Читать книгу Twentynine Palms - Daniel Pyne - Страница 11

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of Jack Baylor’s existence: clothing, running shoes, pile of dog-eared scripts, books in stacks against the wall, outdated PC, flat-screen television, TiVo, tower of DVDs and CDs, flattened basketball, long-shaft putter out and leaning against the unmade sofa bed, posters from a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.