"Scott Nicholson - Must See to Appreciate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nicholson Scott)

MUST SEE TO APPRECIATE
Scott Nicholson

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Scott is the author of six thrillers, five screenplays, numerous short stories
and writing articles. He’s also a freelance editor and award-winning
journalist, which means he pretty much lives off words. Hobbies include
raising goats, tending an organic garden, swimming, ghost hunting, and
playing guitar, but his favourite activity is writing love letters in invisible ink.
He is vice president of the Horror Writers Association and is currently
adapting his latest book They Hunger as a graphic novel. His carefully
disheveled Internet persona is found at hauntedcomputer.com

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This was the part that Reynolds hated the most.

The deal was so close he could almost smell it. The fish was nibbling,
practically had the worm between his nubby gums. Reynolds had wowed
the mark with the double bay windows, the parquet flooring, the loft
bedroom with skylight, and the view of the Appalachian Mountains
stretching a blue hundred miles in the distance. Custom cabinets and a
cherry stair railing hadn’t hurt, either, and the deck was wide enough to field
a baseball game. Surely that was enough to convince anybody that this
twenty-acre piece of real estate and 7,200-square-foot floor plan was the
steal of a lifetime, especially at the sacrificial price of four hundred grand.

But the mark wanted to see the basement. They always wanted to
see the basement. It figured. Reynolds was stuck handling the only haunted
house on the local market, and these idiot buyers didn’t make the job any
easier.

“The bulb’s burned out in the basement, David,” Reynolds said. “Had
the caretaker up here the other day, and said he’d get around to changing it.
You’d think he’d carry one in his truck, you know? Good help is hard to find
around these parts, David.”

Maybe he shouldn’t have said that last bit. This buyer was from
Florida, and might think that poor work habits were an Appalachian
trademark. Reynolds looked David in the eye and smiled. It was Reynolds’
plastic smile, the closer smile, the glib smarmy hypertoothiness that he’d
learned in salesman school.

The man reached into his back pocket and pulled out a flashlight. “I
used to be a builder,” David said. “You can tell a lot about how a house is