"Chalker, Jack L - G.O.D. Inc 1 - Labyrinth of Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

He chose the easy way, setting up a kiddie-prostitution meet and then picking
one of the two we were looking for out of photos kept in a nice family album.
The kid -- the girl -- was all fancied up and brought to the hotel, but they smelled a
rat, somehow, at the last minute, and we could sense it. There were squad cars
around ready to make a move on the undercover man's signal, but it just didn't
happen.
I was pretending to doze in the lobby, dressed like a bum and smelling of cheap
booze, and Brandy was all dressed up like a hooker, all made-up and really
underdressed, cigarette dangling from her lips, and perched sexily on the edge
of an end table leafing through a magazine. Both of us looked totally natural in
that cesspool. We saw them bring in the kid and I was shocked at how they'd made
her up, and even more by her glassy eyes and automatic behavior. The undercover
guy came in a half-hour later and went straight up to the room, but a lot of
time passed. Too much. Finally Brandy read my mind and sauntered over.
"You take the desk clerk and call in the Marines," she whispered, as if coming
on to me. "I'm going up and see what's wrong."
I didn't like that. "Let me go up."
She gave me a kiss -- the first time she'd ever done that. "You just go do what I
say. I'll be all right."
Yeah. All right is not the word for it. She swished and swayed on too-high heels
over to the old elevator and I made my way over to the desk. I hate guns, but
lives were at stake. I didn't want to risk identifying myself first; some of
these places have floor buttons for warning signals.
The clerk was sitting back in a chair next to the old-fashioned switchboard
reading the racing news. I checked my back, pulled my .38, and said, "Real quiet
now, you be a statue. Police." He started to make a move and I was behind there
and cracking him in the face with the gun in no time. I had been right -- there
were three buttons to the right of the switchboard, out of view of the desk
area. He hadn't gotten a chance to push any of them. I picked up his phone and
dialed a special number. "Come on in. It's going down wrong," I said, and that
was that. I then looked around. A half a dozen hookers, bums, and junkies were
around that place and not one of them even deigned to notice what I was doing.
The trouble was, after five minutes the cops didn't seem to be noticing, either.
I decided we'd been had and ran up the stairs. When the desk bastard woke up he
could push all the buttons he wanted.
Brandy had been listening at doors on the third floor, but just as I saw her
there was the unmistakable sound of a shot from one of them and she ran to it,
reaching in her purse and taking out the biggest damned handgun I ever saw. She
blew the lock off, then kicked open the door but kept her back to the wall, very
professionally. There were screams and shrieks inside the room, and when Brandy
saw me she whirled and plunged right into that mess.
The bastards had gone down the fire escape probably before she'd blown the lock
off, leaving the kid screaming there and one very badly wounded detective. I got
to him and he opened his eyes, saw me, and groaned. "Setup," he managed. "They
knew.. .. They wanted me. ... Where the hell's the backup?"
That's what I wanted to know.
By now the hotel resembled a cemetery, and not from the bodies. At the first
shot the place had erupted like Mount Saint Helens, spewing its human garbage
all to hell and gone before the real cops got there. Not even the deskman was
there. I got down there, called for an ambulance, then called the Vice tactical