"Charles de Lint - Mulengro" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

watched from my sofa, thanks all the same.”

“What kind of clubs are these?” Briggs asked.

“What they’d do,” MacDonald explained, “is mount a stuffed leopard’s paw on the end of a club and use
it to mimic the blows of a leopard in ritual killings.”

“Are you serious?”



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 MULENGRO

“Sure.”

“You saw the body,” Briggs said. “Could something like that have been used on it?”

MacDonald shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe it was a leopard or a panther. Maybe you should check
around to see if a circus is in town. You know, Zabu van Gogh—the Amazing Drawing Panther.”

“Everybody’s a comedian,” Briggs muttered.

Cooper cleared his throat and began to straighten the papers on his desk. “I’ll be in touch with you as
soon as I get those final samples back from the lab. It might have been one of those fancy knuckle-
dusters, it might have been an animal. We’ll see.”

“No fur, no saliva, no claws…” MacDonald was ticking the items off on his fingers again. He looked up
at Briggs. “But maybe you’ll get lucky and someone’ll step forward like a good citizen to tell you that
he’s got a panther sleeping under his porch and would you please come to remove it.”

“Maybe I’ll get even luckier and you’ll get transferred out to the West End.” Briggs smiled sweetly and
MacDonald laughed.

“Better watch it, Paddy,” he warned. “Next thing you know, you might start developing a sense of
humor.”




“I hate waiting to get lucky,” Briggs complained to Will later that morning.

They were sitting at Will’s desk in the new police station on Elgin Street, one floor above the Morgue
and the office where they’d left Cooper and MacDonald. The final construction on the new station had
been completed this past spring and everybody had been happy to move out of the crowded confines of
the old building on Waller. The new five-story structure was the pride of the city’s police department. It
was five times the size of the old station and cost fifteen times the price tag of the Waller Street station
that had been built in the late fifties for a modest $1.4 million. Everything in it was still shiny, with a
smell of new paint about it. Briggs figured the glow would last another month, tops. The Morgue already
had its own peculiar odor, as though it had never been moved.