"Carl Hiaasen - Striptease" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hiaasen Carl)

"Did he seem dead?"
"Couldn't tell," replied Crandall. "Too much blood."
"Lord," said the congressman. "Lord, I've got to get a grip on this. Erb, let's you and me pray. Give me your hands." He reached across the seat for Crandall, who shook free of the congressman's clammy fervent paws.
"Knock it off," Crandall snapped.
"Please, Erb, let's join hands." Dilbeck flexed his fingers beseechingly. "Join together and pray with me now."
"No fucking way," said the bagman. "You pray for both of us, David. Pray like hell."


The next night, Erin was taking off her clothes, getting ready, when she told Shad that she'd checked with the hospital. "They said he's out of intensive carethe man who got hurt."
Shad's eyes never looked up from the card table. "Thank God," he said. "Now I can sleep nights."
"The gun frightened me." Erin was changing into her show bra. "He sure didn't look like a bodyguard, did he? The one with the gun?"
Shad was deeply absorbed. Using a surgical hemostat, he was trying to peel the aluminum safety seal from a four-ounce container of low-fat blueberry yogurt. The light was poor in the dressing room, and Shad's eyesight wasn't too sharp. He hunched over the yogurt like a watchmaker.
"I gotta concentrate," he said gruffly to Erin.
By now she'd seen the dead cockroach, a hefty one even by Florida standards. Legs in the air, the roach lay on the table near Shad's left elbow.
Erin said, "Let me guess. You've had another brainstorm."
Shad paused, rolling a cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other. He sucked hard, then blew the smoke in twin plumes from his nostrils.
"The hell does it look like?" he said.
"Fraud," said Erin. She stepped behind a door and slipped out of her skirt. "Fraud is what it looks like to me."
Triumphantly, Shad lifted the foil (intact!) from the yogurt container. Carefully he placed it on the table. Then, with the hemostat, he lifted the dead cockroach by one of its brittle brown legs.
"Isn't that your music?" he said to Erin. "Van Morrison. You better get your ass out there."
"In a minute," Erin said. She put on her G-string, the red one with seahorses. When Erin first bought it, she'd thought the design was paisley. One of the other dancers had noticed that the pattern was actually seahorses. Laughing seahorses.
Erin came out from behind the door. Shad didn't look up.
"Have the police been around?" she asked.
"Nope." Shad smiled to himself. Copsthey usually got about as far as the front bar and then forgot why they'd come. They'd wander through the Eager Beaver bug-eyed and silly, like little kids at Disney World. Cops were absolute saps when it came to bare titties.
Erin said she'd never seen a man get hit so hard with anything as the bachelor who got clobbered with the champagne bottle. "It's a miracle there wasn't brain damage," she said.
Shad took this as criticism of his response time. "I got up there as quick as I could." His tone was mildly defensive.
"Don't worry about it," Erin told him.
"He didn't look the type. Of all the ones to go batshit."
Erin agreed. The man wielding the Korbel bottle was not your typical strip-show creep. He wore a silk tie and passed out twenties like gumdrops.
Erin checked her stiletto pumps for bloodstains. "This is a lousy business," she remarked.
"No shit. Why'd you think I'm sitting here fucking with a dead roach? This little bugger is my ticket out."
As steady as a surgeon, Shad positioned the cockroach in the low-fat blueberry yogurt. With the beak of the hemostat, he pressed lightly. Slowly the insect sank beneath the creamy surface, leaving no trace.
Erin said, "You big crazy dreamer."
Shad absorbed the sarcasm passively. "Do you get the Wall Street Journal!"
"No." She wondered where he was heading now.
"According to the Journal" Shad said, "the Delicato Dairy Company is worth one hundred eighty-two million dollars, on account of Delicato Fruity Low-Fat Yogurt being the fastest-selling brand in the country. The stock's at an all-time high."
Erin said, "Shad, they won't fall for this." She couldn't believe he was trying it again.
"You're late, babe." Shad jerked a thumb toward the stage. "Your fans are waiting."
"I've got time. It's a long number." Erin slipped into her teddy (which would come off after the first number) and her heels (which would stay on all night).
Shad said, "That song, how come you like it so much? You don't even got brown eyes."
"Nobody looks at my eyes," Erin said. "It's a good dancing song, don't you think?"
Shad was scrutinizing the yogurt. A hairy copper-colored leg had emerged from the creamy bog. Was it moving?
Shad said to Erin: "You ever see Deliverance! The movie, not the book. That last scene, where the shriveled dead hand comes out from the water? Well, come here and look at this fucking roach."
"No thanks." Erin asked if Mr. Peepers was in the audience tonight. That was the nickname for one of her regulars, a bony bookish man with odd rectangular eyeglasses. He usually sat at table three.
Shad said, "What, all of a sudden I'm supposed to take roll?"
"He called and left a message," Erin said. "Said he had a big surprise for me, which is just what I need." She dabbed on some perfumewhy, she had no idea. Nobody got close enough to smell it. Unlike the other strippers, Erin refused to do table dances. Ten bucks was ridiculous, she thought, to let some drunk breathe on your knees. Shad said, "You want me to, I'll throw his ass out."
"No, if you could just hang close," said Erin, "especially after what happened last night."
"No sweat."
"It's probably nothing," Erin said. Next came the lipstick. The boss preferred candy-apple red but Erin went with a burgundy rose. She'd hear about it from the other dancers, but what the hell.
Shad sat back from the yogurt project and said, "Hey, come and see. It's just like new!"