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

“I know,” he said. He picked up a poker, jabbed it at the carefully stacked
wood. The logs crumbled into ash. “I looked different then, but I’ve been beside
you from the moment you shot that man trying to rob your friend’s convenience
store.”
I had been alone in that convenience store. Me and the thief. Not even Suzy
saw it. She had been in back dialing 911.
He set the poker down and turned, his hands shaking more than ever. “The
last time, I stopped you from killing a man in an alley in Hollywood. You got
trigger-happy, toward the end.”
The overlay fell across him like a two-part transparency. Same slim body,
same beautiful hair—now silver, same startling blue eyes.
“No,” I whispered.
He shrugged. Either I accepted him or I didn’t.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
 “There are maybe a hundred of us working this world,” he said. “Each with
our own tools, our own abilities. I’m one of six who handle the Southwest.” He saw
the look on my face. “They can’t help, either. We must each work our own people
in our own way. If we fail, we can blame no one but ourselves.” He smiled. “And the
only admonition I got when I started—the only one—was to let no one else touch
my tools.”
“Your banjo.”
He nodded.
“Without it you age?” I asked.
“Without it I die,” he said.
“Why would Mariah want to kill you?” I did believe him, against my will. His
voice was the same.
“She doesn’t. She wants to save someone.”
The picture came clear, then. “The old man.”
He nodded. “Her father.”
And suddenly I was back five years, fifteen pounds lighter, and six hundred
strands of gray darker. Not the lone gumshoe of the mystery novelists, but a
detective with the LAPD, like my father and grandfather before me. Only a girl born
to the Winters family, but still she had to follow tradition.
That afternoon, I hurried through the halls of the hospital, late as usual. We
had a last-minute call, third convenience store robbery in a week, and arrived too late
to do anything but mop-up. I figured by the time I got there, he would already be out
of post-op, and comfortable in his room again.
I wasn’t worried. The operation was routine.
I stopped at the nurse’s station and let the ambiance wash over me. Intercom
voices, a bit too measured, a bit too calm. Televisions, playing clashing programs.
Beeping equipment, and hushed whispers. The squeak of rubber soles against tile.
Lights blinking in the background, and underneath it all the too-strong smell of
disinfectant.
A nurse set her clipboard aside, looked up at me with a fake smile, prepared
for trouble. I told her my name, told her who I had come to see. Her face blanched a
bit.
“Next of kin?” she asked.
“Daughter,” I said.
 She nodded. The routine had not gone according to plan. She hustled me
through back corridors and side doors, ending up in a room I had never seen before,