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

Maybe the guy didn’t have time. Maybe he had run inside, the killer had
grabbed the door and stabbed him, and then left while the poor victim flailed about
inside, trying to pull the knife free and failing.
Although, shouldn’t a knife hold the blood in? Hadn’t Oscar read somewhere
that a stabbing victim should never remove a knife, that the knife would keep him
from bleeding to death?
Oscar was breathing hard. He flipped open his cell and stared at the reception
bar.
Nothing. He should’ve remembered that. One reason he loved this route was
that his boss couldn’t call him and make him veer off it, not without exquisite timing
and a lot of luck.
“Damn,” Oscar whispered. But he slipped the phone onto his belt clip and
walked back to the scene.
He was already thinking of it as a crime scene. How TV of him. He wasn’t
any kind of detective, and he couldn’t figure things out. He had just stumbled on
something awful, and now, it seemed, his brain wasn’t working quite right.
He had to get calm before he took the next step, whatever that would be. He
walked away from the truck and headed toward the guard rail. Maybe the Lonely
Rocks would know. Maybe they would help him remember where the cell reception
started again or where the nearest police station was.
Or ranger station. Or some kind of coast guard unit. Any place with someone
official.
The ocean was bright blue with a topping of snow-white foam near the rocks.
In the distance, the horizon blended with the ocean, looking like the kind of smudge
an artist would deliberately make with chalk by rubbing his finger along a firm line.
Oscar made himself concentrate on that smudge as he crossed the parking lot,
trying to remind himself that this was just a blip in his day, a bad event, one that he
could cope with if he only tried hard enough.
He just didn’t want to be alone with it, nor, for some reason he didn’t fully
understand, did he want to leave the poor victim alone. The guy had been alone long
enough already.
The far edge of the guard rail was battered, and a section was missing. Oscar
frowned. He hadn’t noticed that before, but it meant nothing. He hardly ever came
this far down the parking lot, both because he never needed to—you could see the
ocean from the road—and because the sliding earth made him nervous. The asphalt
already had big cracks in it, and he, with his oversize footballer’s frame, didn’t want
to be the guy to send another section tumbling toward the sea.
He stopped, his heart pounding. He needed to leave this all for the experts.
But he couldn’t. He needed to go forward, to see if the break in the rail had
something to do with the poor slob in the portable toilet.
Cautiously, he took the next few steps, putting a foot down, then easing his
weight onto it, then taking the next step. The ground felt stable enough. There hadn’t
been a lot of rain, so the ground shouldn’t have been saturated. And there hadn’t
been a lot of wind or high surf, so nothing should have been eroded from
underneath.
In other words, he had nothing to fear.
Except that hole in the guard rail and that body in the toilet.
He squared his shoulders again—a trick, he realized, he’d learned from his old
coach—and continued forward, reaching the middle of the still-intact guard rail and
peering over.