"K. D. Wentworth - Tis The Season" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wentworth K D)

Holy orders...I tried to protest, but only a groan succeeded in making it past
my lips.

"See?" the second voice said triumphantly. "He's fine." A small hand tilted my
chin from side to side and bright-red rockets exploded at the base of my skull.
"Welcome back to the land of the living, altar boy."

My eyelids popped open. I stared up through a crimson haze at a face surrounded
with black over white, either a woman or the biggest damn penguin I ever saw.
"What-- ?"

The head nodded. "Midnight Mass is in ten minutes. You'd better look sharp, or
Father Lennie'll have your ass. You'll be on your knees saying Hail Marys until
half-past Easter!"

"Now, Sister Prudence," another female voice said, "don't scare this poor turd
to death, not before he gets himself baptized, anyway." She giggled.

I struggled up to a sitting position, which was blamed hard. My hands was bound
before me with a rosary looped tight enough to cut off the circulation and my
holster was empty. Damned if they wasn't nuns -- I should have known better. The
fish icon was just a decoy to sucker me in. If I'd had any inkling I was dealing
with the Pope's Crew, I would have hauled my piece out and called for backup,
carolers or no carolers. These jokers have got a real deadly sense of
organization.

They'd dumped me in a badly lit warehouse of some sort, crates piled up to the
ceiling, and me, sitting there with my back propped against a forklift. The
chill from the concrete floor had numbed my legs and I could still see my
breath. There was a hint of communion wine in the air as I tugged at the rosary.
The damned beads just bit deeper into my swelling wrists.

Sister Prudence patted me on the cheek, then dug a nail file out of a backpack
and went to work on her black lacquer nails. Each one featured a different
Station of the Cross, real hard-core stuff. I began to sweat in earnest.

She filed the edges delicately. "Now, all you gotta do is follow Father Lennie
down the aisle and light the candles when he says. No big deal. You can do that
much even with your hands tied."

I tried to remember all my training sessions for hostage negotiation, but my
throbbing head felt like it had been stuffed with soggy communion wafers. "You
ain't gonna get away with this," I said. "I radioed headquarters my twenty
before I --"
"Your twenty?" the other nun asked. She reached up and tucked a bright pink lock
of hair back under her starched black-and-white headdress.

"My location." A muscle twitched under my right eye. "And I called in your tag
number too. They oughta be here in about ten seconds."