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

Turvey was white, skinny, hadn't bathed in a month, and had the Last
Supper tattooed on his chest. It was a very fresh tattoo; it hadn't even scabbed over.
Through a film of drying blood, Rydell could see that Jesus didn't have any face. Neither
did any of the Apostles.

'Damn it,' Turvey said, when he saw Rydell. 'I just wanna speak to
the president.' He was sitting cross-legged, naked, on his girlfriend's couch. He had
something like a piece of pipe across his lap, all wrapped with tape.

'We're trying to get her for you,' Rydell said. 'We're sorry it's
taking so long, hut we have to go through channels.'

'God damn it,' Turvey said wearily, 'doesn't nobody understand I'm
on a mission from God?' He didn't sound particularly angry, just tired and put out. Rydell
could see the girlfriend through the open door of the apartment's single bedroom. She was
on her back, on the floor, and one of her legs looked broken. He couldn't see her face.
She wasn't moving at all. Where were the kids?

'What is that thing you got there?' Rydell asked, indicating the
object across Turvey's lap.

'It's a gun,' Turvey said, 'and it's why I gotta talk to the
president.'

'Never seen a gun like that,' Rydell allowed. 'What's it shoot?'

'Grapefruit cans,' Turvey said. 'Fulla concrete.'

'No shit?'

'Watch,' Turvey said, and brought the thing to his shoulder. It had
a sort of breech, very intricately machined, a trigger-thing like part of a pair of
vise-grip pliers, and a couple of flexible tubes. These latter ran down, Rydell saw, to a
great big canister of gas, the kind you'd need a hand truck to move, which lay on the
floor beside the couch.

There on his knees, on the girlfriend's dusty polyester carpet, he'd
watched that muzzle swing past. It was big enough to put your fist down. He watched as
Turvey took aim, back through the open bedroom door, at the closet.

'Turvey,' he heard himself say, 'where's the goddamn kids?'

Turvey moved the vise-grip handle and punched a hole the size of a
fruit-juice can through the closet door. The kids were in there. They must've screamed,
though Rydell couldn't remember hearing it. Rydell's lawyer later argued that he was not
only deaf at this point, hut in a state of sonically induced catalepsy. Turvey's invention
was only a few decihels short of what you got with a SWAT stun-grenade. But Rydell
couldn't remember. He couldn't rememher shooting Kenneth Turvey in the head, either, or
anything else at all until he woke up in the hospital. There was a woman there from Cops