"Callahan 02 - Time Travellers Strictly Cash 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

"I dried my hands. I went into the living room. On the mantel, by the bedroom door, was the envelope, tucked behind the flowerpot. Tucked behind it was his service revolver. I left it there and walked out the door and came here and started drinking, and now I've had enough of this fucking coffee. I want a screwdriver."
Fast Eddie deserves his name. He was the first of us to snap out of the trance, and it probably didn't take him more than thirty seconds. He walked over to the bar on his banty little legs and slapped down a dollar and said, "Screwdriver, Mike."
Callahan shook his head slightly. He drew on his cigar and frowned at it for having gone out. He flung it into the fireplace and built a screwdriver, and he never said a mumblin' word. Eddie brought her the drink. She drained half at once.
Shorty Steinitz spoke up, and his voice sounded rusty. I service air-conditioning systems. The big ones. I was over at Century Lanes today. Their unit has an intermittent that I can't seem to trace. It keeps cuttin' in and out."
She shut her eyes and did something similar to smiling and nodded herhead. "That's it, all right. He'll be home early."
Then she looked me square in the eye.
"Well, Jake, do you understand now? I'm scared as hell! Because I'm here instead of there, and so he's not going to kill me after all. And he tells me that if you try to prevent a death, something worse happens, and I'm going out of my
mind wondering what could be worse than getting killed!" Total horror flooded through me; I thought my heart would stop.
I knew what was worse than getting killed.
Dear Jesus, no, I thought, and I couldn't help it. I wanted very badly to keep my face absolutely straight and my eyes holding hers, and I couldn't help it. There was just that tiny hope, and so I glanced for the merest instant at the Counterclock and then back to her. And in that moment of moments, scared silly and three-quarters bagged, she was readng me clearly enough to pick up on it and know from my face that something was wrong.
It was 10:15.
My heart was a stone. I knew the answers to the next questions, and again I couldn't help myself: I had to ask
them.
"Mrs-?"
"Kathy Anders. What's the matter?" Just what I had asked her, a few centuries ago.
"Kathy, you. . . you didn't lock the house behind you when you left?"
Callahan went pale behind the bar, and his new cigar fell out of his mouth.
"No," she said. "What the hell has that-"
"And you were too upset to think of-"
"Oh, Christ," she screamed. "Oh, no, I never thought! Oh, Christ, Wally, that dumb cocky kid. He'll show up at ten and find the door wide open and figure I went to the corner for beer and decide it's cuts to wait for me in bed, and-" She whirled and found the clock, and puzzled out the time somehow, and wailed, "No!" And I tore in half right down the middle. She sprang frbm her chair and lurched toward the bar. I could not get to my feet to follow her. Callahan was already holding out the telephone, and when she couldn't dial it, he got the number out of her and dialed it for her. His face was carven from marble. I was just getting up on my hindlegs by then. No one else moved. My feet made no sound at all on the sawdust. I could clearly hear the phone ringing on the other end. Once. Twice, Three limes. "Come on, Cass, damn you, answer me!" Four times. Oh dear God; I thought; she still doesn't get it. Five times. Maybe she does get it and won't have it. Six times.
It was picked upon the seventh ring, and at once she was shrieking, "You killed him, you bastard. He was just a jerk kid, and you had to-"
She stopped and held the phone at arm's length and stared at it. It chittered at her, an agitated chipmunk. Her eyes
went round.
"Wally?" she asked it weakly. Then even more weakly she said to it, "That's his will in that manila envelope," and
she fainted.
"Mike!" I cried, and leaped forward. The big barkeep understood me somehow and lunged across the bar on his belly and caught the phone in both hands. That left me my whole attention to deal with her, and I needed that and all my strength to get her to the floor gently.
"Wally," Callahan was saying to the chipmunk, "Waily, listen to me. This is a friend. I know what happened, and-listen to me, Wally, I'm trying to keep your ass out of the slam. Are you listening to me, son? Here's what you've got to do-"
Someone crowded me on my left, and I almost belted him before I realized it was Doc Webster with smelling salts.
"-No,screw fingerprints, this ain't TV. Just make up the goddamn bed and put yer cigarette butts in yer pocket and don't touch anything else-"
She coughed and came around.
"-sure nobody sees you leave, and then you get your ass over to Callahan's bar, off 25A. We got thirty folks here'll swear you been here all iiight, but it'd be nice if we knew what you looked like."
She stared up at us vacantly, and as I was helping her get up and into a chair, I was talking. I wanted her to be involved in listening to me when full awareness returned. It would be very hard to hold her, and I was absolutely certain I couid do it.
"Kathy, you've got to listen carefully to me, because if you don't, in just another minute now you're going to try and swallow one-giant egg of guilt, and it will, believe me, slick in your throat and choke you.. You're choking on a couple already, and this one might kill you-and it's not fair, it's not right, it's not just. You're gonna award yourself a guilt that you don't deserve, and the moment you accept it and pin it on, it'll stay with you for the rest of your life. Believe me, I know. Damn it, it's okay to be glad you're still alive!"
"What the hell do you know about it?" she cried out. "I've been there," I said softly. "As recently as an hour ago."
Her eyes widened.
"I came in here tonight so egoceotrically wrapped up n my own pain that I sat next to you for fifteen minutes and never noticed you, until some friends woke me up. This is a kind of anniversary for me, Kathy. Five years and one day ago I bad a wife and a two-year-old daughter. Andi had a Big Book of Auto Repair. I decided I could save thirty dollars easy by doing my own brake job. I tested it myself and drove maybe a whole block. Five years ago tonight all three of us went to the drive-in movie. I woke up without a scratch on me. Both dead. I smiled at the man who was trying to cut my door open, and I climbed out the window past him and tried to get my wrists on his chainsaw. He coldcocked me, and I woke up under restraint. "I locked eyes with her. "I was glad to be alive, too. That's why I wanted to die so bad."
She blinked and spoke very softly. "How. . . bow did you keep alive?"
"I got talking with a doctor the size of a hippo named Sam Webster, and he got me turned loose and brought me around here."
She waited for me to finish. "You-that's it? What is that?"
"Dis is Callahan's Place," Eddie said.
"This place is magic," t told her.
"Magic? Bullshit, magic, it's a bar. People come here to get blind."
"No. Not this one. People come to this bar to see. That's why I'm ashamed at how long it took me to see you. This is a place where people care. For as long as I sat here in my pain, my friends were in pain with me and did what they could to help. They told stories of past blunders to makeit a little easier for me to make my annual toast to my family. You know what gives me the courage to keep on living? The courage to love myself a little? It's having a whole bunch of friends who really give a goddamn. When you share pain, there's less of it, and when you share joy, there's more of it. That's a basic fact of the universe, and I learned it here. I've seen it work honest-to-God miracles."
"Name me a miracle."
"Of all the gin joints in all the world, you come into this one. Tonight, of all the nights in the year. And you look like her, and your name is Kathy."
She gaped. "I-your wife?- I look-?"
"Oh, not a ringer-that only happens on The Late Late Show. But close enough to scare me silly. Don't you see, Kathy? For five years now I've been using that word, fivesight, not in conversation, just in my head, as a private label for precognition. I jumped when you, said it. For five years now I've been wishing to God I'd been born with it. I was wishing it earlier tonight;
"Now I know better."
Her jaw worked, but she made no sound.
"We'll help you, Kathy-," Callahan said.