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

Cyril Parkus was wearing one of those Body Glove wet suits that surfers use, and was carrying a pair of flippers and goggles. His hair was soaked and beads of water were dripping from his suit.

He’d been swimming.

“Still with us, Harvey?” he said as he padded past me in his bare, sandy feet and dropped his stuff on the table.

“Where’s Arlo?” I asked, my voice raspy and weak.

“At the bottom of the lake.” Cyril replied and walked into the bedroom.

I knew now that it was Cyril who’d been hiding under the porch, and that I’d made things a lot easier for him by pummeling Arlo and taping him up the way I had. The fact that Cyril was wearing a wet suit meant he’d come here planning to do exactly what he did.

When Cyril came out of the bedroom again, he was toweling his hair dry with one hand, and holding the big, serrated knife with the other.

I said, “In the morning, I suppose they’ll find a boat floating in the middle of the lake without an anchor.”

Cyril sat down in the chair I’d pulled out earlier and looked at me, much the same way I’d looked at Arlo.

“Can you blame me?” he asked.

I don’t think he cared about my opinion, and I didn’t offer it.

I thought of Arlo, his mouth taped shut, his arms and legs pinned behind him, knowing exactly what was going to happen to him as Cyril rowed the boat out into the middle of the lake. And then Cyril stopped, tied the anchor rope tightly around Arlo’s ankles, and pushed him into the water. I could see Arlo wriggling helplessly as the anchor pulled him down into the murky, cold depths.

I shivered for him and for myself.

I suppose you could say Arlo deserved what he got for what he did to Jolene, but I was pretty sure Cyril didn’t know about that and if he had, it wouldn’t have mattered. There was only one thing that did, and that’s what I asked him about.

“When did you find out that Lauren was your sister?”

Cyril stared at me. I wondered if he was going to answer me, or gut me with the Rambo knife. I think he was wondering the same thing.

“I felt it almost immediately. Every time I looked at Lauren, I saw Kelly. She was in her voice, her laugh, her eyes. It haunted me,” Cyril said softly, wiping the knife blade with his towel. “I tried to tell myself I was seeing things that weren’t there, but the more time I spent with her, the more certain I became. If Lauren wasn’t Kelly, then she carried her spirit. I knew I was deluding myself, but I didn’t care. Lauren loved me, and I loved her; it didn’t matter if I imagined she was Kelly or not. Then one night after we made love, she just looked in my eyes and whispered, ‘Yes, it’s me.’ She told me everything. And when she was done, I asked her to marry me.”

I could barely lift my head, what with the pounding pain, the double vision, and waves of nausea, but I did. I stared at him, trying to bring the blur into focus.

The guy finds out that the sister he thought was dead is alive, and that he’s been fucking her for weeks, and what’s his first reaction?

He asks her to marry him!

It didn’t make sense to me.

I mean, I could think of a lot of reactions to news like that, but a marriage proposal wasn’t one of them.

“I wish I could say we lived happily ever after, but she was tormented by guilt,” Cyril said. “I told her if there was a price to pay, she’d paid it long ago. She’d earned her happiness. She didn’t believe it, so she threw herself into to charity work, thinking that would make the guilt go away. It almost did.”

How could he not understand her guilt? Didn’t he think there was anything wrong, anything unusual, about marrying his own sister?

Apparently, he didn’t feel the least bit uncomfortable with the arrangement.

The only thing I could figure was that the shock of finding out who she was must have turned his brain to Cheese Whiz.

What other explanation could there be for his bizarre reaction?

And then I realized there was another one, and that it explained everything.

My vision was still a blur, but for the first time since I got involved in this case, I saw everything clearly.

“You were sleeping with your sister before,” I said. “Here, at the lake, when you were teenagers.”

Cyril nodded without a trace of shame. “Arlo saw us in the woods. He was going to tell, unless Kelly slept with him, too. That’s why she killed herself. Only she didn’t, did she? Not then, anyway.”

The rest of the story I already knew or could guess. After staging her suicide, she somehow made her way to Seattle and started another life. After the car accident gave her a new face, there was nothing stopping her anymore from searching out her brother and reuniting with him as lovers once more. No one would ever know the truth about who she was.

But once again, Arlo Pelz discovered her secret.

That’s what I meant about fate being cruel and inescapable. Twice Kelly Parkus had killed herself to protect her brother, only this time, she wouldn’t be coming back.

I almost felt sorry for Cyril.

Then I remembered what he did to Arlo and what was probably in store for me, and he lost my sympathy.

That’s when I should probably have instigated my cunning escape plan, only I didn’t have one. But at that point, I couldn’t even stand up on my own, much less wrestle the Rambo knife away from Cyril. There was nothing stopping him from dragging me to a boat and tossing me overboard the same way he did with Arlo.

“I guess you underestimated me, huh?” I said.

He looked up at me as if he’d forgotten I was there. “What do you mean?”

“I wasn’t just the jerk in the guard shack, the clown with the iron-on badge, was I? You paid me to do a job and I did it, and then some. You sure as hell didn’t expect that, not from a guy you thought couldn’t pick his nose without illustrated instructions. But I found Arlo Pelz and I figured out who your wife really was, didn’t I?”

I was reciting my own epitaph and I knew it.

I wanted him to know how wrong he’d been about me, how smart and capable I’d been. I wanted him to acknowledge it, if only with a nod of his head.

“You’re right, Harvey, I made a big mistake hiring you.” Cyril said. “I was afraid a professional detective might find out who Lauren really was. I never thought you would. Then again, a real detective would have stopped working when I fired him and wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

“So what happens now, Cyril? Are they going to find two boats tomorrow morning drifting without anchors?”

Cyril rose to his feet, clutching the knife and the towel, and looked down at me. “I’m not a murderer, Harvey.”

“Let’s ask Arlo about that.”

“That was justice. He killed my sister and I made him pay for it,” Cyril said. “I’ve got no reason to hurt you.”

“Except to stop me from going to the police and telling them what you’ve done.”

It was only after I said it that I realized how I stupid I was to say anything.

What the hell was I thinking?

Did I want him to kill me?

“I haven’t done anything,” Cyril said. “At least nothing that can be proved. The only person you’d be causing trouble for is yourself.”

“I didn’t push Arlo out of a boat with an anchor tied to his feet.”

I don’t know what was making me say those things, except maybe some deep-rooted death wish I didn’t realize I had. Was I trying to talk him out of sparing my life?

No, I was only saying what Mannix, or Spenser, or even Rockford would in the same situation. They never let the bad guy get away with anything, even if their own lives were at stake. The bad guy had to know that the detective knew what was really going on. Now, more than ever, I felt the need to fulfill the duties of my role.

“Think a moment, Harvey. No one knows I’m here, no one has seen me. And I’ll let you in on a secret: there are no plane tickets, rental car agreements, or gas station receipts proving I was here. I drove up here in my own car, paid cash for gas, and didn’t stop until I got to these woods, where I waited and watched, never encountering a soul,” Cyril said. “You, on the other hand, have left big tracks.”