The Midnight Man (7 page)

I put away the flash and stepped inside, kicking the door shut behind me. She was bent over, holding her injured wrist between bare knees. Her ensemble consisted of severely cutoff jeans and a dirty sweatshirt with no sleeves. Loose threads hung down everywhere. If she was fifteen, I was twenty-one and still in college.

“Jesus Christ, you busted my wrist!” she moaned.

“No, I didn’t. Next time don’t shove a gun in someone’s face unless you don’t want him to have a face. I smelled the bluff when you threatened to call someone instead of shoot me. Besides, I’ve stared down enough muzzles for one day. Where is everybody?”

I felt as if I’d passed through a time warp and been catapulted back fifteen years. The old gym floor, which made tiny snapping sounds as I lifted my soles from its gummy surface, was strewn with rumpled sleeping bags, knapsacks, furniture out of
Home and Orange Crate
, and olive-drab blankets stenciled
U.S. ARMY
. Revolutionary slogans from another era were scrawled in chalk on the gnawed wainscoting, down to and including
FREE HUEY
. I seriously doubted that any of the current inhabitants was old enough to know that Huey wasn’t one of three ducks. There was even a poster of Che Guevara, the one that makes him look like the Messiah and not a greasy little bandit, killed eating grubs from trees in South America.

A loft of sorts added in recent years ran the length of the rear wall, joined to the floor by a wooden ladder and murky with shadows beyond the reach of the ceiling fixtures. That gave me an uneasy moment, but the junior-size gun moll laid my fears to rest by answering my question.

“There’s two guys with guns trained on you upstairs,” she said, testing her wrist for breaks. “I was you, I’d give back the shotgun and split.”

“Just as well you’re not.” I broke it, drew out two 16-gauge shells to keep from blowing off my foot, and tossed them across the room. One bounced and rolled, the other stuck fast where it fell. The gun was short enough to hide in a shoe. “If there was anyone up there you wouldn’t be telling me, and if they were armed I’d be a carcass now. What are they doing, making a score?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Who writes your dialogue, Spillane? Any more guns around?”

She shook her head. It was a pretty head, just like a bottlebrush. “Pigs confis—confiscated them after Laura busted Smitty out of the slam. They got no right. They’s all registered.”

“This too?” I held up the abbreviated fowling piece. “It’s about two feet short of legal.”

“That wasn’t here when they come. I wasn’t neither.”

“What do they call you?”

“Puddin’ ’n’ Tame.” She giggled again.

I peered at her. Her pupils were shrunken to pinpoints. Coke, probably, or maybe just plain angel dust. There were no needle tracks in her arms or legs and she hadn’t yelled loud enough when I stepped on her toes to be shooting between them. Not on that foot, anyway. She appeared to have forgotten all about her wrist. I flipped the shotgun’s release catch, separating the barrels from the action, set the former down atop a broken packing case, and pitched the firing assembly up over the railing into the loft. The girl glared.

“Temptation’s a dangerous thing,” I explained. “Where did Laura stay when she lived here?”

She closed her mouth so tight it bulged, the way kids do when medicine’s coming. But her eyes wandered past my shoulder. I followed them to a door in the wall behind me and grinned. “Thanks, Puddin’.”

It had been a locker room once. The nozzles in the gray-stalled showers were coated with orange rust and there was mold in the corners. Forty-year-old sweat soured the air. The toilet, sequestered in its own alcove, was an old-fashioned affair of white porcelain with a chain. The Pony Express man had given it a quick wipe with a rag when he delivered it and no one had cleaned it since. The smell in there would have revived a corpse.

The lockers had been moved out of the main room and plasterboard partitions erected, forming a rats’ maze of eight-by-eight cells containing old exercise mats for sleeping and various personal items from clothing to coke spoons. There was graffiti here too, of the
OFF THE PIGS
variety, along with similar artifacts of the KerouaccumHoffman era that until tonight I had thought was as dead as John Lennon.

I knew which stall was Laura Gaye’s the moment I saw it, even though it surprised me. A couple of pairs of jeans and some T- and sweatshirts had been flung into a heap in one corner, next to a small stack of hymnals and an army surplus footlocker with a sprung lock. A large crucifix carved from a single piece of wood was mounted on a nail in one of the partitions. But for the clothes, the place was as neat and clean and pious as a monk’s cell, and I’d have bet the clothes were too before the cops got to them. The footlocker was empty, which didn’t disappoint me. The cops would have been through it too, with tweezers.

“They didn’t find nothing neither.”

I hadn’t heard her approaching on bare feet. When I turned, Puddin’ ’n’ Tame was leaning against a partition looking into the cell. Her eyes glittered. She’d just had another snort or pop.

“I thought you said you weren’t here when the cops came.”

“Some of the others was.” Her voice was dreamy. “Pigs didn’t find nothing on account of there wasn’t nothing to find. Deak ain’t nobody’s trained nigger.”

“Deak?” I seized the name. So far no one had identified either of the men who had accompanied Laura Gaye into the courtroom.

Her hand drifted to her mouth. I suppose that in her mind it flew, but when you do dope your reactions go first. Something like terror stirred her sluggish features. Then she giggled.

“I’m a teensy bit high,” she said, exaggerating the dreaminess. “I don’t think—”

“Tallulah?”

The name echoed in the big room outside. A man’s voice, deep and resonant. The whites of her eyes leaped out of the gray gloom.

“Child, where the hell you at?”

Another voice mumbled something unintelligible. My nerves did a wild tango. I sidled toward the door, Luger in hand. It started to open on complaining hinges.

“Look out!” Tallulah lunged for the gun. I jerked it away. My arm collided with the door and the automatic clattered across the concrete floor. When I dived after it, a mortar shell burst at the base of my brain. I kept going, the Luger forgotten.

For a euphoric moment I felt better than I ever had in my life, but that was the siren song of the unconscious. I rolled just in time to avoid another kick to the head. A hobnailed boot glanced painfully off my shoulder. I grabbed at the ankle, but a toe from an unexpected quarter caught me hard in the ribs and pain splintered up my side.

“Get her out of here,” snarled the deep voice. The door opened again and swung shut.

A boot like the one that had struck my shoulder—maybe the same one—left the floor aimed at my face. This time I got hold of it, flailed my legs until I had a heel braced against its mate and shoved upward. There was a splitting sound and a hoarse scream of agony. Then steel flashed in the corner of my eye. I ducked and something swished shrilly past my ear. Not quite past. A large fat drop plopped to my shoulder. The lobe stung.

“No blades.” It was the first voice, though less deep, made shallow by range and pain and lost wind. “We’ll bust up this white motherfucker without help.”

There were more than two, maybe as many as six. A hundred wouldn’t have made much difference. I glimpsed faces in the stark locker-room light, shining black faces, distorted with fury. But mostly I just saw legs and boots. I kicked back and grabbed and tried to get up, but there were too many legs, too many flying boots. They got me in the stomach and groin and neck and head, in the elbows and knees, and all the time that deep black voice kept repeating, “White motherfucking son of a bitch white motherfucking son of a bitch white motherfucking son of a bitch,” until the litany merged with the roaring in my head and then the roaring stopped and then there was silence and then there wasn’t even that. There wasn’t anything, least of all me.

S
OMEONE WAS STANDING
on my eyelids.

He had spurs on and the rowels made my eyes ache. I decided to try to open them anyway. The effort squirted fresh pain into a hundred and one tender spots in my anatomy and gained me nothing beyond a dull headache. I lay there gathering strength for the next attempt while my stomach rocked itself still and sweat trickled down noisily from my forehead into my ears. Meanwhile I watched the pyrotechnics going on inside those stubborn lids. They were corpuscle red and spleen green and arterial blue, with here and there a dash of bile yellow to give the whole thing balance. There were tubas too, but I didn’t much like them because every toot reminded me of the pounding in my head.

Time for another try. No, it wasn’t. Yes, it was. I conjured up a crowbar and pried. I knew if I got one loose the other would break free on its own, as with stuck windshield wipers. Something gave. I cast the crowbar back to the limbo whence it came and grated open the lids.

I’d been cheating myself on fireworks. They were outside, not in, and with the veil gone they leaped into naked brilliance, whirling and plummeting and exploding into colors I couldn’t identify. My stomach lurched. I rolled hurriedly onto my throbbing right shoulder and said goodbye to the roast beef I’d eaten in the little place on Woodward.

I dry-heaved for a full minute after there was nothing left, then turned laboriously over onto my hands and knees and remained like that for a minute or an hour; my head hanging, body burning, and the cold clamminess in which I had lain seeping deeper into my bones. It was pitch dark, but I knew from the gritty wet feel of the surface under my hands that I was in some alley, a location in which my work had occasionally dropped me, not always standing up. It smelled of vomit and motor oil and damp and drunks’ urine and the dry musk of rats. So did the alley, but my work was worse. Traffic hummed in the distance. Except for Vietnam I had never been in a place where I couldn’t hear traffic humming.

I went through the routine.
What’s your name?
A fairly simple question, but there might be a trick to it. What the hell, take a chance. Walker?
First name?
Amos, but don’t spread it around.
Height?
Around six feet, or it was before tonight.
Weight?
One eighty-five.
Eyes?
Two. Brown, if you’re particular.
Hair?
Also brown. Some gray.
Next of kin?
None, unless you count my once-wife, living in California with an out-of-work artist on my alimony.
Interests?
Old movies, jazz and early rock, good Scotch, staying alive. Not necessarily in that order.
Reason for present predicament?
My mother’s fault. She dropped me on my head when I was eighteen months old and broke my common sense.

You’re hurt, Walker. Maybe more hurt than you’ve ever been, even in Nam. Breathing is agony. Get help.
You know so much about it, where do I go? No answer. There’s nothing more useless than an unreliable Id.

Odds are you’ve never been in total darkness. Few have. When you are, all bets are off. I knew where the ground was because I was kneeling on it, and the thread of logic to which I was clinging with my teeth and all four limbs told me that the sky was opposite. That gave me only four directions to choose from. I selected one and started crawling that way. My injured knees hurled white-hot barbs at my brain every time I put weight on them, but if I tried to stand without support they’d buckle.

At length I put out a hand and touched a cold brick. My fingers curled around it, and then the fingers of the other hand curled around one six inches higher, and so on until I ran out of reach. Good old wall. I leaned against it, listening to my lungs creak as they filled and released, filled and released. With every breath I felt the pinch of a damaged rib, or maybe two. Thank God it wasn’t the one the doctors had pinned together. My face ached and my eyes were swollen almost shut. I was in no shape for the big game, or even to reach the end of the alley alone, wherever that was.

Then a light pierced my world of darkness.

It sprang toward me, then away, playing games. Damn childish, that light. I started pulling my way toward it. Hand over hand, wobbling on round heels. Whoever had been holding down my eyelids before was now standing on my feet, and he’d brought a friend. I dragged them along. The light didn’t look any closer. It was like that nightmare in which something you want, something you have to have, is always just out of reach, and the harder you work the slower you move. I started to cry.

“Hold on there, hoss. You drunk or what?”

I stopped crying and started laughing. The line, and its guttural delivery, were strictly Randolph Scott. Instead of the end of the alley, I had reached that point in the nightmare where since nothing made sense anyway, I had no trouble accepting the presence under a city street lamp of a bearded giant in a ten-gallon hat and checked shirt, grinning at me over a .44 magnum that would have knocked all three Earps and Doc Holliday out of their high-topped boots at the OK Corral before they had a chance to draw.

And like all nightmares, this one ended before my face hit the pavement.

“Drink this here.”

I had been suspended for some time in that phantom world between light and dark, aware of my surroundings, of activity going on around me, of the unfamiliar sensation of something soft and wet dragging itself over my face like a big dog’s tongue, and yet unaware of what it all meant or what it had to do with me. My first realization was that I was lying naked to the waist under a sheet, and I wondered if all the corpses were this alert on the slab. When my eyes focused on a big seamed face with a shaggy red beard, it struck me that the Wayne County Morgue was looking pretty far afield for its personnel. The owner of the face and beard was dressed in a red-and-black-checked shirt, and his big cowboy hat was hanging on the back of his chair beside the bed. I was still having that same wacky dream.

“This here” was a pungent brew in an insulated mug held under my nose, steaming hot and reeking of childhood remedy and a familiar, acrid something that stood for everything that was right about America.