"Charles de Lint - Someplace To Be Flying" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

"Gypsy cab."
"I don't get it."
"Unlicensed."
Now she understood.
"Then we can call it in from a phone booth somewhere," she said.
"Whatever."
Hank just wanted away from here. He'd sampled some
hallucinogens when he was a kid and the feeling he had now was a lot
like coming down from an acid high. Everything slightly askew,
illogical things that somehow made sense, everything too sharp and
clear when you looked at it but fading fast in your peripheral vision,
blurred, like it didn't really exist. He could still taste the girl's tongue on
his lip, the earthy scent she'd left behind. It was a wild bouquet, like
something you'd smell in a forest, deep under the trees. He started to
reach for his shoulder again, still not quite able to believe the wound
was gone, then thought better of it.
"We should go," he told her.
She didn't move. "You've been hurt," she said.
He looked down at his bloody shirt and gave a slow nod. "But they
. . . those girls . . . just took it away. I caught a bullet in the shoulder
and now it's like it never happened. ..."
She touched her cheek. There wasn't a mark on it now.
"What's happened to us?" she said. "I feel completely distanced
from what just happened. Not just physically, but . . ."
She let her hand drop.
"I don't know," he said. "I guess it's just the way we're dealing with
the stress."
She nodded, but neither of them believed it. It was something the
girls had done to them.
He led her to the passenger's side of the cab and opened the door
for her. Walking around back, he stopped at the trunk and popped it
open. Between the coolers of beer and liquor on ice, he kept a gym bag
with spare clothes. Talcing off his shirt, he put on a relatively clean T-
shirt and closed the lid of the trunk. He paused for a moment as he
came around to the driver's side of the car, startled by the body lying
there. He kept fading on it, like it didn't really exist, like what had
happened, hadn't. Not really. He remembered the girl's lips again, the
taste of them, the faint wild musk in the air around her. Her breath, he
thought suddenly, had been sweet-like apples.
His attention returned to the corpse. Frowning, he nudged a limp
arm with the toe of his boot, moving it away from the Chev's tire. Last
thing he felt like doing was running over the thing. He picked up the
baseball bat from where it had fallen and tossed it onto the backseat.
"Where to?" he asked when he joined Lily in the front of the cab.
She gave him an address in Lower Crowsea. Yuppie territory. He'd
figured right.
She was quiet until they pulled out onto a main street and headed
west. When she spoke, he started, almost having forgotten she was
there. "How come you don't get a license?" she wanted to know. Hank
shrugged. He turned the cassette over and stuck it back in, volume