Impact by Douglas Preston Read Free Book Online Page B

cooking noise and he drew in hard, filling the bulb with smoke, then taking it into his lungs. Leaning back against the hull, he closed his eyes and let the rush happen, a sense of elation so strong it made him feel, for a moment, almost like a real human being.
    He stuffed the pipe and crank back behind the fishing gear and bounded into the wheel house, feeling on top of the world. Once again he saw the Marea casting a long shadow on the water, and a black rage seized his heart. They were digging for treasure and with a map they might even find it.
    Suddenly, he had an idea. A good idea. In fact, it was the best idea he had ever had.
    Worth checked his watch: four o’clock. The girls were obviously going to spend the night on the boat. This would give him time to go into Round Pond, fuel up, load up on beer and beef jerky from King Ro. He could pay a visit to his connection and score some more crank and collect the money he was owed for the stuff he’d boosted out of that mansion on Ripp Island. He could be back out at Louds at dawn.
    With an out-loud laugh he goosed the throttle to 3000 rpms, spun the wheel, and headed back out past Thrumcap Island and around the southern end of Louds toward Round Pond Harbor.
    With the money from the treasure, he’d buy himself a new boat—and he’d name it the Skull and Crossbones .

12

    “He looks like Squealer, the Beanie Baby pig,” said Mark Corso. “You ever see that pig? Big, soft, fat, and pink.”
    Marjory Leung leaned back on the stool and laughed, her long black hair swaying, then lifted the martini to her pursed lips. Corso watched her abdomen stretching, her apple-shaped breasts sliding under the thin stretchy cotton of her top. They were in one of those California theme bars, done up in bamboo and teak, with corrugated tin roofing and colored floor lights, tarted up like some watering hole on the beach in Jamaica. Reggae music throbbed in the background. Why was it in California that everything had to look like somewhere else? He remembered what Gertrude Stein had said about California. There is no there there. How true it was.
    “Freeman warned me about him,” he added. “How the hell did a guy like that get to be second in command?”
    Leung set the drink down and leaned toward him, conspiratorially, her thin, athletic body like a bent spring. “You know why he keeps his door shut?”
    “I’ve often wondered about that.”
    “He’s surfing for porn.”
    “You think so?”
    “The other day I knocked on the door and I heard this sudden movement inside, like he was startled. And then when I came in he was hastily tucking in his shirt and his computer screen was blank.”
    “Putting away his schlong, I bet. The very thought makes me want to puke.”
    Leung issued a bell-like laugh, twisting on her stool, her hair swinging again, her knee touching Corso’s. Her drink was almost empty.
    He polished off his own drink and waved his hand for another round. The knee remained in contact with his. Leung worked at the Mars mission down the hall as a Mars meteorology specialist. She was funny and irreverent, a refreshing change from the nerds who swarmed that end of the building. And she was smart. First-generation Chinese, she’d grown up in the back of a Chinese laundry run by her parents. They didn’t speak English and she went to Harvard. Corso liked that kind of story. She was like his own grandfather, running away from home in Sicily and getting to America, all by himself, at the age of fourteen. Corso felt a kind of kinship with her.
    “You read that report on Freeman?” he asked her.
    “Yeah.” The bartender slid the drinks over and she took hers. “So creepy . We used to come here for drinks once in a while.”
    Corso had heard about something brief between Leung and Freeman. He hoped it wasn’t true.
    “It’s just awful, him getting murdered like that.” She shook her head, sending ripples through that hair.
    Corso took a chance, pressing his knee