High Position

A contract murder of the deputy head of the Tax Collection Office isn’t easy to uncover. Finding the person who carried it out is only half the job. How can you prove his connection to the client if he himself doesn’t even know the client? Meanwhile, the dead man could be involved not only in corruption schemes, but also at home things weren’t going smoothly… The reader will meet again the investigative team familiar from the detective story “Murder on-line.”

The alarm clock’s ring made Igor Nikolayevich flinch all over. A movement answered with heaviness in his nape, with a slight nausea.

All night he had nightmares. Each time, waking up in cold sweat, he felt relief—at last it was only a dream—and immediately fell into a new nightmare. Yet he could not remember what exactly he’d been dreaming.

— What is wrong with me?—he thought, turning in bed.
—I always slept like the dead. No, that’s a bad comparison. Like a marmot.

— Why like a marmot? — senseless thoughts swirled in his head. — Who’s ever seen how marmots sleep? What are marmots like? How do they look and where do they live?

Reluctantly getting up, he went to the bathroom. Washing carefully and with a certain relief, he looked into the mirror and stuck out his tongue. It was covered with a slightly yellowish thick coating. Aha, everything’s clear: his stomach is in trouble—that’s why his sleep is bad. He smoothed the sparse fuzz bristling over his bald spot, greedily swallowed water from the tap, shaved carefully…