Dead Men's s Boots читать онлайн

He shook his head, staring sombrely at the gutter where a trickle of black water was now running along past us, detouring around the toes of his shoes. ‘Nobody wants to know, do they, Fix?’

‘Wants to know what, John?’ I asked.

‘How the bastards killed me.’

kn""-1em"" width=""2em"">I put the birch twig back in my pocket. ‘Umm – you killed yourself, John,’ I said, as tactfully as I could. ‘You didn’t take any chances about it, either. You stuck a shotgun in your mouth and pulled the trigger. It took Carla two days to get your brains off the walls.

John looked up at me, his expression slightly reproachful now. ‘I might not have had to,’ he said, ‘if you ever picked up your phone.’

I’d been expecting that one: you didn’t need to be Freud to know why I was dreaming about John Gittings while I was sleeping in his bed with his dead body in the room next door. ‘Yeah, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Really, really sorry. On the other hand, you could have left a message that made some kind of sense. You never told me what was at stake, John.

He was rummaging in his pockets, patting his jacket, a distracted frown on his face. ‘I thought I could handle it,’ he admitted. ‘By the time I decided to bring someone else in on it, I was already in way over my head. I always was an arrogant sod, Fix. Almost as bad as you. I think I was supposed to give you something.’

‘The letter? I got it.’

‘No, not the letter. The score. The final score, after the whistle blew.

‘The whistle?’

‘Or the drums. I forget. It’s like a skeleton, Fix. The skeleton of a song.’

‘Yeah, well, thanks for the thought, John. I guess I’ll live without it. What’s inscription night, by the way? It sounds like something you’d get at the local bridge club.’

John sighed and stood up, very slowly, with great reluctance. There was a faint splash as he disturbed the water in the gutter, the rippling after-effects lasting longer than I would have expected. I looked up into his pleading, hangdog face.

‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘It’ll have to wait for another time. You won’t let them get me, will you, Fix? I can rely on you for that much? Blow me away, if you have to. Play me a song and blow me out like a candle. I don’t mind. Just don’t let them get me.’

I stood up too, because the street was filling with water now. The trickle in the gutter had grown into a flood while I wasn’t looking, and it was already up to our knees.