"Hard Candy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vachss Andrew)

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AFTER THE COPS took Belle off the count, I thought about dying too. Thought about it a lot. The Prophet told me the truth.

"If there's something out there past this junkyard, she'll be waiting for you, brother."

"And if there's not?"

"Then what's your hurry?"

"I feel dead inside me," I told the little man with the hustler's soul and the lion's heart. The man who helped raise me inside the walls. Everyone called him the Prof. I thought it was short for Professor- he knew and he taught. But Prophet was the true root. A man who sees the truth sees the future. He showed me both- showed me how to be a man.

Or whatever it is that I am.

"You know what to do with it," he told me.

I knew. Survive is what I knew. What I know. The only tune I know how to play.

Down here, we have rules. We made them ourselves. Feeling dead inside me- that was a feeling. It wouldn't bring Belle back to me- wouldn't get me closer. But making somebody dead…that was a debt.

Belle's father. The maggot who made her older sister into her mother. He loaded her genetic dice. She never had a chance. Her mother died so she could run, and she ran until she died.

I was holding her in my arms when she went, torn to pieces by bullets she took for me. She looked it in the eye when it came for her.