"George R. R. Martin - WC 3 - Jokers High" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

only a brief black string bikini and running shoes. Her body was lean and
gracefully muscular, with small breasts, slim hips, and long legs. She bent
down, unlaced and removed her sneakers and put them next to the trench coat.
She ran a hand almost caressingly over the rear wall of the graystone apartment
building, smiled, and then walked right through the wall.
It was the sound of a power saw biting into sodden hardwood. The whine of steel
teeth made Jack's own teeth ache as the all-too-familiar boy struggled to hide
deeper within the cypress tangle.
"He in dere somewhere!" It was his uncle Jacques. The folks around Atelier
Parish called him Snake Jake. Behind his back.
The boy bit his lip to keep from crying out. He bit deeper, tasting blood, to
keep from changing. Sometimes that worked. Sometimes.
Again the steel saw shrieked into wet cypress. The boy ducked down low; brown,


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brackish water slopped against his mouth, into his nose. He choked as the bayou
washed over his face.
"Tol' you! Dat little gator-bait right dere. Get 'im." Other voices joined in.
The power saw blade whined one more time.
Jack Robicheaux flailed out in the darkness, one arm trapped in the sweaty
sheet, the other reaching for the phone. He slammed the Tiffany lamp back
against the wall, cursed as he somehow caught its petals-and-stems base and
steadied it on the bed table, then felt the cool smoothness of the telephone. He
picked up the receiver in the middle of the fourth ring.
Jack started to curse again. Who the hell had this number? There was Bagabond,
but she was in another room here in his home. Before he could get his lips to
the mouthpiece, he knew.
"Jack?" said the voice on the other end of the line. Longdistance static washed
out the sound for a second. "Jack, this is Elouette. I'm callin' you from
Louisiana."
He smiled in the darkness. "Figured you were." He snapped the lamp switch, but
nothing happened. The filament must have broken when the lamp toppled.
"Never actually called this far before," said Elouette. "Robert always dialed."
Robert was her husband.
"What time is it?" Jack said. He felt for his watch. "'Bout five in the
morning," said his sister.
"What is it? Is it Ma?" He was waking up finally, pulling free from the
fragments of the dream.
"No, Jack, Ma's fine. Nothin'll ever happen to her. She'll outlive us both."
"Then what?" He recognized the sharpness in his voice and tried to tone it down.
It was just that Elouette's words were so slow, her thoughts so drawn-out.
The silence, punctuated by bursts of static, dilated on the line. Finally
Elouette said, "Its my daughter."
"Cordelia? What about her? What's wrong?" Another silence. "She's run off."
Jack felt an odd reaction. After all, he'd run away too, all those years before.
Run away when he was a hell of a lot younger than Cordelia. What would she be
now, fifteen? Sixteen? "Tell me what happened," he said reassuringly.