"Sean Williams - The Perfect Gun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Sean)

Trance-like bongos marked time in a reverberant background while a sonorous voice recited weirdness
over the top. Not at all my cup of tea, but ear-catching all the same. My left index finger absently tapped
along with the rhythm while part of my mind clocked the occasional phrase.
The Perfect Gun leaves in a shadow of perfumes.
The Perfect Gun is an illusion on a surface of memory.
The Perfect Gun is a finger resting on the controls of a broken machine . . .
The guy in the Nissan suddenly slammed on the brakes, causing a mass-swerving of traffic in his vicinity.
My automatic collision-avoidance systems took over, swinging me into the next lane to avoid his
red-eyed rear before I could react. I ducked back into his lane as soon as I could and watched him
closely in my mirrors.
He'd wrenched the wheel to the left and headed for the median strip. I did likewise, cursing. If he was
trying to blow my cover, then he had succeeded. Whatever his game was, I had to stop to check it out.
I'd be carried away by the traffic within seconds if I didn't.
The Nissan bumped onto the strip and jerked to a halt in a cloud of dust. One hundred yards further up
the road, my Chevy imitated it. I put it in reverse and backed up towards him. He didn't seem to notice.
He just got out of the car, holding something in both hands that I couldn't quite make out.
When I had halved the distance, however, it suddenly clicked. He was holding a gun. I crouched lower in
the seat, just in case, and slowed my arse-forward approach. Still he didn't see me. He staggered away
from the Nissan and fell to his knees. He raised the pistol.
The Perfect Gun crouches to intercept shadows . . .
I turned my head away the instant he fired, but caught enough to fix the view in my mind forever: his open
mouth swallowing the barrel, his hands clutching the grip like a drowning man, the sudden flash and kick
and the widening of his eyes, the blossoming of red petals as though the back of his head had sprouted a
dark and malignant flower . . .
Traffic stops for no man, but it seemed to slow for a moment then, as time once again dragged its heels.
I braked hard, threw the car into Park and opened the door. The man I'd been following hit the dirt
before I even made it to my feet, but I ran anyway.
The spread-eagled body lay in a widening pool of blood, eyes open and staring at the tainted sky. His
face, the first time I had seen it up close, looked older than I had expected, much like Peter Lorre's had,
late in his career. The back of his head was a bloody mess. Nonetheless, I kicked the gun away with the
toe of my boot when I was within reach and felt for a pulse. Nothing. The guy really was dead.
"Shit." Whoever my employers were, they probably weren't going to be pleased. At the very best, I was
out of a job. Without moving fast, I'd never know why.
I went through his pockets for papers, came away empty-handed. He was as anonymous in death as he
had been in life--but not, I hoped, forever. Reaching into an inner pocket of my jeans, I removed a small,
plastic capsule and scraped a sample of skin from the back of his left wrist.
Then I turned to his car. The radio was blaring the same request show I'd been listening to, although the
song had finished, whatever it had been.
"Have a nice day, y'all," said Dr Bob.
I thanked him, although I doubted very much I would, and called the cops.
The Twentieth Century: a nice place for a holiday, but you wouldn't want to live there. Or die there, for
that matter. Very few people I knew did either.
The city possessed a permanent population of nine hundred thousand, plus a transient population of
nearly seven million. Many of the transients went native for a few months, until they tired of it and
returned to their careers, castes and communities elsewhere in the System. If you were a tourist, the
difference between regular citizen and 'temporary native' was sometimes hard to pick, but the regulars
always knew. We were the ones who had stopped asking questions and just got on with it. We're the
ones with roles to play.
Me, I'd worked the city for five years, having come here originally to stay with a friend, not to sight-see.
Something about the city sucked me in: its fecundity of people, ideas and lifestyles perhaps; the sense of