"Allston, Aaron - Doc Sidhe 02 - Sidhe-Devil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Allston Aaron)

“God, what a catastrophe that would have been.”
“-they insisted on being helpful. Hey, watch Gaby. She’s going to her uncle Pedro, the cop. I bet she lifts his piece.”
“You’re kidding.” Zeb watched. Gaby hugged a middle-aged Latino man, talked sweetly to him, tucked something away in her flower bouquet as she was doing it. “Je-zus. What have you two really been up to the last six months?”
“Tell you later. Okay, she’s got fire.”
“Huh?”
“A gun. Time for us to take off. These guys can’t be here for anyone else but us, so our departure will probably draw them off, keep everyone else safe.”
“I’m with you.”
“I meant, me and Gaby. Bye.” Harris made a strangled noise loud enough for half the hall to hear. He tugged his tie free. “Enough! Time to change before this thing kills me.” The crowd laughed. The photographer, plainly upset, tried to wave him back to his position, to no effect.
“Gaby and I will be back in fifteen minutes, dressed to gorge. We’ll eat until the first guest blows up.” More laughs. He moved through the crowd toward his wife.
Zeb caught up with him. “I meant it, man. You owe me some answers.”
“I do. You want someone to shoot at you while you get them?”
They reached Gaby. Harris snagged her by the waist, pulling her from the embrace of her father. “I’m stealing her away again, Ted. Be back soon.”
When they were a few steps away, Zeb continued, his voice a growl, “I don’t want them shooting at you, either, moron.”
Gaby said, “I didn’t spot any more in the crowd.”
“They left,” Harris said. “Probably not far.”
“What do you want to bet they’re either in our rooms or between here and there?”
Harris gave her an admonishing look. “Sucker bet.” They reached the doors and the hall beyond.
“So, you’re going to call the police on this?” Zeb asked.
Harris shook his head. “Nah. Too many complications already. What did you do with the door guard?”
Zeb pointed at the couch.
“Get his gun. If he doesn’t have it when he wakes up, he can’t use it.”
Zeb stooped beside the couch and dragged the unconscious man’s revolver out. He shoved it into Harris’s jacket beside the one he’d taken earlier. “I do all this, I do get an answer, don’t I?”
“Oh, I imagine,” Gaby said. “Okay. You want to earn a hundred bucks the easy way?”

Zeb shook the concierge’s hand and pressed the fifties into it. “My pal just got married down in the Catalina Suite. I want to play a little practical joke on him. I’d like to borrow a staff jacket and one of those rolling dinner trays . . . and to charge some champagne to my room.”

Zeb knocked on the bride’s door. There was no response. Gaby slid her card into the lock and Zeb opened the door, then pushed the cart ahead of him as he entered. He slowed the door’s closing so it came to rest against the jamb without latching. “Room service,” he called.
He didn’t see them until he was almost through the entry hall; beyond, two men, one whose blond beard was heavily tinged with gray and another who was clean-shaven, sat on the bed to the right, and a third, an older man, sat in a hotel chair dragged against the wall to the left.
All were squat and surly. The two on the bed had hands hovering near their armpits. The third, the one with the grayest beard, held something the size and shape of an egg but a gleaming black; this he rolled delicately around in his hand as he stared at Zeb. There was something unnatural about the little item; it didn’t roll the way it should, but wobbled as though something alive were inside it. The man kept his other hand tucked into his jacket pocket.
Zeb managed a smile he didn’t feel. “Champagne for the bride’s party. Compliments of the house.”
There was suspicion in the older man’s voice: “What house?”
Zeb just stared for a moment. Was there anyone in the U.S. who didn’t know what “compliments of the house” meant? “The hotel,” Zeb said. “Compliments of the hotel. That means free.”
The hands moved away from the concealed holsters, but Zeb didn’t sense that the men’s guards were lowering. “Put it there,” said the grayest of them, pointing to the window.
“Yes, sir.” Zeb positioned the rolling rack just so, then gestured like a game-show hostess at the bottle and the bucket of ice. “Shall I bring more glasses up?”
“No,” said the graybeard. “Get out.”
The door into the room widened. Silent, Harris entered. Zeb forced himself not to glance in that direction. “Yes, sir,” he said.
He took a step as if to leave, then stopped and looked expectantly between them. He gestured at all of them, two fingers toward the men on the bed, one for the one in the chair. “Sirs, a gratuity is appropriate.”
“What’s that?” asked the graybeard.
Harris moved forward. Gaby entered behind him. She had Pedro’s revolver in both hands, barrel raised toward the ceiling.
“A tip,” Zeb explained patiently. “An informal reward of money for services rendered. At a hotel like this one, an appropriate tip is, well, too damned much.”
They looked at each other, confused.
“Okay, forget it,” Zeb said. “You look like some cheap bastards anyway.” He lashed out with his left foot, hitting the beardless gunman in the side of the head, a gratifyingly solid connection.
Graybeard was fast. He lobbed the black egg toward Zeb. It hit Zeb in the chest and split open with a moist noise. Graybeard said something; Zeb thought the word was “beater.”
And suddenly Zeb was wrapped up tight in a black sheet. It felt and smelled like rubber, constricting his arms and legs, holding him tight. He lost his balance and tipped over backward across the bed.
Someone was shouting in his ear, a wordless yammering, “Ya ya ya ya ya!” Zeb, wrestling with the black sheet, turned to look-right into the glowing eyes of a black rubber face. It was flat as a paper plate, approximately human in its arrangement of features, but looked like a cartoon image of a wild, buck-toothed native, and continued to shriek at Zeb.
“Goddammit, get this thing off me!”
Zeb heard a pair of thuds and a click that sounded like the cocking of a gun. He heard Gaby say, “Don’t move. These are steel-jacketed slugs. You know what they do to you.” Then hands were on him, rolling him over, yanking at the black sheet.
It seemed actually to struggle, but finally came away from Zeb, and he could see Harris tugging at it. Harris gave it another yank and Zeb rolled free, off the bed and onto the floor.
What Harris held was something that looked like what would result if a large black cartoon man were squashed beneath a steamroller. It was sheet-thin and large enough to be a bedspread, but had definable limbs and head-a lolling head that continued to yammer. Its body now lay limp. Harris thoughtfully began rolling it up into a tube, starting with the head so the yammering was cut off.
Zeb sat up. Nearby, Gaby stood covering the graybeard, the one squat man who was still conscious; she held her gun in a two-handed grip, her wedding dress making it a curious picture. Zeb’s gunman was unconscious, leaning against the bed’s headboard; Harris’s target lay flat on the bed, holding his throat and making choking noises. The graybeard was standing, gripping his right forearm in a way that reminded Zeb of hairline fractures.