The Midnight Man Read Online Free PDF

mirror.
    Striped Shirt leaned out the passenger’s window and his shotgun appeared in the mirror on the right side of the car, which had been what sold me on the midget machine in the first place. I threw myself sideways in the seat and the back window disappeared. When I straightened, the seat was covered with pebbles of glass. A couple of dozen black pellets studded the windshield, hairline cracks spreading out from them like strands in a web.
    I gained ground on the hills—of which, fortunately, there were more than a few—but on long downward grades and the straightaway they struck sparks off my rear bumper. Then we went into a series of twisting turns that put me well out in front. I finally lost them by pulling around a circular driveway behind a farmer’s house, waiting for them to thunder past, and piling back into the road going in the opposite direction. The last time I saw the rig, it was half obscured behind its own cloud of dust, turning a row of mailboxes into scrap metal and kindling as Dooley tried to swing around in a driveway too short for the purpose. The transmission whined and bellowed, the amplified baby’s cry of an enraged grizzly.
    When the man at the rental agency was through bewailing the loss of the rear window I gave him Owen Mullett’s name and number. I smoked a cigarette in the sarcophagus the rental agent used for an office while he listened to music and then spoke with the man himself. After a minute he handed the instrument to me.
    “Did you nail him?”
    “In living color,” I replied. “That’s so you can see the red on his hands.”
    I gave the receiver back to the rental man behind the desk. He listened for thirty seconds and hung up, all smiles.
    I took the film to a custom place for developing and slid the eight-by-tens and negatives into a folder with my typewritten report. During my drive to Mullett’s office, police and helicopters cornered Luke David Turkel on the roof of a college dormitory in Raleigh, North Carolina. Half an hour later his broken body was taken to the Wake County Morgue, where pathologists dug out a slug from a Police .38 and another from a .357 magnum said to have been in Turkel’s possession at the time of the attempted arrest. The fatal wound had been self-inflicted. Police said.
    There was only one name left on John’s mirror.
    Mullett loved the pictures and authorized a thousand-dollar bonus on the spot. I didn’t argue. I obtained his permission to use his firm’s name as a reference and collected my check from his personal secretary, who had a brisk face to go with her voice. After banking the bonus, I ate that evening in a restaurant where, for the first time in a long while, I didn’t have to place my order through an outside microphone. It didn’t change my mood. My mind was miles away in the intensive care ward at Detroit Receiving.
    The media had a ball with the continuing manhunt for Alonzo Smith. Network television crews and reporters from as far away as California camped out in front of Detroit Police Headquarters on Beaubien waiting for word that he’d been slain while resisting arrest. It was like the countdown to John Dillinger. Then on Friday, the fugitive spoiled everything by walking into the First Precinct and emptying his pockets before a bewildered desk sergeant, remanding himself into police custody. The out-of-state newspeople packed up and went home. Nothing spoils a good story like anticlimax.
    At his arraignment three days later, Smith’s girlfriend and two unidentified black male accomplices strolled into the courtroom on the fourth floor of the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice armed with M-16 assault rifles and strolled out with the defendant. No one saw them leave the building, but a search of the premises uncovered nothing.
    That afternoon, Mrs. Van Sturtevant called me at my office.

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    I T WAS A TRACT HOME off Livernois, all on one level with lilac bushes out front and flagstones leading across a nice lawn to a