The Midnight Man by Loren D. Estleman Page A

the extreme western edge of the Eastern Time Zone, with a little help from Uncle Sam turning back the hands on the clock like a small boy trying to finagle an extra hour before bedtime. On the horizon the cylindrical towers of the Renaissance Center were lit up like a whorehouse on Saturday night. I’d had some trouble a while back over a man whose office was on the top floor of one of those towers, and I wondered idly if he was still working at this hour.
    Most of the street lamps on the lower east side were broken, which was a blessing aesthetically. Warehouses and tenements wallowed in the mulch of decades, their windows boarded up as if in an effort to shut out the world around them. Yellow mortar oozed out of brick walls covered with obscenities sprayed in black and candy-apple green; slat-sided mutts with glistening sores and eyes bright with the madness of hunger rooted among the offal spilled out of overturned trash cans; heaps of stale laundry shaped vaguely like human beings snored in doorways with their heads leaning against the jambs and their open mouths scooping black, toothless holes out of their stubbled faces. As I swung onto McDougall the beam from my headlamps transfixed a bloated rat perched atop a mound of shredded plastic garbage bags, twin beads of red phosphorescence glowing from its eyes. Entering my intended block, I realized suddenly that I’d been breathing through my mouth for the past five minutes and closed it.
    Many of the numbers had worn off the buildings, if there had been any to begin with. I parked under a functioning street lamp that might discourage the more timid vandals, got a flash out of the glove compartment, and climbed out to search for the place on foot. Twenty yards from the car I turned back and drew the unregistered Luger from its hiding place in the trunk. I made sure there was a cartridge in the chamber and shoved the works under the waistband of my pants. I’d left the Smith & Wesson in the office safe.
    The air was the temperature of human saliva, the street solid black beyond the circle of lamplight except where the still-climbing moon made right triangles the color of milkwater through gaps between buildings. I felt clammy under my clothes—hardly an uncommon reaction for a white man abroad in Blacktown that late. The tiniest noise brought the automatic out of my pocket, the beam of the flash bounding toward the source of the disturbance. Terror grows in the dark like mushrooms.
    When I located the number it was a faint outline in what was left of the darker paint on the front door, the metal numerals having fallen or rusted off in someone’s grandfather’s time and never been replaced. The brick structure had been a gymnasium the year the Marquis of Queensberry took First Communion. Anemic early moonlight lay on the few remaining stippled glass panes in the eight-foot windows near the roof, and the earth had begun to reclaim the broken concrete stoop under my feet. PIGS KEEP OUT , demanded the penciled legend on a square of paper nearly as old as the building, taped above the crusted doorknob. That didn’t apply to me, so I twisted the knob and went in. Two barrels of a sawed-off shotgun were waiting for me in the darkened entrance.
    “What’s the matter, pig? Can’t you read signs?”
    It was a girl asking the questions, in that twangy drawl some blacks can’t get rid of after several generations up North. In the icy light of my flash the weapon looked no longer than some pistols, stockless and supported in two dark slender hands with ragged nails. If it went off at this range I was ground meat.
    I shifted the beam higher, but not too high or I’d have missed her entirely. Lashless eyes blinked in a flat face surrounded by a halo of frizzed black hair. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll turn that fucking thing off. Now , man.” The gun jumped.
    I switched off the beam. A shaft of moonlight fell on two bare feet on the other side of the