Tunnels t-1
Page 37
"Imago."
The name drifted toward him as a breeze picked up and a battered car swerved recklessly around the corner, its wheels squealing. He shivered, and looked suspiciously at an old man as he struggled along the pavement with his walking stick. The man's cheeks were covered with spiky gray stubble, as if he'd forgotten to shave that morning.
As the girl selling the heather brushed past with her basket, Imago looked away for the old man and studied the people at the tables again. No, he was just a little jumpy. It was nothing. He must have imagined it.
He put the bowl of whitebait on his lap and helped himself to another handful, washing it down with some beer. This was the life! He smiled to himself and stretched out his legs.
Nobody saw as he was thrown back against the wall by a sudden spasm and then pitched forward from the bench, his face locked into a grotesque contortion. As he hit the ground, his eyes swiveled up into their sockets and his mouth opened, just once, then closed for the last time.
It was all over long before the ambulance arrived. Because he might have rolled off the stretcher, the two ambulance men decided instead to carry the rigid corpse, one on each side. The crowd of onlookers gasped at the spectacle, muttering among themselves as Imago's body, frozen like a statue in a sitting position, was manhandled into the back of the ambulance. And there was absolutely nothing the paramedics could do about the bowl still grasped in the corpse's hand, so tightly they couldn't lever it out.
Poor old Reggie. A pretty insensitive bunch when it came to the welfare of their clientele, the bar staff were genuinely disturbed by his death. Particularly so when the kitchen was closed and several of them lost their jobs. They were later told there'd been an obscure lead-based compound in his food; it was a freak occurrence, a poisoned fish in a million. His body had simply shut down, his blood clotting like quick-setting cement due to overwhelming toxic shock.
At the inquest, the coroner wasn't too forthcoming about the nature of the poison. Indeed, he was rather baffled by the traces of complex chemicals that had never been recorded before.
Only one person, the girl watching the ambulance from across the road, knew the truth. She took off her scarf and threw it into the gutter, shaking out her jet-black hair with a self-satisfied smile as she put on her sunglasses and inclined her head toward the bright sky. As she walked away, she began singing softly, "You are my sunshine… My only sunshine…"
She wasn't done yet…
FB2 document info
Document ID: 06f67d58-05f7-4376-8750-34cdbc874f55
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 20.02.2010
Created using: FB Editor v2.0, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 software
Document authors :
kejten
Document history:
v1.0 — fb2 creation by kejten
About
This file was generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.
(This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)
Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.
(Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)
http://www.fb2epub.net
https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/