"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Heroics" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

Sarah in some way.
If only he had a gun.
He reached the side road and slipped through the opening in the trees.
The road had once been covered with gravel, but most of it had worn
away with time and traffic. He suspected this had been a logging road. Once
the trees were cleared, no one used it any more.
Except the idiots who took Sarah.
There were weeds in the middle of the path, bent and broken by the
passage of at least one vehicle. The oil trail coated a few of them, still
saying, _Follow me. Follow me._
 He did follow, keeping to the side of the road so that he didn't
disturb the oil trail. He wanted the police to be able to follow it.
He had never been off the main highway. It was quieter here, different,
light filtering through the trees, the smell of pine and loam. There was a
damp scent here, as if the ground never really dried completely, a reminder
that this part of the state was rainforest in the purest sense of the term.
The road twisted around a second growth tree, tall and stately,
towering above him like a beacon. There was a rock in the center of the path
-- more of a boulder really -- and he stopped to inspect it.
Something metal had scraped against it, not once but twice, and there
was black goo along the side. More oil. The rock was pointed on one edge. Cars
had been this way, driving over the rock, figuring they could clear it.
He wondered if the scrapes had caused damage to one of the car's
underbelly -- if what he was taking for an oil leak was something else,
something that would really incapacitate a car quicker than the drip-drip-drip
of the oil pan.
He hoped. He needed a break here. He needed something.
At least his arm wasn't jostling any more. But he was beginning to feel
desperate. He couldn't see the highway. He couldn't even hear vehicles passing
-- if there had been any. Birds chirruped above him, apparently oblivious to
his passage. Or maybe they didn't care.
Sobel could hear his own breathing, coarse and ragged, and smell the
acrid scent of his own sweat.
He needed a plan.
He couldn't go in, guns blazing. He couldn't attack, even if he had
both arms. He was a middle-aged man, about thirty pounds overweight and out of
shape, a man who spent the last twenty years sitting on his ass, typing
comfortably, making up adventures that he had never -- could never --
experience. He'd fought as a boy, but only defensively, arms up as the school
bullies pounded him for their own perverse joy.
He'd won one of those fights, kicking, jabbing, connecting
accidentally, fighting dirty, giving up fighting fair. No one fought fair and
won.
No one.
He'd have to grab her, bring her back down this trail, and they'd be
after him. They'd have their cars, and their guns, and their confidence, and
he'd have a broken arm and a little girl who was scared out of her mind.
If she was still alive.
It was that thought which kept him going forward. Maybe he couldn't
rescue her. Maybe that wasn't his function. Maybe his function was to keep