Читать книгу The Good Guy - Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz - Страница 6
ОглавлениеIn the downfall of golden light from the dragon lamp, a simple iron railing guarded the rising concrete steps. The concrete had been worked with a screed when it was bleeding, and as a consequence, some edges had scaled badly; some treads were as crazed as crackle-glazed pottery.
Like a lot of things in life, concrete is unforgiving.
Through four framed panels, the copper dragon, still bright but greening at the edges, serpentined against a luminous backdrop of lacquered mica lenses.
In the wash of ruddy light, the aluminum screen door appeared to be copper, too. Behind it, the inner door stood open to a kitchen rich with the aromas of cinnamon and strong coffee.
Sitting at the table, Michelle Rooney looked up as Tim arrived. “You’re so quiet that I felt you coming.”
He eased the screen door shut behind him. “I almost know what that means.”
“The night outside quieted around you, the way a jungle does when a man passes through.”
“Didn’t see any crocodiles,” he said, but then thought of the man to whom he had given the ten thousand dollars.
He sat across from her at the pale-blue Formica-topped table and studied the drawing on which she worked. It was upside-down from his point of view.
Out of the jukebox in the tavern downstairs rose the muffled but lovely voice of Martina McBride.
When Tim recognized the drawing as a panorama of silhouetted trees, he said, “What’s it going to be?”
“A table lamp. Bronze and stained glass.”
“You’ll be famous someday, Michelle.”
“I’d stop right now if I thought so.”
He looked at her left hand, which lay palm-up on the counter near the refrigerator.
“Want a cup?” she asked, indicating the coffeemaker near the cooktop. “It’s fresh.”
“Looks like something you wrung out of a squid.”
“Who in his right mind wants to sleep?”
He poured a mugful and returned with it to the table.
As was true of many other chairs, this one seemed like toy furniture to him. Michelle was petite, and the same kind of chair appeared large under her, yet Tim was the one who felt as if he were a child playing at coffee klatch.
This perception had less to do with chairs than with Michelle. Sometimes, all unaware, she made him feel like an awkward boy.
She finessed the pencil with her right hand, holding the drawing tablet steady with the stump of her left forearm.
“ETA on the coffeecake,” she said, nodding toward the oven, “is ten minutes.”
“Smells good, but I can’t stay.”
“Don’t pretend you’ve gotten a life.”
A shadow danced across the table. Tim looked up. A yellow butterfly fluttered at the silvered hooves of the leaping bronze gazelles in a small chandelier by Michelle.
“It slipped in this afternoon,” she said. “For a while I left the door open, tried to chase it out, but it seems at home here.”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
A tree branch whispered into existence between the pencil point and the paper.
“How did you make it up the stairs, carrying all that?” Michelle asked.
“All what?”
“Whatever it is that has you so weighed down.”
The table was the blue of a pale sky, and the shadow seemed to glide behind it, a graceful mystery.
“I won’t be coming around for a while,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“A few weeks, maybe a month.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There’s this thing I have to take care of.”
The butterfly found a perch and closed its wings. As though the shadow were the quivering dark reflection of a burning candle, it vanished as suddenly as a flame from a pinched wick.
“‘This thing,’” she echoed. Her pencil fell silent on the paper.
When his attention rose from the table to Michelle, he found her staring at him. Her eyes were a matched blue and equally convincing.
“If a man comes around with a description of me, looking for a name, just say the description doesn’t ring a bell with you.”
“What man?”
“Any man. Whoever. Liam will say, ‘Big guy on the end stool? Never saw him before. Kind of a smart-ass. Didn’t like him.’”
“Liam knows what this is about?”
Tim shrugged. He had told Liam no more than he intended to tell Michelle. “Nothing much. It’s about a woman, that’s all.”
“This guy who comes around to the bar, why would he also come up here?”
“Maybe he won’t. But he’s probably thorough. Anyway, you might be down in the bar when he comes around.”
Her left eye, the artificial one, the blind one, seemed to pierce him more thoroughly than did her right eye, as if it were possessed of major mojo.
“It’s not about a woman,” she said.
“It really is.”
“Not the way you’re implying. This is trouble.”
“Not trouble. Just embarrassing.”
“No. You’ll never embarrass yourself. Or a friend.”
He looked for the butterfly and saw it perched on the chain from which hung the gazelle chandelier, slowly flexing its wings in the warm air rising from the incandescent bulbs.
“You don’t have the right,” she said, “to go it alone, whatever it is.”
“You’re making too much of this,” he assured her. “It’s just an embarrassing personal thing. I’ll deal with it.”
They sat in the silence of the stilled pencil, no music on the jukebox in the tavern below, no sound issuing from the throat of the night at the screen door.
Then she said, “What are you now—a lepidopterist?”
“Don’t even know what that is.”
“A butterfly collector. Try looking at me.”
He lowered his gaze from the butterfly.
Michelle said, “I’ve been making a lamp for you.”
He glanced at the drawing of stylized trees.
“Not this. Another one. It’s already under way.”
“What’s it like?”
“It’ll be done by the end of the month. You’ll see it then.”
“All right.”
“Come back and see it then.”
“I will. I’ll come back for it.”
“Come back for it,” she said, and reached out to him with the stump of her left arm.
She seemed to hold tight to him, as if with ghost fingers, and she kissed the back of his hand.
“Thank you for Liam,” she said softly.
“God gave you Liam, not me.”
“Thank you for Liam,” she insisted.
Tim kissed the top of her bent head. “I wish I had a sister, and I wish she was you. But you’ve got this trouble thing all wrong.”
“No lies,” she said. “Evasions, if it has to be that way, but no lies. You’re not a liar, and I’m not a fool.”
She raised her head and met his eyes.
“All right,” he said.
“Don’t I know bad trouble when I see it?”
“Yes,” he acknowledged. “Yes, you know it.”
“The coffeecake must be nearly done.”
He glanced at the prosthesis on the counter by the refrigerator, palm turned up, fingers relaxed. “I’ll get it from the oven for you.”
“I can manage. I never wear the hand when I’m baking. If it burned, I wouldn’t feel it.”
Using oven mitts, she transferred the cake to a cooling rack.
By the time Michelle took off the mitts and turned from the cake, Tim had moved to the door.
“I’ll look forward to seeing the lamp,” he said.
Because her lacrimal glands and tear ducts had not been damaged, both her living eye and the dead one glimmered.
Tim stepped onto the landing at the head of the stairs, but before he let the screen door fall shut behind him, Michelle said, “It’s lions.”
“What?”
“The lamp. It’s lions.”
“I bet it’ll be terrific.”
“If I do it right, you’ll get a sense of their great hearts, their courage.”
He closed the screen door and descended the steps, seeming to make no noise on the scaling concrete.
Gliding by in the street, the traffic surely was not quiet, but Tim remained deaf to its chorus. Headlights approached and taillights receded like luminous fish in the silence of an oceanic abyss.
As he neared the bottom of the steps, the noise of the city began to rise to him, softly at first, but then loud, louder. The sounds were mostly made by machines, yet they had a savage rhythm.
