"Alex Irvine - Volunteers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Irvine Alexander C)

"I want to talk to my dad," I said.

"In a minute."

It hurt like hell, but I looked up at him. "No," I said with tears in my eyes. "Right now. Unless you plan to
kill me, you let me talk to my dad right fucking now!" I was screaming by the last few words, and I guess
I got to whatever shred of sanity Bahrani still had hidden away behind his high-school-autocrat fa├зade,
because he took a step back. He looked past me, and for a second I thought he was actually going to tell
Chad Latta to kill me; when I found out later that Chad had shot Julio, I started shaking and didn't stop
until I'd thrown up.

"You're suspended," Bahrani said. "Go home."
As I walked by Latta, he said, "Give Carol Ann a kiss for me," and winked. I had no idea what he
meant, and couldn't look him in the eye anyway.

When I got home my dad took one look at me and said, "Jesus Christ, Wiley." I shoved past him into the
house and slammed the door to my room. He let me stew for a while, but around sunset he knocked, and
when I didn't answer he came in. I was sitting at my terminal watching a video without any idea what it
was. Dad sat on my bed and said, "Milt Bahrani says you're suspended. That have anything to do with
the knot on your forehead?"

"You wouldn't believe me," I said.

"Wiley, you're my son. I will believe whatever you tell me unless I know otherwise."

I turned around. "Okay. Bahrani called me into his office and Chad Latta hit me over the head and while
I was falling down I got this on the corner of Bahrani's desk."

He hated hearing it, both because it had happened and because he was too wrecked to do anything
about it. Or so I thought: the next day I heard he found Milt Bahrani at the Elks Lodge, called him the
shitpot tin god he was, and broke a beer bottle across Bahrani's forehead before Latta arrested him.

That was why I never got to tell my dad that I had been wrong who Chad Latta was trying to look like. I
ran a biometric against all of the archived stills and vid we had from the Fifties, and although he'd ended
up close to James Dean, I was pretty sure that our town cop had gotten a nip and tuck so he could look
like Charles Starkweather. He wouldn't have had to get a doctor to agree; there was a MedSmart berth
that took care of all minor surgery, and as deep as Grant City got in its we-like-Ike hallucination, they
never failed to keep the MedSmart in top condition.

He'd told me to kiss "Carol Ann," who had to be Iris. I don't usually talk to myself, but I said, "Jesus.
What am I going to do?"

And Evelyn answered.
├Дt
It seems odd that I heard about Julio from you. Why wouldn't it have been one of the kids at school?
Justin Rowe would have been glad to get me up to speed on my favorite teacher's murder. Iris also
would have told me.

I wonder if he, Julio, knew it was coming. The only way it makes any sense, though, is if he was
somehow doing it to provoke exactly the kind of thing I ended up doing, and even my paranoia isn't