"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Courting Rites" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

off the wall. The second wasn’t as well-timed—the pimp let out a grunt and slid to
the garbage-strewn pavement.
Then everything froze. Street noise I hadn’t thought I heard disappeared. Cars
stopped in their tracks, and the pimp paused in mid-groan. A man stood over the
pimp, a slender man, longish dark hair and startling blue eyes. A man who hadn’t
been there before.
“I’m going to stop this,” he said. He had the most beautiful voice I had ever
heard. “You’re way past your limit.”
 He ran his hand over the pimp’s wound. A gout of blood and pus leaked out,
followed by the bullet. The wound closed itself, leaving only a scratch. The man
smiled, tipped his hat at me, and then the sounds came back—the honking horns,
blaring music, nattering tourists. The pimp completed his moan, touched his
shoulder, and looked surprised when no blood coated his fingers.
The man had disappeared.
I cuffed the pimp, left him, and took the girl home. She ran away again, not a
week later. Maybe the vision had been right. Maybe I killed too many and had
sympathy for too few.
I came to Nevada to find solace. Instead, I found a loneliness so deep that not
even the desert would soften it. I would dream of the man in black, his beautiful
voice and his striking eyes, and in the morning, I would wake, my gun clutched in
my hand, wondering how the barrel would taste against my tongue.
The dream hadn’t come in nearly a month.
I missed it.
The heat made my skin prickle. I watched the dust devils swirl around me,
wondering if they were lonely, too. Finally I decided they weren’t—they always
worked together, in company of two. I went home to an empty house. No one had
kept me company for a long, long time.
Mariah Golden spent her days at the hospital, holding the hand of an old man
dying of cancer. His room had that putrid stink of flesh gone bad, but she didn’t
seem to mind. She read to him, watched television with him, or sat quietly beside
him, a presence, nothing more.
I had no trouble finding her. She lived in the family home just outside of
town—alone, from what I could tell. She used her credit cards regularly to send
flowers to the old man, and she made no effort to hide her appearance around town.
Odd thing for a thief, but then, a banjo was an odd thing for a wealthy woman to
steal.
I waited until she went on one of her hospital runs, then used the lock set to let
me into her house. The security alarm was a familiar one—I had been the consultant
for the LA firm that developed it—and so I knew I had thirty seconds to disable it
before the cops arrived, guns in hand.
It took me fifteen.
Two steps down let me into the sunken living room, done in cream with
Navajo blankets for color. Designer books stood on the wall, a framed Chagall hid
from the light. I assumed the small objets d’art decorating the tables were also worth
a small fortune.
 I took two steps back up and stopped in the dining room to admire the
stained-glass chandelier and the mahogany table. The dishes in the hutch were
Wedgwood—predictable, I thought—and a Dali original dominated that room.
No banjo.
Not that I expected it to hide in plain sight.