The Midnight Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

tools like a loyal trucker and returned to Detroit an hour ahead of schedule. At least this time he didn’t notice me, for which I was grateful. He could have run over me and never felt a bump.
    While I was in Monroe, Willie Lee Gross swung a stockless .30-caliber carbine out from under a long coat while being questioned by police on a street in Atlanta, Georgia, and was shot to pieces where he stood. That made one name gone from the mirror of John Alderdyce’s bathroom.
    I typed out a report on my Monroe excursion on the pre-Columbian Underwood in my office and delivered it in person to Mullett in his private thinking parlor on West Outer Drive Monday. He read it leaning back in a quilted leather chair behind a glass-topped desk you could have used for a skating rink, said something indelicate around the stem of his dead pipe, and filled me in on a load of Arrow shirts awaiting Dooley’s attention in Flint.
    “How long you want to keep this up?” I asked him, for what had to be the dozenth time. “What if Bass turns up clean?”
    “Then you’re free to meet with him and strike a deal for his biography. It should sell millions.”
    I liked that. I didn’t care for Mullett and the brand of corporate bastard he represented, but somewhere under that two hundred and fifty pounds of executive luncheon there beat the heart of a born pain in the ass.
    The next morning I was waiting at the warehouse in Flint when Dooley arrived to pick up the shirts. I ate a breakfast of dried dates washed down with stale cooler water while he was loading, and followed him down 1-75 fifty miles north of where it becomes the Chrysler. This time I was driving a green Citation, a little more roomy than the Spirit but just as gutless. Nowadays you stick out like a bug on a butter knife if you drive anything you can get into without a shoehorn.
    Things began to look interesting when Dooley made an unscheduled exit just above Pontiac. I stayed several car lengths behind him for ten miles along a two-lane blacktop until he ran out of pavement, where the traffic thinned out and I got right on his rear bumper to avoid being seen in his side mirrors. When he pulled into a driveway leading to a sagging farmhouse with a weather-battered barn, I kept going until there was a hill between us, parked as far off the roadway as I could get, and sneaked back on foot with my Nikon, screwing on the telephoto lens as I went. Birds squawked in the trees and gravel crunched under my shoes. I switched to the overgrown roadbank.
    By the time I got there, my socks clotted with burrs, the barn door was open and three men in work clothes were carrying cartons inside from the big trailer. Dooley was smoking and watching beside a fifth party in faded jeans and a red-and-white-striped tank top over a skinny frame. The party was holding a sawed-off shotgun with the muzzle pointed at the ground. He didn’t appear to be threatening anyone with it, least of all the driver. I clicked away.
    I had exposed sixteen frames when one of the workers shouted and pointed to the big Edison pole I was crouching behind. He must have seen the sun glinting off the lens. I snapped one of him pointing for my trophy wall and took off at a gallop. There was shouting behind me, running footsteps, and then a hoarse roar that had no echo because it didn’t need one. Shot rattled down through the trees in front of me at the base of the hill. A door slammed. A mighty engine growled over and over and caught with a racket like balloons exploding in close succession. Brakes let go with a whoosh, followed by the familiar groaning of the gear-change.
    I reached the Citation just as the great truck lumbered into the road, jackknifing for the turn and bringing down a shower of leaves and branches from the trees on the other side. I got the little motor started and floored the pedal. The rear wheels spat gravel and grass. I pulled away just as Dooley’s big square grille filled the rearview