Trace - Cornwell Patricia (читать книги онлайн полностью без регистрации .TXT) 📗

"Same thing." Henri is tentative as she stands beside the log, looking around the snowy woods and the deepening of the shadows. Through dark cold branches the lights of town homes and the health club are a buttery yellow, and smoke rises from chimneys.

"I wouldn't exactly call it the same thing," Lucy replies, looking up at her, noticing how thin she has gotten and aware of something in her eyes she wasn't aware of in the beginning. "Almost being killed is a detached way of saying it. I guess I'm looking for feelings, real emotions."

"It's better not to look for things." Henri reluctantly sits on the log, keeping her distance from Lucy.

"You didn't look for him and he found you," Lucy says, staring straight ahead into the woods, her arms resting on her knees.

"So I was stalked. Half of Hollywood is stalked. I guess that makes me a member of the club," she replies, and seems rather pleased to be a member of the star-stalked club.

"I thought that too until a little while ago." Lucy's gloved hands reach into the snow between her feet and she picks up a handful of powder and looks at it. "Apparently you gave an interview about my hiring you. You never told me."

"What interview?"

396 " The Hollywood Reporter. It quotes you."

"I've been quoted saying a lot of things I didn't say," she replies, bristling.

"This isn't about what you didn't say. This is about your giving an interview. I believe you did. The name of my company's in the story, not that the existence of TLP is a deep, dark secret, but the fact that I relocated my headquarters to Florida is secret. That I've kept very secret, mainly because of the training camp. But it ended up in the paper, and once something runs, it is picked up again and again."

"You dont understand rumors and bullshit stories, apparently," Henri replies, and Lucy won't look at her as she talks. "If you ever worked in the movie business, you'd see. You'd understand."

"I understand plenty, I'm afraid. Edgar Allan Pogue found out somehow that my aunt supposedly works for me in my new Hollywood, Florida, office. Guess what he does?" She bends over and scoops up more snow. "He comes to Hollywood. To find me."

"He wasn't after you," Henri says, and her tone is as cold as the snow. Lucy can't feel the snow because of her glove, but she feels Henri's coldness.

"I'm afraid he was. It's hard to tell who's driving those Ferraris, you know. You have to get up close to look, and they're easy enough to follow. Rudy's right about that. Very easy. Pogue somehow tracked me down. Maybe he asked enough questions and found the camp and followed a Ferrari to my house. Maybe the black Ferrari. I don't know." She lets the snow fall through her black-gloved fingers and scoops up more, refusing to look at Henri. "He found my black Ferrari, though. Scratched the hell out of it, so we know he found that car when you took it without permission after I told you never to drive it, as a matter of fact. Maybe that's the night he found my house. I don't know. But he wasn't after you."

"You're so egotistical," Henri says.

"You know, Henri"-Lucy drops the snow from her open black glove-"we did an extensive background check on you before I recruited you. There probably isn't an article written about you that we didn't find. Sadly, we're talking very few. I wish you'd stop the star shit. I wish you'd stop the I-got-stalked-so-I-must-be-something shit. It's really boring."

"I'm going in." She gets up from the log and almost loses her balance. "I'm really tired."

"He wanted to kill you to pay me back for something that happened when I was a kid," Lucy says. "As much as one can assign logic to a nutcase like him. Thing is, I don't even remember him. He probably doesn't really remember you, Henri. All of us are just a means to an end sometimes, I guess."

"I wish I'd never met you. You've ruined my life."

Tears sting Lucy's eyes, and she stays seated on the log as if frozen there. She scoops up more snow and tosses it and the powder floats down through the shadows.

"I've always been into men, anyway," Henri says, stepping into the trail they made when they snowshoed to the log just a little while ago. "I don't know why I went along with it. Maybe I was just curious to see what it was like. I guess a lot of people would find you very exciting for a while. Not that experimenting is unusual in the world I come from. Not that it matters. None of it matters."

"How did you get the bruises?" Lucy asks Henri's back as she takes high, exaggerated steps into the woods, stabbing her poles and breathing hard. "I know you remember. You remember exactly how."

"Oh. The bruises you took pictures of, Miss Super Cop?" Henri answers, out of breath, stabbing a ski pole into the deep snow.

"I know you remember." Lucy looks after her from the log, her eyes swimming with tears, but she manages to keep her voice steady.

"He sat on me." Henri stabs the other pole into the snow and lifts a snowshoe. "This freak with long kinky hair. At first I thought he was the pool lady, thought he was a she. I'd seen him around the pool a few days earlier when I was upstairs sick, saw him, only I thought it was a fat lady with kinky hair, skimming the pool."

"He was skimming the pool?"

"Yes. So I thought he was a second pool lady, maybe a substitute or something, a second pool lady skimming away. And here's the funny part." She looks back at Lucy, and Henri's face doesn't look like her face. It looks different. "That fucking drunk of a neighbor was taking pictures just like she does of everything that happens on your property."

"Good of you to pass along the information," Lucy says. "I'm sure you didn't mention it to Benton after all this time, all this time he's spent trying to help you. Nice of you to let us know there might be pictures."

"That's all I remember. He sat on me. I didn't want to tell." She can barely breathe as she steps, then stops, and turns around, and her face is white and cruel in the shadows. "Found it embarrassing, you know." She breathes. "To think of some fat ugly wacko showing up at your bed. Not to have some. You know. But to sit on you." She turns around and trudges ahead.

"Thanks for the information, Henri. You're quite the investigator."

"Not anymore. I quit. I'm flying back," she gasps. "To L.A. I quit."

Lucy sits on the log, scooping up snow and looking at it in her black gloves. "You can't quit," she says. "Because you're fired."

Henri doesn't hear her.

"You're fired," Lucy says from her log.

Henri steps high and stabs her poles through the woods.

57

Inside the Guns amp; Pawn Shop on U.S. 1, Edgar Allan Pogue walks up and down the aisles, taking his time looking as his fingers stroke the copper-and-lead cartridges deep inside the right pocket of his pants. He takes one holster at a time off the rack and reads the package, then neatly hangs each holster back. He doesn't need a holster today. What is today? He isn't sure. Days have passed with nothing to show for them except vague memories of changing light as he sweated on his lawn chair and stared at the big eye staring at him from the wall.

Every other minute he starts coughing a deep dry cough that leaves him exhausted and wheezy and more upset. His nose is running and his joints are aching and he knows what all of it means. Dr. Philpott was out of flu shots. He didn't save any vaccine for Pogue. Of all people who should have had a dose saved for him, he should have, but Dr. Philpott never gave it a thought. Dr. Philpott said he was sorry but he didn't have any vaccine left, nobody in the entire city did as far as he knew, and that was that. Try back in a week or so, but it doesn't look good, Dr. Philpott said.

What about down in Florida? Pogue asked him.