Third man out

Начало книги

I almost asked John Rutka if somebody had shot him in the foot-I knew plenty of people who'd have loved to-but before I could, he gave me a look of astonishment and said, "I've been shot. One of them actually shot me."

"Somebody shot you in the foot?"

"One of them tried to kill him," Eddie Sandifer said, "but they only got him in the foot."

Sandifer looked stunned too, and uncharacteristically shaky; ordinarily it was these two who inspired anger and fright, and Sandifer seemed unsure of what to make of this turn of events.

"It must have been somebody I outed," Rutka said, and looked down, appalled, at the bandaged foot. "God, they're even sicker than I thought. I knew some of them were pathetic, but this is something only a psychopath would do."

We all peered down at the foot as if it might add something on its own behalf. I'd walked over to Albany Med from Crow Street to visit yet another dying friend when I ran into Rutka and Sandifer, and we were in the parking lot outside the E.R., standing in vapors rising from the tarmac after an early evening thunderstorm. Everybody looked purple under the arc lamps, spooky in the urban miasma. Ambulances coasted in and out through the mist, the Tuesday night torn and traumatized delivered as swiftly and silently as Fed-Exed envelopes. Somebody was probably working on a way to fax them in.

Читать дальше →