"Nancy Kress - Oaths and Miracles" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

"Get up, damn it! Get up off that toilet!"

Sue Ann didn't get up. But she turned her face to Jeanne's, slowly,
mechanically, like an automatic flower.

"Cadoc. Verico. Cadaverico."

"What?" Jeanne said. Her stomach flopped again. Sue Ann had
snapped. She was standing in a Las Vegas toilet with a crazy girl
marked for death. Then she realized Sue Ann was speaking Italian.
Something Carlo had taught her, some lying dago sweet talk from a
two-timing son of a bitch.

"It's a joke," Sue Ann said in that same flat voice. "A joke that will
make me dead."

Jeanne grabbed both Sue Ann's hands and yanked her off the toilet.
She dragged her out of the ladies' room and into the showgirls' dressing
room. Kemper had gone. From the stage floated the music for
"Somehow I've Always Known."

"Put this on." She shoved jeans and a yellow cotton sweater at Sue
Ann. When the girl didn't move, Jeanne grabbed Sue Ann's headpiece
and yanked. A handful of hair came off with the sequins and feathers.

Jeanne shoved the sweater over Sue Ann's head, right over the body
stocking and sequined pasties. The sweater stuck. Sue Ann gasped,
unable to breathe, and then pulled the sweater down over her head.
Without prompting, she kicked off her heels and pulled the jeans over
her feathered G-string. Her face was still expressionless.

Jeanne pulled on her own clothes and sneakers and grabbed her purse
and Sue Ann's. Both women still wore stage makeup. Their hair, Sue
Ann's dyed platinum and Jeanne's natural red, stuck out wildly. Jeanne
clutched Sue Ann's arm and steered her down the back stairway, past
the stage door to the basement, through subterranean corridors stifling
with boiler heat, and out a door beside a loading dock far from the
casino's glittery entrance.

What if they were out there now, in the parking lot? Waiting?

She forced herself to walk normally. But nothing was normal, nothing
would ever be normal again. Nothing had been normal for four months,
not since she'd come to Las Vegas to be Amber, not since she'd driven
her third-hand Ford Escort, a graduation present, out of her father's
East Lansing driveway because East Lansing, Michigan, wasn't good
enough for her, not her, not for Jeanne Cassidy who was made for fun
and bright lights and excitement. . . . Her stomach flopped again and
she thought she was going to be sick. Sue Ann moaned softly, the