"Nayler, Ray - Man In The Dark" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nayler Ray)

"The name is Alice." She put a warm, dry hand in his.

"Sam."

"The phone is dead. But the least I can do is get you some dry clothes. You'll catch your death. Listen to me -- I sound like your mother."

He realized that he was shivering. It was all he could do to keep his teeth from rattling together.

"That would be good, I think. The clothes, I mean."

She went up the stairs, leaving him in the dark with the impression that he had walked in on something some uncomfortable situation.

"Are you alone?" he called after her.

She answered from around a shadowy corner. "Yes. Now that my husband died."

She came down the stairs, turned a light switch on.

Under the light, he could see the work lines on her face and hands, the careless frizz of her blonde hair. Her eyes were hard.

She's remembering him, Sam thought.

"I laid the clothes out on the bed. The room is up to the left. You aren't hurt from the accident?"

"No." He wished that he was. It would have been something to show for it.

The bedroom was small and tidy in that "Country Cottage" style that Sam had seen before when arresting stolen car dealers. There were at least a dozen quilts layered on the bed, a half-dozen more draped over a Shaker chair. His wet boots were leaving a spreading gray stain on the immaculate white carpet. The clothes she had picked out for him were folded at the foot of the bed. He disrobed carefully, peeling away the layers of his uniform, wet by wet, balling them up and looking for a place to set them that would cause the least damage. There was nowhere. His gun belt was soaked, his bootlaces tight with water. Trying to take his boots off while standing, he stumbled. Finally he had to sit on the edge of the bed, pressing water into patchwork, heaving the boots off, sliding his pants down. Even his underwear was soaked.

Taking his uniform off always made him feel more naked, as if he was shedding armor. He balled up the pieces and went into the bathroom. Bowls of seashell soaps and the alien scent of potpourri. He stumbled in the dark and found the light switch. Paintings of farmland in flat patchwork, like the quilts. American primitive. His mother had loved the style, had collected it the way white mothers collect smiling Negro salt-and-pepper shakers. She had kept piles of fat coffee-table books full of the two-dimensional paintings in their apartment in Chicago.

Power, but no phone, Alice had said. The rain hammered on the windowpanes, a shower of pebbles against the glass. Power, but no phone. How had she known the phone was out? He put his wet boots in the bathtub, mopped the puddles off the floor with the towel. He avoided his brown nakedness in the mirror.

In the bedroom, he dressed in the other man's clothes. The dead man's clothes. They were cut for shoulders broader than his, a waist that sagged. He belted his gun around the loose waist of the work-jeans. The shoes--beaten sneakers--fit perfectly.

Back in the bathroom, he looked at himself in the mirror, clad in baggy flannel and denim, and smoothed his short-cropped hair.

They would joke about it at the station for months, when they found him like this.

"I should be dead," he said aloud.

She was sitting in the kitchen, unconsciously drumming her feet on the yellow linoleum, bent over a cup of coffee. She looked up at him and covered her mouth with her hand.

He ignored the look, sat down. She took her hand away from her mouth, and smiled.

"You look different."

"How's that?"

"Smaller."