"Энди Макнаб. Удаленный контроль (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

that by the end of the day I'd be more exhausted than the kids. I got to the
driveway and turned in.
There was nobody waiting. The houses were quite a distance apart, so I
didn't see any neighbors, either, but I wasn't surprised D.C."s bedroom
suburbs were quite dead during weekdays.
I braced myself; on past form, I'd get ambushed as soon as the car
pulled up. The kids would jump out at me, with Marsha and Kev close behind.
I always made it look as if I didn't like it, but actually I did. The kids
would know I had presents. I'd bought a little Tweety-Pie watch for Aida,
and Kelly's was the Goosebumps kids' horror books numbers thirty-one to
forty I knew she already had the first thirty. I wouldn't say anything to
Aida about forgetting her birthday;
hopefully she'd have forgotten.
I got out of the car and walked toward the front door. Still no ambush.
So far, so good.
The front door was open about two inches. I thought, Here we go, what
they want me to do is walk into the hallway like Inspector Clouseau, and
there's going to be a Kato-type am bush. I pushed the door wide open and
called out, "Hello?
Hello? Anyone home?"
Any minute now the kids would be attacking a leg each.
But nothing happened.
Maybe they had a new plan and were all hidden away somewhere in the
house, waiting, trying to muffle their giggles.
Inside the front door there was a little corridor that opened up into a
large rectangular hallway with doors leading off to the different downstairs
rooms. In the kitchen to my right I heard the sound of a female voice
singing a station jingle.
Still no kids. I started tiptoeing toward the noise in the kitchen. In
a loud stage whisper! said, "Well, well, well I'll have to leave ... seeing
as nobody's here ... What a shame, because I've got two presents for two
little girls..."
To my left was the door to the living room, open about a foot or so. I
didn't look in as I walked past, but I saw something in my peripheral vision
that at first didn't register. Or maybe it did; maybe my brain processed the
information and rejected it as too horrible to be true.
It took a second for it to sink in, and when it did my whole body
stiffened.
I turned my head slowly, trying to make sense of what was in front of
me.
It was Kev. He was lying on his side on the floor, and his head had
been battered to shit by a baseball bat. I knew that, because I could see it
on the floor beside him. It was one he'd shown off to me on his last visit,
a nice light aluminum one.
He'd shaken his head and laughed when he said the local rednecks called
them Alabama lie detectors.
I was still rooted to the spot.
I thought: Fucking hell, he's dead-or should be, looking at the state
of him.
What about Marsha and the kids?