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were Jensen's, but Mac
James's personal cipher was appended. I say he's still alive, and that
Commander Jensen destroyed his ship to hide evidence detrimental to himself.'
The thin man stirred at last. 'MacKenzie James is undoubtedly still alive. But
the promotion to captain that's coming to Jensen cannot be stopped without
blowing Mac's cover. With the Syndicate families being the threat that they
are, l'm reluctant to call down a public hero. The people need the morale
boost.
And Mac's far too valuable a contact to waste just to bring a murderer to
trial.' 'Let it pass, then?' the short man concluded.
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'No.' The word held the hardness of nails. 'Give Jensen a fi'le in our
records. He might prove useful someday.'
28~
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That Way Lies Camelot
The May sunlight that fell through the window was serene enough to trigger a
violence of resentment and hurt. Lynn Allen hurled a sodder~, crumb-gritty
sponge in the sink and ran her fingers through hair that fell thick to her
shoulders, in neglected need of a cut. Childless, stil~ single at
thirty-three, she held little enough in common with a younger sister whose
pretty, homey kitchen reflected family cheer at every turn. And what could
anybody say to comfort a sibling who was divorced, a mother of three, with her
eldest just barely twelve and lying in a coma, not expected to last out the
day?
Words failed. Despair raged in like flood tide.
Wretched with the helplessness that overran them all over Sandy's terminal
illness, Lynn blinked and roused and wiped damp palms on her jeans. She tried
to regroup, to recover a grip on the immediate, while at the end of the gravel
drive outside, a school bus slowed to a grind of gears; stopped to a squeal of
brakes. The front door banged.
'Damn it!' Raw with exasperation, Lynn repeated the same check she'd completed
five minutes earlier.
There'd been no forgotten books or sweaters in the breakfast nook then; she
hadn't overlooked a misplaced brown bag lunch. No dab hand with kids, she'd
thought she'd done miracles to get her nephews out the door on time for school
without their incessant bickering firing her temper.
In typically eight-year-old smugness, Tony hollered bad news from the hallway.
'Dog pen's empty, Aunt
Lynn! Grail's run off again.'
And the front door, left open, wafted air strongly scented with bursting
pre-summer greenery. The patter of the boy's running
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sneakers diminished down the porch stair as he raced headlong toward the
waiting bus.
'Damned stupid flea-bag of a mutt!' Lynn clenched her fists, feeling sloppy
and out of synch in clothes more suited for weekend picnics. The dog's timing
couldn't be worse; and worse, couldn't be helped. He would have to be rounded
up before he finished dining from the neighbor's upset trash cans, and nosed
out more original mischief that would incite some busybody's complaint to the
county dog catchers.
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Ragged already from grief and exhaustion, Ann was shortly going to be coping
with the funeral of a son.
Given hassles with the insurance company over hospital expenses worth more
than her house, the last thing she needed would be another fine for an
unleashed pet.
The dog was Sandy's, after all. Obligation to a child, who could not be spared
by all the torments of modern medicine, would invoke motherly sentiment by the
bucket. The scrofulous yellow hound, with its torn ear and its ridiculous
shambling gait, would be redeemed. An ounce of common sense suggested the
creature should be better off abandoned to be humanely destroyed.
Through the window, washed in early, blinding brightness, Lynn saw Tony's neon
jacket disappear inside the doorway of the bus. Brian, just ten, had boarded
already. One problem less, with the boys off her hands; which left the
damnfool dog. Lynn moved mechanically to the closet and snatched the first
jacket to hand, an anorak that was baggy and grease-stained enough to have
belonged to Annie's ex. She grimaced and pulled the thing on. It felt worse
than her face, which any other day would have been tastefully made up for her
work as design manager for a New York advertising firm.
But her job, as well as the tacked together appointments she called a social
life, had been wrenched to a halt by Sandy's relapse. The event had impelled
her to acts of insanity: to cash in her unused vacation time and leave the
office in a hair-pulling rush.
Her boss's shouting troubled her yet. 'There might not be any job here for
you, whenever the hell you get back!'
And her reply, as filled with female bitchiness as any chauvinist could wish,
to find fault for firing her later: 'My nephew is ill, and l'm driving to New
Hampshire to help my sister. If you've got a problem with that, then take my
resignation in writing, sideways, down the first orifice you can reach.'
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She'd slammed the office door upon a thunderstruck, stupefied silence; and
although she'd stayed absent for a month and sent no word, nobody from the
firm so much as phoned. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]