"Spider Robinson - Distraction" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

DISTRACTION

"Why that dump, Angel?"
"Jesus, kid," the smaller man hissed. "What did I tell you about names?"
Thomas Two Bears stopped walking. "Shit, manтАФ"
Angel did not stop. "What did I tell you?" he repeated in a prison-yard murmur,
without turn-ing his head or moving his lips. "Say it back to me.
His large companion hurried to catch up, so he could reply without raising his
own voice above a whisper. "From the moment you go out on a job, you don't use
nobody's name, ever," he recited.
"And why not?"
A sentence was Thomas's limit of memoriza-tion; he took refuge in paraphrase.
"Then you get into the habit, like, and you don't go blabbin' somebody's name when
something goes wrong, and you don't gotta cool no citizens." He was puffing just a
bit: the sidewalk sloped uphill.
Angel winced. "The only time you cool a citizen is if he's tryin' to cool you first,
and you can't run away, and you can't stop him without chillin' him. Listen to me,
stupid: the Vancouver cops or the RCMP catch you with an armful of VCRs, a
good lawyer, you might do a year. You ice a citizen and it's at least a nickel.
Especially an Indian kid icin' a rich white dude."
Thomas brushed aside this digression. "I still want to know why that shithole
back there."
They had reached the big firehouse on the corner. Church across the street; a
good place to pause without drawing notice; not in front of anybody's house.
Besides, it was quite dark out, a usefully moonless and cloudy night. Angel stopped
and lit an Export A, his round face looking like a jack-o'-lantern in the glow from his
Bic lighter. "How is that place different?"
"It's a little dinky piece of shit. Peelin' paint. Dirty windows. The friggin' lawn's
got herpes, for shit's sake."
"Right. In West Point Grey. You know about this neighborhood?"
"It's where the money is. What else I gotta know?"
Angel shook his head. "He doesn't know the territory. Kid, you're lucky you ran
into me: you ain't got the brains to be a thief."
Thomas Two Bears could have twisted Angel's head off with one hand. He thrust
both of them deep into his pockets, and whispered, "I know that," so loudly that he
flinched himself. "So teach me like you said, okay?"
"Pay attention, then. Three or four years ago, all the houses on this block looked
like that, little and short and old, only with better lawns. Big like that one, but kept
up. Old retired rich people lived here. Then one morning, for no particular reason, all
the real estate guys woke up with a hard-on. They all got together and announced
this whole area was worth four times what it was the day before, and the citizens all
bought it. Next thing you know, a plague of realty rats came through here buyin' up
all the nice old wood-frame houses, and they tore 'em all down and built all these
giant ugly Martian boxes out of balsa wood and slapped stucco on 'em and sold 'em
to airhead yuppies for a couple of mil apiece."
Thomas looked back down the street. Most of the houses did look like the box a
real house had come in. "So?"
"So tell me: what kind of guy, you go to him and say, `I'll give you three times
what your house is worth,' and he says, `Take a hike, I like it where I am'?"
"Oh." Thomas lit a Player's Light King of his own, his last, and tossed away the