"Miller, Kevin James - The Taking Of Martha Lorrimar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Miller Kevin James)

"No. You know. At those hotels near there."
"Let me think....Our inside guy says she's, like a sex addict or something. Nympho. Toland cut her into the con with the offshore accounts because she puts out for Toland a lot--and I mean a lot. So I guess this thing about her being a whore, for more sex and money, yeah that makes sense. If you can grab Toland's secretary out there, near the airport, maybe our plan will still work. Her name is Alice Carson. Of course, if she's not using her real name, I guess we're screwed again. And Bo?"
"Yeah?"
"Waste the girl you got there in the van already, OK?"
The high school had a huge parking lot that was nice and big and empty, and well away from the street. Bo went there, opened the door, and told Martha Lorimar to walk out and keep waling in a straight line and yeah, with the cotton and all still on her eyes.
He was drawing a bead on the back of her head, when three sets of headlights blinded him.
When he could saw again, three marked police cars were in front of him. He saw, in silhouette, three pairs of cops standing by the patrol cars.
"Drop that gun, son," said a voice.
Martha Lorimar had disappeared.
Bo let the .45 fall to the parking lot with a clatter.
One of the cops came out from behind the headlights, a guy about 40, blue eyes, his patrolman's hat pushed back on his balding head. Hell, the guy still had his service revolver in its holster.
"What are you doing here, son?"
"I work at the factory near the train station. I couldn't sleep after I got off the late shift."
True. Bo and J.T. didn't make enough money off crime, at least not yet, to live off that. J.T. worked in a garage, and Bo in the factory.
The cop looked down at the .45.
"And the gun?"
"There are many scary guys I work with at the plant. I'm afraid sometimes they're going to follow me."
Without the cop saying anything, Bo dug out his wallet and displayed the permit for the gun.
"Yeah, OK," said the cop. He looked down at the .45. "My dad, in the army, had a gun just like that." He looked at Bo again. "Bet you're wondering what so many of us are doing here. Huh?"
"It's none of my business."
"That's true. I'll tell you anyway. It's drugs, son. Selling them, using them, hurting each other over them. Happens a lot at this school, and usually after hours." The cop looked at the school and sighed. "I wish these kids who go here would spend more of their time fucking."
After the cops let Bo go, he tried the hotels out near the airport. At the second one, he was trying to act sexy and interested with this 18-year-old girl with much red hair and acne who was working the front desk, when he got a look at the sign-in book: Alice Carson--Room 932.
He came off the elevator onto the ninth elevator. He heard the gunshots, ten of them, sounding like firecrackers going off in a toilet.
From a room down the hall, a man wearing just baggy underwear staggered out. Hi eyes were two pools of blood. He hit the wall opposite his room, and slid to the floor, groaning louder than hurricane ripping up the whole world.
A skinny blond woman hurtled out of the same room, wearing just a terry cloth bathrobe. Bruises covered her face. Her long, drawn out scream hurt Bo's ears. She had her hands wrapped around Martha Lorimar's throat.
And Martha Lorimar had gotten rid of the cotton and bandanna Bo had put over her eyes and now held a silver automatic pistol and a slender back briefcase.
She shot the skinny blond woman in the head.
Then Martha Lorimar noticed Bo. She pointed her gun at him.
"You," she said. "Someone in this dump is going to call the cops with all this racket. Let's give them somebody to tell them a story."
She shot Bo in the leg.
Bo grunted and hit the floor.
He heard Martha Lorimar walk up to him as his nose dug into the hallway carpet
"Yeah, I recognized you. Got the rope off my wrist and the blindfold off at the high school, and studied your pretty face from the bushes. I'm 44 next week. I tried to play it their way, for more than twenty years, and I can't take it. When I was young, even more than you, they called me the Spider. Stupid name for a girl, huh? Fuck 'em. Fuck 'em all. With what's in this briefcase, and what that dumb dead bitch told me, I can set myself up anywhere. Let them try and get their cops and stupid people with clipboards and medications and questions and their how-do-you-feel-today shit on me then."
Bo heard her walk away.
He passed out for a while. When he woke up, he heard sirens, like trillions of them, from outside the hotel.
The parking garage for the hotel was just below the official first floor. There was a button for the parking garage in the elevator.
Bo dug out his .45 and buried it in an ice machine he found around the corner. He ripped up his T-shirt and tired it around his bloody leg.
All that time, he was thinking. He was thinking about a teenager girl, or maybe someone twenty-two, twenty-three, more than two decades back, who had been in charge of anything illegal in this stupid town and that girl still being inside that heavy woman who had shot him in the leg. Stack that up against J.T. and his "plans" and his "operations" that had always added up to what? Not much.
The hotel hadn't been opened a month. The layout of the whole place was confusing, and maybe it hard for anybody to get out in hurry, maybe even not somebody smart, no matter how cold. Bo gambled on that, and on not having been passed out that long. His bare chest was cold, and he somehow dragged himself toward the elevator. He avoided the fast footsteps and the barking commands and the sounding of knocking on doors. All that, the cops, sure.
Into the elevator, and soon he was in the parking garage, under the hotel. He found the ramp that led up to the street, and stood in front of it, on his shaking, bloody leg, and waited. Bo didn't have to wait long.
Martha Lorimar, the Spider, came roaring up to him in a brown Honda Civic. She slammed to a halt, got out of the car, and pointed her gun at him.
Neither of them said nor did anything for a moment. She didn't have anything to say, but Bo had two words for her.
"Take me."

Kevin James Miller writes: I have written 70 stories, reviews, and poems for over 30 publications, including "Rain on A Stranger's Eyes" in Mississippi Review Web Summer 2000 Noir Issue. My science fiction story "A Narrative of Future Possibilities" appeared in Would That It Were, the on-line "historical SF" publication. The fantasy story "Three Eyes That Never Close" appeared in The Cafe Irreal, an on-line publication dedicated to the surreal. "The Hotel of the Dead," appears in the paperback horror anthology Cold Storage. My radio play, "The Unraveling," will be produced by Mind's Ear Productions in Spring of 2001. I'm also a college English teacher. I'm the Contributing Writer for Infernal, an on-line publication that will be debuting in June.