The Lonely Dead

Начало книги

We met in the parking lot of the Yakima mall. Yakima is a small city in central Washington State. It's a city in the sense that it calls itself one; it has a mall in that you can go indoors and shop without views of the outside reminding you where you are. In three hours only two people had entered the mall. Both were teenagers wearing football shirts. Neither looked as if they had the hard cash to turn the place's fortunes around. They came out later, carrying nothing. Huge canvas signs around the third storey advertised retail space at knock-down rates. The big corner spot at street level was vacant, which is never a good sign.

I sat in the car drinking Americanos I fetched from a Seattle's Best across the way. The coffee shop was the only business on the Avenue that appeared to believe in itself: the rest looked like they'd stashed their For Lease sign in a safe place, looking to save a few bucks come the inevitable. I could almost hear the sound of a mayor sitting behind a big shiny desk, drumming his fingers, quietly losing his mind as he felt the town snooze around him. It would survive — even this dead zone needed somewhere to host a Les Schwab and make up the national Burger King quota — but it was unlikely to make anyone rich again. If that was what you had in mind, you'd go up to Seattle, or down to Portland. What you did in Yakima I had no idea.

Читать дальше →