Read Online Fear of the Dark by Gar Anthony Haywood - Free Book Online

thumb, waiting. Nothing happened. He thought to ring the bell again, but decided not to; he didn’t think Townsend was home. If Sheila’s memory for faces could be trusted, the gas station attendant had killed two people and made a few thousand enemies because of it, and no one in his position was going to wait for a black man he didn’t know to ring his doorbell twice before making some attempt to defend himself.
    Still, Gunner kept the .357 unholstered and tried the door on a whim, remembering how easily Mean Sheila’s had flown open in his hand the day before. It was locked. There was no give in it worth noting, which meant he was up against a dead-bolt mechanism.
    And that meant he was out of luck.
    He was marginally efficient at slipping conventional locks with a credit card or thin strip of celluloid, but dead-bolts were dead ends for novice burglars with bad hands, and playing with this one would just be a waste of his time. Understanding that the giant revolver on his hip could go unnoticed by Townsend’s neighbors for only so long, he was about to head downstairs to squeeze the landlord for a key when inspiration embraced him and he returned to the window instead, clutching at straws. It turned out to be a good move.
    The frame of Townsend’s window was the same one Gunner had seen a million times before, an engineering marvel of function and frugality unparalleled in its almost total disregard for security. At either end of a fixed pane, a pair of glass rectangles ran along common rails above and below, sliding east and west to open and close. They were closed now, but the aluminum clamps that should have been fastened to the upper rail to obstruct their movement were missing, replaced by a typical, insufficient alternative: a long wooden dowel sitting snugly between the guides of the bottom rail. It was Gunner’s experience that the dowel did its job fairly well when it was the proper diameter and cut to an appropriate length, but when it was an inch too short and a quarter of an inch too fat for the width of the lower rail to fully accommodate …
    Gunner slapped the window’s fixed pane with an open hand once, near the bottom rail, and the dowel disappeared, rolling over the edge of the inner sill, down to the floor below.
    Gunner grinned.
    He pulled the small screen closest to the door away from the window frame overpowering the stripped threads of two short screws, threw the screen into the apartment, and slipped through the window after it, looking back over his shoulder to see whether anyone was watching. No one was.
    Obviously, Townsend’s apartment building was a crime wave waiting to happen.
    Gunner set the screen behind a couch bleeding white stuffing, closed the window behind him, and moved directly to the apartment’s bedroom, showing the small and impersonal living room only rudimentary interest as he navigated his way through it. A psychologist adept at interpreting trash might have been able to read something of importance into the furnishings, but to Gunner they were just a testimonial to Townsend’s fondness for Coors in cans and the Los Angeles Times funny pages.
    The bedroom, on the other hand, was nothing less than an inanimate extension of the man himself. Who he was and how he lived was here an open book, a mystery revealed like the workings of a pocket watch exposed to the naked eye. Whereas the living room was nondescript, devoid of decoration, this room was flamboyant, a prime example of interior graphics run amok. A water bed bearing a single, shocking-pink sheet sat in the middle of the floor, surrounded on three sides by an uncoordinated mix of poster art Scotch-taped to the walls. The posters covered a wide variety of subjects, from women in compromising modes of undress to soldiers at war, but viewed as a whole they could be seen to adhere to a common theme of ultra-conservative politics and dedication to all things white, people most especially.
    Townsend didn’t know it,