to jump through a window or attack a child for no
apparent reason. Julian Cash attributes this to a short circuit in the
brain, and that is why he no longer believes in crimes of passion.

When men snapped it wasn't passion, it was only a short circuit, just
like that well-behaved dog who was after a ball one minute, an arm and
a leg the next. The fact that this sort of behavior is so much rarer
in dogs than in people, who seem to snap like crazy, especially during
the month of May, makes no difference to the nine other men and women
on the Verity police force. Not one of them will approach Julian if
his dogs aren't leashed, yet these officers will break up a bar fight
without thinking twice. They'll stop a speeder on a deserted back road
when they know damn well there could easily be a weapon in the glove