Scimitar

Начало книги

Tomás was talking about a head floating in a toilet bowl.

This had been years ago in Houston, in the building where he’d lived. They’d heard yelling upstairs and he’d gone up with his sister and his brother-in-law, this shabby little walkup where they were living at the time, climbed the stairs with the smell of rancid oil and stale cooking in the hallway, a whiff of marijuana drifting from one of the apartments, knocked on the door to 3C, and a woman opened the door and told them in Spanish that her husband had just suffered a heart attack. But there was a bloody cleaver in her hand.

“He’s in the bathroom,” she’d told them in Spanish.

In the bathroom, the man’s decapitated body was lying alongside the tub, and his head was floating in the toilet bowl.

“Gross,” BJ said.

Pudgy and short, with blue eyes and straight brown hair styled at a barber’s college, BJ looked like a Georgia redneck farmer. Actually, he was a preppy WASP, born and bred in Connecticut, a product of Choate and then Yale where — to hear him tell it — he’d learned not to pee on his hands, although graduates of Harvard also claimed that singular distinction. He peppered his speech with teenage colloquialisms, sometimes sounding more like a Valley Girl than a man with a medical degree. He was now rolling his baby blues in bug-eyed horror at the very thought of a severed head in a toilet bowl.

Читать дальше →