"Alan Dean Foster - Impossible Places" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

“I will help you forget your worries.”
It was growing harder to restrain himself, to act sensibly and carefully as he always had. But he
managed. Somehow he managed. Then, when accumulated frustration threatened to explode inside him,
Providence intervened.
It was to be a routine trip downriver. The rain had been continuous for days, as it usually was at that
time of year. Though there were few travelers to accommodate, the lodge still needed certain supplies.
Max had tried to choose a day when the weather looked as though it might break temporarily to begin
the journey to Maldonado, but the rain was insistent.
The two Indians who usually accompanied them were off hunting, and no one knew when they might
return. In a fit of irritability, Max announced that he and Carlos would go alone, the Indians be damned.
Carlos could barely contain himself.
It would be so easy. He’d been so worried, so concerned, and it was going to be so easy. He waited
until they were well downriver from the lodge and village, far from any possible human sight or
understanding. Then he turned slowly from his seat in the front of the long dugout.
Through the steady downpour he saw Max. The older man’s hand rested on the tiller of the outboard,
its waspish drone the only sound that rose above the steady splatter of rain on dugout and river. His gaze
dropped to the tiny pistol Carlos held in his fingers, the pistol Carlos had bought long ago in Quito and
had kept hidden in his pack ever since.
Max was strangely calm. “I didn’t know you had a gun. I hadn’t thought of that.”
Carlos was angry that he was trembling slightly. “You don’t know anything, old man. Not that it
matters.”
“No. I guess it doesn’t. I don’t suppose it would change your mind if I just told you to take Nina and
go?”
Carlos hesitated. He did not want to talk, but he couldn’t help himself. “You know?”
“I didn’t for certain. Not until this moment. Now I do. Take her and go.”
Carlos steadied his hands. “The money.”
Max’s eyebrows lifted slightly beneath the gray rain slicker. Then he slumped. “You know everything,
don’t you? Tell me: did she resist for very long?”
Carlos’s lips split in a feral smile. “Not even a little.” He enjoyed the expression this produced on the
dead man’s face.
“I see,” Max said tightly. “I’ve suspected the two of you for some time. Stupid of me to hope it was
otherwise.”
“Yes, it was.”
“I mean it. You can take her, and the money.”
“I do not trust you.”
For the first time Max looked him straight in the eyes. “You’re not the type to trust anyone, are you,
Carlos?”
The gunman shook his head slowly. “I’ve lived too long.”
“Yes, you have.” Whereupon Max lunged at him, letting the tiller swing free.
 The unguided prop swung wildly with the current, sending the dugout careening to port. It surprised
Carlos and sent him flying sideways. He was half over the gunwale with Max almost atop him before he
had a chance to react. The old man was much faster than Carlos had given him credit for, too quick, a
devil. Carlos fired wildly, unable to aim, unable to point the little gun.
Max stopped, his powerful fat fingers inches from Carlos’s throat. He straightened slowly, the rain
pouring off him in tiny cascades, and stared downriver, searching perhaps for the destination he would
not reach. A red bubble appeared in the center of his forehead. It burst on his brow, spilling off his nose
and lips, thickened and slowed by the dense hair that protruded from beneath the shirt collar where he
was forced to stop his daily shaving, diluted by the ceaseless rain.
He toppled slowly over the side.
Breathing hard and fast, Carlos scrambled to a kneeling position and watched the body recede astern.