"Van Lustbader, Eric - Angel Eyes(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

The two of them got up. "Stay here," Tori said to Russell.
"But-"
"You'll be all right as long as you don't move." Her eyes fixed his. "Do you understand me?"
Russell nodded unhappily. It was perfectly clear. He was a gringo in the middle of a hostile environment. He needed the lowest possible profile.
Tori and Estilo made their way laterally across the tiers of cheering aficionados. The man who Cruz's woman had been looking at had left his seat. Tori knew there was a need to hurry, the noise was perfect cover. But they could not afford to divert attention to themselves.
"How do you want to do this?" Estilo asked.
"You go up behind him," Tori said. "I'll try to get between him and Cruz."
Estilo nodded, and the two of them split up. Estilo made his way up the tiers, higher and higher, working through the throng, which was still on its feet, applauding the beautiful death of the bull.
Tori was now near enough to the dark-skinned man to see the death stare in his eyes. It was a look she knew well, the mark of pure concentration, when the environment narrows down to one focus point: the kill. In this case, the victim was Cruz.
Estilo had identified the dark-skinned man as a member of the Orola drug clan, Cruz's bitter rival. The Orolas were from Cali, and Estilo knew them all.
The dark-skinned man was coming not with a shotgun or a MAC-10 machine pistol, but with a small-caliber handgun. It was a suicide mission, for sure, but it was the kind of surgical strike the Orolas preferred. It was the Medellin sicarios who loved to blow away half a city block to get their job done. Moreover, there was an elegant sense of irony at work here, executing Cruz at the corrida, in the tumultuous moment after the kill, that was typical of the Orola mind. Tori admired the strategy even as she worked herself into place to foil it.
She was very near the dark-skinned man now, and she stood still, contracting her wa, allowing his concentrated energies to pass over her. He was aware of nothing but his target: Cruz. He need not even concern himself with Cruz's bodyguards, who, in any case, were trained to look for weaponry, because he did not have to think about an escape. There was no escape.
The crowd was chanting, roaring, surging as the matador ceremoniously withdrew his blade from the heart of the beast. A single line of blood ran down his sword.
Tori waited until the dark-skinned man drew his gun. He raised it, aiming at Cruz's heart. With a great kiai shout. Tori lunged forward, the hardened underedge of her hand snapping the bone in the dark-skinned man's extended forearm.
She was aware of Cruz turning in a defensive crouch, the contraction of the circle of his bodyguards, their shotguns swinging down in concert. Screams from the crowd, the beginnings of a core of panic from those bystanders nearest the incident.
There was no reason for haste now. Tori twisted the gun from the dark-skinned man's trembling hand, held him up as his legs gave way beneath him. His head fell loosely in shock. As she saw the vulnerable spot at the back of his head, she thought of the bull, lying in its own blood in the red dust of the corrida below her. In this, she thought, Estilo is wrong, there can be no beauty, no artistry in this. Death is its own realm, it is finite, and when it comes, it comes, finis.
Cruz was shouting to his bodyguards, and they nimbly stepped around the fleeing people. All of them were focused on her. Cruz moved along the are of the tier to where Tori stood, holding the dark-skinned man.
When she judged Cruz close enough. Tori grabbed a handful of the dark-skinned man's hair, jerked his head up so Cruz could see his face.
"Do you know this man?" Cruz asked her in a voice made hoarse by the proximity to death and by his innate suspicion.
"He is from Cali," Tori said. "He was to be a gift from the Orolas."
"A final gift, it would seem,'' Cruz said, taking the gun from her. He examined it, then looked full into Tori's face. "He had to get close to use this. He wasn't going to get out, was he?"
"Not today."
Cruz put the muzzle of the man's gun against the back of his head and pulled the trigger. "Not any day," he said.
Cruz lived in an enormous suite on the top floor of the Monaco Building, a glitzy apartment dwelling in El Poblado, Med-ellin's choicest district. His men patrolled the surrounding block, and there were two guards armed with shotguns in the hallway of his apartment. Inside, the living room was lined with bear and leopard skins, Flemish tapestries, and his lieutenants-more sicarios.
Because he had summarily executed the Orola assassin without first interrogating him, Tori had lowered her estimation of Cruz. But it would have meant a loss of face in front of all those paisas had he not killed the man immediately, and his business would no doubt have suffered as a consequence.
He was not a bad-looking sort, though he was flat-faced. His black hair came down in a widow's peak; he wore it slicked back, very long against his neck. But he scowled a great deal, he had an overactive trigger finger, and he was much feared in and around Machine-Gun City.
Certainly the Orolas found him something more than a nuisance. Just about three months ago he and ten of his sicarios had ambushed the youngest of the Orola brothers at the El Cerrito tollbooth. He had been making inquiries of Cruz's contacts with the Bolivian cocaleros-the coca farmers who grew the plant from which cocaine was ultimately refined. Cruz had not taken kindly to what he had seen as an act of war, and he had retaliated in the only true language he spoke. The five-minute hail of bullets fired from the massed MAC-10's of Cruz's sicarios had taken out not only their target, but his three bodyguards, a dozen human mules moving one hundred kilos of raw cocaine, and four bystanders, not to mention taking the concrete and tin tollbooth apart at the seams. Cruz had bragged about the kill for weeks afterward.
"This was not the first attempt on my life made by the Orolas," Cruz said as they seated themselves in his enormous living room. "But they are incompetent. They do not know how to refine the art of killing." He was bragging again, but what the hell, Tori thought, he was safe, in the center of his own turf, with the scalp of another of his enemies fresh on his fingers. He was entitled.
Tori made the introductions, and Cruz listened politely but, she thought, a bit disinterestedly. She was prepared to do something about that, but only at the right moment.
"Do you know what this country would be without me and the people like me?" Cruz said. "Fucked." He laughed. "Ask the economists, if you doubt me. The Colombian economy is so fragile, like the glass of one of my Ming vases. Without cocaine trafficking to prop it up, our country would be plunged into a recession so severe I fear there would be no end. No, no, on second thought don't ask the economists, they're a bunch of maricones. Ask the people of Colombia, they will tell you the truth. They do not want this internal war the president has pushed on the country. They are sick of their government. And I am sick of planting bombs in post offices and government buildings. In my opinion the government of Colombia is dead."
His self-promotion was like a cheap perfume, Tori thought, making everything around it reek. She already felt contaminated by his braggadocio.
Cruz's woman, Sonia, was servilely making the rounds, getting drinks for everyone. Tori thought she looked a little pale beneath her rich tan.
Tori sat next to Russell on a long sofa covered in pinto horse-hide. A Chinese vase-one of several throughout the room-sat on the center of a Lalique crystal cocktail table just in front of her. She noticed that the brocade curtains half closed across the windows were lined with metal foil. She wondered whether this made them bulletproof as well as soundproof. "Do you know what you're doing?" Russell asked her.
She said, "Are you good at improvisation, Russ? I hope so."
Cruz grunted. "So. Now you are here.'' His tone and manner suggested that this was all she was likely to get from him by way of a thank-you for saving his life: an invitation to the great man's sanctuary. He gave the impression that he was already bored with their company. Perhaps he had come to believe that he was immortal, that her intervention had been irrelevant. Or, just as likely, his absolute power had corrupted him absolutely, and he was now nothing more than a pig.
Either way, Tori decided, she was going to shake him. This fat man, Cruz, was not so different from others of his ilk. She knew what made him tick: power and sex, in that order. But for him, as for the others like him, sex was not so far away from power, and often the two were inextricably entwined.
Sonia was important to him. When she ceased to be important, Cruz would see to it that she disappeared from his life. She would be thrown into the gutter and made to stay there. But for now he conferred his power upon her like a shadow, and she in turn gave to him the aura of her sexuality. And this aura of hers had about it a kind of magic. Like a dice shooter on a roll, Cruz was convinced he had luck on his side. Luck in the form of Sonia. This, too, made her his showpiece, in bed as well as out there in the streets of Machine-Gun City, where he cut his deals, cut down his enemies, where he was king. The paisas watched her coming and going, and they envied Cruz his ability to attract and keep this woman with the sultry eyes.
Cruz was looking pointedly at his watch when Estilo rose from the plush sofa and said, ''Are you sure it's secure in here?''
Cruz looked up. "Secure? What do you mean by secure?"
"I was wondering about the Orolas," Estilo said. "Was that man the only assassin they have in Medellin?"
Cruz snorted derisively. "Are you crazy?" He pounded has chest like a gorilla, only with a good deal less charm. "This is my heart. My empire extends in all directions from this point. The Orolas are nothing. They have always been nothing. They do not have the cojones to worm their way into this building."
Sonia excused herself, and a moment later Tori did the same. Quickly, she followed Sonia through the apartment. As Sonia closed the door to one of the bathrooms, Tori stuck her shoe in the doorway, shoved the door open and stepped inside.
''Jesus.'' The place was as big as a football field. There were two of everything, including six-foot whirlpool spas and live palm trees. Tori could not tell whether there was more marble or mirror. She locked the door behind her, watched carefully the play of emotions on Sonia's face.
"Your days are numbered here," she said to Sonia. "Any fortune-teller would tell you that.''
"In fact, one already has," Sonia said with surprising candor. "Her face was white when she told me." Sonia waited a minute, trying and failing to get the measure of Tori. ''Did Cruz send you?" She seemed unafraid, almost defiant.
Tori laughed. "Madre de Dios, no."
''But you're a friend of his."
"I want something from him. That's not the same thing."
"Almost," Sonia said. "But no, not quite." Her shoulders slumped a little, as if she had been maintaining a pose. "You're just another business associate here to cut a deal."
"Maybe," Tori said. "But if I do, it won't be with Cruz." She put her back against the door. "Whose mistress are you?" She said it so abruptly and in such a different tone of voice that Sonia started. "Which one of the Orola brothers do you sleep with?"