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

The sun was heading for Hawaii. Just enough breeze for a pattycake sound against the hull. I was stretched out on the sun deck. A line of pelicans creaked by, beating and coasting, heading home to the rookery. What I had learned so far from Arthur didn't sound promising. But I comforted myself with thinking that while we were getting him in shape, I was doing myself some promised good. I was on cheese, meat and salad. No booze. No cigarettes. Just one big old pot pipe packed with Black Watch for the sunset hour. Due any time now.

Every muscle felt stretched, bruised and sore. We'd anchored at mid-morning. I'd spent a couple of hours in mask and fins, knocking and gouging some of the grass beards and corruption off the hull. After lunch I'd lain on the sundeck with my toes hooked under the rail and done about ten sets of situps. Chook had caught me at it and talked me into some of the exercises she prescribed for her dance group. One exercise was

a bitch. She could do it effortlessly. You lift your left leg, grab the ankle with your right hand, and play one-legged jump rope with it, over and back. Then switch hands and ankles and jump on the other leg. After that we swam. I could win the sprints. In our distance events, she had a nasty habit of slowly drawing even, and then slowly pulling away, and an even nastier habit of smiling placidly at me while I wheezed and gasped.

I heard a sound and turned my head and saw her climb the ladderway to the sundeck. She looked concerned. She sat cross-legged beside me. In that old faded pink suit, dark hair in a salty tangle, no makeup, she looked magnificent.

"He feels kind of weak and dizzy," she said. "I think I let him get too much sun. It can sap your strength. I gave him a salt tablet, and it's making him nauseated."

"Want me to go take a look at him?"

"Not right now. He's trying to doze off. Gee, he's so damn grateful for every little thing. And it broke my heart, the way he looked in trunks, so scrawny and pathetic."

"He eats many lunches like today, it won't last long."

She inspected a pink scratch on a ripe brown calf. "Trav? How are you going to go about it? What are you going to try to do?"

"I wouldn't have the slightest idea."

"How long are we going to stay here?"

"Until he has the guts to want to go back, Chook."

"But why should he have to? I mean if he dreads it so."

"Because, dear girl, he is my reference library. He doesn't know what very small thing might turn out to be very important, so he doesn't think of it or mention it. Then when it's about to go off in my face, he can tell me where the fuse is, which is something he can't do from a hundred miles away."

She looked at me speculatively. "He wants to give up the whole idea."

"Okay. Sure."

"Damn you!"

"Sweetie, you can take a good and gentle horse, and you can start using a chain on it. Maybe you turn it into a killer. And maybe you break it right down to nothing, to a trembling hunk of meat. Then can you ever turn it back into a horse? Depends





on the blood line. Sometimes you don't want the victim along. Sometimes, like this time, you have the hunch you'll need him. I won't go into this without him. So he has to forget the chain. You're along to turn him back into a horse, Chook. You've got to prop him up. I don't want you in on any of the rest of it."

"Why not?"

"It sounds just a little too dirty so far."

"And I have just walked out the convent gates in my little white pinafore. Come on, Trav!"

"Miss McCall, the most dangerous animal in the world is not the professional killer. It's the amateur. When they sense that somebody is taking back what they went to so much effort to acquire, that's when they get violent. The essentially dishonest man is capable of truly murderous indignation. In this instance, the bitch will be looking on, heightening the performance, looking for blood. I don't think she'll relish losing."