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

to her and said, "Catch you on the way out," but when he emerged
eight minutes later, carrying a sack of groceries and a bag of ice, he
blew by her kettle like she was using it to render tallow from
building inspectors' butts and he needed to escape the stench.


"It's not like you can't afford a couple of bucks for the less
fortunate."


She rang her bell especially hard right by his ear and he spun
around, swinging the bag of ice at her about hip level.


Lena jumped back. She was thirty-eight, lean, dark-skinned, with
the delicate neck and finely set jawline of a flamenco dancer; her
long black hair was coiled into two Princess Leia cinnabuns on
either side of her Santa hat. "You can't take a swing at Santa! That's
wrong in so many ways that I don't have time to enumerate them."


"You mean to count them," Dale said, the soft winter sunlight
glinting off a new set of veneers he'd just had installed on his front
teeth. He was fifty-two, almost completely bald, and had strong
carpenter's shoulders that were still wide and square, despite the
beer gut hanging below.


"I mean it's wrong — you're wrong — and you're cheap," and with
that Lena put the bell next to his ear again and shook it like a
red-suited terrier shaking the life out of a screaming brass rat.


Dale cringed at the sound and swung the ten-pound bag of ice in a
great underhanded arc that caught Lena in the solar plexus and sent
her backpedaling across the parking lot, gasping for breath. That's
when the ladies at BULGES called the cops — well, cop.


***


BULGES was a women's fitness center located just above the
parking lot of the Thrifty-Mart, and from their treadmills and
stair-climbing machines, the BULGES members could watch the ins
and outs of the local market without feeling as if they were actively
spying. So what had started as a moment of sheer glee and a mild
adrenaline surge for the six of them who were watching as Lena
chased Dale through the parking lot, turned quickly to shock as the
evil developer thwacked the Latin Santa-ette in the breadbasket with