"Roger Zelazny - Amber Chronicles, The 06 - Trumps of Doom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zelazny Roger)

I left the remains in the doorway of a nearby record store, and while I
thought about it on the way home it did not strike me until the following
day that it had been the anniversary of the truck crash. Even then, I
dismissed it as an odd coincidence. The matter of the mail bomb that had
destroyed half of another apartment the following year did cause me to begin
wondering whether the statistical nature of reality might not be under a
strain in my vicinity at that season. And the events of subsequent years
served to turn this into a conviction.
Someone enjoyed trying to kill me once a year, it was as simple as
that. The effort failing, there would be another year's pause before an
attempt was made again. It seemed almost a game.
But this year I wanted to play, too. My main concern was that he, she,
or it seemed never to be present when the event occurred, favoring stealth
and gimmicks or agents. I will 'refer to this person as S (which sometimes
stands for "sneak" and sometimes for "shithead" in my private cosmology),
because X has been overworked and because I do not like to screw around with
pronouns with disputable antecedents.
I rinsed my coffee cup and the pot and set them in the rack. Then I
picked up my bag and departed. Mr. Mulligan wasn't in, or was sleeping, so I
left my key in his mailbox before heading up the street to take my breakfast
at a nearby diner.
Traffic was light, and all of the vehicles well behaved. I walked
slowly, listening and looking. It was a pleasant morning, promising a
beautiful day. I hoped to settle things quickly, so I could enjoy it at my
leisure.
I reached the diner unmolested. I took a seat beside the window. Just
as the waiter came to take my order I saw a familiar figure swinging along
the street - a former classmate and later fellow employee Lucas Raynard: six
feet tall, red-haired, handsome in spite, or perhaps because, of an
artistically broken nose, with the voice and manner of the salesman he was.
I knocked on the window and he saw me, waved, turned and entered.
"Merle, I was right," he said, coming up to the table, clasping my
shoulder briefly, seating himself and taking the menu out of my hands.
"Missed you at your place and guessed you might be here."
He lowered his eyes and began :reading the menu.
"Why?" I asked.
"If' you need more time to consider, I'll come back," the waiter said.

"No," Luke answered and read off an enormous order.
I added my own.
Then: "Because you're a creature of habit."
"Habit?" I replied. "I hardly eat here anymore."
"I know," he answered, "but you usually did when the pressure was on.
Like, right before exams - or if something was bothering you."
"Hm," I said: There did seem to be something to that, though I had
never before realized it. I spun the ashtray with its imprint of a unicorn's
head, a smaller version of the stained-glass one that stood as part of a
partition beside the doorway: "I can't say why," I finally stated. "Besides,
what makes you think something's bothering me?"
"I remembered that paranoid thing you have about April 30, because of a