"Tom Reamy - Under the Hollywood Sign" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reamy Tom)

Under the Hollywood Sign

by Tom Reamy

I can't pinpoint the exact moment I noticed him. I suppose I had been subliminally aware of him for some
time, though he was just standing there with the rest of the crowd. Anyway, I had other things on my
mind: a Pinto and a Buick were wrapped around each other like lettuce leaves. The paramedics had two
of them out, wrapped in plastic sheets waiting for the meat wagon, and were cutting out a third with a
torch. He appeared to be in the Buick, but you couldn't really tell.

My partner Carnehan and I were holding back the crowd of gawkers. A couple of bike cops in their
gestapo uniforms were keeping the traffic moving on Cahuenga, not letting any of them stop and get out.
But there were still twenty or twenty-five of them standing there—eyes bright, noses crinkled, mouths
disapproving.

All except him.

That's one of the reasons I noticed him in particular. He wasn't wearing that horrified, fascinated
expression they all seem to have. He might have been watching anything—or nothing. His face was
smooth and placid. I think that's the first time I ever saw a face totally without expression. It wasn't dull
or blank or lifeless. No, there was vitality there. It just simply wasn't doing anything at the moment.

And he was … Don't get the wrong idea—my crotch doesn't get tight at the sight of an attractive young
man. But there's only one word to describe him—beautiful!

I've seen my share of pretty boys—the ones that flutter and the ones that don't. It seems the prettier they
are, the more trouble they get into. But he wasn't that kind of beautiful.

Even though the word is used these days to describe practically everything, it was the only one that fitted.
I thought at first he was very young: nineteen, twenty, not more than twenty-one. But then I got the
impression he was much older, though I don't know why, because he still looked twenty. He was about
five-ten, a hundred and sixty-seventy pounds—one of those bodies the hero of the book always has but
that you never see in real life.

His hair was red, or it might have just been the light from the flashers. There were no peculiarities of
feature; just a neutral perfection. I've heard it said that perfect beauty is dull, that it takes an imperfection
to make a face interesting. Whoever said it had never seen this kid.

He was standing with his hands in his pockets, watching the guys with the torch, neither interested nor
uninterested. I guess I was staring at him, because his head turned and he looked directly at me.

I could smell the rusty odor of the antifreeze dribbling from the busted radiators and the sharp ozone of
the acetylene and the always-remembered smell of blood. A coyote began yipping somewhere in the
darkness.

Then a couple of kids got too close and I had to hustle them out of the way. When I looked back, he
was no longer there.

They finally got the third one out of the Buick. When they pulled him out I could see the wet brown stain
all over the seat of his pants where his bowels had relaxed in death. The ambulance picked up all three of