"Spider Robinson - Very Bad Deaths" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

one was dead or badly hurt. A neighbor who wanted to tell me my house was on fire. The first home
invader in the history of Heron Island.
Number four was a joke; we did have a full-time RCMP officer on the island, Corporal McKenzie, but
he'd never made an arrest. Numbers two or three would be bad news, but the kind I would want to open
my door to. It was number one that had me hesitating at the threshold.
I had little to fear from a legitimate police raid. Nothing, really, except annoyance and brief indignity.
My house and office were always scrupulously free of any seditious, proscribed or obscene materials,
My hard drive never contained anything remotely questionable whose encryption I did not trust
absolutely. And the contents of the little gray plastic film can, while outstanding in quality, were of a
quantity nobody could reasonably call anything but personal use. By a cheapskate. If part of your job
description is pissing off the powerful in the public prints, you're wise to keep a tight ship at all times.
But one of the things this knock might be was a mistake. Heron Island is about half an hour from
Vancouver. The drug squad, a right bunch of cowboys, loved to make surprise busts. The trouble was,
they were notorious fuckups. You probably read about the time they kicked in the wrong door, and the
20-year-old college student inside was unwise enough to be caught with a TV remote control in his hand
that, in a certain light, looked not too much unlike some sort of Martian weapon; he had to be killed to
ensure the safety of the officers. Who then learned that the guy they actually wanted lived next door, or
rather, used to; he had moved six months earlier. If you missed that story, you must have heard about the
squad that crashed their way into a house they had been surveilling continuously for days, were startled
to find a child's birthday party in progress inside, and were forced to blow the family watchdog into
hamburger, in front of a room full of horrified kids and terrified parents, for trying to protect them.
There turned out to be no drugs or drug users present.
In both cases, an internal inquiry totally exonerated the cops of any improper actions.
If, thanks to some totally typical typo, it was those guys out there knocking on my door, I definitely did
not want to open it with a weapon in my hand, even one as low tech as a plastic trackball.
But what ifтАФas seemed more likelyтАФit was some sort of nutbar out there? An insomniac Jehovah's
Witless, say, or a tourist ripped on acid. Or a belligerent drunk, or the new boyfriend of an old girlfriend
in search of karmic balance. In that case it might be better if I didn't, literally, drop the ball. I'm skinny,
frail, and no fighter: any edge at all was welcome.
Most likely of all, of course, was the secret nightmare of any opinion columnist bright enough to get
published: the disgruntled reader who decides to make his rebuttal in person, with a utensil. There is no
opinion you could conceivably express, however innocuous, that won't piss off somebody, somewhere.
It was comforting to be in Canada, where there are almost no handguns, despite everything the
government can do to keep them out.
But that didn't mean that the guy who was even now knocking on my door for the third time wasn't
doing so with the butt of a shotgun. Or the hilt of a butcher knife, the sweet spot of a Louisville Slugger,
the handle of an axe, or for that matter the tip of a chainsaw. Maybe, I thought, I should forget my silly
trackball and start thinking in terms of turning my half-liter can of Zippo fluid into a squeeze-operated
flamethrower, or some speaker wire into a noose, orтАФ
"Owww," whoever it was out there said. "Cut it out."
The voice was muffled; I could hear it at all only because he was speaking loudly. And the words were
baffling, when I'd thought myself as confused as possible already. Cut it out? I was standing still, frozen

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 - Chapter 1

with indecisionтАФwhat the hell was it I was supposed to stop doing?
"Being so paranoid," he called.