Night Freight (9 page)

"Who'd do that?"

"Same one who killed him."

"There's no blood or nothing," Barney said. He was back to being grumpy. His voice had that hard edge and his eyes had a squeezed look. "None of the grass is even flattened down. You been seeing things, Joe."

"I tell you, it was the real thing."

"And I tell
you
, it wasn't. Go out and take another look, see for yourself. Then get that oil pan out of the shed and your ass back to work. I promised old lady Cassell we'd have her car ready by five-thirty."

I went outside again. The wind had picked up a couple of notches, turned even colder; it was like fire against my bare skin. The hills east of town were all shimmery with haze, like in one of those desert mirages. There was a tree smell in the air but it wasn't the usual good pine-and-spruce kind. It was a eucalyptus smell, even though there weren't any eucalyptus trees within two miles of here. It made me think of cat piss.

I put my head down and walked slow over to the parts shed. And stopped just as I reached it to draw in a long breath. And then went on to where I could see past the far corner.

The dead guy was there in the grass. Lying right where I'd seen him before, laid out on his back with one leg drawn up and his face blown away.

The wind gusted just then, and when it did it made sounds like howls and moans. I wanted to cover my ears. Cover my eyes, too, to keep from seeing what was in the grass. But I didn't do either one. All I did was stand there shivering with my eyes wide open, trying to blink away some of the shimmery haze that seemed to have crawled in behind them. Nothing much was clear now, inside or out—nothing except the dead guy.

"Joe!"

Barney, somewhere behind me. I didn't turn around but I did back up a couple of steps. Then I backed up some more, until I was past the corner and couldn't see the dead guy anymore. Then I swung around and ran to where Barney was in the shop doorway.

"He's there, Barney, he's there, he's there—"

He gave me a hard crack on the shoulder. It didn't hurt; only the cold hurt where it touched my face and hands. He said, "Get hold of yourself, man."

"I
swear
it," I said, "right where I saw him before."

"All right, take it easy."

"I don't know how you missed seeing him," I said. I pulled at his arm. "I'll show you, come on."

I kept tugging on him and finally he came along, grumbling. I led the way out behind the shed. The dead guy was still there, all right. I blew out the breath I'd been holding and said, "Didn't I tell you? Didn't I?"

Barney stared down at the dead guy. Then he stared at me with his mouth open a little and his nose dripping snot. He said, "I don't see anything."

"You don't . . . what?"

"Grass, just grass."

"What's the matter with you? You're looking right at him!"

"The hell I am. The only two people out here are you and me?"

I blinked and blinked and shook my head and blinked some more but the dead guy didn't go away. He was
there
. I started to bend over and touch him, to make absolutely sure, but I couldn't do it. He'd be cold, as cold as the wind—colder. I couldn't stand to touch anything that cold and dead.

"I've had enough of this," Barney said.

I made myself look at him instead of the dead guy. The cat piss smell had gotten so strong I felt like gagging.

"He's there," I said, pleading. "Oh God, Barney, can't you see him?"

"There's nobody there. How many times do I have to say it? You better go on inside, Joe. Both of us better. It's freezing out here." He put a hand on my arm but! shook it off. That made him mad. "All right," he said, "if that's the way you want it. How about if I call Madge? Or maybe Doc Kiley?"

"No," I said.

"Then quit acting like a damn fool. Get a grip on yourself, get back to work. I mean it, Joe. Any more of this crap and you'll regret it."

"No," I said again. "You're lying to me. That's it, isn't it? You're lying to me."

"Why would I lie to you?"

"I don't know, but that's what you're doing. Why don't you want me to believe he's there?"

"Goddamn it,
there's nobody there
!"

Things just kept happening today—bad things one right after another, things that made no sense. The cold, Madge, Barney, the dead guy, the haze, the cat
piss smell, Barney again—and now a cold wind chilling me inside as well as out, as if icy gusts had blown right in through my flesh and were howling and prowling around my heart. I'd never felt like this before. I'd never been this cold or this scared or this frantic.

I pulled away from Barney and ran back into the shop and into the office and unlocked the closet and
took out the duck gun he lets me keep in there because Madge don't like guns in the house. When I got back to the shed, Barney was just coming out with a Ford oil pan in his gnarly hands. His mouth pinched up tight and his eyes got squinty when he saw me.

He said, "What the hell's the idea bringing that shotgun out here?"

"Something's going on," I said, "something crazy. You see that dead guy there or don't you?"

"You're the one who's crazy, Joe. Give me that thing before somebody gets hurt."

He took a step toward me. I backed up and leveled the duck gun at him. "Tell me the truth," I said, desperate now, "tell me you see him lying there!"

He didn't tell me. Instead he gave a sudden lunge and got one hand on the barrel and tried to yank the gun away and oh Jesus him pulling on it like that made me jerk the trigger. The load of birdshot hit him full on and he screamed and the wind screamed with him and then he stopped but the wind didn't. Inside and out, the wind kept right on screaming.

I stood looking down at him lying in the grass with one leg drawn up and his face blown away. I could see him clear, even through that shimmery haze. Just him down there. Nobody else.

Just Barney.

My series character, the "Nameless Detective," has been around almost as long as I have; he was "born" more than thirty years ago in the pages of
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine
, and since then has appeared in some twenty-six novels and two collections. "Souls Burning" is the only "Nameless" story in these pages, included for two reasons: it's much more a psychological horror story than a detective story, and it's by far the darkest of any of his cases—as shadow-haunted, in fact, as any story in
Night Freight
. Maxim Jakubowski, who first bought it for
New Crimes 3
, stated in his acceptance note, "You must care deeply about what this story has to say." Perceptive fellow, Maxim.

H
otel Majestic, Sixth Street, downtown San Francisco. A hell of an address—a hell of a place for an ex-con not long out of Folsom to set up housekeeping. Sixth Street, south of Market—South of the Slot, it used to be called—is the heart of the city's Skid Road and has been for more than half a century.

Eddie Quinlan. A name and a voice out of the past, neither of which I'd recognized when he called that morning. Close to seven years since I had seen or spoken to him, six years since I'd even thought of him. Eddie Quinlan. Edgewalker, shadow-man with no real substance or purpose, drifting along the narrow catwalk that separates conventional society from the underworld. Information-seller, gofer, small-time bagman, doer of any insignificant job, legitimate or otherwise, that would help keep him in food and shelter, liquor and cigarettes. The kind of man you looked at but never really saw: a modern-day Yehudi, the little man who wasn't there. Eddie Quinlan. Nobody, loser—fall guy. Drug bust in the Tenderloin one night six and a half years ago; one dealer setting up another, and Eddie Quinlan, small-time bagman, caught in the middle; hard-assed judge, five years in Folsom, goodbye Eddie Quinlan. And the drug dealers? They walked, of course. Both of them.

And now Eddie was out, had been out for six months. And after six months of freedom, he'd called me. Would I come to his room at the Hotel Majestic tonight around eight? He'd tell me why when he saw me. It was real important—would I come? All right, Eddie. But I couldn't figure it. I had bought information from him in the old days, bits and pieces for five or ten dollars; maybe he had something to sell now. Only I wasn't looking for anything and I hadn't put the word out, so why pick me to call?

If you're smart, you don't park your car on the street at night south of the Slot. I put mine in the Fifth and Mission Garage at seven forty-five and walked over to Sixth. It had rained most of the day and the streets were still wet, but now the sky was cold and clear. The kind of night that is as hard as black glass, so that light seems to bounce off the dark instead of shining through it; lights and their colors so bright and sharp-reflecting off the night and the wet surfaces that the glare is like splinters against your eyes.

Friday night, and Sixth Street was teeming. Sidewalks jammed—old men, young men, bag ladies, painted ladies, blacks, whites, Asians, addicts, pushers, muttering mental cases, drunks leaning against walls in tight little clusters while they shared paper-bagged bottles of sweet wine and cans of malt liquor; men and women in filthy rags, in smart new outfits topped off with sunglasses, carrying ghetto blasters and red-and-white canes, some of the canes in the hands of individuals who could see as well as I could, carrying a hidden array of guns and knives and other lethal instruments. Cheap hotels, greasy spoons, seedy taverns, and liquor stores complete with barred windows and cynical proprietors that stayed open well past midnight. Laughter, shouts, curses, threats; bickering and dickering. The stenches of urine and vomit and unwashed bodies and rotgut liquor, and over those like an umbrella, the subtle effluvium of despair. Predators and prey, half-hidden in shadow, half-revealed in the bright, sharp dazzle of fluorescent lights and bloody neon.

It was a mean street, Sixth, one of the meanest, and I walked it warily. I may be fifty-eight, but I'm a big man and I walk hard too; and I look like what I am. Two winos tried to panhandle me and a fat hooker in an orange wig tried to sell me a piece of her tired body, but no one gave me any trouble.

The Majestic was five stories of old wood and plaster and dirty brick, just off Howard Street. In front of its narrow entrance, a crack dealer and one of his customers were haggling over the price of a baggie of rock cocaine; neither of them paid any attention to me as I moved past them. Drug deals go down in the open here, day and night. It's not that the cops don't care, or that they don't patrol Sixth regularly; it's just that the dealers outnumber them ten to one. On Skid Road any crime less severe than aggravated assault is strictly low priority.

Small, barren lobby, no furniture of any kind. The smell of ammonia hung in the air like swamp gas. Behind the cubbyhole desk was an old man with dead eyes that would never see anything they didn't want to see. I said, "Eddie Quinlan," and he said, "Two-oh-two" without moving his lips. There was an elevator but it had an out of order sign on it; dust speckled the sign. I went up the adjacent stairs.

The disinfectant smell permeated the second floor hallway as well. Room 202 was just off the stairs, fronting on Sixth; one of the metal 2s on the door had lost a screw and was hanging upside down. I used my knuckles just below it. Scraping noise inside, and a voice said, "Yeah?" I identified myself. A lock clicked, a chain rattled, the door wobbled open, and for the first time in nearly seven years I was looking at Eddie Quinlan.

He hadn't changed much. Little guy, about five-eight, and past forty now. Thin, nondescript features, pale eyes, hair the color of sand. The hair was thinner and the lines in his face were longer and deeper, almost like incisions where they bracketed his nose. Otherwise he was the same Eddie Quinlan.

"Hey," he said, "thanks for coming. I mean it, thanks."

"Sure, Eddie."

"Come on in."

The room made me think of a box—the inside of a huge rotting packing crate. Four bare walls with the scaly remnants of paper on them like psoriatic skin, bare uncarpeted floor, unshaded bulb hanging from the center of a bare ceiling. The bulb was dark; what light there was came from a low-wattage reading lamp and a wash of red-and-green neon from the hotel's sign that spilled in through a single window. Old iron-framed bed, unpainted nightstand, scarred dresser, straight-backed chair next to the bed and in front of the window, alcove with a sink and toilet and no door, closet that wouldn't be much larger than a coffin.

"Not much, is it," Eddie said.

I didn't say anything.

He shut the hall door, locked it. "Only place to sit is that chair there. Unless you want to sit on the bed? Sheets are clean. I try to keep things clean as I can."

"Chair's fine."

I went across to it; Eddie put himself on the bed. A room with a view, he'd said on the phone. Some view. Sitting here you could look down past Howard and up across Mission—almost two full blocks of the worst street in the city. It was so close you could hear the beat of its pulse, the ugly sounds of its living and its dying.

"So why did you ask me here, Eddie? If it's information for sale, I'm not buying right now."