Twentynine Palms. Daniel Pyne
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Название: Twentynine Palms
Автор: Daniel Pyne
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Зарубежные детективы
isbn: 9781582436746
isbn:
It’s just how things work.
Which is why, on balance, Symes knows he should be home sleeping instead of out here spitting husks into the darkness. “Heroes,” Symes’ friend Corporal Evan “Fast-Pass” Mulvey observed, not very long before they picked up the pieces of him from a roadside ditch in Helmand Province, “are just cowards with balls.”
Jaw set, stubborn, angular, only Symes’ sad brown eyes betray the feelings that skitter through his fretful guts as he holds vigil.
three
Near the rutted cliffs of Santa Monica, on a quiet stretch of the single-digit streets, a clean, white Thunderbird is double-parked in front of a six-plex. The car’s vanity plate reads: TORY G.
In an upstairs apartment, Tory Geller stands contemplating the familiar, cluttered front room, entry door open behind him. An angry car horn blares outside in the darkness, protest of a passing motorist forced to swerve past the T-bird.
Tory disappears down the unlit hallway.
In his wake lies the detritus of Jack Baylor’s existence: clothing, running shoes, pile of dog-eared scripts, books in stacks against the wall, outdated PC, flat-screen television, TiVo, tower of DVDs and CDs, flattened basketball, long-shaft putter out and leaning against the unmade sofa bed, posters from a few indie movies, a stained and cracked fiberglass surfboard, and an inflatable pterodactyl hanging from the ceiling.
Tory comes back holding a fat, brown-and-black Tonganese with a nervously twitching tail.
“Where’d he go, Murphy? Where’s handsome?”
A phone machine sits atop a stack of old phone books on a table in the corner. On its face is balanced a small yellow Post-it pad, and on this is scrawled a number and the words Rancho Del Dorotea.
Murphy the cat purrs recklessly.
The lids of Tory Geller’s eyes sink to half-mast, and he digs in his pocket for the golf tee he found under the bed in Montecito, to return it to the collection of tees and ball markers in the Davy Crockett water glass beside the answering machine.
four
A red neon sign pulses: VACANCY. A girl in a sundress sleeps, and dreams she is sleeping. An empty lawn chair waits on the edge of a desert motel pool, pale red pistachio shells neatly scattered on the ground around and under it like tea leaves waiting to be read.
five
There is the bleed of far-flung televisions, and that specific TV blue that ghosts the walls flutters across the queen-sized beds and half-shadowed faces above machine-quilted polyester bedspreads; a dream shared, or dreams, overlapping, felt truly but later forgotten, like a dog-eared copy of the CliffsNotes on Jack’s Life Until Now. His thoughts grind, unruly. Stop, he tells himself. Just stop. One of his hands is interlocked with hers, and in that Fuzzy Warm Aftermath it would be hard for him to say where his body ends and Mona’s begins. There is her hair across the side of his face. There is the soft compression of her happily worn-out breathing.
“Oh. My. Goodness.”
Jack’s feet have socks on them, Mona’s are wagging, double-time. Their hands untangle. Bedsprings creak.
“Oh, hey, whoa, don’t, no no no no, shit, don’t, don’t drop that on the carpet, okay?” Mona props herself up on one arm, peering in at Jack through the open bathroom doorway as he stands drilling urine into the backwater of the toilet bowl. “They leave these spots that’re all hell to clean,” she explains.
“You have some experience in that area, too?” Jack shakes and returns.
“I work here.” She lets his surprise register, while Jack, being the actor, tries unsuccessfully to conceal it. “Yeah. I bet you had me figured for some lonely local who goes to the Roundup Room hoping romance will make a road stop.”
At the foot of the bed, Jack stands, looking down at her. That is pretty much what he had figured.
Mona gropes for Jack’s cigarettes, which she finds practically crushed underneath her. “Also, I live here. Room one-twenty-four, on the end.” She looks up at him. “My mom owns this place.”
Jack’s mind empties. Any plans he had of choreographing the rest of this weekend sift through his fingers.
“Your mom?”
Mona taps out a deformed cigarette. “Want to meet her? See what I’m going to look like in about thirty years?”
Jack fumbles the lighter from the bed stand onto the bed. Why would she say that? Mona fishes for it in the swirl of sheets, lights her own cigarette. She’s still smiling, and Jack is unnerved.
“You’re not such a nice guy, are you, Jack?”
“I could be.”
“Ah.”
“Look, Mona—”
“Relax. Mom’s gone to La Costa for the week, to troll for guys who run hedge funds and pop Viagra like breath mints.” Mona touches him lightly, on the arm. “Don’t wig out on me, Jack. I’m a grown woman. Or a big girl, to borrow your quaint worldview. Either way? I do what I want.” She puffs on the cigarette somewhat awkwardly, like someone who never really learned, then puts it between Jack’s lips, glancing at the silver lighter, where there’s an engraved inscription that reads simply: MAD ABOUT THE BOY. Mona frowns at it.
“I’m fine,” Jack says dryly.
“Fine.” She looks up at him.
“Yes.”
“I just thought I should tell you. I didn’t have to.”
“Tell me what?”
“About Mom.”
“No. You didn’t.” Jack’s wondering why she did tell him, now, what it implies if it implies anything, mistrusting any of the well-honed instincts that have guided him to this moment. He wants to run, and yet he wants to stay, for once, to find out why he would want to run.
“You don’t have a sister, do you? I mean, a real one.”
“No.” She waits. He tries to think of something СКАЧАТЬ