William Shatner - Tek War 7 - Tek Money

VIP免费

2024-12-20 0 0 697.49KB 337 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

tek Money [158-011-3.0]

By: william Shatner

Synopsis:

Seventh novel in the Tek War series.

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

Publiyhers Since 1838 200 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

may not be reproduced in any form without permission. Published

simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shatner, kS, qlliam.

Tek money / l il liam Shatner.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

ISBN 0-399-14109-X

"The seventh book in a futuristic thriller series featuring Detective

Jake Cardigan."

1. Cardigan' Jake (Fictitious character)--Fiction. 2. Private

investigators--Fiction. I. Title.

PS3569.H347T444 1995

95-8686 CIP

813'.54c20

Book Design by Julie Duquet

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Per Traynor was having

trouble getting to where he wanted to go.

It was a hot, dry, restless night in late October of the year 2121. A

raw, feverish wind was knifing across the night beach in the Malibu

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Sector of Greater Los Angeles, rattling the long twisty row of

decorative palm trees, snatching at Traynor's sleeve, shoving him off

balance.

His difficulties had grown worse ever since he set his sky car down at

the seaside lot and started making his way along the dark sand. It was

probably because of that damned stopover in the Venice Sector. He'd

promised himself he was through with that sort of thing.

A lean, lighthaired man of forty one, Traynor stumbled as a sharp new

gust of hot wind hit at him. He fell to his knees on the harsh sand,

putting out both palms to save himself from toppling over completely.

"Jesus!"

One of his hands had touched the face of a dead man who was partially

buried in the gritty sand. Thick blood was smeared all across the dead

face, great splashes of it. As he struggled to pull away clear,

Tra)mor managed to drag the corpse with him. He struggled, but

couldn't seem to disentangle himself.

"Don't you recognize me, Pete?" asked the dead man, smiling with his

bloody lips. "It's me--Flanders."

"You're five weeks dead, Flanders," he shouted at him. "I had nothing

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

to do with it."

Crying out, Traynor rolled to his left, kicking out, crawling away from

the smiling corpse.

The harsh sand slowed his progress, scraping at his clothes. The wind

grew even hotter as it came swirling around him.

"What's wrong, dear?"

He hadn't noticed until now that his wife--well, actually, his former

wife since November of 2120--was standing only a few feet away. Slim

and pretty in a long white dress, wearing one of her black ribbons to

hold back her russet hair.

"I came here to..." He paused, shaking his head the way you do when

you're trying to come fully awake. "I have to see Jake Cardigan. He

lives along here someplace, but I'm having a bad reaction to--"

"Not a very good idea, is that, Peter?" suggested his ex-wife. "You

don't want, really, to talk to anyone right now, least of all a private

investigator."

"I didn't quite catch what you said, Amy." He took a few shaky steps

in her direction, glancing down to make sure he wasn't going to step on

the corpse.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

But the dead man had moved. He was sitting, cross legged, over on a

white neo-iron bench. He had his shirt pulled open wide and was

probing a gaping lazgun wound in his chest with two bloody fingers.

"Leave me the hell alone, lYlanders," he yelled. "I didn't know what

was going to happen."

When Traynor looked again toward his wife, he was just in time to see

her catch fire and begin to burn. She was soon completely surrounded

by a crackling roar of bright orange flame.

"As I was saying, Peter, you're not being at all smart," she resumed.

"Go home now and forget this nonsense. You don't, not at all, need a

detective."

He pressed all the fingers of his right hand to his temple. "There's

something I've found out--I told you a little bit about it, Amy, the

last time I came to see the kids. It's worse than I thought and I've

got to do something."

"No, that isn't necessary at all." The flames were taking her over,

sending a high flickering torch of fire up into the dark windy night.

"You're only upset because you and Dennis had a disagreement."

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

"I can't argue now--I'm not thinking very straight." He moved,

unsteadily, closer to her. The flames that

were consuming her gave off no heat. "Don't get mad and criticize

me--I know I shouldn't have stopped at that Tek parlor."

Amy disintegrated, turning to dark, leafy ashes and drifting away on

the wind.

Traynor clenched his fists, pressed them, hard, into his ribs. Would

have been a hell of a lot better to have come straight here, instead of

stopping for that damned Tek session. Sometimes, though, he felt a lot

better, a lot braver, afterward. But tonight, something was wrong. He

was having painful flashbacks, unwanted illusions, and they seemed to

be getting worse.

After a moment, struggling hard, he was able to regain control of

himself again. Things were okay once more and he was sure he could

hold off any further hallucinations.

Traynor could remember Jake Cardigan's address now. He knew exactly

where to find the beach side condo. He remembered, too, everything he

had to talk over with him.

"Jake's just about the only person in Greater LA that I can trust."

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Six big black candles were burning up ahead on the beach, each in a

man-high golden holder. They circled a plain coffin that was resting

on a metal rack.

He halted, gripping one hand tightly in the other, fighting what was

happening to him. "Nothing is really there," he reminded himself.

"Nothing at all. This is just another damned Tek fantasy."

The coffin didn't go away.

He'd long since recognized it. He remembered it from twenty one years

ago. A closed coffin, because of the way his mother had died.

Now, slowly and silently, the coffin lid began to rise.

Traynor put his hands up over his eyes, but he discovered he could see

right through them.

His mother's charred and blackened body sat up and shook its head. "You

shouldn't be out so late, dear," she cautioned. "Best go right home

now, darling. You don't really want to visit this detective."

"I have to, Mom. I've found out something--stumbled on it. A lot of

bad things are going to happen unless--"

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

"You're Pete Traynor, aren't you? Is something wrong?"

About thirty feet up beyond his mother's coffin a lean teenage young

man was standing, watching him.

"I'm looking for Jake Cardigan," he managed to say. "You're his

son?"

'"That's right, yes," answered Dan. "You don't look so well. Is

there--"

"I've got to talk to him right away."

"Dad's not at home, but he should be soon. Come on over on the deck

and sit down, Mr. Traynor."

The only way to get over to Dan Cardigan and the condo building that

rose up behind him was by walking through the coffin.

"Don't keep on with this, son," warned his mother.

Traynor said to Dan Cardigan, "I know about the hijacking of--"

That was all he got to say.

A huge roaring began in his ears. He heard cries of pain and the

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

boom of thunder and dark, discordant music.

His mother tried to embrace him. "Poor Pete, poor baby."

Before she touched him, his brain seemed to explode inside his skull

and he felt his life go spinning away on the red wind.

THE BEItRDED HRN was saying, "Our revels now are ended. These our

actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are... The strap on

Jake Cardigan's wristwatch phone began to contract and expand against

his flesh. A handsome, somewhat weatherbeaten man of almost fifty, he

leaned forward in his amphitheater seat and held the small instrument

close to his right ear before activating the speaker button.

Dan's voice said anxiousb; "Dad, you'd better get home. There's been a

death and--"

His son's voice was suddenly cut off.

Frowning, Jake tapped out his home number on the wristphone.

The pretty blonde woman in the next seat spoke a question close to his

ear. "Something wrong?"

"Not sure, Bev," he answered in a whisper. "Dan called, then got cut

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

off."

The phone at home rang again and again. Dan didn't answer.

Jake said to Bev Kendricks, "Sounds like Dan may be in trouble." After

pointing a thumb at the nearest exit to the Beverly Hills Sector

Shakespeare HoloTheatre, he eased up to his feet and started making his

way along the dark row of seats.

Bev rose up and followed him. "Excuse me."

Down on the circular stage the hologram actors continued with The

Tempest. the sky car bounced slightly as Jake guided it through the

windy night. He tapped into the home sec system at the condo he shared

with his son, and asked it, "Give me a report on what's going on."

"Everything is normal, sir," came a tinny voice out of the small voxbox

in the dash panel.

"Pictures, room by room," requested Jake as the sky car carried them

toward his home.

"I'm sure he's okay," said Bev, who was sitting, leaning forward, in

the passenger seat beside him.

"Yeah, probably," he conceded, watching the monitor screen as it took

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

tekMoney[158-011-3.0] By:williamShatner Synopsis: SeventhnovelintheTekWarseries. G.P.PUTNAM'SSONS PubliyhersSince1838200MadisonAvenueNewYork,NY10016 Copyright1995byWilliamShatner Allrightsreserved. Thisbook,orpartsthereof, maynotbereproducedinanyformwithoutpermission. PublishedsimultaneouslyinCanad...

展开>> 收起<<

William Shatner - Tek War 7 - Tek Money.pdf

共337页,预览68页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

William Shatner - Tek War 7 - Tek Money

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: