"Night Warriors - 02 - Death Dream" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

But John, trying to be firm, trying to stay in control, said, 'It's okay; I'm not going to do anything stupid. Call the cops. Go on, call the cops! I'll go check on Lenny.'
The telephones in the bedroom had been smashed, so Jennifer hurried back downstairs while John ventured along the corridor toward Lenny's room, his revolver clasped in both hands. 'Lenny?' he shouted. 'Lenny?' He had a terrible vision of Lenny sitting up in bed > with some crazy burglar holding a knife to his throat and keeping his hand clamped over the boy's mouth.
'Lenny, do you hear me? It's Daddy!'
There was no reply. The house was silent, except for the faint sound of traffic outside, and Jennifer's voice as she talked in a quick, frantic tone to the Philadelphia Police Department.
As he approached Lenny's room, John saw to his consternation that there were more deep scratches along the wall, similar to the first scratches he'd seen when he had come home. That could only mean that the burglars had been here before he got home - and that all the time he and Jennifer had been laughing and reading and drinking martinis and eating supper, those maniacs had been tearing their precious bedroom to shreds.
He reached Lenny's door and eased it open, keeping the revolver pointed at the ceiling. He didn't want any accidents, not with Lenny, his last living connection with Virginia.
'Lenny?' he whispered.
He remembered what somebody in Miami Vice had said about making your-self a target, so he stepped quickly into the room and dodged to one side to avoid being silhouetted against the light in the corridor. He paused, feeling chilled and frightened, breathing in the greasy smell of the revolver.
To his relief, Lenny lay where he had left him, still fast asleep, his mouth still open. John leaned forward to make doubly certain that he was breathing; then he crouched and moved away from the bed making a quick inspection of the rest of the room. He checked behind the door, and almost fired when Lenny's white bathrobe came swinging out at him. He eased open the closet. He crouched down on his hands and knees so that he could look underneath the bed. He cautiously parted the curtains with the barrel of his gun.
There was nobody there. It looked as if the intruders had ventured partway down the corridor, tearing at the walls, but they seem to have stopped short of Lenny's room.
John tested Lenny's window. Only the small top window was open; the main window was still closed and locked. He looked down into the brick-paved yard. There was a small patio with a fountain and white garden furniture, and an arrangement of seven well-cultivated bay trees in earthenware pots. No sign that anybody was hiding down there.
He eased down the hammer of the .38 and went back along the corridor, checking the guestroom, the second bathroom, the linen closet, the closet where Jennifer kept the Hoover. He tried the attic door: it was locked, and the key was still hanging on the hook beside it.
John called out, 'It's okay, Jen! Lenny's still asleep -and they're gone, whoever they were!'
Jennifer was coming back upstairs. She ran a trembling hand through her hair, and tried to smile. 'I talked to the police. They're sending somebody around.'
'We'd better see what's been stolen,' John told her, putting his arm around her shoulders.
'Oh God,Т she said, shaking her head. 'Why should anybody want to do anything so meaningless?'
T don't know, honey. I can't even guess.'
They went back into the ravaged bedroom. John began to gather up pieces of broken china and picture frames, while Jennifer sorted through the jewelry and the perfume bottles and cosmetics. Half a dozen bottles of nail varnish had been smashed open, and the white shag carpet was sticky with glutinous scarlets and sticky pinks.
John was so dispirited that he gave up collecting the smashed pieces, and dropped them back onto the floor. But Jennifer slowly stood up, her hands full of rings and necklaces and brooches, and she was frowning in surprise.
'Do you know something? They haven't taken a single thing - not one.'
John leaned over and picked through a heap of jewelry. 'Are you sure? How about that ring I gave you after the Philly Pops concert?'
'Here it is. It's got nail polish on it, but that'll clean off.'
'And that watch from your father?'
There, on the floor.'
John found his own drawer, upturned on the floor. Underneath it he discovered his gold cuff links, his gold bracelet, and the gold Julius Caesar medallion that Virginia had given him in 1973, when medallions for men had still been fashionable.
СThis doesn't make any kind of sense at all,Т said John, picking up the medallion and staring at it as it spun around on the end of its chain. 'Anybody could pawn this for two, three hundred dollars, and three hundred dollars buys a whole lot of crack.'
'You think drug addicts did this?' asked Jennifer. Her eyes glistened with tears.
'Sure - that was my first reaction. But if it was drug addicts, why didn't they take anything?'
'Maybe we surprised them, rushing upstairs like that. Maybe they frightened themselves with their own noise.'
'Jennifer,' said John, 'they've taken this room apart. They've broken everything - absolutely everything. How long do you think it took them to do that? Look at it - every dress, every coat, every picture, everything. And those nail-varnish bottles! Six of them, all broken. You know how damned hard it is to break one of those. If they had rime to do that, they had time to steal anything they wanted.'
They heard the scribbling sound of police sirens growing louder. John went to the window and saw a patrol car and an unmarked car with a flashing red beacon on the roof draw up outside. "The cavalry,' he said, and went downstairs to open the door for them.
Jennifer went out to the landing. She heard John open the front door; heard deep men's voices; heard somebody cough. As she stood there, Lenny came shuffling along the corridor, hot-cheeked and dandelion-headed, in his Gobot pajamas.
'Jenny?' he said blurrily. 'What's wrong? I heard police cars.'
Jennifer held him tight. 'We've had burglars,' she told him. 'Don't worry, they haven't stolen anything. Your Daddy and I frightened them away. They've just made a mess, that's all.'
Lenny peered toward the main bedroom. 'Did they mess up your whole room?'
СI'm afraid so. But we have insurance. We'll just have to go out and buy ourselves a couple of new pillows and a new comforter.'
Lenny said, 'I'm going to get a drink of water. My mouth feels awful dry.' He disappeared into the second bathroom.
John came up the stairs, followed by two detectives and two uniformed police officers. The detectives were both pale-skinned blacks, remarkably alike, and when they reached the landing Jennifer saw to her surprise that they were twins. One of the officers accompanying them was white, the other black. Jennifer couldn't help thinking that she didn't know when she'd seen such a racially balanced group before. They were like a road show for Mendel's theory of genetics.
One of the detectives came forward, his hands in his coat pockets, and said to Jennifer, 'Sergeant Clay, ma'am. And this is Detective Clay.'
Both sergeant and detective were tall and smooth-skinned, with those flat, almond-shaped faces and slightly hooked noses that betray Arabian ancestry. They both wore shiny metallic mohair suits and black loafers. The only noticeable difference between them was that Sergeant Clay had one brown eye and one gray one; while Detective Clay's eyes were both brown.
'Mind if I take a look?' asked Sergeant Clay, and eased open the bedroom door. His twin followed him inside. The two uniformed officers waited on the landing, one of them assiduously penciling notes in his notebook, the other yawning.
'Well, they made some kind of a mess,' Sergeant Clay remarked. 'How much did they take?'
That's the odd part about it,' said John from the doorway. 'As far as we can make out, they didn't take anything at all. They just broke the place up.'
Detective Clay crouched down on his haunches, balancing himself with the splayed fingers of one hand. His nostrils flared slightly, as if he were trying to distinguish some faint and equivocal odour.
They broke everything,' put in Jennifer. 'There isn't one single item in this room that hasn't been torn or damaged or thrown around.'
Sergeant Clay stepped carefully all around the room, glancing at this, studying that. Eventually he said, 'How do you think they got in?'
'What?' asked John.
СI said, "How do you think they got in?'"
John made a face. СI really have no idea. The garden door has been locked all day, and nobody could have come in that way this evening without us seeing them. All of the downstairs windows have security bars and locks. And apart from the fanlights in this room and Lenny's bedroom down at the end of the corridor and the John across the landing, all of the upstairs windows are closed and locked.'
'Have you looked around the house since this happened?'