"Cast Of Shadows" - читать интересную книгу автора (Guilfoile Kevin)

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From the passenger seat of his twenty-year-old Cutlass Supreme, Mickey Fanning watched the door of the New Tech Fertility Clinic for most of three days. Each morning he arrived at 7 a.m. and claimed the best of spot of all, on the opposite side of the street and just south. This morning he shifted into park, freed himself from the fraying shoulder harness, and scooted across the bench seat. It had occurred to him the night before that he would be less conspicuous if he weren’t behind the wheel.

At eleven, exactly eleven according to his old watch, which he checked and adjusted whenever time and traffic were given on talk radio, he slid back to the driver’s side and pulled out, circling the block until he could find a less good but still adequate surveillance position. At 3 p.m. he did it again, settling even farther down the street. He left for his motel only after the last doctor locked up, noting the exact times of the physicians’ arrivals and departures in a perfect-bound pocket notebook, the cover of which he had decorated with blue ballpoint crosses and the letters JESUS across the top and JUSTICE down the left margin, with each word sharing the adorned initial j.

His cleverest friends called him Mickey the Gerund back in the days when he had clever friends. Since he was nineteen or so, Mickey had been suspicious of clever people. Clever people were very nearly intellectuals, and intellectuals were the reason – one reason, anyway – that the world was going to hell soon, starting with the Arab nations, followed shortly thereafter by atheist China, pagan India, and then, probably, the United States, from the coasts inland (although the heartland was rotten with sin, too, a fact to which he was about to testify). Intellectuals, in his experience, didn’t believe in right and wrong. Mickey the Gerund believed in nothing but. Not just the practical right and wrong of deeds as revealed to the apostles by the example of Jesus Christ (although that, too), but right and wrong as it has existed from the beginning (and ever shall be, world without end. Amen). God did not arbitrarily decide what was right and what was wrong; God was right and wrong incarnate. What else did Jesus mean when he said, “No one is good but God alone”? The Lord did not invent righteousness, but instead was made up of it. If Mickey were ever called to account by the laws of man for what he had done and what he was about to do, he would calmly produce his four-hundred-page typed manifesto, in which he explained this and other truths. Few would understand it, but those few would have a chance, just a chance, of passing through the needle-eyed gates of His Kingdom.

He watched a couple exit through the tinted doors. The man was older than the woman and they were holding hands. She was young and fit and wholesomely pretty. He watched her, was aroused by her. He prayed in a distracted whisper, but the words spilled out in an unexamined, rote chain. Mickey the Gerund did not believe that sex was evil in itself (and procreation was, of course, preferable to the reproductive perversions that took place in jars inside the clinic), but he was certain that his sudden covetous lust for this woman was proof she was trapped in the clutches of a demon. Would it not distort the bigger picture, disrupt the master plan, he could extract some measure of justice through her. He wasn’t going to fall for such wicked temptation, however. The devil would no doubt sacrifice a common siren to maintain control over the hell soldiers still inside the building. Mickey had sworn off many sins on the day he decided to give himself to Jesus, women being one of them, and women had been the hardest of all to give up. In many ways celibacy had been the most rewarding, however. He saw things clearly. So long as a man thinks he might again know woman, his mind will always be fogged with desire, and Mickey was reminded of this by every unclean thought and every painful erection.

Mickey pointed his first and second fingers at the couple as they paused beside their parked Acura down the street, cocked his thumb hammer, and let it fire, first at her, and then at him.