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

"The poor dumb bastard."

"Outclassed."

I got her stinger out of the freezer and brought it to her. She

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sipped it. "There isn't anything else you can do, of course," she said.

"Beg your pardon?"

She looked at me and opened her eyes very wide. "Get it back, of course. They cleaned him clean. That's why he came to you."

I got up and went over to the tuner and killed Mr. Bach. I stood in front of Chook. "Now just one minute there, woman. Hold it. There's no..."

"For God's sake, stop looking as if you're going to bray like a wounded moose, McGee. We talked about you once."

"Make some sense."

"He wondered about you. You know. What you do. So I sort of told him."

"You sort of told him."

"Just how you step in when people get the wrong end of the stick, and you keep half of what you can recover. McGee, why in the world do you think he came right to you! Could anything be more obvious? Why do you think that poor whipped creature crawled across the state and fell on your doorstep? You can't possibly turn him down."

"I can give it a very good try, honey."

Silence. She finished the drink. She clacked the empty glass down. She came up off the couch, moved close, stood tall, fixed me with a poisonous stare, upslanted, fists on hips. "Did I do you a favor coming here?" she said in almost a whisper. "Do you owe me for that, and for one or two other small things I could name? Do you want me to go after them myself? I will, you know. I'm calling you on mis one, you big ugly lazy jerk. They smashed him. They gutted him. And there's no other place he can turn." Giving emphasis to each word by rapping my chest with a hard knuckle, she said, "You-are-going-to-help-that-man."

"Now listen..."

"And I want a piece of the action, Travis."

"I have no intention of..."

"The first thing we have to do is get him on his feet, and pry every living piece of information out of him."

"How about that weekly television thing you..."



"I'm two tapes ahead, and I can go down there and do three more in one day. Trav, they didn't leave him a dimel It was some kind of land development thing. Over near Naples."

"Maybe by fall..."

"Travis!"

By the following Saturday afternoon The Busted Flush was swinging on two hooks in Florida Bay, two miles off Candle Key, all larders stocked, five hundred gallons in the fresh water tanks. With alterations from time to time, I've tried to make the old barge-type houseboat ever more independent of shoreside services. Except when home at Bahia Mar, I like to avoid the boat basin togetherness. Under one hatch I have a whole area paved with husky batteries, enough of them so that I can stay at anchor and draw on them for four days before they begin to get a little feeble. When they're down, I can use them to start up an electric trickle-feed generator which can bring them back up in six hours. If I ever get careless enough to run them all the way down, I can break out the big 10 kw gasoline generator and use it to get the electric one started. At anchor I switch everything over to 32 V. I can't run the air-conditioning off the batteries, but I can run it off the gas generator. Then it is a decision as to which will be the most annoying, the heat or the noise.