"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - A Time for Every Purpose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

A Time for Every Purpose

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch


Fictionwise Contemporary Science Fiction
Nebula Award(R) Finalist; Year's 25 Best Mystery and Crime Stories
Pick



Shaunessy sat on the step leading into the laundromat. His jeans were
faded, his hair tousled, and he clutched a superball in his slender, unlined
right hand. He wore a ripped Moetley Cruee T-shirt that made him feel
less than he was. He repeated his title to himself for reassurance:
Shaunessy. Detective. Homicide. Time Force.
The summer heat, thick with humidity, surrounded him. He
remembered the neighborhood well. Throughout his childhood, they had
called it Willy Street. Its run-down buildings were home for the city's poor,
the counterculture, and the vagrants. By now, 1994, the renovation project
that had started in 1986 had blossomed into a revived neighborhood:
rejuvenated Victorian homes stood beside houses that hadn't seen paint or
repair since the mid-1930s. The residents of the redesigned homes now
called the area Williamson Street. In another decade, only the aging
hippies who had never been able to leave Madison would use the area's
nickname.
He remembered the neighborhood well. But he hadn't remembered
what it was like to be fourteen.
Shaunessy ran his hand through his soft hair, feeling the dampness of
sweat at the roots. His heart seemed to be beating twice as fast as normal,
and he knew that it wasn't caused by waiting for Rothke. A
fourteen-year-old's body felt different from a seventy-year-old's. That was
what Kaiser had tried to warn him about. You were just a kid, Michael,
Kaiser had said. A kid's body doesn't react like an adult's.
How well he was learning that. He had gotten an erection watching a
woman walk down the street тАФ not a very attractive woman, slightly
obese, but wearing a sundress so small that he saw her breasts straining
against the fabric.
His pants were getting tight just from the memory. He stretched out his
legs and tugged at the hems. Then he took a deep breath and went over
the plan in his mind.
Rothke would arrive at six with a bag of laundry. He had been explosive
all week тАФ the heat combined with his particular mental unbalance. At
six-fifteen, Connie Grayson would walk in. She was a college freshman
whose parents had bought her a condo in one of the renovated buildings.
Her washing machine had broken down, and she had a date at eight. She
would strike up a conversation with Rothke, ask him if he was a student.
He would later say it was like a bomb going off in his head тАФ of course he
wasn't a student. He wasn't a pampered rich boy who had money and
brains and looks. He was a hard-luck kid who lived in a $400 studio next