"Christopher Moore - The Stupidest Angel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore Christopher)

pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the
mistletoe.


Pine Cove, her pseudo-Tudor architecture all tarted up in holiday
quaintage — twinkle lights in all the trees along Cypress Street, fake
snow blown into the corner of every shop's windows, miniature
Santas and giant candles hovering illuminated beneath every
streetlight — opened to the droves of tourists from Los Angeles, San
Francisco, and the Central Valley searching for a truly meaningful
moment of Christmas commerce. Pine Cove, sleepy California
coastal village — a toy town, really, with more art galleries than gas
stations, more wine-tasting rooms than hardware stores — lay there,
as inviting as a drunken prom queen, as Christmas loomed, only five
days away. Christmas was coming, and with Christmas this year,
would come the Child. Both were vast and irresistible, and
miraculous. Pine Cove was expecting only one of the two.


Which is not to say that the locals didn't get into the Christmas
spirit. The two weeks before and after Christmas provided a
welcome wave of cash into the town's coffers, tourist-starved since
summer. Every waitress dusted off her Santa hat and clip-on
reindeer antlers and checked to make sure that there were four good
pens in her apron. Hotel clerks steeled themselves for the rage of
last-minute overbookings, while housekeepers switched from their
normal putrid baby-powder air fresheners to a more festive putrid
pine and cinnamon. Down at the Pine Cove Boutique they put a
"Holiday Special" sign on the hideous reindeer sweater and marked
it up for the tenth consecutive year. The Elks, Moose, Masons, and
VFWs, who were basically the same bunch of drunk old guys,
planned furiously for their annual Christmas parade down Cypress
Street, the theme of which this year would be Patriotism in the Bed
of a Pickup (mainly because that had been the theme of their Fourth
of July parade and everyone still had the decorations). Many Pine
Covers even volunteered to man the Salvation Army kettles down in
front of the post office and the Thrifty-Mart in two-hour shifts,
sixteen hours a day. Dressed in their red suits and fake beards, they
rang their bells like they were going for dog-spit gold at the Pavlov
Olympics.


***


"Give up the cash, you cheap son of a bitch," said Lena Marquez,
who was working the kettle that Monday, five days before Christmas.
Lena was following Dale Pearson, Pine Cove's evil developer,
through the parking lot, ringing the bejeezus out of him as he
headed for his truck. On his way into the Thrifty-Mart, he'd nodded