"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Nutball Season" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

But the guy wanted to waste police time on something that wasn't ever gonna happen, and I had to let
him know that we didn't send squads chasing after every elf in the bushes, metaphorically speaking.

But then, on the other hand, they teach you at the academy to listen to these nuts on the offsides that even
nuts sometimes know something what might be true.

So I got to thinking I had this guy figured out, so I leaned forward and I said, "Pop, I know it's tough
when families don't get along, and it ain't fair your daughter keeping you away from your grandson, but
you know, the kid ain't gonna hold it against you if you get a friend to bring him his toys this year. The kid
is gonna be a might upset if his mom takes out the deer rifle and pops you one. I mean, if those're your
options, you gotta know which one I recommend."

He got up and his voice went all deep, just like I was thinking it shoulda been, except it still wasn't jolly,
and he said, "I hate going to the established authorities. They never believe me. Why can't you people
have an open mind for once?"

The dispatch, he looked up from his nails, and the desk sarge, who had come back in from wherever the
hell he'd been, looked at the old guy throw a fit right in front of me, a very cultured fit, but a fit all the
same, and I knew what the sarge was thinking: he was thinking, there goes Mantino again, pissing off
some citizen.

I'd already heard the lecture about my melancholy state, about the way I should maybe get some help
now that Cindy Lou was gone, only the lecture probably wouldn't go that way. It probably would be a
bit harsher since Cindy Lou'd been gone nearly six months, and my mood hadn't improved much. It was
that empty house, you know, the starter, with two bedrooms the size of a closet, and the one empty as a
grave, what was supposed to be for the first little Mantino way back when me and Cindy Lou actually
liked each other. I'd been spending those last six months thinking, not about Cindy Lou, because me and
her we weren't right, but about family and how some people want one and never get it and how some
people get one and never want it.

All this went through my brain in like a split second, while the geezer's using his elegant voice to
broadcast to the whole house how I failed him. So I got up, and I said, not so loud that the sarge could
hear, but loud enough to shut up the geezer, "If you got the magic that can make reindeer fly, how come
you can't land on a roof without some wacko with a shotgun seeing you?"

The geezer sighed and got back in his chair. The desk sarge looked down, the dispatch went back to his
nails, and all was right with the world.

Momentarily.

"The magic works like this," the geezer said. "Anyone who believes in me can see me."

I said, "Look, from what I can see in them letters, she don't believe in you."

"You haven't read closely enough," the old man said. "She believes strongly enough to see me as a threat
to the entire civilized world. Unfortunately, she is probably the person who believes in me the most of all
the adults in all the world."

He had a point. He had a delusion, she had a delusion, and it was shared and there was a gun mentioned,
and I probably shoulda been taking this whole thing a lot more seriously than I had been.