Ultimate Thriller Box Set - Crouch Blake (лучшие книги без регистрации txt) 📗

Above all of this, looking down on everything like the imperious Greek gods in those old Hercules movies, are the people who live in the gated communities on the graded peaks of Spanish Hills.

On the off-chance that those farm workers ever rise up in violent revolt and storm the hills, they’ve got to get past the guard in the shack first.

I like to think that the terrifying prospect of rousing me from reading a paperback is what keeps them in line.

The night before my first day as a detective went fast. The only memorable moment was the flash of breast I saw while staring at the scrambled picture of the cable porn channel on TV. That was another perk of the job I forgot to mention.

I practically ran out of the shack when Victor showed up in the morning. I didn’t want to get caught by surprise, just in case Lauren Parkus decided to meet her lover promptly at eight a.m.

I hustled down the street to my car, which was parked beside the grassy embankment, and changed into a polo shirt and sunglasses as a disguise. As soon as I was in the car, I stripped off my uniform pants and put on jeans. Actually, that was a lot harder than it sounds, and I was really afraid Lauren Parkus would pick that moment, while my feet were up against the dashboard and I was struggling with my pants, to leave for her erotic romp.

But she didn’t.

In fact, she was taking so long to get going that I was getting mightily pissed. I was eager to begin detecting, and she was sapping my enthusiasm by not doing her part.

I sat there for two hours, my hands on the steering wheel, staring at the gate, playing out various surveillance scenarios in my mind, and I got so into it that when she finally drove out in her Range Rover, I thought it was an illusion.

I resisted the temptation to stomp on the gas pedal and instead showed my calm professionalism by easing into traffic, not that there was any. I was the only other car on the road, so I stayed way back behind her until we got down into the sprawl of shopping centers and gas stations.

The traffic was pretty heavy down there, so I hesitantly let two cars slip between us. It was a good thing she was driving such a high car, or I would have had a hard time following her.

She turned into the Encino Grande Shopping Center and parked right in front of a place called The Seattle Coffee Bean. I parked in one of the aisles so I could watch her inconspicuously. Lauren went inside and ordered something. I deduced it was coffee.

My hand was shaking as I made a notation in a notepad of her activities. All she did was buy a cup of coffee and my heart already was pounding with excitement. If this kept up, I figured I’d have a stroke when her stud finally appeared.

She sat down at a table outside and took her time sipping her coffee. It gave me a chance to really look at her for the first time.

Lauren Parkus was in her early thirties, with long, black hair and the same lean physique and tennis tan as her husband, which made sense to me. They probably worked on it together, unless she was bonking her tennis pro. I figured I’d soon find out which it was.

Her face had a sculpted beauty, as if God was concentrating very hard while he was working on her slender nose, her sharp cheekbones, the gentle curve of her chin, and her long, graceful neck.

She was clearly deep in thought over something, giving her a pensive expression that did nothing to dull the startling intensity of her eyes, which I could feel from twenty yards away.

She wore a large, loose-fitting blouse that was casually unbuttoned down to the swell of her perfect breasts. And I mean perfect, the kind of breasts you only see on women on movie posters, book covers, and comic books.

I picked up one of the disposable cameras and snapped a picture. It wasn’t for Cyril Parkus. It was for me.

Lauren was beautiful.

It took her a half an hour to finish her coffee; then she drove off across the parking lot. I was right behind her, I mean literally, as she stopped for traffic at the exit. She glanced into the rearview mirror and I ducked down, as if searching for a station on the radio.

When I looked back up, praying that she hadn’t seen my face, Lauren had already shot into traffic on Las Posas. I tried to follow, but nobody would let me in. It was bumper-to-bumper and the space between the cars and the sidewalk was too narrow for me to fit into. I watched in desperation as she sped through the intersection and on towards the freeway onramp.

If I didn’t get through the intersection before it turned red, she’d hit the freeway and I’d never catch up to her.

I swore, turned the wheel, and hit the gas, speeding with half my car on the road, the other half on the sidewalk, the underbelly of my Sentra scraping the curb and spraying sparks as I went. But Lauren didn’t see any of that; her Range Rover had already disappeared down the embankment to the freeway.

I made it through the intersection as the light turned yellow, and raced onto the freeway in time to see Lauren’s Range Rover about five cars ahead of me.

I weaved through cars until I’d cut the number of cars between us down to two, then I relaxed, settling back into my vinyl seat, noticing for the first time that my entire body was drenched with sweat.

I’d almost lost her and yet, the truth is, I loved every desperate moment.

***

I spent the next forty-five minutes on the freeway into Santa Barbara torturing myself, wondering if I’d screwed up and she’d done all that on purpose to lose me.

But if Lauren had, she wasn’t making it too hard for me to keep up with her.

Then a Highway Patrol car roared up behind me, tailgating me for a while and giving me something new to worry about. I convinced myself he could tell I was stalking this beautiful woman and he was just waiting for back-up before arresting me. But after a mile or two, he got off the freeway and let me go back to torturing myself over previous events.

The further north we got, the foggier and cooler it got. It’s what my mother used to call “beach weather.” She liked it misty and gray like that. I don’t know why. I suppose it’s one of the things I might have asked her, if she hadn’t walked out the door one morning when I was fourteen and decided not to come back.

That’s around the time I started reading mysteries. I began with Encyclopedia Brown, which I liked for the tough puzzles and the simmering erotic tension. I kept waiting for him to cop a feel from Sally, the prettiest girl in the fifth grade and the only kid in school who could kick the shit out of that bully Bugs Meany, but if it ever happened, I missed it.

I went from Encyclopedia to the Hardy Boys, and then at a garage sale I stumbled onto a pile of ratty, old paperbacks by Richard Prather. He wrote about Shell Scott, a detective who, like me, had a twenty-four-hour-a-day hard-on and looked like a freak. Shell was six feet tall with white hair and white eyebrows. I was gawky and covered with zits. He got laid all the time by women he called tomatoes. I masturbated a lot.

When I wasn’t reading or jerking off, I watched PI shows on TV. We had a great UHF station that showed all the old stuff, everything from “77 Sunset Strip” to “Cannon.” The PIs on The Strip, they were cool cats, even though one of the detectives was played by an actor named Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. If a guy with a name like Efrem could fool people into thinking he was cool, maybe Harvey Mapes wasn’t such a geek name after all. Private Eye Frank Cannon was an ugly fat-ass, but I admired how he got the job done anyway. I thought it’d be great if in one episode he overpowered a hitman by sitting on him, but I don’t think he ever did.

Lauren took the first off-ramp into Santa Barbara, where Kinsey Milhone lives, though she calls it Santa Teresa, which doesn’t fool anybody. I followed Lauren as she drove along the broad beach and I wondered which of the hotels she’d end up at. She had her choice of meticulously maintained, retro-style motels or one of the lush, expansive resorts. They were all pricey and only a few stories tall to maintain Santa Barbara’s friendly village ambience and ensure unobscured views of the offshore oil rigs.