"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Sweet Young Things" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

He insisted on sitting next to Fala. When she managed to slip to the other side
of the table, his foot found her leg. She twisted away. They played this game during
the entire meal. Tess was the one who spoke to him, telling him lies about their pasts,
pretending they were here for some kind of teachers’ conference, which only made
Fala think of her upcoming exam, and the fact that she’d had no sleep at all.
Finally, when he finished his bacon and eggs, Preston told them a little about
his life. “I sell property.”
“Oh,” Tess said in this fakey little-girl voice she’d managed to find inside
herself. “You’re a real-estate agent.”
“Better than that,” he said. “I work big deals. I find communities on the verge
of turning themselves around and purchase a lot of property at bargain prices. Then
I find a big business to go on them.”
He made it sound like he was helping the communities. Fala’s stomach turned
and she pushed away her half-eaten pancakes.
“How do you find communities?” she asked.
He looked at her as if she had suddenly, and surprisingly, grown a brain. Tess
caught the look, too, and elbowed her, encouraging her to shut up.
“It takes a little urban-planning knowledge. First you go to a state with high
unemployment or a backwards economy. Then you find a community that has, for
some reason, started to grow. You look at the surrounding communities, and find
the one that hasn’t changed in thirty, forty years. That’s the one that’ll rebuild
because the land is cheap. And you buy up what you can.”
“There’s money in that?” Tess asked before Fala could ask anything else.
“If you sit on the property for the right amount of time.” Preston made it
sound as if he sat on the property for weeks, months, maybe years. And that was
what had screwed the Club up in its early pursuit of him. They looked for someone
who acted on the long-term rather than the short.
He didn’t reveal anything else that night, not even the name of his company,
although he did give Fala his room number. He made her promise to come upstairs
with him. She shot a trapped glance at Tess, who shrugged, offering no help at all.
Fala’s breakfast threatened to make a reappearance. She forced herself to
smile at Preston. “I’ll be right up,” she said, and hurried to the ladies’ room, hiding
there until her nausea passed.
It took nearly half an hour. By then, Preston had gone upstairs, and Tess had
lost fifty dollars in a nearby slot machine.
“You should’ve gone,” Tess said. “Imagine what you could’ve learned.”
“He would have died,” Fala said, which was one of her favorite phrases, an
attempt to sound tougher than she was. But she wondered, as she pried her friend
away from the slot machine, if there wasn’t more truth in that statement than she
wanted to acknowledge.
Deep down, she wanted her pound of flesh from Preston. Tess liked to think
that pound would come as money, repayment for all they had suffered. At first, they
thought he was working Vegas. It was only later they discovered that he was just
passing through.
Still, Fala and Tess worked out the beginnings of a plan that morning, a plan
that the Club would implement all over the country, in an attempt to destroy
Preston’s life the way he had destroyed theirs.
But Fala wondered if poverty, jail time, and humiliation were enough to satisfy
her. She wanted to hurt Preston so badly he had no sense of self left.
Preston had already climbed out of poverty with his schemes, and he didn’t