Midnight Rain: A Detective Jack Dunning Novel Read Online Free PDF

marriage.
    “Alright, you win.” Joe throws his hands up in surrender. “The armory is opening its doors in case it floods, but you can’t wait until the last minute. If you like, I can drive you over.”
    Cookie bristles. “With all the Shanty Irish piling in from across the tracks? I’d rather be hit by lightning.”
    “You are one stubborn woman,” he says, patting her shoulder. Then more seriously: “I know a lot of ladies who’d give anything if just one person cared if they lived or died.”
    “I’ll call if I need you.”
    “Not tonight,” he says, a cool note of resignation creeping into his voice. “At least I know where I stand.”
    “Now Joe, don’t…”
    He turns abruptly and goes back down the stairs.
    * * * *
    As Joe warms up the car he looks up at Cookie’s apartment where a ruby lamp glows behind the pane. She’s been part of his life since they played kick-the-can as kids. He was despondent when she eloped with that handsome rascal, Skip Millstone. Skip probably broke her heart a million times with his philandering ways, people pitying her and laughing behind her back. A year later Joe caved in to parental pressure and married Mildred Lovisoni. He never made her feel second best, although the torch he carried for Cookie continued to flicker in secret.
    Seven years ago Skip was killed behind the wheel of his roadster, a foot on the gas and his eye on a pretty young thing swinging a tennis racket. Pow! Right into a tree. Joe figured he had it coming.
    Cookie reclaimed her maiden name, something unheard of in her generation. She said that Millstone was a bit weighty and she couldn’t lug it around anymore. The judge laughed and granted her request. A few months later, Mildred lost her struggle with lupus, and after a reasonable period of mourning, he set his cap once again, for Cookie.
    After all these years she still fascinates him. He’d asked her once if she could really tell fortunes, if she could see into the future when she gazed into her crystal ball. Her response was surprisingly candid. She told him the ball was merely the focal point of her intuitive energies. Her talent was reading people, analyzing their concerns and knowing what kind of advice they needed to hear. It usually involved romance, money or guilt. How complicated is that? In the process, she’d become privy to more sins and secrets than Father Doyle at St. Finnbar’s or Chief Garvey down at the station. People are more inclined to confide in someone who lacks the power to relegate them to hell or jail. As for the visions? They’re the real McCoy, beyond her understanding or control.
    Rain taps on the roof of the car and Joe turns on the windshield wipers. He pulls into the street and heads toward home where his fat orange cat waits in the window. He’s not getting any younger and he’s tired of lying alone in bed listening to the clock tick away the hours.
    Something’s got to give and it looks like Cookie isn’t going to budge.
    * * * *
    I head home as soon as Angel calls the station and tells me that Lulu is unaccounted for. Jake is unlocking the Barker’s room with a passkey when I arrive. We hear a moan and Angel, Jake and I rush to the bedroom where Lulu’s husband Roland is cussing up a storm. Weighed down by a heavy plaster body cast, he’s wedged awkwardly between his bed and the wall with Lulu nowhere in sight.
    “I pounded on that blasted wall half the night before I realized 307 was vacant,” says Roland. He’s a big man who stumbled off the curb four weeks ago, broke his femur and cracked his pelvis. Now he’s 275 lbs. of dead weight.
    I look at Jake. He looks at me. He’s a tall colored man with shoulders like a bison. “Okay, let’s do it,” he says. He takes Roland’s upper body and motions for me to take his legs. One, two, three and we hoist him onto the bed, the patient grumbling all the way. My bad leg makes a popping sound at the hip and I pretend not to notice the pain that