"Aldridge, Ray - Filter FeedersV1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Aldridge Ray)

"But . . . how will you get it back?"

He made a gesture of dismissal. "Do not be concerned. Perhaps one of us will swim ashore. Perhaps you will return it when next you visit."

"I'm not sure you'd want to swim in the harbor," she said with a little shudder of distaste. "And I have to work at the Bugeyed Sailor tonight."

He shrugged, clearly uninterested.

As Thomas was helping her to board the dinghy, she remembered her manners and said, "Thank you for a very pleasant experience. I really enjoyed it."

"And do you remember it well?" he asked, which struck her as a very odd question.

"As well as I remember anything," she said.

This answer seemed to please him; at least his faint smile seemed stronger.

The restaurant was unusually busy, which served to keep the Sailorman away for a while, but toward closing, business flagged.

A young couple full of romantic sighs lingered on the deck, holding hands and gazing deeply into each other eyes. She didn't hurry them; she sensed a big tip. She waited in the farthest comer of the deck and looked out at the Rosemary, which during the evening seemed to have shifted her anchorage. The old white ketch floated quite near, perhaps only a hundred feet off. The portholes and skylight were dark; the boat exuded an air of emptiness and disuse. Teresa fell into a mood of vague self-pity.

The tip wasn't that big, she saw with some annoyance. She didn't realize how late it had become until the lights inside went out. The Sailorman came bustling out, a gleam in his bulging eyes. Her heart sank; she wondered if she were alone with him. Had the other help already gone home?

"You gotta bust the table yourself, honey," he said happily. "Busboy took off. But just stack on the drainboard. I don't make you wash. I'm good to you, right?"

She slid away from him along the deck's rickety railing, but almost immediately saw that she had erred by moving into the corner. There the Sailorman trapped her. He squeezed her breasts painfully; his belly bent her backward over the rail. He fumbled with his pants, then he pushed his hand up the leg of her culottes and dug his dirty fingers into her. In his enthusiasm, he ripped open the inseam of her culottes. "Now you got a chance to be good to me," he said. "I'm a big tipper, too."

If she screamed, would it do any good? Or would he just break her neck and throw her into the harbor with the other garbage? If the Sailorman killed her, who would know what had happened?

A sour cheesy stink assaulted her nostrils, even worse than the Sailorman's ordinary body odor, worse than his dead-fish breath. Disgust overcame fear, and she tried to dig her fingernails into his face. But they were too short to do any real damage and he chortled tolerantly.

She was almost ready to give up, when something changed. The Sailorman sagged against her, his weight crashing the breath out of her. His fingers ceased their assault.

A long moment passed, and Teresa noticed that he'd stopped breathing. Her panic, which had briefly subsided, instantly returned. She pushed at him, but he was immovable. Would she be found asphyxiated under the Sailorman's gross corpse, two bodies hanging over the corner of the railing, an amazing spectacle for the charter boats on their way out to the Gulf? What a dreadful thought. She writhed, trying to get away.

The Sailorman drew a long shuddering breath and pushed away from her. His eyes had gone dull, his body had slumped, his flaccid penis hung from the fly of his Popeye costume. "Excuse me," he said in a strange flat voice. "I just remembered something." He turned and shambled away, staggering a little, and disappeared into the restaurant.

She just stood there for a while, until her breath came back. She leaned on the railing, thinking she might throw up, and then she saw that Thomas was watching from Rosemary's deck.

He stood motionless, a silhouette against the lights across the harbor. She had a bizarre impulse to wave, followed by a sudden irrational certainty that Thomas had done something to stop the Sailorman. This was so strange a thought that it superseded gratitude. Suddenly she transferred the fury she'd felt for the Sailorman to the man on the boat. Angry questions filled her. What was he? And whatever he had done to the Sailorman, why hadn't he done worse? Should she go to the police? Why should they believe her version of the night's events? Would Thomas be a witness?

It was hard to imagine that he would; she remembered Linda saying, "Thomas almost never leaves the boat."

She paused to pin her culottes together, then hurried down the road to the Shipshape Chandlery, behind which the dinghy was still beached.

The night was breezy and dark, the moon obscured by low clouds. The harbor was disturbed by a fish-scale chop and the idea of rowing the dinghy out to the ketch was unappealing. Also the boat seemed to have moved away from the shoreline again; it would be a long pull. But she still felt shaky with anger, with the need to do something so she pushed off and began splashing her way across the water.

The ketch remained dark when she reached it, and Thomas was gone from the cockpit. She tied the dinghy's line to the cleat. Wasn't there some sort of etiquette involved in boarding a boat? One wasn't supposed to just jump on, she thought, and then was annoyed with herself that she could still be concerned about such a trivial matter, at such a time. Still, she rapped on the deck with her knuckles, as though knocking on a door. The sound was muffled by the thickness of the teak decking, but she was sure those within could hear it.

She waited, but after a while it became clear there would be no response. She began to feel a bit foolish. The outraged energy which had driven her across the dark harbor was fading, and she wished she had just gone back to her room, where she could wash the Sailorman's stink off her and where the bottle of Nembutal waited patiently.