Читать книгу Blackbird - Tom Wright - Страница 8

The broker, the coker, the midnight toker, the woman thought. Confederacy of dumb-asses, she thought. Organ meats wall to wall. Sneezy, though – Sneezy had his assets, she had to admit. And even Grumpy wasn’t exactly a dead loss – especially in the hot tub, where he could hold his breath longer underwater than anybody in the group – as long as he’s got his blow. And his little blue pills.

On the other hand, she didn’t much like this recent tendency of hers to relent, to start cutting people slack, anytime a little snow blew in. She looked across the den to where Bashful, naked as a baby like everybody else, sat slouched back in the grey loveseat, absently twiddling a lock of her blonde hair and gazing off into the middle distance. The sight of those bouncy little bare boobs ignited a momentary glow of need in the woman, not quite hot enough to compel action but nice all the same. Shaking off the thought for now, she rolled the archaic but still satisfactorily crisp thousand-dollar bill she kept for just this purpose into a slim straw, inserted one end into her right nostril, touched the other to the line she’d just built on the jade coffee table, and tooted up. Her own private reserve, not the street-level Bisquick these morons always brought.

‘Phone,’ groused Grumpy as he walked in from the kitchen.

‘I’m busy,’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ he shrugged. ‘Lotta that goin’ around. You seen my shorts?’ He tossed her the phone.

She caught it and said hello as she stood, realising with satisfaction that she was now a comfortable minimum of two lines past caring where her own clothes were or what anybody thought of her nakedness.

‘Who is this?’ she asked the phone. ‘How’d you get this number?’

She listened for a moment, glancing at Grumpy with a frown.

‘Well, believe me, she and I’ll be having a little come-to-Jesus meeting about that tomorrow.’ Another frown at Grumpy, who turned and wandered off toward the bedrooms. ‘So, what’s this about, Bone?’

By now some of the others were looking at her. She walked out onto the deck and slid the door shut behind her, noticing the absence of stars in the sky. The air out here was humid against her skin and had a restless, overcharged feel.

She looked around at the trees and down toward the dim light-haze of the town. ‘It’ll cost you a lot more than that, Bone,’ she said. ‘But I’m listening.’

Which was true – it was her trade, and she was good at it. Switching the phone to her other ear, she glanced up at the sky again. ‘Make it an hour and a half,’ she said. ‘Do you know where my office is?’ She looked in through the glass door at her companions, listened a moment longer, then said, ‘Okay,’ and thumbed the phone off, unaware that the decision she’d just made meant, among other things, that she wouldn’t live to see the end of the coming storm.