"Van Lustbader, Eric - Linnear 01 - The Ninja" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

'And you like mysteries.'
He watched the sweep of her dark hair, sliding across one cheek, hiding the eye
with the crimson motes. 'In a sense. . Yes.'
'Your features are all Caucasian,' she said, abruptly switching topics.
'Yes,' Nicholas said. 'Physically I take after my father, the Colonel.' He put
his head back on the couch, his hair touching her outstretched fingers for a
moment before she moved them back, curling them into a fist. He stared up at the
patterned pools of light playing upon the ceiling. 'Inside, though, I am my
mother's son.'
Doc Deerforth never looked forward to the summer. This was a curious thing, he
thought, because it was invariably his busiest time. The influx from the city
never ceased to astound him, the migratory pattern of almost the entire Upper
East Side of Manhattan, as fixed and precise as the geese flying their arrowhead
formations south in the winter.
Not that Doc Deerforth knew all that much about Manhattan, not these days, at
least; he had not set foot in that madhouse in over five years and then it had
been only to pay a brief visit to his friend Nate Graumann, New York City's
Chief Medical Examiner.
He was quite content to be out here. He had his daughters who, with their own
families, visited him regularly - his wife had died of leukemia over ten years
ago, turned to a faded photo - and his work as doctor in West Bay Bridge. Then
there was his ancillary M.E. work for Flower at Hauppauge. They liked him there
because he was thorough and inventive; Flower kept asking him if he would come
to work for the Suffolk County M.E. but he was much too happy where he was.
There were friends here, plentiful and warm but, most of all, he had himself. He
found that, essentially, he was happy with himself. That did not stop the
occasional nightmare, however, from creeping through like a clandestine burglar
on the loose. He would still wake up, drenched in sweat, the damp sheets twisted
clammily about his legs. Some nights he would dream of white blood but he
dreamed of other things as well, dream symbols of his personal fright. At those
times he would get up and pad silently into the kitchen, making himself a cup of
hot cocoa, and would read, at random, from one of Raymond Chandler's seven
novels, finding within that spare inferential prose-style a kind of existential
calm amid his private storm, and inside thirty minutes he had returned to sleep.
Doc Deerforth stretched, easing the ache that sat like a stuck pitchfork between
his shoulder blades. That's what comes of working all hours at my age, he
thought. Still, he went over his findings once again. It was all there, black
and white, the words piling together into sentences and paragraphs, but now he
was seeing the meaning for the first time, as if he were an Egyptologist who had
at last stumbled upon the Rosetta Stone.
Another routine drowning, he had thought, when they had called him out to Dune
Road. Of course he did not mean that. The word routine had no place in his
vocabulary. Life was the most precious thing in the world to him. But he need
not have become a doctor to feel that way. Living through the war in the Pacific
Theatre had been enough. Day after day, from his disarrayed jungle camp during
the bitter fighting in the Philippines, he had seen the cascades of small
one-man planes guided by their kamikaze pilots as they plunged headlong with
2,650 pounds of high explosives in their blunt noses into the American warships.
The cultural chasm between East and West could be summed up by those aircraft,
Doc Deerforth had always thought. The Japanese name for them was Oka - the