"Jeffrey Thomas - The Hate Machines" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thomas Jeffrey)

"Oh God, oh no ... my baby ... my little girl," Cardiff sobbed instantly,
and Bell caught him as the attendant scrambled forward to glide the drawer
away again. Cardiff saw his daughter's long black hair, matted and glued
with her own blood, vanish through a caul of tears.
"We have three boys in custody already," Bell told him, still holding onto
his arms. "We're pretty sure they're responsible. They were pumped up on
buzzers when we brought them in, and one of them has a record of previous
sexual assault..."
"Sexual assault," Cardiff echoed, gasping for air. "Sexual assault ... my
baby ... my little girl..."
"I know," Bell told him. "I know."

Cardiff was given three days off from work. He made a recording of the
single mention of his daughter's murder that he witnessed on VT. They
might not have bothered at all had Lena and Marisol not been so pretty, so
photogenic, even in death. They showed a vid of his daughter's body
splayed in some parking lot where she had been found, even showed a
close-up of tiny red ants swarming on her bare belly around the navel that
Cardiff had kissed to tease her as a toddler. Then, they showed the three
young men brought into court for their arraignment. They were all three of
them short, slender, crewcut, such a mix of ethnic groups they had become
no ethnic group at all, like a distillation of the worst of every race and
culture. One of them rubbed away tears in his eyes. After he made the
recording, Cardiff played it back, and froze on the face of this crying
boy. He was crying for himself, not the two girls he had slain. Not for
Lena.
But worse than the crying boy was another who smiled. He even looked
directly into the camera, and hence directly at Cardiff, and smiled.
Cardiff froze on his face the longest. He studied the boy, waiting for
something other than sadness to come. Something other than anguish. He
waited, as if he couldn't remember what else he might feel, as if he were
trying to remind himself why he was even looking at this smirking
stranger's face.
At last, unfulfilled, he shut the VT off. And with its glow extinguished,
a subtler luminosity caught his attention.
"You!" Cardiff bellowed, leaping instantly to his feet. He aimed his
finger at the evil imp's green circle of face. "You think this is funny,
fucker? You think this is all a big joke? Huh? Huh?" He started toward the
thing, his hands like an eagle's talons.
Saundra and Seth came in from the other room, having heard his outburst.
Saundra's eyes were red and Seth had been comforting her.
Cardiff glanced over his shoulder at them and then turned instead to the
door, leaving his apartment.

When he returned to work after the funeral, Cardiff had bought a small
hate machine for his car, and an even smaller one with a flip-open lid
that revealed a red clown's face, which he carried in his jacket pocket.
He would need to have this one on him when he went to the trial.
He had been working for several hours when he remembered the photo of Lena
he had hidden in his drawer. Drawer like a morgue drawer. He immediately