"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Incident at Lonely Rocks" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

or otherwise left inside the portable toilets, and while they’d given him a start, they’d
never scared him.
Not like that fake bear.
 He knocked one final time, hoping that someone would open the door. When
no one did, he squared his shoulders, put his fingers in the little half-moon handle,
and pulled.
The door came open easily enough. That surprised him, and looking back on
it, he wasn’t sure why. Later, he realized that everything about the toilet had
surprised him, and yet the parts registered separately, not as a cohesive whole.
First the door, then the flies—an entire swarm of them, buzzing around him as
if it were summer. He tried to wipe them away from his face with his free arm.
Then the darkness. He thought the entire place was in shadow, even though he
knew it wasn’t: There had been sunlight on the door, after all. But the interior looked
dark, and these places only looked dark when they were in shadow.
Only he tried not to leave them in shadow, so no one would be tempted to
pull a prank or get hurt using the facilities.
What he saw as darkness was actually blood, great gobs of it, dried black
against the molded plastic walls.
And finally, he saw the body, wedged—which was the wrong word because
obviously, he’d heard the body flopping around—between the tiny sink and the side
wall. The body belonged to a man, a Birkenstock wearer just like Oscar had initially
suspected, only this guy had a knife stuck up to the hilt in the left side of his flannel
shirt. He had a pair of glasses hanging from one ear, and his face looked naked. It
also looked weird, with the blood spatter on one side, but not on the other. It took
Oscar a while to figure out that the glasses had been in place when the guy died.
Oscar had probably dislodged the glasses. He’d probably moved the entire
body when he shoved the portable toilet.
That made his stomach heave. He backed out of the toilet and ran toward the
guardrail, planning to let go of his breakfast over the edge.
He didn’t quite make it. He lost a great meal on the side of the asphalt,
crouching so that he barely missed his shoes.
He stayed that way for a minute, afraid he’d lose more. He couldn’t very well
leave the guy here, but he couldn’t take him either. That would be tampering with a
crime scene, right? Oscar watched a lot of the detective programs on
television—from CSI to all its spin-offs, and its nonfiction inspiration shows on
Discovery and PBS—and he knew that touching stuff was the worst thing he could
do.
So was panicking.
He swallowed against the bile still rising in his throat and made himself
concentrate. No car, no other people, nothing obvious. He wasn’t in any danger,
even though his heart was pounding.
He had time to consider his next move.
He stood slowly. His stomach was settling down. He headed to his truck. He
had a cell phone in there, mounted on the sunflap. If he called for help, all he had to
do was wait for it, here, with his portable toilets, and the poor soul who had died in
one.
Obviously not in the act of using it either. The guy had died there, but he
hadn’t locked the door when he had gone inside. You’d think if some guy was being
attacked by a maniac with a knife, he’d go into the nearest building—even if it was
made of plastic and had thin walls—and lock the door.