"Susan Palwick - Going After Bobo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Palwick Susan)

Mom! If David—"

"I know," she said. "I know you would." And then she gave me a quick kiss on the
forehead and went downstairs again, and after a while, Hobo got off the desk and
came back to lie on my feet. Watching him lick Ins shoulder, I wondered what it felt
like to have a transmitter.

I'm the only one in the family who doesn't know.

****

Letty is Mom's best friend; they've known each other since second grade. Letty
works for the BLM, and they have really good topo maps, so she could tell me
exactly where Bobo was: just inside the mouth of an abandoned mine.

"He could have crawled there to get out of the snow," I said. The transmitter signal
still hadn't moved. Mom and Letty exchanged looks, and then Mom got up. "I'm
going upstairs now," she said. "You two talk."

"He could have," I said.

"Oh, Michael," Mom said. She started to say something else, but then she stopped.
"Talk to Letty," she said, and turned and left the room.

I listened to Mom's footsteps going upstairs, and after a minute Letty said, "Mike,
it's not safe to go out there now. You know that, right? It wouldn't be safe even in a
truck. Not in this weather. And in the snow, you can know exactly where something
is and still not be able to get at it."
"I know," I said. "Like that hiker last year. The one whose body they didn't find until
spring." Except that the hiker hadn't had a transmitter, so they hadn't known where
he was. It didn't matter. For ten days after he went missing, the cops and the BLM
had search teams and helicopters all over the mountain, and never mind the weather.

"Yes," Letty said very quietly. "Exactly." She waited for me to say something, but I
didn't. "That guy was dying, you know. He was in a lot of pain all the time. His wife
said later she thought maybe that was why he went out in a storm like that, while he
could still go out at all."

Letty stopped and waited again, and I kept my head down. "He went out in bad
weather," she said finally, "near dark. It's snowing now, and you were getting ready
to hike up the mountain when your mom got home at seven-thirty. Michael?"

"Bobo could still be alive," I said fiercely. "It's not like anybody else cares. It's not
like the state's going to spend thousands of dollars on a search-and-rescue!"

"So you were thinking—what?" Letty said. "That you'd go up there and get
everybody hysterical, and get a search going, and while they were at it, they'd bring
Bobo back? Was that the plan?"

"No," I said. I felt a little sick. I hadn't thought about any of that. I hadn't even