Greg Iles - The Quiet Game
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- Название:The Quiet Game
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- Год:неизвестен
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- Рейтинг книги:5 / 5. Голосов: 1
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“You lying piece of shit! You’re just trying to save your own ass!”
He’s buying it. “Leo didn’t give a shit about you, Ray. How else do you think they got you? You must have had a lot of time to think about it. Five years, man!”
More silence.
“Ray?”
No sound at all. Nothing but the slow ticking of the two cars, barely audible through the ringing in my ears. The son of a bitch is probably moving up to kill me, and if I don’t move, I’m going to die. But if I break for the door, I’m framing myself for a shot. Shivering against Ike’s body, I realize that I no longer hear his breathing. His eyes are still open, but they are fixed and dilated.
Ike the Spike is dead.
“Ray…? Talk to me, Ray!”
Nothing.
The loading door beckons. But as I gather my legs beneath me, Ruby Flowers’s voice sounds in my head, an echo from childhood. “Broad is the gate that leads to destruction, but narrow the way that leads to salvation…”
To my left-in what must be a corner of the old shelling plant-is a pool of darkness so black it could be the bottom of the Marianas Trench. My legs are tensed beneath me like steel springs. Gripping Ike’s gun in my right hand, I launch myself low and hard toward that black hole. As the darkness envelops me, a stroke of lightning flashes in my brain, and I know no more.
Consciousness returns like blood to a sleeping limb.
Pain is the first sensation.
Then light.
The pain radiates from my forehead. The light is faint but real, thirty yards away, illuminating a parked police car. Not a police car. A sheriff’s cruiser.
Ike’s cruiser.
I roll over slowly and feel along the cold cement for Ike’s gun. My right wrist bangs into something cold and immovable. I touch it with my hand and feel along it. A steel rail. It’s one loading arm of a forklift. That’s what I slammed into when I ran into the pool of darkness. A goddamn forklift.
The gun is underneath the fork.
Closing my hand around its butt, I get to my feet and walk toward Ike’s car. Strangely, I am unafraid. Unafraid because I know I’m alone. If I wasn’t, I would be dead. Ray finally believed what I was telling him, and once he did, his priorities changed.
At the edge of the darkness I look at my watch. Eight forty-five. I met Ike around eight. Ray started shooting about ten minutes after we started talking. I don’t know how long the shooting lasted, but he’s had at least twenty minutes to reach the target I offered up to him to save myself.
Ike’s body lies behind his cruiser, where I dragged it in that last furious rush. His eyes are open but unseeing. I feel his carotid artery to be sure, then hold my hand over his mouth.
Nothing.
Climbing into the Maxima, I start the engine and dial Tuscany on the cell phone. While it rings, I floor the accelerator and make a wide squealing turn on the cement floor, then roar through the main loading door. The phone clicks as I hit Canal Street and nearly skid into the curb on the other side.
“Liv Marston,” says a clipped voice. “If you’re a reporter-”
“It’s Penn.”
“What do you want?” The voice hasn’t warmed even one degree.
“I know you don’t want to listen to me, but you’ve got to.”
“Is it about the trial?”
“No. You’ve got to get out of the house.”
“What?”
I hesitate before I reply. Some savage part of me wants to get Livy away and leave her father to face the retribution of his past. Poetic justice, if ever there was any. But I can’t do it.
“Ray Presley’s on his way to Tuscany. He’s going to try to kill your father. He could already be at your house. Or on the grounds somewhere.”
Silence.
“Did you hear me, Livy?”
“I heard you.”
“Tell your father to call the police. They’ll send an army out there to protect him.”
“Are we done now?”
Are we done? “Did you understand what I just told you? Presley is coming there to kill your father.”
“I hope he comes here.”
“You what?”
A police car tears around the corner of Main and Canal, lights flashing, heading in the direction of the pecan-shelling plant. In fifteen minutes every cop and deputy in this town will be combing the downtown streets.
“You’re playing in things you don’t understand, Penn. I tried to tell you the other day. You were a fool to involve yourself in any of this.”
“I understand more than you think. I know now why you did the things you did in the past. The choices you made.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t want to discuss it on the phone. It has to be face to face.”
“We don’t have anything to say to each other.”
“I’m begging you, Livy. Meet me one last time. For the sake of whatever it is that’s bound us together all these years. If you will, I think it will change both our lives. Maybe forever.”
This time she hesitates. “It’s not about the trial?”
“I don’t give a damn what happens at the trial. Name a place. Anywhere, I don’t care. I’ll even come to Tuscany.”
“No. Jewish Hill.”
“Jewish Hill?” Yet another landmark from our past. “In the cemetery?”
“That’s about as private as you can get.”
“Isn’t it locked at night?”
“Park at the foot of the hill. By the wall. It’s not like we’ve never done it before.”
“Do you still have the gun you had in the motel?”
“Yes.”
“Bring it. And drive fast leaving the house.”
“What time?”
“I’m five minutes from the cemetery. Leave now.”
“All right.”
Livy’s borrowed Fiat is parked at the foot of Jewish Hill when I arrive, next to the low stone wall of the city cemetery. She got here first because I took a wide circle through town to avoid the police. I park behind the Fiat and shove Ike’s pistol into my waistband, then get out and walk up to the Spyder.
Livy is not in the car.
To my left, across Cemetery Road, stands the dark silhouette of Weymouth Hall, an antebellum mansion that marks the two-hundred-foot drop to the river, its widow’s walk silhouetted against the stars. To my right is the low wall and the nearly vertical slope of Jewish Hill. One mile south along the bluff, the police are taping off the pecan plant as a crime scene.
I climb the wall and push through the shrubbery, then dig my hands into the face of the hill and begin climbing. As I near the top, a ghostly figure appears at the edge, looking down at me.
It’s Livy. Her hair is flying behind her, caught in the wind blowing up the bluff from the river. She’s wearing a white blouse, a fitted jacket, and slacks tapered to the ankles. She bends and catches my hands, then pulls me up to the flat plateau of gravestones, statuary, and mausoleums.
“Did you call the police?” I ask.
She brushes a strand of hair from her eyes. “Daddy called some off-duty cops. They got there before I left.”
“How did he react when you told him Presley might be coming to kill him?”
“What do you want, Penn?”
“It scared him to death, didn’t it? Livy, your father gave the cops what they needed to send Presley to Parchman when we were kids.”
“Really?” A hard smile tightens her mouth. “Good.”
“What I don’t understand is why my call didn’t scare you.”
She walks past me to the edge of the hill. The lights of Vidalia, Louisiana, a mile away, outline her like another marble angel among the stones. “Why are we here, Penn? What’s the big mystery?”
“You are.”
She turns back to me. “I’m the mystery?”
“You’re the mystery of my life. But I understand you now.”
Something flickers in her eyes. I can’t tell if she’s intrigued or afraid. “Do you? Enlighten me, then.”
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