"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 173 - Once Over Lightly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

It was all right. After all, she was paying me—she really was; I'd collected the first week's pay in
advance—and she was entitled to give the orders.

About ten o'clock, Glacia said something else that seemed a bit odd. “I'm going to say good night to
Uncle Waldo,” she told me.

“If I'm not back in half an hour, will you check up?”

“What do you mean, check up?” I asked.

She said angrily, “Just see why I haven't returned! You ask too many questions!” She flounced out,
slamming the door.

I went over to a chair and dropped into it, waiting for the clock minute-hand to move half an hour. And
presently I noticed that I had instinctively or for some other occult reason selected a chair facing the
door. My hands seemed to have a peculiar unrest of their own—they wanted to hold something, and the
fingers were inclined to bite at whatever they gripped, the latter objects alternating between the chair
armrests, my knees, a handkerchief and an Indian warclub that I chanced to pick off the table.

The warclub, it presently occurred to me, was out of place. It didn't belong in the room, which was
otherwise a fine modern hotel room. The screwball atmosphere of the hotel didn't extend to any of their
suites—except for one little touch like a stuffed buffalo or something of that sort. And that reminded
me—I looked around for the screwball item in Glacia's suite. But there didn't seem to be anything,
because the warclub wasn't enough of a zany touch to qualify.

Presently I was worrying because there wasn't a stuffed buffalo or the equivalent in the place. The logical
conclusion to be drawn from that was: I must be getting a loose shingle. The nutty desert resort, and the
intangibility of my job, might be getting me.

Twenty minutes later, I decided I was scared. There was no other emotion that would quite account for
my goose bumps. Frightened. Why? Well, Glacia wasn't back yet. But that didn't quite account for it.
Something was giving me the feeling—Feeling indeed! It was more than an impression. It was utterly
conviction—that there was considerable danger afoot. Where the notion came from, I hadn't the slightest
idea.

In the next five minutes—Glacia had been gone twenty-five now—I formed a sound notion of what was
making the roots of my hair feel funny. It was this: It didn't make sense, but it was this: Something was
waiting around to happen, and it was something violent. I had arrived at the desert resort and found an air
of suspense, of expectancy, concealed waiting, tension, fear, danger and God knows what more. How
did I know I had found these things? Somebody would have to tell me.

I was in the right mood to jump seven feet straight up when the door began to open with sinister
slowness. It had been twenty-nine minutes since Glacia left. The door to the hall opened a fractional inch
at a time. I didn't jump straight up or straight down. I just turned to stone.

Nobody more dangerous than Glacia came in. She gave me a rather odd smile.

“It's fate. Why don't you go to bed?” she said.