The Midnight Man (23 page)

They did, with the gradual coming-to-realization of the sun rising or a clock hand moving. The minimal starlight sifting through the open door—not at all through the windows, which I assumed were boarded over—touched litter on the floor, curlicues of old spray paint on part of a naked wall, the indistinct looming solidity of a standing staircase. Beyond here were dragons. I fingered my gun and breathed and waited. I could have heard my watch ticking if I were wearing one. I was a figure in an unfinished charcoal sketch, crowded into one corner with the whole brooding emptiness of the canvas before me. I was at the mercy of the artist, and of whatever dark thing he chose to place in that emptiness. Portrait of a sleuth beyond his depth.

Hard fingers clamped themselves around my right wrist. I pulled back instinctively, and a point of cold fire found the pulse beneath the left corner of my jaw. I sucked air.

“Move just one hair and I’ll carve you up like a Halloween punkin.”

The voice was the same in person as over the wire, only sharper, more electric. His face was a dark steaming reality two inches from mine. I smelled chicken on his breath.

“I’m carrying,” I told him. “I stand a fair chance of hitting something vital by firing through my pocket.”

“You better move fast after you pull the trigger ’cause your jugular goes next.” He was breathing raggedly. “You ever see arterial blood? It’s orange.”

He was commando wise and suicide smart. I relaxed my grip on the .38. “You’ve got the wheel.”

“I do like a man with a clear sense of his own mort—mortality.” He worked his hand down my wrist and into my pocket, where he got his thumb behind the trigger and tugged out the gun, hand and all. He pried it out of my grasp.

The blade was withdrawn. His hands probed my whole length, even patting my hair for a hideout shiv. He relieved me of my wallet and flash.

I knew what was coming next and rolled with it. The gunsight raked stingingly across my cheek without drawing blood. I made a noise as if it had.

“I ought to make you eat it,” he spat. “Didn’t you hear me when I said no weapons?”

“Would you, in my place?”

That time I wasn’t ready for it. A cut that was just starting to heal split open and a warm trickle coursed down my cheek into my mouth. I was getting used to that salt-and-iron taste.

He backed away then, out of my reach. He wasn’t stupid or he wouldn’t have remained at large this long. The flash snapped on and he studied the cards and papers in my wallet. The yellow light reflecting off the celluloid windows glowed dimly on even, ginger-colored features recognizable from an early mug shot used again and again in the papers and on television. He sported a week’s growth of beard, and his hair frazzled out untidily from under a worn cloth cap with a creased peak. His eyebrows slanted away from the bridge of his nose, giving him a surprised look. He removed some bills and turned out the light.

“Getaway stake?” I said.

He came forward and thrust the wallet back inside my jacket, keeping the flash. “Let’s call it a deposit in case you don’t turn out to be everything you said.”

He retreated again. I could make out some highlights on his face now, but nothing else. He was wearing dark clothes.

“I got you white folks all figured out. You’re full of brotherly love long as you got the gun. But when one of us gets it you holler ‘nigger’ and go for a rope.”

I grunted.
“Roots,
right?”

“So you heard it before. This time listen to the words.”

“There’s a little more to it than that,” I said. “There’s a matter of two cops killed and another paralyzed from the waist down.”

“I didn’t invite them out there, man.”

“Didn’t you?”

He breathed some air. “Keep talking, whitey. Make sense.”

“It wasn’t like you to leave evidence linking your group to the arson that brought those cops out to Mt. Hazel. You weren’t as dumb as the others. Like the fisherman said, if you expect to catch trout you got to dangle bait.”

“For someone who says he ain’t a pig, you sure talk like one.”

“Sometimes it pays to think like one. You know that. That’s what you were doing that night at Willie Lee Gross’s place.”

“Who’s paying your way, flapjaw?”

“Does it matter?”

“It does if it’s John Blue. Maybe you’re their Judas goat. Get me out in the open so’s they can do for me just like they done for the others.”

“Would I have come alone if that were the case?”

“You tell me. I’m the original endangered species.”

“All broke up over your woman, aren’t you?” Easy, Walker. He’s got the hammer.

He laughed nastily. “She was my woman like she was Deak’s woman like she was Felix’s woman like she was everyone else’s woman. She’d ball anything in pants and then she’d go to church to save her soul and then she’d ball anything in pants again. I didn’t ask her to come get me out of the slam. If she didn’t I wouldn’t be here. I’d be in a nice cozy cell dictating my mem—memoirs.”

“Speaking of here, why’d you pick this spot?” Keep him talking.

“Why not? I was born in this building. Like it?”

“I can’t see much of it.”

“You ain’t missing nothing.” His feet scuffed the worn linoleum, the sound echoing. “I know this place better than anywhere. We used to pitch pennies against that wall. Kids don’t do that no more, I guess. When I was nine I fell down them stairs. Landed right there and busted my arm. Ma took me to this old white doctor with onions on his breath. I can smell them onions now. He set the bone but he didn’t do a good enough job and it had to be busted again later and reset. Sometimes, when it’s cold out and that arm starts hurting, I dream about finding that son-of-a-bitch doctor and busting
his
arm. Stupid kid stuff.”

He stopped walking, and sniffed loudly. “Smell that? Cabbage and piss and puke. I grew up with that stink. It’s in my nose and I can’t get rid of it. I joined the marines and they sent me to Germany, but it followed me. Guess I’ll die smelling it. That and the onions on that white doctor’s breath.”

“Tallulah Ridder didn’t smell much better.”

Something creaked. He was leaning on the staircase banister. “Everything dies, man.”

“Not at fourteen, man,” I said. “Not stuffed into a hot trunk with a broken neck.”

The building settled in the silence that followed.

“My father took off when I was little,” he said then. “So did the fathers of most of my friends. Where do all the fathers go, man? Tell me that.” He didn’t wait for me to tell him. “There was hookers in the lobby when it rained. They used perfume instead of soap. First time I had the bread I took one in a doorway two blocks down from here. I was thirteen. It was all over in two minutes. She took my money and my cherry and gave me the clap. Some trade.”

I wasn’t there. He’d been on the run so long he was talking to himself. I’d mentioned Tallulah to flush him out from behind the Selma-to-Montgomery rhetoric, hoping for a glimpse of his true face. I was just starting to realize he didn’t have one. Corpses were only broken parts in his vengeance machine. He bored the hell out of me. My skull ached. I needed air. I got more words.

“My mother scrubbed white folks’ toilets and hooked a little on the side. She drank. I didn’t think nothing of it; all my friends’ mothers was drunks and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be. They found her on her face in a mud puddle on Sherman five years ago. She drowned in less water than they used to cut the drinks in her favorite bar. She was too drunk to lift up her head.”

I breathed some of the fetid atmosphere. “Sorry to hear it. But you were already pretty far gone by then.”

Floorboards shifted. He was standing upright again. I’d reminded him I was there. I pressed on.

“Is that why you knocked down those cops? Because you got a dose from a working girl and your mother died breathing dirty water?”

He let loose a string of curses. I caught a dull flash of teeth. “Man, you wouldn’t understand if I tattooed it on your lilywhite chest. You think juicing folks is all we stand for? I been years working up to this. I even went into the service just to learn all you motherfuckers could teach. That’s what the Indians done toward the end. Sent the young braves east to study in the white man’s schools so they’d know how to deal with him. But it was too late. Well, it ain’t too late for us.”

“Working up to what?”

“Say what?”

“You said you’ve spent years working up to this. What’s ‘this’?”

The building groaned like an old man lowering himself to a bench.

“Nothing,” he said finally. He sounded played out. “Just the cause, man. Just the cause.”

I almost brought up the mayor. But I was too far away from having him bagged to slam that door. “So what’s the punch line? Do we go to police headquarters or what?”

More silence. An ambulance siren started up many blocks away and climbed fast, as thin as an exposed nerve. Someone’s always bleeding somewhere. Smith sighed.

“Davey said it would come out like this. I told him to be more positive.”

“Davey?”

“Luke David Turkel.” Rhythmically, like a tired instructor prompting a difficult pupil. “He said going in we’d all end up in the slam or dead. I said he shouldn’t talk like that. By this time I expected the brothers and sisters to be rioting in the streets, torching and trashing and dumping over cars. I figured the revolution would be
on.
Willie Lee agreed with me.”

“That should’ve tipped you off. Never go with a nineteen-year-old kid’s hunch.”

He wasn’t listening. “Bet ‘I told you so’ was the last thing Davey was thinking when the bastards spilled him in Carolina.”

I said, “You were as late as the Indians. Ten years too late. Too many of the brothers and sisters are making steady wages to riot. They got sucked into that white system you hate so much. Pancho Villa’s defunct.”

“That’s e. e. cummings.” He responded wearily. “Only he said it about Buffalo Bill. ‘Buffalo Bill’s defunct.’ I finished school in the marines. See, we ain’t all illiterate.”

Something struck the floor with a tapping sound and rolled to a stop. The noise was repeated five times. Boards sighed under the linoleum as he came toward me.

“Hold out your hands.”

When I obeyed, he slapped a heavy steel something into my right palm and a lighter something into my left.

“Careful with that blade,” he said. “I oil it a lot and it slips out if you breathe on it.”

I put it away in a pocket and poked the empty revolver into its holster. “What about the flash?”

He handed it over. I turned it on and frisked him, making a chiding noise with my tongue against my teeth when I found a .32 Remington pocket pistol in his right sock.

“Man’s got to have an edge,” he said.

I dropped the little automatic into the pocket containing the knife, retrieved the bills he’d taken from me, and stuck them back into my wallet. “My car’s down the street this side. We’ll stop on the way to the cophouse to call the press. You first, Spartacus.”

The street looked a little less dark than it had going in. I gave Smith plenty of time to descend the steps before I followed. On my way down, the night exploded in a brilliant flash of blinding white light.

The headlamps of a car parked facing us in a driveway across the street bleached out the shadows, impaling Smith to the sidewalk in front of me like a bug on a card. The engine caught with a shriek. I hurled myself from the steps, tackling my charge around the waist and forcing him face first into the gutter. I suppose he’d consider that symbolic. He woofed when we struck.

The first bullet whacked one of the boarded-up windows from the sound of it, like a wooden bat breaking on a fastball. The second went somewhere into space, and a third twanged off the curb a few inches short of my face. Concrete dust pelted my cheek. There may have been others. I wasn’t counting.

Rubber chirped on asphalt. The engine noise swelled. I pushed myself up onto my knees, straddling Smith as I clawed for the little Remington in my pocket. The world filled with naked light. I thrust the automatic straight out in front of me in both hands and fired three times. Glass fell apart with a noise like coins falling. I was breathing hot metal when the light raked past me. Tires screeched, a wheel bumped over the curb on the other side. The car accelerated. I leaped up and sprayed bullets after it until the gun snapped empty. By that time even the exhaust was fading. Tires squealed around corners farther and farther away. I’d had as much chance of getting the license number as I had of being named Miss Black America.

Another thing I didn’t have was Alonzo Smith. When I looked around I was alone.

I
SPENT THE NEXT HALF HOUR
cruising the neighborhood, stopping here and there to train the powerful beam of the foot-long police flashlight into the shadows behind trash cans and between buildings. No Smith. If he had the smarts I gave him credit for he’d stashed a vehicle near our rendezvous for just such an emergency as this and was moondust by now.

Bright boy, Walker. Talk them into going with you and then nail it down by leading them into a trap. The Midnight Man rides. I took out my frustration on the accelerator getting out of there. I had no doubts about my destination. I was on my way to meet an attempted murderer.

I made the driveway on the fly, cutting across the front lawn and braking to a jarring, screeching, bouncing stop two feet short of the garage door. Leaving the lights on and the engine running, I piled out without bothering to slam the door and leaned my face close to the garage’s oval window with my hands cupped around my eyes. It was too dark to see if a car was parked inside, let alone if its windshield was smashed.

She had the front door open by the time I got to it. In blue chiffon robe and backless slippers she looked small enough to wrap up and carry home in a pocket.

“Mr. Walker” she said, clutching the neck of the robe. “What—”

I tore loose the robe’s belt and tugged it open before she could stop me. She caught her breath. She was fully dressed underneath. I seized her right wrist and sniffed the palm of her tiny hand. Maybe I smelled cordite, maybe not. She might have worn gloves.