"Van Lustbader, Eric - Dark Homecoming(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

Rachel Duke undressed slowly and languorously. As she let her clothes fall to the floor, she thought of Gideon's body. Gideon, who was just a cubicle away and very soon would be closer than that. Her mind filled with images of Gideon's long, lean musculature: sinuous biceps, sleek flanks, hot butt. She was so in love with Gideon, she couldn't see straight. It might have been a yucky cliche, but the truth was she never knew what intimacy meant until she met Gideon. Rachel's parents weren't exactly big on intimacy; God alone knew how they had had her.
But she was not in her parents' world now; she was in Gideon's. Gideon was eighteen-three years older than Rachel. Not that the age thing mattered to either of them. Gideon's world was terrifying and intoxicating and exhilarating all at once, and Rachel couldn't get enough of it. She glanced at her watch: just past 2 a.m. and their day was just beginning. The last bit of clothing slithered to her ankles. She reached out, and as she pressed her palm to the bare wall that separated her from the next cubicle, a tremor of intent went through her. Gideon.
As she readied her body, so she readied her mind.
Soon, Rachel, at the Boneyard, was plugged in and turned on. She sat in the tiny cubicle. Dim illumination played like sunlight cascading through densely forested foliage. The drowsy sounds of birds and bees, the soft burble of a nearby stream wafted on air perfumed with a combination of cypress, juniper, and a hint of lime.
Rachel liked the dirty-sexy-free feeling that came from being in heat outdoors with the animals watching and knowing what you were doing. So she had dialed up all this synthetic light and sound and smell through the computer interface to which she was hooked up. The tangle of humid odors came to her through a hopped-up network that spewed aromatherapy essential oils into the cubicle.
She was naked, save for odd-looking garments of black rubber strapped across her breasts, over her groin, and around her thighs. Electrical leads ran from points on these garments to the computer terminal, and a flexible penislike projection rose up inside her.
The Boneyard was a virtual sex parlor, one of the first of its kind. Gideon had turned her on to it. It was a way to explore fantasies, to make real-or virtually real-what was in your head without fear of AIDS or other sexually transmitted diseases. It was, in short, the ultimate analgesic for the new, severely anxious generation.
Rachel sat back, legs spread, and watched through eyes slitted with a surfeit of drugs and lust, the electronic image of Gideon. With the computer interface, you could, of course, pick out anything to look at from the data bank images. But she and Gideon preferred their own images, as least when making virtual love to each other. When, on occasion, they interfaced sexually with like-minded individuals a half-continent away, they appeared on the monitor as all sorts of strange and wonderful people.
Rachel's right forefinger 'moved the trackball mouse pointer higher up Gideon's virtual inner thigh. At almost the same moment, jolts of pleasure were transmitted through the leads in her garments to one erogenous zone after another. With a little scream, Rachel came. Gideon, knowing her so well, kept her at the peak for so long, her feet lifted off the floor and her thighs began to shake uncontrollably until her head lolled to one side.
Afterward, in the sweaty interim between bouts, she snorted more coke. Gideon, in the next cubicle, was doing the same, she knew. Somewhere in the dim recesses of her mind Rachel knew it was too much, but she didn't care. She wanted more, needed that much in order not to think about her father, the flaming pyre of his death.
That particular thought caught like a thorn in her throat. She wanted to dissolve in tears but instead did more coke.
Was it true you never stopped loving your daddy no matter what? Even after he was dead? What part of him lived on in your heart like a dark seed, growing?
Part of her desperately wanted her mother to burst in and rip her from the sexual net, but her mother would never do it. For one thing, her mother would never believe the kind of secret life she was living. For another, she wouldn't know how to tackle it. Though she demanded to know where Rachel was going at night, every night, coming home at five, six in the morning, Rachel wouldn't tell her.
And still she let her go. That was her way. See something nasty, something incomprehensible and do the ostrich dance-stick your head in the sand. Why the hell didn't she stop us? Rachel thought. Because the time when she could is long past, and now it's far too late. Then the feeling-that peculiar burning that began in her thighs and crept upward took hold of her and felt too good. She thought: Maybe once I wanted her to come and save me; but what if I didn't? Because she was feeling that thorn in her throat again, she did more coke. Because if she didn't surely she'd set herself on fire. She'd tried, once, and Gideon had saved her. Had Gideon done a good or a bad thing?
The conundrum made her thirsty, and she gulped down some of the black lemonade she had purchased in the parlor outside.
This so-called parlor, the large common room of the Boneyard, was strewn with a hodgepodge of comfy Art Deco furniture. There you could just chill, rap a little while drinking a variety of coffees, cappuccinos, lattes, or, as was becoming increasingly popular with the kids who found their way here by word of mouth, a collection of sodas, dark and thick with herbal tinctures, featuring names like DOA, Skullcrusher, and BaddAss Brew. It was all loose-limbed, informal, low-tech out front. But back here in the CyberCubes, the surroundings were high-tech city.
She felt Gideon suffusing her with pleasure again and she forgot about her father's ghost. Groaning, she dropped her black lemonade to the countertop. She used her mouse to give as good as she got, and soon enough, panting, her breasts heaving, she came again.
Sweat sheened her and she grabbed for the rest of her black lemonade.
She was in the midst of her third orgasm when the last coke hit brought back layers of the acid trip that had been hovering in the corners of her mind. She felt as if Death had come into the room and scythed apart reality. She saw herself from above, slumped and damp, glassy-eyed in the aftermath of cyber-sex; she was also that person, dimly aware of a presence like an angel hovering above her shoulder.
And the angel that was Rachel left the room, as it always did, on its personal search to find her uncle. He had been a cop when he and her mom had been so pissed at each other they stopped talking. But Rachel had seen pictures of him; she even had one hidden in her room. When she stared at that photo she imagined what he might be like: strong, tough, big as a bear, and smiling at her always. That she was conjuring up the perfect father, who would love and protect her unconditionally, never occurred to her.
She only knew that she hated her mother for refusing to tell her where her uncle was. Her mother actually seemed frightened that Rachel had become more and more curious about him as Rachel had grown into a teenager. All Rachel knew was if she had a brother she'd never treat him like her mother treated hers.
Reality kept slipping out of focus like a lighthouse in the fog. Now the cyber-stimulation came again, but this time it felt like a hive full of wasps had gotten under her skin.
When Rachel screamed it sounded like a jet airplane revving its engines. She jumped up, popping cables. Those that did not break, slewed her off balance, and she fell into a bog of quicksand. She screamed again but her mouth was full of sand. Her arms were a mile long, her legs like the wobbly piers of a suspension bridge in an earthquake. Nothing seemed right or good or...
A frightful bout of nausea caught her like a steamshovel in the gut and she doubled over. She retched so hard that she vomited blood. She blinked back tears and found she couldn't see. Then she was doubled over again in an agony so profound it all but paralyzed her. When it felt as if it couldn't get any worse, pain exploded in the small of her back and she spasmed into a fetal position.
The door to the cubicle burst inward and sixteen images of Gideon followed themselves inside. Rachel's mouth worked spastically and she tried to reach out, but she'd lost all control of her limbs.
Then the world shattered into a hundred-thousand razor-sharp fragments, taking her with it into an oblivion where even her insupportable pain could not be felt.
2
When the wahoo took the line, Bennie Milagros cursed under his breath. "Shit," he said as the line spun out across the blue and gold sea, "I wanted a sailfish."
Lew Croaker, his steady gaze already on the dancing fish, cut engine speed and got ready to maneuver. "Watch it," he said. "This is no pussycat." The wahoo was a powerful fish that could move at such astonishing speeds its first run often burned out the fisherman's reel.
"You an' me, we chow down on this wahoo at dusk." Bennie Milagros was braced tensely near the stern of the boat. A tall man in his thirties, slim as a flamenco dancer, he had a high domed forehead and long hair down to his shoulders. He wore a white short-sleeve linen shirt, a pair of red-and-black shorts that reached almost to his very hairy knees, and reed huaraches. Tufts of wiry black hair waved from the knuckles of his toes. The shorts were held up over his skinny hips by a belt with an enormous oval silver buckle gaudily engraved with gold steer horns. A Smith & Wesson .38 was tucked into his waistband. Bennie was one of those rich Paraguayans who had come to South Florida to spend money and be seen. If he also did a little business here and there, so much the better. "Fighting fish like this reminds me. There was this guapa, she was special. God hears me, I would a married her if I could, but that woulda spoiled her, you know?"
"You mean it would've spoiled you."
"You know, Lewis, you are a very hard-hearted man." Bennie was grinning. "But, no, listen to me. This guapa she was like a magnificent wild animal, you break its spirit, it's a sin, you know? I mean, you gotta treat a woman with respect. I look darkly upon men who disrespect women." What, exactly, Bennie Milagros's business might be wasn't known to any official entity of the United States. Croaker suspected that was just as well.
"So this guapa, what could I do? I respected her, kept her spirit alive here." He thumped his chest with his free hand. "But God hears me, I am the poorer for being without her." He flicked the rod. "Now, magnanimous man that I am, I am willing to share with you this piece of philosophy. I swear on the soul of my dead mother, your cock'll grow feathers the minute you meet a guapa like this one. Pearl in a fuckin' oyster, believe me." Bennie grunted as the wahoo struck outward and the reel began to spin madly. The eight-foot rod flexed severely as the fish took off, and Croaker turned the wheel over hard, heading Captain Sumo away from Alligator Reef. The reef dropped off sharply, and they were soon in about three hundred feet of water, three miles out from Islamorada, one of the middle Florida Keys.
The ocean stretched blue and green, the white-gold sparkle of the sun lacing the wave crests. It was cool and clean out here, and Croaker loved it; the rime of salt borne on breeze and spray coated human skin and boat lacquer alike.
Bennie worked the fiberglass rod-glass, in fisherman's parlance. "But, shit, I wanted that fuckin' sailfish."
"You already landed one today," Croaker pointed out. "Relax. You're only allowed one billfish a day."
"I feel a need for it in my soul, understand? Maybe you don't." Bennie risked turning his flat face toward Croaker. "You Anglos, you have some weird fuckin' ideas 'bout spirituality. See, it's all, like, televangelists caught with their pants down an' after-death experiences an', like, alien abductions. An' you see all that shit in the National Enquirer so much that's what defines spirituality for you. You gents just don't get it, an' that's why you're all crawling over each other to find it." He reeled out some line. His coffee-colored eyes flashed with salacious good humor. He was a handsome man, his pockmarked cheeks making him seem all the more powerful.
Croaker slowed some more and turned to starboard. This fish was going to get away unless they were both very careful. "Don't lump me into your great Anglo stew."
"Oh, yeah." Bennie flicked his wrist, began to reel in line. "I forgot myself for a minute. You're an ex-cop. NYPD detective lieutenant." He shook his head. "Dirty business."
"More than you could imagine," Croaker said. Fifteen years prowling the filthy underbelly of the city's streets had made Croaker immune to life. Even little pleasures had dissolved like wet snow in the city's acid gutters. He'd spent early mornings washing the blood of murder victims and violent perps off his hands until he'd scrubbed his fingertips raw. And when he had come in out of the slime, he'd been met with a cynical web of Police Plaza corruption between politicos and penthouse residents, played like a game of squash where no one worked up a sweat. Soon he'd been driven back onto the streets again, trying to wash away what would never come off.
"He's doubled back!" Bennie tensed, reeling in line like a madman. Croaker whipped the wheel around. Bennie was a fine fisherman; Croaker never had to baby-sit him as he did with many of his well-heeled clients who, jaded by afternoons cell-phoning from the golf course, had decided sport fishing made for a power experience.
"Here he comes!"
Croaker could see the wahoo's narrow wake, knew Bennie was right-the fish was making a run at the boat. "Make sure you take up every inch of slack!" he shouted as he goosed the engines to life, moving Captain Sumo out of the way of the wahoo's charge.
Bennie was reeling like crazy, his eyes following the wahoo's silver wake, sharp as a knife. At the last instant Croaker could see that the wahoo was going to try to go under the boat, and turned again. The wahoo jumped instead, and then ran. Bennie's reel spun madly.
"Oh, good one!" Bennie cried. "Yeah, well, you an' I, we got something in common besides loving South Florida and fishing." He took one hand off the rod for an instant, struck himself in the midsection.
"Yeah? What's that?"
The wahoo chose that moment for a spectacular leap, then began another run. Bennie was almost jerked off his feet. He took one lurching step, fetched his hip bone against the rail. With a powerful sweeping motion, he lifted the tip of the rod as the line spun out. "Lotta life yet in this one," he grunted.
Croaker once again altered the boat's speed, coming to port.
With the wahoo more or less under control for the moment, Bennie said, "We both know what it's like to have enemies."
"You've got to be joking." Croaker laughed. "I'm like the manatee. I've got no natural enemies."