Thicker Than Blood - Crouch Blake (лучшие книги онлайн TXT) 📗

Vi reached Silver Lake Drive and stopped.

Sam had deposited her near the deserted Coast Guard station and the ferry docks.

The lights of Ocracoke shone and reflected in the harbor—a cold twinkling silence. It was midnight and she didn’t have a key to her room at the Harper Castle B&B.

The Coast Guard station was dark.

I’ll just have to wake somebody up.

She would’ve run but it was all she could do to walk, her legs still burning from the sprint across the tidal flat. As she walked along the double yellow line she thought of Andrew Thomas, wondered if he’d still be alive when she saw him next.

She felt overjoyed to be back on Ocracoke. The safety was palpable. She could sense the seven hundred sleeping residents all around her.

She started to say a prayer of thanks.

A car approached from behind.

Stepping back onto the shoulder, she watched an ancient pickup truck come rumbling slowly toward her. It pulled up beside her and squeaked to a halt.

The passenger window rolled down and Rufus Kite leaned forward from the driver seat, his eyes hollowed in the absence of light—two oilblack pools.

"Miss King? Thank God."

"What are you doing—"

"Oh thank God. Everyone’s looking for you."

"Who’s looking for me?"

"Someone saw you with Andrew Thomas in Howard’s Pub. Everyone’s looking for you. Come on, get in."

The passenger door swung open.

"I’ll take you back to the house," he said. "We’ll get you cleaned up. I imagine you have some very important phone calls to make."

"Well, yeah I do, but…  No, I think I’ll just walk over to the Silver Lake Inn." She motioned down the street to a three-story motel on the waterfront. "I’ll wake someone up if I have to, but I don’t want to trouble—"

"No trouble at all. Hop in. Besides, I don’t think anyone’s there, Miss King."

An odd tone in his voice. Not mere insistence.

Something rustled in the back of the truck.

"Look, I appreciate the offer, but—"

Maxine Kite sat up from the truck bed and climbed out of the back wielding a mallet. Vi was backpedaling, on the verge of running, when Maxine cracked her skull open.

Vi’s knees went to jelly and her cheek hit the cold pavement, blood running across her eyelid, down the bridge of her nose, over her lip, between her teeth. She heard a door screech open, saw Rufus step down onto the road on the other side of the truck, watched his boots come toward her, wondering if this throbbing sleepiness at the base of her neck meant she were dying.

Vi rolled onto her back.

Swallowed blood.

Warm liquid rust.

The spindly branches of a live oak overhung the road. Between its limbs the night sky shone in pieces—cloudless, black, filling up with stars.

Rufus and Maxine stood arm-in-arm grinning down at her.

A walkie-talkie crackled.

Rufus pulled it from his back pocket, pressed the talk button, said, "Yeah, son, we got her. See you back at the house."

Vi’s brain told her arm to unzip the poncho and take out the gun but she remembered that she didn’t have it and besides the arm wouldn’t move.

"Now that’s what you call a good ol’ fashioned wallop," Rufus said and chuckled.

Then the old man kissed his wife on the cheek and leaned down toward Vi, all gums tonight.

"Her lips are still moving," he said. "Go ahead and clonk her again, Beautiful."

[Alternate ending of Locked Doors begins here...]

S W E E T – S W E E T

&

B E A U T I F U L

However, there is a locked room up there

with an iron door that can’t be opened.

It has all your bad dreams in it.

It is hell.

Some say the devil locks the door

from the inside.

Some say the angels locked it from the outside.

The people inside have no water

and are never allowed to touch.

They crack like macadam.

They are mute.

They do not cry help

except inside

where their hearts are covered with grubs.

—Anne Sexton, "Locked Doors"

F o u r  D a y s  L a t e r

50

MONDAY morning, 10:00 a.m., Horace Boone leaned back in his chair and sipped from an enormous mug of coffee, watching through the window as the sun made its brilliant ascent above the Outer Banks, whetting the sky into cloudless November cobalt.

It should’ve been a lovely morning, sitting in that warm sunlit nook of the Ocracoke Coffee Company, amid the smell of fresh coffee beans and newspapers and baking pastries and the murmurs of browsing customers in the adjoining Java Books.

But Horace was a wreck.

It had been four days now since he’d watched Andrew Thomas board the Island Hopper with that pretty young woman and taxi out through Silver Lake harbor into the sound. He’d waited and waited, staring through the windshield as the sky dumped cold unrelenting rain. An hour had passed and the Island Hopper returned without them.

By nightfall there was still no sign of them so he made his way back to the Harper Castle B&B, had supper, and went to bed.

First thing Friday morning, he returned to the Community Store docks. The Jeep Cherokee that Andrew and the woman had arrived in was gone. Horace drove to Howard’s Pub, saw that the Audi Andrew had rented wasn’t there either.

Behind the wheel of his own subcompact rental, a tiny white Kia, Horace felt the hot tears begin to roll down his cheeks. Up until a few days ago he’d sensed that he was fated to tail Andrew Thomas and record his story. He’d managed to follow him nearly three thousand miles from Haines Junction, Yukon, to Denver International Airport. There, he’d lost Andrew in security, waited all weekend in despair near a stand of payphones in the food court of Terminal B, berating himself for flushing his savings on this ridiculous endeavor. Watching the stream of travelers, he resolved to fly back to Anchorage, apologize profusely to Professor Byron, and finish his MFA in the creative writing program. This last year of his life had been derailed by a twenty-four-year-old megalomaniac who fancied he would write a book about Andrew Thomas and become famous.

As Horace gathered his backpack and came to his feet he stared down the terminal and watched in astonishment as the man he thought he’d lost glided toward him on the moving walkway. Andrew Thomas walked right up beside him, grabbed a payphone, and with his back turned to Horace, proceeded to make a phone call.

Horace felt certain he was hallucinating but he stood there and listened as Andrew called the North Carolina Department of Transportation and inquired about the ferry schedules from the mainland to a place called Ocracoke Island. Had Horace any lingering doubt about whether fate and fortune were in his pocket, he then observed Andrew hang up, redial, and book a room at the Harper Castle B&B on Ocracoke for the following week.

His rejuvenation was instantaneous.

Once on Ocracoke, Horace spent Wednesday and Thursday following Andrew’s movements throughout the island—the two trips to the stone manor on the sound, Andrew’s visit to Tatum Boat Tours, Bubba’s Bait and Tackle, his peculiar meeting with the pretty blond at Howard’s Pub, and finally, Andrew and the blond’s departure on that boat in the middle of a nor’easter.

Apparently they had returned late in the night and for some reason left the island. Had Horace waited by the docks he might be with them now. Instead he’d come thousands of miles only to lose Andrew permanently on a small island off the coast of North Carolina. He’d let the story of a lifetime slip away. Andrew was long gone by now, pursuing Luther Kite, in a story that Horace would never get to tell.