Harken

Начало книги

There are some places in the world so empty you could scream and hear your voice echo a hundred times, like an entire village crying out at once. Almost everywhere else in Los Angeles, even in the vacant hours before dawn, there are distant rumblings of cars over concrete bridges, screaming jets flying from the LAX airport over shingled apartments, a nearby husband and wife arguing in Spanish over the credit card bill.

But not where I waited. There was nothing down the deserted street long forgotten by municipal workers, the uneven road speckled by potholes and gleaming lines of tar left behind from shoddy repairs. Even the grass barely swayed as the soundless wind crept through the ends of my hair like fingers. You never notice the crickets until their hum has died.

I stood on a thin strip of gravel beside the road, surrounded on all sides by trees and boulders tall enough to block my sight of the San Fernando Valley of California. The road was swept gently by the glow from a single streetlamp a few paces away, only bright enough to stroke my face and the body of my silver BMW, its usually-sparkling paint now dusty from our drive up the hills. I sniffed. That was the terrible truth about nice cars: you might pay a fortune, but you still drive the same dirty roads as everyone else. Funny how roads were the great equalizer.

Читать дальше →