The Midnight Man by Loren D. Estleman Page B

threshold. “I’m not a pig,” I explained. “You have the wrong barnyard animal.”
    “That’s your opinion, fuzz. Buzz off, fuzz.” The rhyme amused her. She repeated it, giggling. It was not a reassuring giggle.
    “I’m not with the police, I’m private.”
    “Same difference. You want to leave or you want me to call someone to help you leave?”
    “Neither.” I tromped on her toes and knocked aside the barrels of the shotgun with my elbow. For good measure I brought the flashlight down hard on the carpus in her wrist. She shrieked, and while she was shrieking I wrenched the weapon out of her grasp. I stiff-armed her away from me and groped for a light switch on the right side of the door. In this building it was on the left side. Light trickled down from neon tubes in two ceiling troughs. Three more remained dark, and one of the two flickered and buzzed like a June bug trapped between screens.
    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