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

The chill touch of the wind found her lips. The bees there had left.

"Oh, God," Honey said, sucking in air. "Oh God oh God oh God."

"From your profession, I wouldn't have guessed you to be religious," Stinger said.

"Please," she said. "Please don't kill me."

"I can't make any promises," he said.

"Please. Not like this. Not dressed in lingerie, wearing this make-up. Oh God, what will my parents
think?"

"One advantage of being an orphan," said Stinger. "I never had any awkward conversations. If I'd had
folks, they probably wouldn't have been thrilled by my career choice. I'm sure your folks aren't happy."
"M-my real name isn't Honey," she said. She remembered hearing in movies that it's important for
hostages to remind kidnappers that you were a real person. So, as surreal as it seemed to make
conversation buried under a mound of bees, she continued: "My real name's Barbara. I'm from Dayton,
Ohio. I came here to be an actress and only do this to pay rent. I have a mother, a father, two
sisters--they don't know I'm a hooker. I don't want to die and have them find out what I've been up to on
the evening news. Please, please, let me go."

"If you could see where you are, you'd be more careful with your words," Stinger said.

"You said you were a hero! A superhero! Why are you doing this? Why?"

"Because heroes work for justice, right? Wrong. The Blue Bee, he had forty years. He could have
broken me out of jail at any time. He ignored me. I did forty years hard time before making parole. The
Blue Bee, he had money. Impossible, unimaginable wealth. He could have pulled strings. He could have
hired attorneys. He was a master of disguise--he had alternate identities set up. He could have helped
me, but he didn't."

"I'm sorry," Honey said.

"He's vanished, you know. The Blue Bee hasn't seen action in forty years. I watch the papers."

"He might be dead," Honey said. "How do you know he'll come here? Even if he's alive, he might be in a
home by now. He'd be in his seventies."

"He's alive," said Stinger. "His secret identity--the obituary appeared years ago. But it had a code phrase
in it, to let me know he'd assumed one of his cover identities. I just don't know which one."

"Where ... where are we? It feels like I've been carried around a lot? It sounds like we're up high some
place? Oh God. They're crawling on my eyes. Please, please take them off my face at least. Please."

Stinger sighed. He hummed a little noise, deep in his throat, and the bees crawled away from her face
and throat.

She opened her eyes and looked down, to police lights flashing a hundred impossible stories away. She