"Pat Cadigan - Death in the Promised Land" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cadigan Pat)

"Which one?" asked Konstantin.
The coroner chuckled. "That's good. 'Which one?" She shook her head, laughing some more. "I'll have my report in your in-box tomorrow." She went up the hall, still laughing.
"Well," said the night manager, sniffing with disdain. "Some people ought

better stick with what they know than mock what they don't know squat about. "
"My apologies if she offended your beliefs," Konstantin said to her. "Is there some other way into that room that nobody knows about-vents, conduits, emergency exit or access?"
Pleshette wagged her fuzzy head from side to side. "Nope."
Konstantin was about to ask for the building's blueprints when Taliaferro snapped the archiver closed with a sound like a rifle shot. "Right. Some great place you got here. We'll interview the clientele now. Outside, in the parking lot. "
"Got no parking lot," Pleshette said, frowning.
"Didn't say your parking lot. There's a car rental place down the block. We'll corral everyone, do it there." Taliaferro looked at Konstantin. "Spacious. Lots of room to move around in."
Konstantin sighed. "First let's weed out everyone who was in the same scenario and module with the kid and see if anyone remembers the kid doing or saying anything that could give any hints about what was happening to

him." She started up the hall with Taliaferro.
"You could do that yourself, you know," Pleshette said.
Konstantin stopped. Taliaferro kept walking without looking back." Do

what?"
"See what the kid was doing when he took it in the neck. Surveillance'll have it."
"Surveillance?" Konstantin said, unsure that she had heard correctly.
"Of course surveillance," the night manager said, giving her a sideways look. "You think we let the blowfish come in here and don't keep an eye on

them? Anything could happen, I don't want no liability for the bone in somebody else's head. Nobody does. "
"Can I screen this surveillance record in your office?" she asked.
"Anywhere, if all you want to do is screen it. " Pleshette frowned, puzzled.
"Good. Set me up for it in your office."
Pleshette's frown deepened. "My office."
"Is that some kind of problem?" asked Konstantin, pausing as she moved toward the open doorway of the room, where she could hear DiPietro and Celestine bantering with the stringer.
"Guess not." The night manager shrugged. "You just want to screen it, my office, sure."
Konstantin didn't know what to make of the look on Pleshette's funny little face. Maybe that was all it was, a funny little face in a funny little open-all-night world. A funny little open-all-night artificial world at that. For all Konstantin knew, the night manager hadn't seen true daylight for years. Not her problem, she thought as she stuck her head through the doorway of the cubicle where Celestine and DiPietro were now busy jockeying for the stringer's attention while the stringer pretended she wasn't pumping them for information and they pretended they didn't know she was pretending not to pump them for information. No one had to pretend the dead kid had been temporarily forgotten.
"Pardon me for interrupting," Konstantin said a bit archly. DiPietro and Celestine turned to her; in their identical white coveralls, they looked like unfinished marionettes.
"Attendants'll be coming for him. Before you do a thorough search of the room, you might want to, oh-" she gestured at the body --cover him up.-
"Sure thing," said Celestine, and then suddenly tossed something round and wrapped in plastic at her. "Think fast!"
Konstantin caught it by instinct. The shape registered on her before anything else. The kid's head, she thought, horrified. The cut across his throat had been so deep, it had come off when they'd peeled him.
Then she felt the metal through the plastic and realized it was the kid's head-mounted monitor. "Oh, good one, Celestine. " She tucked the monitor under her left arm. "If I'd dropped that, we'd be filling out forms on it for a year. "
"You, drop something? Not this lifetime." Celestine grinned; her muttonchops made her face seem twice as wide as it was. Konstantin wondered if there was such a thing as suing a cosmetologist for malpractice.
"Thanks for the act of faith but next time, save it for church. " Konstantin went up the hall toward the main lobby, Pleshette following in a swish of kimono.

There were only two uniformed officers waiting in the lobby with the other three members of the night staff, who were perched side by side on a broken down, ersatz-leather sofa by the front window. The rest of the police, along with the clientele, were already down the block with Taliaferro, one of the uniforms told Konstantin. She nodded, trying not to stare at the woman's neat ginger-colored mustache. At least it wasn't as ostentatious as Celestine's muttonchops, but she wasn't sure that she would ever get used to the fashion of facial hair on women. Her ex would have called her a throwback; perhaps she was.
"That's all right, as long as we know where they are." Konstantin handed her the bagged headmount. "Evidence-look after it. There's some surveillance footage I'm going to screen in the manager's office and I thought I'd question the staff there as well-" The people on the couch were gazing up at her expectantly. "Is this the entire night shift?"
"The whole kitten's caboodle," Pleshette assured her.
Konstantin looked around. It was a small lobby, no hiding places, and presumably, no secret doors. Small, drab, and depressing-after waiting here for even just a few minutes, any AR would look great by comparison. She turned back to the people on the couch just as the one in the middle stood up and stuck out his hand. "Miles Mank," he said in a hearty tenor.
Konstantin hesitated. The man's eyes had an unfocused, watery look to them she associated with people who weren't well. He towered over her by six inches and outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds. But they were fairly soft pounds, packed into a glossy blue one-piece uniform that, combined with those gooey eyes and his straw-colored hair, gave him a strangely childlike appearance. She shook his hand. "What's your job here?"
"Supervisor. Well, unofficial supervisor," he added, the strange eyes looking past her at Guilfoyle Pleshette. "I'm the one who's been here the longest so I'm always telling everybody else how things work."
"So go ahead, Miles," Pleshette said, her voice flat. The kimono sleeves snapped like pennants in a high wind as she stretched out her arms and refolded them. "Say it-that if they promoted from within here, you'd be night manager. Then I can explain how they had to go on a talent search for an experienced administrator. It'll all balance out."
"Nobody ever died while I was acting night manager," Miles Mank said huffily.
"Yeah, that's true-everybody survived that riot where the company had to refund all the customers. But nobody died so that made it all good-deal-well-done. "
Miles Mank strode past Konstantin to loom over Pleshette, who had to reach up to shake her bony finger in his face. Konstantin felt that panicky chill all authorities felt when a situation was about to slip the leash. Before she could order Mank to stop arguing with Pleshette, the mustached officer tugged her sleeve and showed her a taser set on flash. "Shall I?"
Konstantin glanced at her nameplate. "Sure, Wolski, go ahead." She stepped back and covered her eyes.
The flash was a split-second heat that she found oddly comforting, though no one else did. Besides Guilfoyle Pleshette and Miles Mank, Wolski had also failed to warn her fellow officer, the other two employees, or Taliaferro, who had chosen that moment to step back inside. The noise level increased exponentially.
"Everybody shut up!" Konstantin yelled; to her surprise, everybody did. She looked around. All the people in the lobby except for herself and Wolski had their hands over their eyes. It looked like a convention of see-no-evil monkeys.