"Destroyer 002 - Death Check.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

So Remo Williams stood silently in the gymnasium feeling his conditioning leave him. He breathed deeply, then slid through the dark, in almost imperceptible movements, and was in the balcony. He wore black tennis shoes so that he could not see his feet, a tee shirt dyed black so that the white of the shirt in the dark would not throw off unbalancing brightness. His shorts were black. Night moving in night.

He moved from the balcony rail to the top of the basketball backboard. He seated himself carefully, with his right hand between his legs and his legs stretched out over the hoop below. Funny, he thought. When he was a policeman in his twenties, he would have been puffing if he ran a block, and probably would have had to engineer a desk job by thirty five or face a heart attack. It was nice then. Just walk into any bar you wanted when off duty. Have a pizza for supper if you wished. Get laid when you had a chance.

But that was when he was alive. And when he was officially alive, there were no such things as peak periods with rice and fish and abstinence. Actually, he didn't really have to follow the regimen. He thought about that often. He could probably do very well at less than full capacity. But a wise Korean had told him that deterioration of the body is like a stone rolling down a mountain. So easy to start, so hard to stop. And if Remo Williams couldn't stop, he would be very dead.

He lowered his shoes to the rim, getting the feel of its grip into the backboard. If you know the feel of objects, the feel of their mass, their movement and their strength, you could use that as your strength. That was the secret of force. To not fight it. And to not fight it was the best way to fight people when you had to.

Remo stood up on the rim and gathered the where of the floor into his balance. He should have changed the height of the hoop, because sooner or later he would be performing muscle memory instead of proper use of balance and judgment. When he had first learned the exercise, he watched a cat for a day and a half. He had been told to become the cat. He had answered that he would prefer to become a rabbit so he could get laid, and how long was this dingaling training going to go on?

"Until you are dead," he was told.

"You mean fifty years."

Х "It might be fifty seconds, if you are not good enough," said the Korean instructor. "Watch the cat."

And Remo had watched the cat and for a few moments thought, really thought, he could become the cat.

Now Remo Williams indulged his own private little joke which signalled the start of the exercise.

"Meow," he whispered in the silent, dark gym.

He stood on the rim, straight up, and then his body fell forward, shoes gripping the rim by pressure, head going forward, shoes flipping up, rim adding force, body heading straight down, hair and head aiming straight at the floor-like a dark knife dropping into a dark sea.

His hair touched the varnish of the floor and triggered a body trunk flip, the dark form in the blackened gym spinning in space, the sneakers coming around quick- rocket fast-arching and down steady standing on the wooden floor.

Blat. The sound echoed in the gymnasium. He had held for the last hair-touching instant and then let the muscles take over, the muscles of a cat which shifted the body in .air and put the feet on the floor. An exercise the body could do only when the mind was trained, trained to steal the balance of another animal.

Remo Williams had heard the blat in the gym, the sound of his sneakers hitting the floor. He was not purring.

"Shit," he mumbled to himself. "The next time it'll be my head. That dumb bastard is gonna get me killed yet, with his goddam peak period."

And he returned to the balcony and the backboard, this time to do it right. Without a sound when his sneakers hit the floor.



CHAPTER THREE



The sun reflected on the scales of the fish and played on the water and warmed the covered wood -pier of Giuseppe Bresicola's wholesale fish market which jutted out into San Francisco Bay like dirty toy sticks on a blue plate.

Bresicola's did not smell of fish: it breathed of fish and sounded of fish, from the splat of mackerel piled on mackerel to the scrape of steel across scales. Entrails in giant barrels in seconds began the inevitable decay. Fresh seawater squooshed over the scale-caked wood. And Bre-sicola smiled because his friend was again visiting him.

"I no tella you the orders today, Mr. Time-Study man. Not today." He made a playful stab at his friend's head. How nice this boy moved. Like a dancer. Like Willie Pep. "You don't get the orders today."

"What do you mean, not today," asked the friend who was six feet tall and husky. He scraped his brown shoes playfully on the wood, a small dance without motion. They were good shoes, $50 shoes. Once he had bought ten pairs of $100 shoes and then heaved them out into the Bay, but the next day all he did was draw money from his account and buy new shoes. So, he had gotten that out of his system and throwing shoes away meant only that you had to take the trouble of buying more.

"It's abalone," said Bresicola. "We got another order from New York. Just now."