"Laura Resnick - Ever Since Eden" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Laura)

me. The man who got out of it was dripping with sweat and shouting. He also
had a six-foot long snake dangling from his right hand.
I was inside the store and hiding behind the cash register before I
realized that he wasn't just trying to scare me with the creature he held
dangling from his fist. He was in trouble. Things got pretty chaotic when he
followed me inside. I screamed and threw up. Several other people screamed.
The cashier phoned 911 and screamed for help while simultaneously screaming at
the man to get the hell out of her store. And the man was babbling wildly,
trying to ask for help.
The thing had bitten him in his own yard, and for reasons which elude
me to this day, he had chased it under his porch and captured it. It bit him a
second time. He seized it by the throat and was taking it with him to the
Emergency Room; this way, he claimed, the doctors could identify it and give
him the correct treatment.
As far as I was concerned, _shooting_ this idiot would be the correct
treatment. The young police officer who arrived a couple of minutes later
seemed to agree with me, since he approached the store with his gun cocked and
pointed straight at the man.
"Sir, put the snake down!" the cop cried.
"Where's the hospital?" the man screamed, red-faced and shaking. The
snake wriggled.
"Don't put it down!" I screamed. I was cornered behind the cash
register. My refuge had become a trap.
"Put down the snake!" the cop shouted, his gun shaking. "I'm going to
shoot it."




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 "No, no! The hospital! I've got to get it to the hospital!"
"Sir, you're hysterical! I think you may be delirious! Now put the
snake down!"
"You afraid of snakes, son?" the cashier asked the cop.
The cop pointed the gun at her. She hit the deck. I never took my eyes
off the snake. I had a plan. If the man dropped it, I'd climb up on the
refrigerator unit.
"I think that thing is dead," the cashier said to me when the two men
went back to shouting at each other. "It couldn't breathe with the death-grip
that guy's had on its throat all this time."
I apologized for throwing up in her store.
The cop finally convinced the man to drop the snake. I jumped on top of
the refrigerator unit and cracked my tailbone. The cop fired six shots at the
snake, which danced all over the floor until it finally lay in a motionless,
mangled heap. The cop dragged the raving man out to his squad car and took
off.
I went home, packed up my belongings, and left Texas forever.
Now, you may think this story is a feeble reason to abandon not only
job and boyfriend, but to also eliminate any chance of ever again setting foot
in the biggest state in the coterminous United States. Frankly, that's what