"Rogue Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Budrys Algis)

4

Hawks broke the silence. He reached out, pulled the bottle out of Connington’s hand, and swung toward the cliff. The bottle flailed away and disappeared over the edge. Then Hawks turned to Barker and said quietly, “There are a few more things I ought to tell you before you definitely accept the job.”

Barker’s face was strained. He was looking at Connington. His head snapped around in Hawks’ direction and he growled, “I said I’d do the damned job!”

Claire reached out and took hold of his hand, pulling him down beside her. She thrust herself forward to kiss the underside of Barker’s jaw. “That’s the ol’ fight, Hardrock.” She began nibbling the skin with its faint stubble of beard, gradually inching her mouth down his throat, leaving a row of regularly spaced marks: wet, round, red parentheses of her lipstick, enclosing the sharper, pinker blotches where her incisors had worried his flesh. “He’ll do it, Ed,” she murmured sidelong. “Or at least he’ll give it as much of a try as any man could.”

“Don’t the three of you care?” Connington blurted, his head jerking back and forth. “Didn’t you hear?”

“We heard you,” Hawks said.

“Well, what about it?” Connington challenged them incredulously.

“Tell me something, Connington,” Hawks said. “Did you make your little speech so we’d stop now? Or could anything make us stop, now things are in motion the way you hoped?”

“Not hoped,” Connington said. “Planned.”

Hawks nodded. “All right, then,” he said in a tired voice. “I thought so. All you wanted to do was make a speech. I wish you’d chosen another time.”

Claire chuckled, a silvery ladder of sound. “Isn’t it too bad, Connie? You were so sure we’d all fall down. But it’s just like it always was. You still don’t know where to push.”

Connington backed away incredulously, his arms spread as if to knock their heads together. “Are you three crazy? Do you think I made this stuff up out of my head? Listen to yourselves — even when you tell me it’s all malarkey, you have to say it each a certain way. You can’t shake loose from yourselves even for a second; you’ll go where your feet take you, no matter what — and you’re laughing at me? You’re laughin’ at me?”

He lurched around suddenly. “Go to hell, all of you!” he cried. ’G’wan!” He began to run clumsily across the grass to his car.

Hawks looked after him. “He’s not fit to drive back.”

Barker grimaced. “He won’t. He’ll cry himself to sleep in the car for a few hours. Then he’ll come in the house, looking for Claire’s comfort.” He looked down at Claire with a jerk of his head that broke the chain of nibbles. “Isn’t that right? Doesn’t he always do that?”

Claire’s lips pinched together. “I can’t help what he does.”

“No?” Barker said. “It’s me he’s after?”

In a vicious, throaty snarl, Claire said, “Maybe he’s had you. He’s never had me.”

Barker’s hand cracked over, and Claire fell back, holding her cheek. Then she grinned. “You’ve done better than that. You used to do a lot better. But that wasn’t bad,” she admitted.

“Barker,” Hawks said, “I want to tell you what you’re going to have to face.”

“Tell me when I get there!” Barker snapped. “I’m not going to back out now.”

Claire said, “Maybe that’s what he wants you to say, Al. Putting it that way.” She smiled up toward Hawks. “Who says Connington’s the only schemer?”

“What’s the simplest way for me to get back to town?” Hawks said.

“I’ll drive you,” Barker said coldly. His eyes locked on Hawks. “If you want to try it.”

Claire murmured a chuckle and suddenly rubbed her cheek down the length of Barker’s thigh. She did this with a spasm of her entire body; an undulant motion that was completely serpentine. She stared up at Hawks through wide, pleasurably moist eyes, her upstretched arms curled around Barker’s waist. “Isn’t he grand?” she said huskily to Hawks. “Isn’t he a man?”