"THE BROKEN GUN" - читать интересную книгу автора (L'Amour Louis)

ISBN 0-553-24847-2
Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada
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OPM 75 74
To Alan Ladd
and Bill Bendix.
together again.
5
He lay sprawled upon the concrete pavement of the alley in the darkening stain of
his own blood, a man I had never seen before, a man with the face of an Apache warrior,
struck down from behind and stabbed repeatedly in the back as he lay there.
Two police cars with flashing lights stood nearby, and a dozen shirt-sleeved or uniformed
men stood about, waiting for the ambulance to come. But it was much too late for
an ambulance.
"Sorry to get you out of bed at this time of night, Mr. Sheridan."
Detective Sergeant torn Riley had introduced himself at the door of my motel room
a few minutes before. He spoke politely, but I had a feeling he could not have cared
less about awakening me. He was a man doing a hard, unpleasant job in the best way
he knew how, and my own hunch was that he was pretty good at it.
"We thought you might know something about him."
Riley showed me the newspaper clipping and I recognized it as one that had appeared
in the local paper the previous morning. It mentioned the fact that I, Dan Sheridan,
author of a dozen volumes of western fiction and history, was in the city doing research.
What it neglected to mention was the slip I'd made during a moment of exuberance
on a television
6
interview when I said, "Among other things I want to find out what happened to the
Toomey brothers."
The interviewer, with less alertness than usual with his kind, ignored the remark
and went on to other things.
As a matter of fact, I had planned to keep the mystery of the vanishing Toomeys as
my own private story, to be developed by me in my own good time.
The Toomeys had left Texas for Arizona some ninety years before, and up to a point
their drive could be documented; beyond that point there was a complete void. Four
thousand head of cattle and twenty-seven men had stepped right off into nothingness
... or so it seemed.
"I can't be of much help, Sergeant," I said. "I never saw the man before."
"It was an outside chance." Riley was still looking at the body. "Can you think of
any reason why he might have wanted to contact you?"
"Sure. I hear from all sorts of people. Some of them just want to talk about a story
I've written, but most of them want help with a book they're writing themselves.
Once in a blue moon somebody comes up with something I can use in a story."
"The name Alvarez means nothing to you?"
"No, it doesn't. Sorry."
That should have been the end of it, and all I could think of was getting back into
bed. I'd had a busy day and a long flight, and I was tired.