"Ellison, Harlan - Objects Of Desire (txt)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

here.

And they mentioned, in passing, the green light.

Don't ask.

When I turned in my prelim, the Boss gave me one of his looks. Not the one that
suggests you're about to be recycled, or the one that says it's all over for
you...the one that says if I had a single wish, it would be that you hadn't put
these pages in front of me. He sighed, shoved back his chair, and took off his
glasses, rubbing those two red spots on the wings of his nose where the frames
pinched. "No one saw anything else? No one with a grudge, a score to settle, a
fight over a bottle of wine, a pedestrian pissed off the old guy tried to brace
him for loose change?"

I spread my hands. "You've got it there, all of it. The women are of no earthly
help. They just keep saying they loved him, and that they can't live without
him. In fact, we've got two of them on suicide watch. They might just not want
to live without him. Boss, I'm at a total loss on this one."

He shoved back from the desk, slid down the chair till his upper weight was
resting on his coccyx, and stared at me.

"What?"

He waggled his head, as if to say nothing, nothing at all. He reached out an
enormous catcher's mitt of a hand and tore a little square off his notepad,
wadded it, and began to chew it. Never understood that: kids in home-room with
spit-wads, office workers with their minds elsewhere, people chewing paper.
Never could figure that out.

"So, if it's nothing, Boss, why d'you keep staring at me like I just fell off
the moon or something?"

"When was the last time you got laid, Jacobs?"

I was truly and genuinely shocked. The man was twice, maybe three or four times
my age; he walked with a bad limp from having taken an off-duty slug delivered
by a kid messing with a 7-Eleven; he was married, with great-grandchildren
stacked in egg-crates; and he was Eastern Orthodox Catholic; and he bit his
nails. And he chewed paper. I was truly, even genuinely, shocked.

"Hey, don't we have enough crap flying loose in this house without me having to
haul your tired old ass up on sexual hare-assesment?"

"You wish." He spat soggy paper into the waste basket. "So? Gimme a date, I'll
settle for a ballpark figure. Round it off to the nearest decade."

I didn't think this was amusing. "I live the way I like."