Читать книгу The Detective's Garden - Janyce Stefan-Cole - Страница 4

Everyone likes to believe there once was a garden where all things were pure.

Life’s a humbling lesson, Emil thought, facing his own gun. The intruder lit a cigarette with one hand, using a beat up old Zippo lighter sporting a Lucky Strike logo, but smoking a Gauloise, inhaled hard, exhaled slowly while demanding the deed to Emil’s house. In the other hand was the Smith & Wesson .38 Special. Emil didn’t care about losing the house; one was as good as another; a roof, running water, heat. But to take the garden—that was punishing.

He’d faced a gun before, on another summer night long ago, in Slovenia. With him then was a girl he hardly knew, Elena. They’d been lovers only a few days and would soon part—forever, he’d assumed. The man with the gun called her a thieving betrayer, and Emil, in the briefest of glances, saw his lover’s fear. It ran across her face like the shadow of dark birds, a flock of evil black birds.

Guns make a lot of noise. Bang! The Big Bang theory; scientists say it happened very fast. There was a pinprick of something—matter, antimatter, dark matter?—and it popped, blew massively and the universe was born. Science would want to know what blew. The religious would say who made it blow. But Emil would ask why.

Thou shalt not kill, the Sixth Commandment, behind honoring mother and father. The first commandment is in regard to no other gods. Emil found it odd that murder was so low on the list, but he was an ex-homicide detective and would have put not taking life at the top. The question was whether he was facing a killer now, or an amateur bent on getting even. Either way, at such close range, Emil would be dead if a bullet left the chamber.

He was told to sit. The one with the firepower gives the orders; Emil walked slowly to the other side of the marble table and sat. The garden was quiet all around them, only the crickets with their obsessive rubbing, on and on, and the suffocating heat. It was going to be a long night.

And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the East; and there he put the man

whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree

that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the

garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Book of Genesis