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

work -- divorces, money transfers, security analysis for the little businesses,
that kind of thing. Noting that you can reduce holdups by half by just painting
the curb in front of a store yellow, for example. The city never knows if it's
legit or not, but while it doesn't help crooks fleeing on foot, or local
burglars, it sure as hell makes holdup men uneasy to park in a yellow zone
waiting for a getaway. That cops notice. So, instead of taking a risk, you hold
up the drugstore down the street without a yellow curb.
That kind of stuff is readily available to franchises and chains, but little
mom-and-pop stores never think that way and it's cheap to pay a fee to somebody
like me to show it to them. They save more than my small fee in the first holdup
they don't have.
So now Brandy's out in the twelve-year-old rustbucket that's all the
transportation we have, looking over clerks at 7-Elevens, and I'm sitting there
getting worried. It wasn't that she was out alone; she was pretty well equipped
to take care of that. The fact was, she had really poor vision for somebody that
young, poor enough that I wouldn't let her drive me to the hospital if I were
dying, and certainly poor enough that the next time she had to take a driver's
eye test she'd flunk, and I just knew that sooner or later she was going to
crack up the car and herself with it. She has a pair of glasses but won't wear
them, and they're out of date anyway.
Finally, the phone rings, and I pick it up, thinking by now it's the cops or the
morgue.
"Hey! I got him!" she said excitedly. "That asshole who gave us the tip don't
know a Seven Eleven from a Wawa Thrift Market, that's all!"
I was relieved, but I didn't want to show it. "So where are you now?"
"Down halfway to the airport. How much cash money you got?"
I checked. "About twelve bucks. Why?"
" 'Cause I'm blowin' my last nine on gas and I'm starving. Pick you up in, oh,
forty minutes and we'll hit a drive-through or something. Guess that's all we
can afford on that money. All the Jews in the world and I got to pick the one
with twelve bucks. Gotta go or I won't be able to pay for this call and get
'nuff gas to get there. Bye."
I sat back and sighed. Two days of combing those stores, and after expenses we
might get a hundred bucks out of it. Worse, there wasn't anything else ongoing
at the moment. Things had been slow, real slow, for months now and we were up to
our necks in debt, and behind in almost everything. We needed to clear about two
grand a month to keep up and still survive at the poverty level; the past four
months we'd made a total of about three. We'd had slack times before, but we
always had a little money from my withdrawn pension funds or something to cover
things, but they were all gone now. There was nothing wrong with us as
detectives, but things were so low-class now that it'd take a big chunk of dough
to pump new life into the agency. One of us would eventually have to take a job
outside the business; we couldn't even afford to get sick at this rate. Brandy
had looked around, but found offers only for menial jobs, cleaning and fast food
and that kind of thing, all minimum wage and no benefits. Me, I was more than
ten years her senior, and there wasn't much of a job market these days for a guy
my age whose only qualifications were being an ex-cop and a failed P.I. Somehow
I felt I'd go on welfare before I'd get a job selling shoes.
The time was coming, though, when we'd have to grow up and be adults. It might
already have come. Being good wasn't enough. It had never been enough. It was