"Let's All Kill Constance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray Douglas)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

BACK down the steep cement steps we went, and under the pale moonlight by the car, Crumley peered into my face. "What's that mad-dog look?"

"I've just joined a church!"

"Get in, for Christ's sake!"

I got in, running a fever.

"Where to?"

"St. Vibiana's Cathedral."

"Holy mackerel!"

He banged the starter.

"No." I exhaled. "I couldn't stand another face-on. Home, James, a shower, three beers, and to bed. We'll catch Constance at dawn."

We passed Callahan and Ortega, nice and slow. Crumley looked almost happy.

Before the shower, the beers, and the snooze, I pasted seven or eight newsprint front pages on the wall over my bed, where I might wake in the night in hopes of solutions.

All the names, all the pictures, all the headlines big and small saved for mysterious or not mysterious reasons.

Behind me," Crumley snorted. "Horse apples! You going to commune with news that was dead as soon as it was printed?"

"By dawn, sure, they just might drop off the wall, slide under my eyelids, and get stuck in the creative adhesive in my brain."

"Creative adhesive! Japanese bushido! American bull! Once those things are off the wall, like you, do they propagate?"

"Why not? If you don't put in, you never get out."

"Wait while I kill this." Crumley drank. "Lie down with porcupines, get up with pandas?" He nodded at all those pictures, names, and lives. "Constance in there somewhere?"

"Hidden."

"Hit the shower. I'll stand guard on the obituaries. If they move, I'll yell. How does a margarita strike you as nightcap.”

"I thought you'd never ask," I said.