"Ed Howdershelt - Field Decision" - читать интересную книгу автора (Howdershelt Ed)

He said, "Well, damn. Guess you think I'm doing it on purpose, huh?"
She snorted a stifled chuckle and said, "And _again_. That's five in a
row, I think."
Cade smiled at her and said, "Well, then, here's your chance to change
the pattern, ma'am. Care to make it six times?"
"_No!_" said the blonde, raising both hands in grinning mock protest.
She reached for her phone. "Now get out there and let me call your boss."
Cade rose from his chair and headed for the coffee. He refilled his cup
and took a seat on the bench in the hallway next to a discarded or forgotten
German newspaper and picked it up.
It was one of the two Kaiserslautern dailies. Like local papers
everywhere, there was little within it to interest anyone from beyond the
area, but an article about the U.S. Army hospital in nearby Landstuhl caught
his attention.
It turned out to be a diatribe about misbehaving soldiers. That, too,
was hardly remarkable, since such problems were commonplace for every town
near every military base in the world, U.S. or other.
Cade remembered the incident mentioned in the article, but what the
article had failed to mention was that the bar in which the squabble had
occurred had tried to charge a group of off-duty GI's forty bucks each for the




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four bottles of cheap champagne they'd consumed in celebration of someone's
promotion.
That had been a mistake, given that one of the guys worked in the
Provost Marshall's office. He told the bar manager that there would be no
payment without a proper receipt that he could show his boss.
The manager had said that nobody had ever asked for a receipt before
and that he had none to give and continued to demand payment. The GI had stood
his ground on the matter until one of the bar girls had taken a swing at him.
Also unmentioned in the article was the fact that a bar girl who sold a
bottle of champagne received a hefty commission on the sale. When the girl
tried to hit him a second time, one of the other GI's restrained her, the
manager had hit that guy, and that's when the real fight started that wound up
in the street outside the bar.
The bar manager later told the German cops and the American MP's that
the whole altercation had been a misunderstanding that had gotten out of hand.
The GI's didn't have to pay for the overpriced champagne, but were "asked"
never to return.
Without a receipt, the Army couldn't -- or wouldn't -- put the bar
off-limits, but word had spread around the base quickly. The new bar in town
had closed due to lack of business after only a month.
Cade heard the office door open and the blonde's voice say, "Mr. Cade?"
He rose to his feet. She left the door open and retreated into the
office. Cade picked up his coffee cup and followed her, shutting the door and
taking his previous chair.
As he sat down, she asked, "Cade isn't your real name, is it?"