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

with her fake name and address. He slid the top half back to her. She put that in her
left pocket, knowing she’d lose the little stub within a day.
Not that she cared. The ring hadn’t been her grandmother’s and she wasn’t
here for the money.
She’d come to check out the place before she made the owner an offer he
couldn’t refuse.
****
Division Street in Gresham, Oregon, still wore its 1950s roots with pride.
Once the main drag in a city that had once been more than a suburb, Division had
decaying supper clubs with faulty neon lights, taverns with one single greasy window
up front, and more pawnshops than any other stretch in the Portland metropolitan
area.
If you drove with your eyes half-closed, you could see how classy this place
had been: An overgrown golf course hugged the bend in the road, and motels that
advertised color television led into a development of 1950s houses twice the size of
an ordinary ranch.
There’d been money here once—not a lot, but enough to give its residents a
sense of power and pride. But sometime in the ‘seventies, the highway bypassed
Division, taking the important business traffic with it, and nearly killed the street. The
moneyed elite either moved to Portland proper or watched sickness and old age eat
away their tiny pot of gold.
 The houses got shabbier, the businesses rattier, and the neighborhood filled
with outsiders who had too many babies and bought their clothing at Wal-Mart.
Fala had known it was the perfect place the moment she’d driven past the
newly opened discount cigarette store, right next to the boarded-up bank. It was
only a matter of time before Preston Lidner—or someone like him—would show.
****
She bought the Fast Cash Pawnshop for two hundred thousand dollars cash,
about a hundred and fifty thousand more than it was worth. The business might’ve
been a going concern twenty years ago, when it had been the only pawnshop on
Division, but now it had rivals on every block, most of them computer savvy and
willing to take the absolute junk for much higher prices.
Behold the great god e-Bay.
In the back, beneath a decade’s worth of newspapers, she found a
four-foot-high cast-iron safe with a combination lock. She called a locksmith from
Portland, had him reconfigure the lock, and, the moment he left, placed the estate
jewelry inside. She set up her computer, added a DSL line, and established more
firewalls than she really needed.
Then she spent the next two days combing through the junk, looking for the
buried valuables, and placed them in the back as well. When she got a chance, she’d
take the larger items to a storage unit she had just rented. The storage unit was at the
edge of Lake Oswego, another once-independent city that had become one of
Portland’s high-end neighborhoods.
Her new home, though, was a trashy apartment at the edge of Division, in a
cinderblock building that had never seen better days. Every morning when she went
to work, she tucked her long hair under a Seattle Mariners baseball cap and put a
fresh pack of Pall Malls in her purse, next to the scratched vintage lighter she’d
found in Topeka.
She kept her nails short, but painted them ruby red, wore matching lipstick, a
little too much blush, and fake eyelashes that brushed against her upper cheeks every