"Paul Levinson - Loose Ends (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levinson Paul)

bit more assertion in his gait. He turned randomly down several
connecting passages, passed several orderlies and nurses and
made a point of not avoiding their gazes, and eventually wound
up at what looked like a service elevator. The doors were open.
He walked in and pressed Lobby and hoped for the best.
The elevator wobbled its way down, Jeff envisioning himself
a dead man dangling from a slowly descending rope. The doors
finally opened on a poorly lit hallway that said Ground Floor.
He walked a few feet, and was glad to see the hospital lobby. He
wondered why the act of leaving a hospital always felt like
escape from a high-security prison.
He hailed a cab and said take me to the airport. The cabbie
talked Kennedy, but Jeff was too tired to give more than grunts
in response.
He sank into bed in the motel room, utterly drained. He
closed his eyes and looked again at the lumpy bag in the
hospital laundry room. It was a woman's body, face down, wearing
only a 20th-century bra and shiny beige panties that clung
tightly to her rear. She looked familiar. He turned her over
and found eyes staring blankly up at his. He tried to scream,
but his throat stuck. The eyes were Rena's.
He sat up in bed, broken out in a cold sweat, and shuddered
for a long time...
I guess I'm not as cut out for time travel as once I
thought, he thought. But how could anyone know that beforehand?
You had to actually live through these loops, bristling with
serrations, to know the toll they took.
***
Twelve hours later, he was on a plane for New York.
Staring out of the window as the engines revved up, Jeff
realized he was losing a golden opportunity to stop the killing
of Lee Harvey Oswald. He looked at his watch. That would
happen tomorrow. He toyed with the idea of making a last-minute
dash from the plane and calling the Dallas police. He'd have
plenty of time and ... No! For once he'd do the cautious thing
and return to New York and then 2084. No chance the police
would take his call seriously anyway -- just another crank come
out of the now festering assassination woodwork.
Of course, a crank who knew about Oswald's murder would be
someone Jeff would want to meet. Wasn't there some story that
the Dallas police were indeed warned by someone about the
shooting of Oswald? Was that someone Jeff? Or someone else on
trespass from the future?
He fidgeted with his seatbelt. Maybe the attempt on his
life in the hospital last night -- if that nurse with the
intravenous was indeed trying to kill him -- was intended
precisely to stop him from interfering with Ruby's murder of
Oswald. No, that sort of reasoning would get him nowhere. It
was paranoid nonsense. Yet he was here on this plane leaving
the scene of the crime of the century, when there were plenty of