Nice Dragons Finish Last

Начало книги

It was a very ugly house.

Two stories tall with a cheap yellow stucco finish and a roof sagging under the weight of the mismatched clay tiles, it stood alone in the vast expanse of the Nevada desert at the end of a long road meant to hold a hundred more just like it. But the second housing bust, or maybe the third, had nixed that plan, and years of bank ownership had left the property in limbo. With no landscapers to fight it back, the desert had moved in to reclaim the land, slowly covering the PVC pipes and pre-poured cement driveways until only the lone McMansion remained, sticking out of the sandy waste like a monument to terrible civic planning.

By contrast, the car crunching to a stop on the cracked asphalt at the road’s end looked like a visitor from another world. Dark, sleek, and covered in black chrome with windows so tinted they would have made driving impossible in the days before computers took over the roadways, the sedan was a showpiece for its owner’s wealth and importance, and the men who got out were exactly the sort you’d expect.

Читать дальше →