"James Maxey - The Final Flight of the Blue Bee" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maxey James)

"A hostage," Stinger said.
****
Three weeks in the hospital and Robert didn't come to see him once. Not a terrible shock, he supposed.
Mick had been unconscious when they pulled off his mask. He was gratified to learn that he was listed on
the hospital charts as John Doe. They didn't recognize him. Why should they? He had no life outside of
being Stinger, and no relatives now that his grandmother had died. Publishing his photo in the paper didn't
turn up any leads. They'd fingerprinted him, but he'd never had any real trouble with the law. If millionaire
physician Robert E. Eggers were to suddenly drop in to visit the John Doe handcuffed to the bed, it
wouldn't take a terribly clever person to connect the dots.

The police had quite a case against him. The murder weapon had his prints on it. He'd been caught
fleeing the scene of the crime. The final blow--after he'd healed enough to eat solid food again, he'd been
taken down to the police station and interrogated under bright lights for five hours. The police hadn't been
shy about banging on his casts, or landing punches on areas of his body already bruised and broken.
He'd finally admitted to shooting Mr. Mental. The guy's real name turned out to be Mark Carpenski,
who'd made his living as a hypnotist on the Jersey Shore before becoming a bank robber.

"He was going to detonate the world's nuclear arsenal with his electro-helmet," Mick protested. "I'm a
hero, not a criminal."

The commissioner tossed the helmet onto the table before him.

"This thing ain't nothing but an army helmet wrapped in tin foil, kid," the Commissioner said. "Now, you
going to tell us your name, or not? After they scrape your ashes out of the electric chair, wouldn't you like
your headstone to say something other than John Doe?"

Despite the beatings, the threats, the tricks, and promises of a bargain, Mick never broke. He never told
them his name, or betrayed the Blue Bee. He claimed partial amnesia after his nine-story fall, claimed he
couldn't remember who he had been before that final confrontation, and eventually they'd given up.
Perhaps they believed him. Certainly, his boyish good looks, his stoic air, and his insistence that he'd
done the world a favor by killing Mr. Mental, swayed the jurors. They found him not guilty of first degree
murder. But manslaughter, assault with a deadly weapon, breaking and entering, resisting arrest, all
brought in guilty verdicts. At twenty, Stinger, a.k.a. John Doe, secretly Mick Payton, found himself in jail
for forty years to life.

If he'd ever ratted out the Blue Bee, he could have cut his sentence in half.
****
The word didn't quite register with Honey. It seemed to be from some foreign language, nonsense noises
strung together.

"Hostage?" she asked.

Stinger turned toward her and held up a Dixie cup full of yellow fluid. She couldn't tell what it was. Then,
without warning, he threw it on her.

"What the hell are you doing?" she yelled. She sniffed the drops of the yellow fluid that trembled in the
light hairs of her arm. It didn't smell like urine. It smelled nice, actually, like daffodils. Still, that was no
excuse.