"Wayne Wightman - The Attack Of The Ignoroids" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wightman Wayne)

And one uncharted gardenia.

CLEETIS RAVED for a few minutes till I hosed him down. He became marginally
sober. "Go clean up. When you stop gibbering, we're going to Vera's."

"Uuuuh...uuuuh ...."

As an exemplary shallow person Cleetis's emotions run with equivalent depth.
Fifteen minutes later he came back out, his little driver's cap on, tossing the
car keys in one hand, and humming. "Gotta get grass seed while we're out, boss."

I got in the back seat of the Buick and decided to stop thinking. Vera would
distract me.

"Here, boss, this make you feel better." He slipped a cassette of country and
western music into the player. Two chords into "Lick My Chops" I threatened to
report his three parole violations I'd kept track of, and he turned it off.

I do not sympathize with suffering cowboys.

"Ramsden! You're early. And very pale."

"A woman just combusted in my front yard," I said sullenly.

"Two of 'em," Cleetis corrected. "Went up whoof, just like that."

I looked at him.

"I'll wait in the car," he said.

Inside, Vera snuggled up to me as much as a six-foot woman can to a guy who's
five-ten. She'd taken off her real estate uniform and now wore something that
looked like a very expensive poncho, blue-black with a high black embroidered
collar. She wrapped her arms around me and breathed in my ear, "Patience dear.
Would you like a drink to take the edge off? You do smell a bit smoky," she
said.

"Vera, a woman went up in flames in my front yard."

She planted a swift kiss on my sun-cracked lips and left for the kitchen. "I
have just what you need. Something without subtlety."

Along with selling houses, Vera was the nurse at a place she referred to as
Hormonal High. Her background was nearly as Byzantine as my own. Her degrees
were in DNA protein synthesis, but once upon a time she had accepted a job at
the infamous Ortho-Nuclear Chemical Dynamics Corporation and been given a
fabulous salary. But when a certain presidential candidate was in the
death-throes of his campaign and needed a public service scandal to boost his
ratings, he revealed the story of Ortho-Nuke's "Project Frankenstein" and Vera
ended up selling pieces of quadraplexes to white trash and bandaging bite-wounds