"Leonard, Elmore - Out of Sight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leonard Elmore)

for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0-670-84819-0

for michoel and kelly

ONE

FOLEY HAD NEVER seen a prison where you could walk right up to the
fence without getting shot. He mentioned it to the guard they called
Pup, making conversation: convict and guard standing in a strip of
shade between the chapel and a gun tower, redbrick structures in a
red-brick prison, both men looking toward the athletic field. Several
hundred inmates along the fence out there were watching the game of
football played without pads, both sides wearing the same correctional
blue, on every play trying to pound each other into the ground.

"You know what they're doing," Foley said, "don't you? I mean besides
working off their aggressions."

Pup said, "The hell you talking about?"

This was about the dumbest hack Foley had ever met in his three falls,
two state time, one federal, plus a half-dozen stays in county
lockups.

"They're playing in the Super Bowl," Foley said, "pretending they're
out at Sun Devil Stadium next Sunday. Both sides thinking they're the
Dallas Cowboys."

Pup said, "They ain't worth shit, none of 'em."

Foley turned enough to look at the guard's profile, the peak of his cap
curved around his sunglasses. Tan shirt with dark-brown epaulets that
matched his pants, radio and flashlight hooked to his belt; no weapon.
Foley looked at his size, head-to-head with the Pup at six-one, but
from there, where Foley went pretty much straight up and down in his
prison blues, the Pup had about forty pounds on him, most of it around
the guard's middle, his tan shirt fitting him like skin on a sausage.
Foley turned back to the game.

He watched a shifty colored guy come out for a pass and get
clotheslined going for the ball, cut down by another shifty colored guy
on defense. The few white guys, bikers who had the nerve and the size,
played in the line and used their fists on each other, every down. No
Latins in the game. They stood along the fence watching, except for
two guys doing laps side by side around the field: counterclockwise,
the way inmates always circled a yard here and in every prison Foley
had ever heard of.