"Alan Dean Foster - Glory Lane" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

The Albuquerque cops were what you could call half-cool. They let you know
they were around and what your place was and that they could find you if
they needed to, but as a rule they weren't into heavy-duty hassling.
Albu-querque was just big enough, just cosmopolitan enough to barely
tolerate Seeth and his friends, though the cops would come down on you
hard and fast if you so much as parked ten minutes too long in a
thirty-minute zone.

Where he really belonged was L.A. or New York. Not out here in the vast,
stinking, conservative American heart-land. Trouble was you couldn't pick
up the bucks for relocation and cross-country airfare doing odd jobs at
min-imum wage. The good low-paying jobs were all taken by Hispanics. Not
that Seeth blamed them. Most of them had wives and kids and dreams that
would never be fulfilled. You could always try hitching, but he'd probably
end up run down by some berserk redneck trucker. Bus fare was as bad as
airfare. He was stuck.

He passed the big Diamond's department store and eyed the huge
plate-glass windows longingly. The police cruiser might still be hanging
around. It was a neat old building, rich with granite and concrete
decoration. They'd probably replace it with a parking lot some time next
year.

Checking himself out in the reflective window, he had to admit, as would
anyone with an eye for fashion, that he looked his usual slick self. Black
jacket dripping zippers, a few tastefully slung chromed chains, the
black-and-white striped pants he'd had to get by mail order since you didn't
find stuff like that on the rack at Sears, neatly set off by the lightning bolt
earring dangling from his left earlobe. Above that was the Maltese cross ear
bracelet, carefully shaved skin, and his three-inch Mohawk haircut. A little
traditional, but a lot easier to maintain than those damn spikes.

Running fingers across the bald left side of his skull, he felt the beginnings
of bristle. Time to shave again, he told himself. For all that, lookin' pretty
good. A little black eye makeup and complementary lipstick would have
really sharpened him up, but he didn't see the point in going all out just for
a casual nocturnal stroll. The parallel red stripes he had painted on his neck
and that ran from beneath his right ear to under his jacket collar were an
original touch of his own. They were purely symbolic. He could have made
them look a lot more like real blood, but then he would have had to deal
with questions from the straights on the street.

He considered walking over to the university anyway. What stopped him
was the possibility of encountering a couple of all-American frat types,
jocks who'd enjoy noth-ing more than beating the crap out of a wayward
punk. Though Seeth could take care of himself, he was only five-six and
barely into three figures poundage-wise. There was the blade he concealed
in his special pants-leg pocket, but if he actually had to stick somebody
he'd be as bad off as if he just let himself get beaten up. The cops weren't
likely to buy a claim of self-defense if his tormentor turned out to be, say,