"Wildcards - 05 - Down And Dirty" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

The janitor looked as if he wanted to shake his head, but the proximity of the
knife to his throat stopped him. "Don't really need them. No one's broke into
the morgue for, jeez, months now."
"Okay." Brennan eased the knife away from the janitor's throat and the man
visibly relaxed. "Take us to the storeroom. Be quiet and no funny business." By
way of emphasis Brennan touched the tip of the janitor's nose with the tip of
his knife, and the janitor nodded carefully.
Brennan squatted and held out his palm, and Lazy Dragon climbed onto it. He put
the mouse in his vest pocket, holding back a smile at the janitor's bug-eyed
stare. He looked as if he wanted to ask Brennan a question, then thought better
of it.
"It's this way," the janitor said, and Deadhead and Brennan, with Lazy Dragon
peering from his pocket, followed him.
The janitor let them into the room with his key. It was a dark, cold, depressing
room with floor-to-ceiling body lockers in the walls. It was where the city kept
all the corpses that no one wanted or that no one could identify, before their
pauper burials.
Deadhead's jittery smile widened when they entered the room, and he hopped from
foot to foot with ill-suppressed excitement.
"Help me find it!" he commanded. "Help me find it!"
"What?" Brennan asked, truly mystified.
"The body. Gruber's fat, cold body." He looked frantically at the lockers,
capering in a macabre dance as he went along the wall.
Brennan frowned, herded the janitor in front of him, and started searching the
opposite wall. Most of the name tags set into the little metal holders on the
locker doors simply had anonymous ID numbers. A few had names.
"Say, this what you looking for?"
The docile janitor, who was preceeding Brennan, looked back helpfully. Brennan
stepped to his side. The locker he was pointing at was third up from the floor,
about waist high. The tag on it said Leon Gruber September 16.
"Here it is," Brennan called softly, and Deadhead scuttled across the room.
There had to be, Brennan thought, some sort of message on the corpse, something
that only Deadhead could decipher. Perhaps this Gruber had smuggled something
into the country in a body cavity... but surely, he thought, anything like that
would've been found by the morgue technicians.
"The body's been here a long time," Brennan commented as Deadhead opened the
locker door and pulled out the retractable table on which the corpse lay.
"Yes, it has, yes, indeed," Deadhead said, staring at the dingy sheet that
covered the body. "They pulled strings. Pulled strings to keep it here until I
... until I could get out."
"Get out?"
Deadhead pulled the sheet down, exposing Gruber's face and chest. He had been a
fat young man, soft and pastylooking. The expression of fear and horror pasted
on his face was the worst that Brennan had even seen on a corpse. His chest was
puckered with bullet holes, small caliber from the look of them.
"Yes," Deadhead said, but he never looked up from Gruber's dead, staring eyes. "
I was in prison ... hospital, really." From somewhere on his person he had
produced a small, shiny hacksaw. His lips twitched in incessant, spasmodic
jerks, and a line of spittle ran from the corner of his mouth to drip off his
chin. "For corpse abuse."