The Broken Souls. J. Kerley A.
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Название: The Broken Souls
Автор: J. Kerley A.
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Ужасы и Мистика
isbn: 9780007346417
isbn:
Harry told the uniforms the show was over and to get back to diverting traffic, if any happened to show up. I put on latex gloves, opened the door of the Mazda. The victim’s bowels had released and the car was thick with the smell of blood and excrement. She was tumbled across the transmission hump, her head on the passenger seat, braided and beaded hair flung like a rag doll’s. Her nose appeared broken. Her lower lip was torn. There were wounds across her torso, her blouse glossy with blood. Her throat had been slit.
I took a deep breath and continued my visual inventory. One of her hands looked odd. It was hanging down on the passenger side, in shadow. I went to the passenger side and opened the door, my fears confirmed. Three fingers broken, the digits bent backward. It was unsettling, like a hand assembled incorrectly.
I made myself concentrate on the pillaging of the vehicle – sound system removed, wires dangling. The glove box was open, contents scattered. Maps half-open on the floor, registration, manual, tire-pressure gauge. Sun visors pulled forward. Sometimes folks clipped a few spare bucks there, for toll roads and the like. Blood was everywhere, like the interior had been hosed down with an artery.
I knew why Logan had passed on the case. This one had an immediate bad feel, a one-glance Creep Factor. I studied the woman again, a cold wave spreading through my gut. The smell overwhelmed me and I withdrew.
“She was beaten and cut,” I told Harry. “It’s bad.”
Harry had gone to the car for his rain gear, not that it would do much good. He leaned in and scanned the scene for several minutes, his mind taking pictures. Now and then a detail pulled a grunt or a sigh. He studied the floor at the woman’s feet, put his hand in, touched the floor, looked at his fingertips. Then, aiming the flashlight close to the floor, he repeated the motion.
“What is it, bro?” I asked.
Harry didn’t hear me. He turned his face to the sky, as if looking for the answer to something.
Lucas crouched in shadow beside the fast-food restaurant’s stinking dumpster, wadding cold French fries in his fist and jamming them into his mouth. Untouched fries were safest, he figured. The cast-off sandwiches all had bite marks.
Lucas pushed sodden, foot-long black hair from his eyes, brushed French-fry salt from his thick beard. He leaned out into the light. There was a bank beside the restaurant, a small branch office with an ATM in the drive-through. Getting money was critical to Lucas’s plan. Money breeds money, hadn’t he heard that a thousand times? Like a mantra: Money breeds money.
In the half-hour he’d been waiting, over a dozen cars had slipped to the ATM, drivers making transactions, zooming away. Two of the drivers had pulled to the side, close to the rear of the restaurant. Lucas had watched as the drivers turned on their interior light and fiddled with banking paperwork.
The door at the back of the restaurant slammed open. Lucas froze in the shadows and stench.
“You there, you,” a voice yelled, angry. Lucas felt his muscles tighten, his hands ball into hard fists.
“Me?” said someone inside the place.
“You – Darryl, is it?”
“Daniel,” a voice grunted.
“I got soft-drink canisters out here. Get ’em inside.”
“I still got to finish mopping the –”
“Now.”
The door banged shut. Lucas slithered beneath the wheeled trash bin. His heart sank when he saw he’d forgotten his purse. Made of cheap white vinyl, it lay past the dumpster, almost in the cone of light from the restaurant. The door reopened and feet appeared. Canisters were hefted in the door.
The door shut. Lucas squirmed from beneath the dumpster, pavement grease now added to his shirt and pants, pulled from a donations pile outside a Goodwill store. He’d left his institutional clothing with the other cast-offs.
Lucas clutched the purse to his chest and turned his eyes back to the ATM. Women afforded the best opportunities. But he’d take whatever fate provided and work with it.
He waited twenty minutes, only one vehicle stopping at the ATM in that time, a pickup truck with dual tracks and a stars’n’bars decal on the window. A good ol’ boy, Lucas thought. The type to keep a pipe under the seat. Or a gun.
Not worth the risk.
Minutes later a compact car entered the bank lot: a woman, driving slow. Lucas gathered the purse in his hand and threw it into the shadowy corner of the bank lot, twenty feet away. It landed as the car’s headlights washed over the pavement. The lights hit the purse, passed by, angled toward the ATM.
Slowed.
Stopped a dozen feet short of the ATM. Lucas held his breath.
Take the bait.
The car began backing up. Lucas raised to a crouch. Tensed his muscles. The car parked beside the purse. He heard the door locks snap off.
Lucas was up and running.
The next morning I arose to a sky the color of unfired clay. Harry and I had worked until three in the morning, ascertaining what we could from the victim’s name and vehicle papers. Thunder rumbled in the distance, another storm cell rolling through. The phone rang as I was pouring coffee. It was Danielle Danbury – my girlfriend.
“Carson, can you stop by before work?” Her voice was somber.
“What’s wrong, Dani?”
“Please hurry.”
“On my way.”
Though Dani’s profession as a TV journalist made us natural adversaries, we’d been thrown into an uneasy alliance last year, tracking collectors of serial-killer memorabilia. The bizarre episode had taken Dani and me – I simply couldn’t use her on-air moniker, DeeDee – to Paris to interview an elderly art professor. While in the City of Light we’d become lovers, a condition that remained.
The erratic and overlong hours of our jobs made getting together more chance than certainty, and not counting sleeping, we grabbed maybe fifteen hours a week together. At least that had been the norm until a couple months back when Harry jumped into Logan’s mess and I’d played catch-up eighteen hours a day.
I raced down the steps of my stilt-standing beachfront home and jumped in my old pickup, making Dani’s house in twenty minutes. She was in reporter garb: good jeans, white silk blouse, burgundy linen jacket, strand of pearls at her neck, tiny matching earrings. Her blonde hair was lacquered, a concession СКАЧАТЬ