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

I sensed mischief as she studied me. "I guess any man would find her pretty exciting."

"Hell, it's exciting to be pushed out a window. Or run over."

"And you didn't have the least little urge, darling? She did sort of have an eye on you."

"The .scorpion is a very cute little brown bug, the way she plods along with that tail curled over her back. She's a living fossil, you know, unchanged in millions of years. It's imaginable that some bug-lover might want to pick one up and stroke her scaly little back."

Big brown girl in scanty pink, in Zen-pose on my splendid vinyl imitation of teak. It is real teak on the aft deck below, partially justifying such trickery. Staring dubiously at me. "Men aren't that bright about those."

"Arthur wasn't."

"And what have you got? Radar?"

"Alarm systems. Bachelor devices to detect poisonous types. One good way is to watch how the other women react. You and the others, when Wilma Ferner was around, all your mouths got a little tight, and you were very very polite to her. And you made no girl talk at all with her. No clothes talk. No date talk. No guided trips to the biff. No girl secrets. Just the way, honey,

27

a woman should be damned wary of a man other men have no use for."

That was a little careless, and too close to home. Frankie gives most men the warm sweet urge to hit him heavily in the mouth. Chook's dark eyes became remote. "If the breeze dies it could get buggy here."

"The long-range forecast says we'll get more wind instead of less." I rose smartly to my feet. If I'd been alone, perhaps I would have crawled moaning to the sundeck rail and hauled myself up. Vanity is a miracle drug. I could count on three or four more days of torment before, I hoped, the limberness would come back, along with the hardened belly and lost pounds and unjangled nerves.

As I stretched and yawned, Chookie said, "Hey!" and came to me and in a very gingerly way touched, with one fingertip, the pink weal below my left armpit. "I didn't notice that. It's new, huh?"

"Aw, it's just a scratch."

"Knife?"

"Yup."

She swallowed and looked ill. "The idea of knives, it makes my stomach turn over. And it makes me think of Mary Lo Ching."

While I'd been away on this last one, the one that gave me the funds for a slob summer, an animal had gotten to Mary Lo with a knife. The twins had been working in Miami Beach, in March. They got him in a few hours by rounding up known sex offenders. They'd thought this one harmless. He'd been tucked away a few times for short falls. Peeping, indecent exposure. His profession was fry cook. All the time he was working himself up to a big one, and Mary Lo had been in just the wrong place at the wrong time. He hadn't been selective. Just the first one he could get to. They didn't count the wounds. They just said "more than fifty."

The psychiatrists call it a sickness. The cops call it a hell of a problem. The sociologists call it a product of our culture, our puritanical tendency to consider sex a delicious nastiness. Some of them escalate to the big violence. Others stay with a small kick, peering into bedrooms. You can't give a man life for that,

nor even constructive psychiatric help during a short sentence. He cuts brush on the county gang, tormented by the other prisoners, driven further into his private madness. Then he comes out and cuts up Mary Lo, and at once everybody is an expert on how he should have been handled by the authorities, up to and including gelding the very first time he committed a nuisance in a public park.

"Anybody know anything about Mary Li?" I asked.

"Just that she went back to Hawaii." Chook stepped back a pace and looked at me from ears to heels as if examining one of the metal sculptures in the garden of the Museum of Modern An. She shook her head sadly and said, "McGee, I swear, I never really noticed before how many times you've been torn up."

"This one here happened when I was three. My big brother threw a hammer up into a tree to knock some apples down. The hammer came down too."

"Do you like being in a crazy kind of business that gets you so close to being killed?"

"I don't like to hurt. Every little nick makes me that much more careful. Maybe I'll get so careful I'll have to find some other line of work."