"McCammon Robert R. - They Thirst" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCammon Robert R)

pits of his eyes bore white pupils, faintly veined with red. From a distance
they were as pink as a rabbit's, but up close they became snakelike, glittering
coldly, unblinking, hypnotizing. His hair was yellowish-white and closely
cropped; a blue trace of veins at the temples pulsed an instant behind the
jukebox's beat. He left his helmet strapped around the handlebars and moved
toward the building, his gaze flickering toward the cars: there was a rifle on a
rack in the truck's cab, a "Hook 'Em Horns!" sticker on a car's rear fender, a
pair of green dice dangling from the jeep's rearview mirror.
When he stepped through the screen door into a large room layered with
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smoky heat, the six men inside-three at a table playing cards, two at a light
bulb- haloed pool table, one behind the bar-instantly looked up and froze. The
albino biker met each gaze in turn and then sat on one of the bar stools, the
red cobra on his back a scream of color in the murky light. After another few
seconds of silence, a pool cue cracked against a ball like a gunshot. "Aw,
shit!" one of the pool players- a broad-shouldered man wearing a red checked
shirt and dusty Levis that had been snagged a hundred times on barbed wire-said
loudly with a thick Texas drawl. "At least that screwed up your shot, didn't it,
Matty?"
"Sure did," Matty agreed. He was about forty, all arms and legs, short red
hair,| and a lined forehead half-covered by a sweat-stained cowboy hat. He was
chewing | slowly on a toothpick, and now he stood where he could consider the
lie of the balls, do some more chewing, and watch that strange-looking white
dude from the !| corner of his eye.
The bartender, a hefty Mexican with tattooed forearms and heavy-lidded_ black
eyes, came down the bar following the swirls of a wet cloth. "Help you?" he
asked the albino and looked up into the man's face; instantly he felt as if his
spine had been tapped with an ice pick. He glanced over toward where Slim
Hawkins, Bobby Hazelton and Ray Cope sat in the third hour of their Friday night
poker game; he saw Bobby did an elbow into Ray's ribs and grin toward the bar.
The albino said quietly, "Beer."
"Sure, coming up." Louis the bartender turned away in relief. The biker looked
bizarre, unclean, freakish. He was hardly a man, probably nineteen or twenty at
the most. Louis picked up a glass mug from a shelf and a bottle of Lone Star
from the stuttering refrigerator unit beneath the bar. From the jukebox, Dolly
Parton began singing about "burning, baby, burning." Louis slid the mug across
to the albino and then quickly moved away, swirling the cloth over the polished
wood of the bar. He felt as if he were sweating in the glare of a midday sun.
Balls cracked together on the green-felt pool table. One of them thunked into a
corner pocket. "There you go, Will," Matty drawled. "That's thirty-five you
oweil . me, ain't it?"
"Yeah, yeah. Damn it. Louis, why don't you turn that fuckin' music box down so a
man can concentrate on his pool playin'!"
Louis shrugged and motioned toward the poker table.
"I like it that loud," Bobby Hazelton said, grinning over kings and tens. He was
a part-time rodeo bronco-buster with a crew cut and a prominent gold tooth.
Three years ago he'd been on his way to a Texas title when a black bastard of a
horse called Twister had thrown him and broken his collarbone in two places.
"Music helps me think. Will, you oughta come on over here and lemme take some of
that heavy money you're carrying around."