"Michael Marshall - The Straw Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Marshall Michael)

rockclimbing, or having a job. He was familiar with England as a concept, and gathered that it had a
whole lot of history and a thriving rock music industry, both of which he was in favour of.
In the end the conversation petered out, running aground in the shallows of shared experience. Suzy
was a little disappointed, having enjoyed the encounter. Mark was preoccupied, wanting to do some
shopping. In the hotel they'd stayed at the night before, the bartender had spent some time trawling the
radio waves in search of something to play very loudly. He'd accidentally wandered across a classical
station, and for a brief, wonderful moment, a snatch of the Goldberg Variations had floated across the
bar. Mark had pictured the radio station as just one guy holed up in the mountains someplace, the door
barred against hordes armed to the teeth with Garth Brooks records. The Bach had remained in Mark's
head through the following hours of syrupy ballads contrasting the fragility of marriage and the
steadfastness of dogs, and he wanted to buy a CD and play it in the car. Palmerston didn't have a
classical music store.
Trent was soon joined by a gaggle of floppy and unattractive teenage boys, and as Suzy
eavesdropped it emerged that he was engaged in convincing the youths to help him move a huge pile of
dirt outside his trailer, down by the old railroad line. It was never established why the dirt was there, nor
why it now needed to be moved somewhere else. The boys were, not unnaturally, interested in some
kind of payment for this work, and this was offered in the form of a case of beer. As none were within
three years of legally being able to buy alcohol, the proposition was readily accepted. While they waited
for Trent to finish wading through his burgers, they lurked like a crew of disreputable seagulls, trading the
affectionate insults and unrealistic suggestions which are the key discourse of boys. During this it became
clear that despite the surfing-related T-shirts in which most were clad, not a single one had ever surfed,
most had not been out of state, and only one had even seen the sea.
Overhearing this, the Campbells realized how extraordinary it was that they were тАФ on a whim
conceived one drunken evening in a pub six thousand miles away тАФ driving the entire breadth of
someone else's vast country. They became both flushed with pride and utterly overawed with the
magnitude of the undertaking, and sipped their coffees meditatively, taking perhaps five or six minutes
longer than they normally would have allowed. Without this delay, they'd have been out the door by
12.50. Even with it, they'd have been on the road by 12.56 at the latest. By then Suzy would have been
ready for a cigarette, which the signs on the walls forbade through curt, easy-to-read sentences and
internationally recognizable iconography. Pete Harris was in no real hurry, and would have been there
anyway: still gazing at the house on a plot by itself, wondering vaguely how much it might cost, knowing
that even if he could rustle up the money, his wife would have earmarked it for something else.
At 12.53 a woman shouted in the middle of the restaurant.


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It was a brief, emphatic utterance, conveying nothing except urgency. People moved unconsciously out of
the way, creating a clearing in the central aisle. It became evident that two men тАФ one in his late teens,
the other mid-twenties, both wearing long coats тАФ were the focus of the woman's concern. The older
man had short fair hair, the younger's was darker and rather longer. It was soon also clear that they were
carrying semi-automatic rifles.
 The light in the room seemed suddenly very bright, sounds abnormally clear and dry, as if some
cushioning ether had been swept away. When you're sitting in a McDonald's on a weekday lunchtime
with your coffee just approaching a drinkable temperature, and you realize that night has fallen out of a
clear blue sky, time slips into a slow moment of lucidity. Like the long second before the impact of a car
crash, this hiatus is not there to help you. It's not an escape route, or a gift from God, and it is not enough
to do anything in except take the chance to greet death and wonder what took it so long.
One of Trent's crew of slackers had just time to say 'Billy?' in a tone of goofy bafflement, and then the
two men started shooting.