"Steven Gould - Jumper 03 - Griffin's Story" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gould Stephen Jay)

I jumped to the middle of the street and stepped up to the police car. "Hey," I whispered.
The cop recoiled, surprised, his book dropping and one hand going down to his gun belt.
"Aren't you–?"
"Yes! But the men who killed my parents are right there!" I stabbed my finger back down
the brick path to the stairway. "Behind the garage."
Only they weren't behind the garage.
Projectiles shattered the passenger windows and slashed sideways and then the cop was
bent over, his head halfway out the window, clawing at the thing sticking out of his neck, a
thing with a cable attached to it, and I was in the Empty Quarter in a whirlwind of dirt and
brush.
Oh god, oh god, ohmigod. Had they seen me jump? When I appeared at the cop car? But I
was on the other side, away from them. I'm short–the car should've blocked me.
I still had the brick in my hand. There was blood on my shirt. The cop's blood.
I jumped back to the alley and peered up the path. The three were out by the car, weapons
leveled, each looking in a different direction, but they all turned back toward me the instant I
appeared.
 They know when I jump.
They ran back toward the flat and I jumped again, but only down the alley, below my
bedroom window. I heard their footsteps by the stairs and I heaved the rock up, hard as I
could, through my window.
Fire, light, sound, and flying glass. I couldn't have stayed there if I tried, but I returned to the
end of the block almost as soon as I'd flinched away to the Empty Quarter.
Debris was still raining down and the roof was gone from the flat and every car alarm in
the city seemed to be going off. I walked carefully up the sidewalk as dozens of people came
out of their homes to look wide–eyed down the street.
I backtracked and looked down at the mouth of the alley, where the men had come from
when I first saw them. After a minute, two of them appeared, dragging the third with his arms
across their shoulders. As they passed under the streetlight I saw blood on their faces–flying
glass, I decided– and one of them smoked, literally, puffs of smoke rising from his hair and
shoulder.
A car came up the street and stopped abruptly. They pushed the man who couldn't walk
into the back and climbed in on both sides, then the car was moving toward me.
I stepped behind a tree and watched it go by. At the next block it turned right. In the
distance, the blare of car alarms was replaced by the rising sound of emergency service sirens.
For a moment I thought about walking back to the fiat, to see if there was anything left,
anything I could take away, but the neighborhood was well and truly roused and too many of
them knew my face.
I jumped.



Chapter Four
Grasshoppers and Charcoal
When the bus stopped in La Crucecita, I thought it was just another stop in the journey.
We'd been five days on second–class buses and ruteras–shared minivans in which the other
passengers might include chickens and where I'd ended up with a baby or toddler in my lap
more than once. We'd stayed one night in a hotel in Mexico City but otherwise it was nap as
you could on the crowded, bouncing buses.
Consuelo said, "Hemos llegado," and after five days of hearing nothing but Spanish, I
actually understood her.