"Destroyer 029 - The Final Death.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

"What is this status thing that keeps eating at you?" Vinnie asked his wife. "Status? I sell steaks and hamburgers."
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"Stop it, Vincent," his wife said. Her mouth puckered up. "You make it sound as if you were running McDonald's."
"If I was really making it, I'd be McDonald's. I'm not that good, so I run Vinnie's Steak House. So come off all this status thing, will you. I'm not made out of money."
"Is it that you don't have it, or you just don't wish to spend it on me and the girls? You always seem to have enough money for what you want, though. Those hunting trips. I've never heard you put one oif because you didn't have the money."
"It costs me a tank of gas to go hunting, for Christ's sakes. What do you spend hunting?" asked Vinnie.
"Not much more than you spend around here on us, I guess," his wife said, her voice biting.
"Ah, stuff it. Buy what you want," Vinnie said. And she had. And the latest was this pussy car Monte Carlo that he hated.
His mood improved as he drove away from the house. He could mock his wife's insistence on status, but Vinnie Angus had come a long way from dishwasher in a greasy spoon in South Boston, where success meant not getting killed by getting in between the blacks and the Irish who kept trying to murder each other.
He had watched and learned and saved his money, then made the jump to his own restaurant in New Haven. Everyone said that a good steakhouse could not be successful in a college town. Vinnie had made it work. He got the restaurant rolling and married the cute,
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leggy Jewish chick behind the cash register and moved into the suburbs.
His good mood went as fast as it had come.
What had it all gotten him? A too-big house with a too-big mortgage. A wife who covered her age with so much makeup that he had not seen the skin of her face in 10 years. A pair of daughters who were God's gifts to the orthodontics profession. And this gas-guzzling pussy car that he hated.
He had two restaurants, both successful, but the government and rising prices took out the money faster than his customers could put it in. Yet what else could he do but keep doing what he had always done? A failure, it occurred to him, could stop anywhere and start over, but a success was doomed to ride on the back of the tiger forever.
Vinnie Angus turned onto the Post Road and moved north, past the garbage antique shops, the railroad salvage stores, the tacky shoe stores, all the colored lights, the sparkling signs, the neon, the plastic, and turned left into his parking lot.
The warm gray-brown of his exterior wood visually softened the area. The muted lights glowing through the thick dark-yellow drapes gave the restaurant a glow even in the daytime.
When Vinnie Angus entered the restaurant, he forgot his problems. He was in another world, a world of his own creating.
Sitting on a crate in the simple cement block kitchen was his cook.
"It in yet?" Vinnie asked.
"Yeah," the cook said. "Just this morning."
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The man got up and moved past Vinnie to the floor-to-ceiling refrigerator. He pulled out a slab of flank steak, sliced away at the outlying fat, poked it professionally a few times with a large two-pronged fork, then slapped it on the grill.
"Easy, you sucker," the cook said. He always talked to his meat.
"I'll be at the bar," Vinnie said.
Vinnie sat at the bar telling the bartender how he kept trying to teach grill jockeys that a good piece of meat was like a good whore. Slap her around a little and she'll get nice and soft for you. But beat the hell out of her and she'll be tough as nails.
"I hear you talking," said the bartender and poured another beer.
Twelve minutes later, the cook was out of the kitchen with a brown stoneware plate with beige trim clutched in a towel in his hand. Sitting in the middle of the dish was a dark, sparkling hunk of prime steak.
Vinnie cut into it, exposing a grey-orange plateau that seemed to suck at the blade of the knife.
"Nice," Vinnie commented. "Texture's good."
He sliced crossways with the serrated edge of the knife, then harpooned a piece with a thick silver fork the bartender laid in front of him. Vinnie plopped it into his mouth, ran his tongue across the outside for any sign of charcoal, then bit down.
The meat seemed to make way for his teeth until he got to the other side where, along the
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edge, it became tough and tinny for a microsecond, then seemed to melt and dissolve down his throat.
Except for that split second, it was the best flank steak Vinnie Angus had ever tasted. He finished it in seven big bites.
"There you go, sucker," said the cook to the empty plate on the way back to the kitchen. And Vinnie Angus went to his office to complain to Peter Matthew O'Donnell about the tinny taste around the government's USDA insignia.
"It's like eating goddam solder," Vinnie roared into the telephone.
"Easy, Big Vin. Easy. I'll light a fire under the ass of those Texas bastards. It won't happen again."
"Okay," said Vinnie Angus.
The Anguses has tuna casserole that night. Vinnie poked at three noodles, excused himself, then went upstairs to pack for his hunting trip the next day.
"Can hardly wait, can you?" said his wife in a tone somewhere between snide and shrill, from the other end of the table.
"Now, now," said Vinnie with practiced patience. He winked at his daughters as he disappeared out of the room.
Behind him he heard Rebecca, his younger daughter, say: "Do I have to? Daddy didn't."
"You want to look like him when you grow up ? Eat," said Mrs. Angus.
And his older daughter, Victoria, said
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sharply, "Stop it, mother." He could hear her chair push back from the table.
Vinnie, Angus sat down on the hard, thick wooden chair in his stuffy study. The chair creaked uncomfortably under the 20 pounds he had put on in the last five years.
He looked at his trophies and guns and looked forward to tomorrow. His throat would be scraped raw by the cold morning air. His breath would come in huge noisy gasps. His arms would grow tired from holding his twelve-gauge shotgun. His legs would ache by mid-morning. And he would love it. When he hunted, he was alone with himself, young again.
All he had to do now was to saddle soap his Timberline boots, make a lunch, pack his equipment, set his alarm clock for 4 a.m. and. . . .