"MacDonald, John - Travis McGee 06 - Bright Orange for the Shroud" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacDonald John D)

A Fawcett Gold Medal Book Published by Ballantine Books

Copyright й 1965 by John D. MacDonald Publishing, Inc.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

All characters in this book are fictional and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

A condensation of this novel appeared in COSMOPOLITAN Magazine.

ISBN 0-449-13358-3

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Fawcett Gold Medal Edition: September 1965 First Ballantine Books Edition: August 1983 Eleventh Printing: February 1989

1

A,

NOTHER season was ending. The mid-May sun had a tropic sting against my bare shoulders. Sweat ran into my eyes. I had discovered an ugly little pocket of dry rot in the windshield corner of the panel of the topside controls on my houseboat, and after trying not to think about it for a week, I had dug out the tools, picked up some pieces of prime mahogany, and excised the area of infection with a saber saw.

Cutting and sanding the new pieces to fit was a finicky chore. Sawdust stuck to my sweaty chest and arms. I was sustained by an awareness of the cool dark bottles of Dos Equis beer in the stainless steel box below, and by the anticipation of trudging from Bahia Mar over to the public beach where a mild wind from the east was capping the deep blue swells with white.

Also I was sustained by the determination that this would be a slob summer for McGee. It wouldn't be a gaudy summer. There wasn't enough bread for that. But a careful husbanding of funds would see me through, leaving the emergency fund untapped, ready to finance some kind of an operation in the fall.

I needed a slob summer. The machine was abused. Softness at the waist. Tremor of the hands. Bad tastes in the morning. A heaviness of muscle and bone, a tendency to sigh. Each time you wonder, Can you get it back? The good toughness and bounce and tirelessness, the weight down to a rawhide two oh five, a nasty tendency to sing during the morning shower, the conviction each day will contain wondrous things?

And I wanted it to be a loner summer. There'd been too much damned yat-a-ta-yak, fervid conversations, midnight plots and dirty little violences for which I had been all too unprepared. The pink weal six inches below my armpit was a reminder of luck. If my foot hadn't slipped exactly when it did....

A knife blade grating along a rib bone is a sound so ugly and so personal it can come right into your sleep and wake you up ten nights running.

I got a good fit on the biggest piece, drilled it, and was setting the long bronze screws home when I heard a tentative and hollow call from dockside.

"Trav? Hey, Trav? Hey, McGee?"

I turned and walked to the aft end of my sun deck and looked down at the dock. A tall, frail, sallow-looking fellow in a wrinkled tan suit too large for him stared up at me with an anxious little smile that came and wentЧa mendicant smile, like dogs wear in the countries where they kick dogs.

"How are you, Trav?" he said.

And just as I was about to ask him who he was, I realized, with considerable shock, that it was Arthur Wilkinson, dreadfully changed.

"Hello, Arthur."

"Can I... may I come aboard?"

"Certainly. Why ask?"

The gangplank chain was down. He came across, stepped onto the afterdeck, tottered, tried to smile up at me, grabbed at emptiness and collapsed onto the teak deck with a knobbly thud. I got down there in two jumps, rolled him over. He'd abraded the unhealthy flesh under one eye in the fall. I felt the pulse in his throat. It was slow and steady. Two fat teenage girls