"Van Lustbader, Eric - Dark Homecoming(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

"Really? You, an ex-cop, work now and again when the mood prevails with the elite Feds, what're they called, the Anti-Cartel Task Force. Anyone official inquires, they don't know you, you don't know them. Your name ain't on their books, so who's to say who's lyin'."
"You know that for a fact?"
"It's a guess, what d'you think?" Bennie grinned as he worked his rod. "Also, word is you did some mighty fancy footwork with the mob. You got friends-and enemies-in high places, Lewis, don't lead me to believe otherwise." Bennie shrugged. "I know what I need to 'bout you," he said.
"Where'd you hear all this nasty stuff?" Croaker asked.
"Guys I play mah-jongg with." Bennie had a laugh like a macaw's startled screech. He flashed a quick glance at Croaker.
The wahoo was tiring, no doubt about it. Its runs were shorter and less powerful. Bennie definitely had him under control. It wouldn't be long before they could gaff him aboard. "I know something about that mechanical left hand of yours. I know it ain't no handicap. Far fuckin' from it. Also, I know how you came to South Florida baby-sitting a guapa witness to multiple murder, and when the case was over, you threw in your shield prematurely and settled down with the guapa. What was her name?"
"You tell me."
Bennie shrugged. "She was a model, right? Now she's off in Paris, Milan, fuck knows where. An' who cares, anyways? She sure as shit ain't here. Her idea of life was different than yours. Just like your Mafia princess back on Long Island. She was beyond the law and she was married. Ooo, I like the size of your cojones, se?or!" He shook his head. "God hears me, the guapas can be cruel when they want to be."
"They weren't cruel," Croaker said, despite himself. "Like you said, they were not for me."
Bennie ignored Croaker's comment. He flicked the glass rod, hurting the fish more, weakening it further. "So you came back to this forty-foot Hatteras and the sport fishing charter company you'd started years ago, after you realized the obvious: that the thing with the Mafia princess was, like, unworkable."
"Very impressive."
"Didn't do it to impress you," Bennie said, reeling in the wahoo. "Did it to make a point 'bout the kind of man you are an' the kind of man I am."
The wahoo's wake was wide now. Exhausted from the fight, it was almost on its side. Croaker threw the boat into neutral, then climbed out of the cockpit and went to fetch the short, stout gaff.
As Croaker came up beside him, Bennie's coffee-colored eyes slid his way. "You an' me we're the same, deep down inside, is what I think."
Croaker held the gaff vertically, as if it were a medieval halberd. Next to Bennie's slender frame his bearlike bulk seemed overpowering. He had the handsome weather-beaten face of a cowboy; Robert Mitchum tall in the saddle. Sunlight flared in his gray eyes. His artificial left hand, made of black polycarbonate, stainless-steel, iridescent blue titanium, and matte-gray boron components, looked like a knight's mailed fist. "And what kind of man is that?"
"Very fuckin' careful." Bennie grinned fiercely as he handed off the rod to Croaker while he took possession of the gaff. It was his fish to land all the way into the boat; that was one of Croaker's rules of the sea. "Like, here's a for instance. You come down here your rep precedes you. You begin to do work for the Feds, helping the Coast Guard out now an' then, wrapping up drug smugglers they can't get a handle on. Did a lotta tracking in the 'glades." He meant the Everglades. "Nasty kinds of stuff in there, gators, crocs, snakes, I mean to tell you. But you, very careful, you learned your way around. Like a fuckin' native. Like-what's the name of those Indians, not the Seminoles, who came down later on from somewhere north, right?"
"Georgia. They came in the eighteenth century."
"Yeah," Bennie said. "So anyway, not them. I mean the original
Florida gents, got whacked like the Indians in Mexico and Peru by the fuckin' Anglos hornin' in, taking whatever the hell they wanted."
"The Calusas."
"Right. You hit the 'glades like, you know, a fuckin' Calusa. Careful" Bennie stretched over the side, swinging the gaff down. He was trying to find the gill slit to hook into. "Lots of evil happenin' in South Florida, I don't have to enumerate to you. Pays t'be'specially careful down here."
"And you'd know about being careful, Bennie."
"Sure I would. What I do in life-" Bennie paused as he made another pass at the wahoo's elusive gill slit. "When it comes right down to it I don't really do anything at all. I'm a fixer. People have problems an' I fix 'em. Business problems, personal problems-I fix 'em all. An' not like you think-I see that look on your cop face. You seen I'm carrying, I know what's on your mind. But you're wrong. The piece is for protection only." He spread his hands. "I negotiate. I find a way to make a settlement." He hunched forward, his voice lower, more throaty. "See, my experience has been that people-no matter how stupid, stubborn, or prideful-are motivated by the same thing: they don't want to lose. I show 'em how they won't lose."
Bennie wiped salt spray out of his eyes with the back of his arm. He was concentrating on the movements of the wounded wahoo. Hurling itself against the boat hull, it still had a bit of life left in it. Finding the gill slit at last, he bent over farther, grunting.
"Ah, shit!" The wahoo had flicked one last time and the gaff's hook ripped through skin and flesh. "I'll never get this part clean." Ribbons of blood darkened the water.
"You want help," Croaker said, holding tight rein on the line, "just say the word."
Bennie was balanced precariously on the top rail. "The day I need help landing a fuckin' wahoo-"
The rest of his sentence was lost in a guttural scream. The water around the wahoo, already dark with uncoiling blood, turned black, then a sickening white. With a great roar, the water purled upward and, foaming madly, revealed the head of a tiger shark.
"What th' fuck?" Bennie shouted.
It was huge-over a thousand pounds for sure, Croaker estimated. The jaws gaped open inches from Bennie's hands. The cavity looked as big as the Lincoln Tunnel. As the massive jaws clashed shut, the gaff snapped in two and part of the wahoo disappeared in a bright maelstrom of flying blood and churning water.
Bennie tried to scramble back, but his belt buckle got hung up on the rail. For a moment he hung there, his upper torso suspended out over the water.
Croaker extruded stainless-steel nails from the tips of the polycarbonate and titanium fingers of his left hand, slashed them horizontally, snapping the monofilament line. He dropped the glass rod to the pitching deck as, with a sickening lurch, the tiger shark surfaced again, coming right at Bennie.
"ЎMadre de Dios!" Bennie's white face was flecked with fish gore. Scales refracted miniature rainbows off his cheekbones, nose, and eyebrows. His wide, staring eyes reflected the ugly gray-brown snout of the shark.
Bennie's head was directly above the gaping jaws, and still the shark rose, gripped by a frenzy of blood lust. Croaker used his right hand to grab Bennie by the back of his shirt collar, hauling backward. But that damn silver buckle was caught beneath the top rail.
In desperation, Croaker shouldered in beside Bennie. Bending over the rail, he swung his left hand down in a flat arc. Sunlight glittered off the back of,-his artificial hand. The extruded stainless-steel nail of his thumb pierced the shark's right eye, while the other four buried themselves in its snout. It was the only part of the shark's anatomy that seemed sensitive. Croaker remembered stories of divers who claimed they'd fended off attacks by slamming its nose. He prayed they were true.
The tiger shark thrashed, its powerful tail churning the water, the flailing of its thick body rocking the boat. Its sandpaper hide scraped against the hull, stripping off layers of paint and wood. Half-blinded and blood-maddened it rose vertically a third time, then crashed downward. Croaker's nails were embedded deep within monstrous flesh and cartilage, In reflex, he'd curled them and now couldn't extract them. The shark's abrupt downward rush threatened to take him with it.
Bennie, who had been struggling with his buckle, lurched free and, taking hold of Croaker's sweat-soaked shirt with one hand, drew the .38 Smith & Wesson from his waistband and pumped six rounds into the shark's head. He was aiming for the brain, but it was so small and so well armored he couldn't be sure he'd hit it.
Either by malevolent design or by simple reflex, the shark leaped out of the water again. Could Bennie have been such a poor shot, even at point-blank range or was the prehistoric beast's body unaware as yet that it was dead? No matter. The ruined snout burst upward in an eruption of pink spume. The leading edge of its double-rowed teeth grazed the inside of Bennie's right forearm and he gasped. He was so startled he dropped the .38 as if it were a hot iron. It disappeared down the shark's throat. Then Croaker, bunching his fingers, tore his steel nails clear through cartilage and flesh, ripping open the shark's snout in a long, bloody rent that went from end to end.
It was dead. For sure it was dead, with six .38 bullets in it and blood pumping out of it like a fountain. But Croaker had seen too many landed sharks presumed dead come to life with tragic results. The beast continued its psychotic thrashing, lashing out with tail and mouth, more dangerous than ever. Croaker turned and, grabbing a boat hook, proceeded to jam the brass end of it through the shark's good eye.
The boiling water slowly subsided. Blood spread like an oil slick from a damaged tanker. Turning slowly on its side, spinning like a dying sun in space, the shark gradually sank beneath the ocean, leaving nothing in its wake. To the very end its jaws were working spastically.
"Goddamnit," Bennie said, leaning against the railing. The color was already returning to his pockmarked cheeks. "The sonuvabitch took my wahoo and my gun."
As soon as they docked, Croaker drove Bennie to the Fisherman's Hospital to get the shark wound tended to. It wasn't much more than a shallow gash, but you never knew. It was on the inside of Bennie's right arm and had come very close to the large median vein.
On their way to dinner, Croaker and Bennie drove through a late afternoon chewy with brine and the iodine of dried seaweed. They were in Croaker's 1969 flamingo and white T-bird, which, Bennie loved to say, wallowed like a pig but rode at top speed like a magic carpet. Bennie, his right arm resplendent with yellow disinfectant and squooshy gauze, used his cellular phone to call a woman named Maria. Croaker heard him making plans for her to meet him at ten that night. Bennie gave her a Mile Marker number, which was as much of an address as you were going to get in the Keys. "It's right off U.S. One, Maria. On the left. You can't miss it. An' about Sonia, she's cool with it? Good."
He turned to Croaker as he hung up. "Now when the guapas show up don't, like, get your head turned around."
Croaker laughed. "Hey, Bennie, since when do I care who you go out with?"
Bennie grinned. "Maria's my date. Sonia's for you, bright boy."
Croaker shook his head. "No go. You know I'm not into that scene."
"What scene? What?" Bennie spread his hands expressively. "Jesus Christo, Lewis, this girl's no whore." He gestured with his chin. "You recall that story I told you 'bout the guapa stole my heart?"
"I remember everything you tell me, Bennie." He grinned. "Pearl in the oyster."
"Hey, don't laugh, man." Bennie settled himself in his seat. "You think I introduce you to just any woman? No fuckin' way." He sniffed the yellow disinfectant on his injured arm and wrinkled his nose in distaste. "Sonia's someone's pearl, let me tell you. Could be she's yours."