"Michael Swanwick - The Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

"You know what no means, Donald. You're not stupid."

"No I'm not, and neither are you. We both know the score. Now let me in, goddamnit."

"Enjoy your present," she said, and closed the door.

I found Courtney's present back in my suite. I was still seething from her treatment of me and stalked into
the room, letting the door slam behind me so that I was standing in near-total darkness. The only light
was what little seeped through the draped windows at the far end of the room. I was just reaching for the
light switch when there was a motion in the darkness.

Jackers! I thought, and all in panic lurched for the light switch, hoping to achieve I don't know what.
Credit-jackers always work in trios, one to torture the security codes out of you, one to phone the
numbers out of your accounts and into a fiscal trapdoor, a third to stand guard. Was turning the lights on
supposed to make them scurry for darkness, like roaches? Nevertheless, I almost tripped over my own
feet in my haste to reach the switch. But of course it was nothing like what I'd feared.

It was a woman.

She stood by the window in a white silk dress that could neither compete with nor distract from her
ethereal beauty, her porcelain skin. When the lights came on, she turned toward me, eyes widening, lips
parting slightly. Her breasts swayed ever so slightly as she gracefully raised a bare arm to offer me a lily.
"Hello, Donald," she said huskily. "I'm yours for the night." She was absolutely beautiful.

And dead, of course.
Not twenty minutes later I was hammering on Courtney's door. She came to the door in a Pierre Cardin
dressing gown and from the way she was still cinching the sash and the disarray of her hair I gathered she
hadn't been expecting me.

"I'm not alone," she said.

"I didn't come here for the dubious pleasures of your fair white body." I pushed my way into the room.
(But couldn't help remembering that beautiful body of hers, not so exquisite as the dead whore's, and
now the thoughts were inextricably mingled in my head: death and Courtney, sex and corpses, a Gordian
knot I might never be able to untangle.)

"You didn't like my surprise?" She was smiling openly now, amused.

"No, I fucking did not!"

I took a step toward her. I was shaking. I couldn't stop fisting and unfisting my hands.

She fell back a step. But that confident, oddly expectant look didn't leave her face. "Bruno," she said
lightly. "Would you come in here?"

A motion at the periphery of vision. Bruno stepped out of the shadows of her bedroom. He was a
muscular brute, pumped, ripped, and as black as the fighter I'd seen go down earlier that night. He stood
behind Courtney, totally naked, with slim hips and wide shoulders and the finest skin I'd ever seen.