Dead Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page A

emergencies. While he scrubbed I dragged my desk chair over and sat next to him, feet propped on the low windowsill.
    I said, “It’s not working out, is it?”
    “… I guess not. Neal was a great bookseller, but he’s hopeless in an office. Last Friday I caught him trying to send a fax through the slot where the paper comes out.”
    Even
I
could send faxes. “You’re cutting him an awful lot of slack.”
    “Well, he’s … Neal.”
    “If he’s having so much trouble, why does he want the job?”
    “He’s got to have something to do. Even if we could afford it, he’s not the kind of man who can stay home and tend to his knitting.”
    The image of Neal—a shaggy bear of a man—knitting made me smile. “Couldn’t he continue to sell books online?”
    “You’ve got to be computer literate to do that. Neal’s even worse than you used to be.” Ted turned concerned eyes on me. “Are you building up to telling me to fire him?”
    I wished I could. But what Ted had said before held true for me as well: Neal was Neal, and I cared about him.
    “No, I’m not. But you’ve got to find a way to use him that won’t throw the entire operation into chaos. And you’ve got to promise me one thing.”
    “Sure. What?”
    “That you won’t kill him. It’d be very bad for business.”
    After Ted went back to his office, I booted up my Mac and accessed
InSite
magazine. This week’s Top Hit was Bay Area oxygen bars—an article that didn’t particularly interest me because I preferred to get my daily intake by breathing deeply, rather than snorting oxygen at ten bucks a pop. Personality of the Week was one of our urban activists whose not-so-inadvertent clumsiness at the groundbreaking for yet another development that the city didn’t need had caused the mayor’s fedora to be carried off on the breeze and eventually spiral into a sinkhole. The Poetry in Motion department reported on hip Bay Area limo companies. They Say Volumes interviewed the author of
Instant Connection in the Elevator and Other Places,
who advocated dressing up in outlandish costumes and cavorting in public places as a means of meeting women. Incredible Edibles was singing the praises of tofu for those who hadn’t heard of it, presumably because they’d been living in underground caverns for the past two decades. Here, There, and Everywhere featured a club that was about to go belly-up and a restaurant I’d been eating at for at least a year.
    Maybe there wasn’t enough cool stuff to go around this week.
    I clicked off the site, shut the machine down, and stared at the blank screen, gradually noting my own features. I was frowning. That frown had confronted me from a lot of reflective surfaces lately. Was it becoming permanent? God, I hoped not! I looked like my mother—
    Which mother? McCone? Biological? Adoptive?
    Adoptive. Definitely. Learned behavior. Ma had frowned a lot before she fell in love, divorced Pa, and had a face-lift.
    Learned behavior could also be unlearned. I leaned close to the screen and rubbed furiously with my fingertips at the creases between my brows.
    “So what’s happening, Shar?” J.D. Smith asked.
    J.D. was a good friend, a former
Chronicle
reporter who, as he put it, had recently gone over to the other side and was now freelancing for various electronic publications.
    “Well, I’ve got an interesting case—”
    “Don’t tell me about it. Your last interesting case, you blackmailed me into putting you in touch with a confidential source.”
    “Whom I prevented from being framed for a felony.”
    “Well … So what’s this one?”
    “An undercover investigation of
InSite
magazine.”
    “That
is
interesting. I’d like to hear more about it.”
    “And I’d like to hear more about
InSite
.”
    “I know enough to fill a long dinner hour.”
    “Name the time and place.”
    In the hours before my eight o’clock appointment with J.D. I caught up on paperwork; spent some time discussing what constituted