"Уильям Гибсон. Virtual light (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

Rydell waited as Sublett pulled on a pair of disposable surgical
gloves.

'Howdy,' Sublett said, climbing into his seat. He closed his door
and began to remove the gloves, gingerly peeling them into a Ziploc Baggie.

'Don't get any on you,' Rydell said, watching the care with which
Sublett treated the gloves.

'Go ahead, laugh,' Sublett said mildly. He took out a pack of
hypo-allergenic gum and popped a piece from its bubble. 'How's ol' Gunhead?'

Rydell scanned the displays, satisfied. 'Not too shabby.'

'Hope we don't have to respond to any damn' stealth houses tonight,'
Sublett said, chewing.

Stealth houses, so-called, were on Sublett's personal list of bad
calls. He said the air in them was toxic. Rydell didn't think it made any sense, but he
was tired of arguing about it. Stealth houses were bigger than most regular houses, cost
more, and Rydell figured the owners would pay plenty to keep the air clean. Sublett
maintained that anybody who built a stealth house was paranoid to begin with, would always
keep the place locked up too tight, no air circulation, and you'd get that had toxic
buildup.

If there'd been any stealth houses in Knoxville, Rydell hadn't known
about them. He thought it was an L.A. thing.

Sublett, who'd worked for IntenSecure for almost two years, mostly
on day patrol in Venice, had been the first person to even mention them to Rydell. When
Rydell finally got to answer a call to one, he couldn't believe the place; it just went
down and down, dug in beneath something that looked almost, but not quite, like a
bombed-out drycleaning plant. And it was all peeled logs inside, white plaster, Turkish
carpets, big paintings, slate floors, furniture like he'd never seen before. But it was
some kind of tricky call; domestic violence, Rydell figured. Like the husband hit the
wife, the wife hit the button, now they were making out it was all just a glitch. But it
couldn't really be a glitch, because someone had had to hit the button, and there hadn't
been any response to the password call that came back to them three-point-eight seconds
later. She must've messed with the phones, Rydell thought, then hit the button. He'd been
been riding with 'Big George' Kechakmadze that night, and the Georgian (Tbilisi, not
Atlanta) hadn't liked it either. 'You see these people, they're subscribers, man; nobody
bleeding, you get your ass out, okay?' Big George had said, after. But Rydell kept
remembering a tension around the woman's eyes, how she held the collar of the big white
robe folded against her throat. Her husband in a matching robe but with thick hairy legs
and expensive glasses. There'd been something wrong there but he'd never know what. Not
any more than he'd ever understand how their lives really worked, lives that looked like
what you saw on tv but weren't.

L.A. was full of mysteries, when you looked at it that way. No