"Carrie Richardson - A Dying Breed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Richardson Carrie)

My mind refused to accept the sight of the decomposed body standing before me, but the smell was
another matter. It was God-awful -- that vicious, rotten tang that even a novice can't mistake.
Kyle's noises had changed to the sound of vomiting. I didn't blame him, but I needed something I
could deal with. "Kyle, stop that right now! Angelina, get out here and make Kyle clean up his
mess!" Angie had managed to extricate herself from the tangle in my office. She edged up to the
front desk, never taking her gun off our visitor, and bent over the retching Kyle. I heard a
sharp slap, and a string of quiet Spanish profanity that would blister paint. Kyle shut up.
Angie can keep him in line. Me, I'm only his mother.
This had to be a dream or some sort of horrid practical joke, and I must look just as silly as I
felt. I tried to think of a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation. I opened my mouth,
to say I don't know what, but the apparition beat me to it.
"Sheriff Webster." The sound was a dry whisper that went right to my knee joints and gnawed.
The fleshless jaws moved a little, but I swear I don't know how it made sound: it had no lips, no


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tongue -- no lungs, for godsakes. The vacant orbits regarded me blankly. Any minute, I thought,
Angelina and Kyle are going to bolt and leave me here with this -- thing. Hell, I might even go
with them.
Instead, I found myself answering it. "I'm Sheriff Webster, yes." And, inanely, "How can I help
you?"
Shreds of dry flesh rustled as the corpse made a faint motion -- something that rang a familiar
chord, but there was no time to follow the thought -- with its hands. I felt like joining Kyle in
his adoration of the floor tiles. The whisper came again. "Arrest the man who killed me."
This just had to be a dream. Or maybe one of those new-fangled "Candid Camera" rip-offs.
Hollywood special effects can do anything these days. I was probably exchanging pleasantries with
latex and invisible wires. What could I do but play along? "Come into my office and tell me
about it."
As I passed the front desk I leaned over to address my deputies. "Angelina, get your notepad.
Kyle, get that mess cleaned up and get back on the radio. Both of you -- if you so much as
breathe a word of this to anybody, I will personally line you up against that wall and shoot you.
Do you understand me?"
They nodded, wide-eyed. Angelina whispered, "Doris, is that thing for real?"
"I don't know, Angie. Now get a move on." She crossed herself, and Kyle looked ready to heave
again. I fixed him with a glare that made him change his mind and turn back to the radio monitor.
I sat down behind my desk as the walking affront to gastric stability edged into the office and
lowered itself gingerly into the other chair. That left no room in the office for Angelina; she
took up station in the doorway behind the thing. She must have been thinking along the same lines
I had been: I saw her wave her hand through the air above it, feeling for wires. Nothing.
If it was fake, it was a beautiful job. Adult male, exact age and race unknown (I can do some
field forensics, but I'm not that good), in an advanced state of decompostion. All the internal
organs were gone, but some stringy remnants of muscle and skin clung to the bones. Some black
hair remaining on shreds of scalp. Dead several months, at least, but it would take a pathologist
to tell exactly how long.
Multiple traumatic fractures of all the long bones, several broken ribs, palmar bones crushed.
Probable cause of death: the entire left side of the skull was shattered. Dark emptiness yawned
within. Buried without benefit of shroud or coffin, and recently exhumed: dirt dusted the
parchment skin and filled the floors of the orbits, and a dessicated millipede was wound into one