The Fear Artist

Начало книги

Two two-gallon cans of paint weigh about five times as much as he’d thought they would.

Feeling as burdened as a prospector’s donkey, the wire handles of the cans cutting into his palms, he manages to pull open the door of the shop unaided. The door immediately swings shut on his chest, so he pushes it with his knee and edges through it sideways, left side first. One hundred percent of his attention is focused on not letting the door close on the can in his right hand.

Which means that when Poke Rafferty steps onto the wet sidewalk with his back to the road, he’s too preoccupied to hear the people running. So he’s unprepared when the crowd suddenly floods past, going at top speed, and the very large man strikes him from behind.

Rafferty pitches forward at a diagonal and bounces off a couple of running men on the way down. He instinctively throws his hands in front of him to break his fall, then tries to yank them back again when he registers the dangling paint cans. He fails on all counts, landing on his elbows with bone-chipping force and allowing the cans to hit the pavement hard enough to burst open in two eruptions of color, Apricot Cream (Rose’s choice) and a sort of rotted eggplant called Urban Decay, which Miaow picked for her room.

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