"Alexander Jablokov - Dead Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jablokov Alexander)

“Well, don’t get your ass shot off out there,” she said to me. “First day of the
season, everything that moves looks exactly like what they’re after.”

“Don’t worry. I found what I was looking for.”

She shifted her gaze to me. “Oh?” Her eyes were gray. Nothing spectacular at
all. “And what was that?”

I was getting too chatty. “Just some leftover junk. It’s not really what you end
up finding. It’s the sport.”

She snorted. I had just demonstrated that I was as dumb as the rest of them.

The dead man was waving his cup again. When she stooped to pour, he held
the cup away, balking her of her prey. “These yours?”

“What makes you think that?” A half-dozen watercolors hung on the
woodgrain-vinyl wall, between a clock that peeked out of a print of mallards taking
off from a slough and a rack of state capital plates with most of the states missing.

“I don’t know.” The dead man put on a sucked-in-cheek connoisseur
expression. “Something about the style.”

She shrugged resentfully. Though slender and flexible, she was older than she
looked at first. But that shrug had no doubt always looked the same, distinctive even
in a prenatal ultrasound. “Yeah.” It was a confession.

“Nice work.”

“Sure.”

“No, really. Got a minute?”

She gazed out through the window at the parking lot, where silent trucks
waited on the gravel for their hunters to return.

“You’ve, ah, got a theme, right? What would you call it ... industrial crap
versus weeds. Right there on the edge, where one becomes the other.”

“If you say so.” She started clearing the dead man’s plate.
 “I’m not done.”

The way she yanked her hair back showed she didn’t believe him, but she put
the heavy plate, with its pink rim and smears of yolk, back down.

“I like this one. Rusted pump housing among spring skunk cabbages. And
this ... crumpled paper bag rhyming with the dried oak leaves around it. You don’t
call that a theme?”