Midnight Club Read Online Free PDF Page A

They didn’t think I could handle this.”
    Stefanovitch finally shoved open the van door. He nearly hurled the folded body of a specially designed twenty-two-pound wheelchair out onto West Ninety-ninth Street.
    He then shimmied across the front seat, trying not to wince as a knife of pain pierced his lower spine.
    Grasping the door with one arm, he pulled open the lightweight, foldaway wheelchair and sat down in it with a dull thud. The whole operation had taken a little less than twenty seconds. About average assembly time.
    “Christ, you’re actually getting slower at that. I’d have thought a former farmboy-jock like yourself would have that knocked cold by now.”
    Kupchek was still nagging and complaining at him from the sidewalk. He was really wound up tonight, Stefanovitch could tell. Kupchek had been Stefanovitch’s number two for nearly four years, since before the transfer to Homicide. He had learned not to help Stef unless the help was absolutely necessary, or explicitly requested.
    Stefanovitch hit the sidewalk rolling, ignoring the stream of gibes from Kupchek. Both of his arms were pressed down hard against the rubber guards over the wheels of his chair. The tarnished silver vehicle seemed to fly, moving faster than it looked as if it ought to.
    He aimed himself toward the general commotion, down where the dome lights on half a dozen police cruisers were rotating, shining emergency red and blue. The riot of bright colors caused him to squint both eyes.
    “How many dead inside, officer?” Stefanovitch finally stopped in front of a well-kept brownstone. He questioned a bleary-eyed patrolman posted at the foot of the stairs.
    The young patrolman recognized Lieutenant Stefanovitch from Homicide. John Stefanovitch’s controversial return to active duty had made newspaper and television reports around the city a year before. Since then, his reputation in the police department had shifted from “hard-charging,” to “tough and cranky,” to “presuicidal.”
    “Three, sir, I think. Two on the first floor. Throats cut. One’s up on the second floor. The coroner himself’s inside.”
    “Big deal.” Bear Kupchek seemed to let the words slide out the side of his mouth. “I’m here myself, aren’t I? Lieutenant Stefanovitch is here himself.”
    Kupchek suddenly lifted Stefanovitch out of the wheel-chair. The sight was startling and completely unexpected, but the young patrolman didn’t allow himself to blink, much less smile.
    “Don’t just stand there, bring along Lieutenant Stefanovitch’s chair,” Kupchek snapped back at the patrolman, who immediately obliged.
    “Easy with the merchandise,” Stefanovitch said as he was hoisted up the front stairs like a bulky sack of grain. No matter how much he tried to rationalize it, being carried was humiliating. It made him feel like a freak. That was the word; it was exactly the way he felt, the way a lot of people in wheel-chairs were made to feel.
    “All right, let the lieutenant through,” Kupchek called ahead in a loud, gruff voice.
    Stefanovitch and Bear Kupchek passed through a crush of crime-scene regulars as they made their way into the brown-stone. The familiar jangle of guns and handcuffs surrounded them.
    Officers nodded and muttered their hellos. Everyone seemed to know Stefanovitch and Kupchek. Necks stretched to catch the sight anyway.
    Kupchek put Stefanovitch back into his wheelchair on the second floor.
    “Thanks for the ride,” Stefanovitch said.
    “All in the line of duty. Anyway, it helps keep me svelte.”
    “Bear, I want you to wake up the Fifth Homicide Zone.” Stefanovitch then said to Kupchek, “Make it the Fifth and the Sixth Zone.”
    “You want me to call Good Morning America, too?”
    “Canvass every car between Ninetieth Street and One Hundred Tenth. We’ll need all the license plate numbers. Find out who might have been parking a car on the street late tonight. Maybe somebody saw something. Have them wake up the