Read Online The Midnight Man by Loren D. Estleman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Loren D. Estleman
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eighteen months old and broke my common sense.
You’re hurt, Walker. Maybe more hurt than you’ve ever been, even in Nam. Breathing is agony. Get help. You know so much about it, where do I go? No answer. There’s nothing more useless than an unreliable Id.
Odds are you’ve never been in total darkness. Few have. When you are, all bets are off. I knew where the ground was because I was kneeling on it, and the thread of logic to which I was clinging with my teeth and all four limbs told me that the sky was opposite. That gave me only four directions to choose from. I selected one and started crawling that way. My injured knees hurled white-hot barbs at my brain every time I put weight on them, but if I tried to stand without support they’d buckle.
At length I put out a hand and touched a cold brick. My fingers curled around it, and then the fingers of the other hand curled around one six inches higher, and so on until I ran out of reach. Good old wall. I leaned against it, listening to my lungs creak as they filled and released, filled and released. With every breath I felt the pinch of a damaged rib, or maybe two. Thank God it wasn’t the one the doctors had pinned together. My face ached and my eyes were swollen almost shut. I was in no shape for the big game, or even to reach the end of the alley alone, wherever that was.
Then a light pierced my world of darkness.
It sprang toward me, then away, playing games. Damn childish, that light. I started pulling my way toward it. Hand over hand, wobbling on round heels. Whoever had been holding down my eyelids before was now standing on my feet, and he’d brought a friend. I dragged them along. The light didn’t look any closer. It was like that nightmare in which something you want, something you have to have, is always just out of reach, and the harder you work the slower you move. I started to cry.
“Hold on there, hoss. You drunk or what?”
I stopped crying and started laughing. The line, and its guttural delivery, were strictly Randolph Scott. Instead of the end of the alley, I had reached that point in the nightmare where since nothing made sense anyway, I had no trouble accepting the presence under a city street lamp of a bearded giant in a ten-gallon hat and checked shirt, grinning at me over a .44 magnum that would have knocked all three Earps and Doc Holliday out of their high-topped boots at the OK Corral before they had a chance to draw.
And like all nightmares, this one ended before my face hit the pavement.
“Drink this here.”
I had been suspended for some time in that phantom world between light and dark, aware of my surroundings, of activity going on around me, of the unfamiliar sensation of something soft and wet dragging itself over my face like a big dog’s tongue, and yet unaware of what it all meant or what it had to do with me. My first realization was that I was lying naked to the waist under a sheet, and I wondered if all the corpses were this alert on the slab. When my eyes focused on a big seamed face with a shaggy red beard, it struck me that the Wayne County Morgue was looking pretty far afield for its personnel. The owner of the face and beard was dressed in a red-and-black-checked shirt, and his big cowboy hat was hanging on the back of his chair beside the bed. I was still having that same wacky dream.
“This here” was a pungent brew in an insulated mug held under my nose, steaming hot and reeking of childhood remedy and a familiar, acrid something that stood for everything that was right about America.
“What is it?” My vocal cords squeaked against each other, and the lips I was using had been donated by someone else. I hadn’t got the hang of them. They were a couple of sizes too large, for one thing.
“Chicken soup and Kentucky sippin’ whiskey,” said Redbeard, in a southwestern drawl gone gravelly around the edges. “The soup part’s got something to do with one or two sheenies skulking around amongst the
You’re hurt, Walker. Maybe more hurt than you’ve ever been, even in Nam. Breathing is agony. Get help. You know so much about it, where do I go? No answer. There’s nothing more useless than an unreliable Id.
Odds are you’ve never been in total darkness. Few have. When you are, all bets are off. I knew where the ground was because I was kneeling on it, and the thread of logic to which I was clinging with my teeth and all four limbs told me that the sky was opposite. That gave me only four directions to choose from. I selected one and started crawling that way. My injured knees hurled white-hot barbs at my brain every time I put weight on them, but if I tried to stand without support they’d buckle.
At length I put out a hand and touched a cold brick. My fingers curled around it, and then the fingers of the other hand curled around one six inches higher, and so on until I ran out of reach. Good old wall. I leaned against it, listening to my lungs creak as they filled and released, filled and released. With every breath I felt the pinch of a damaged rib, or maybe two. Thank God it wasn’t the one the doctors had pinned together. My face ached and my eyes were swollen almost shut. I was in no shape for the big game, or even to reach the end of the alley alone, wherever that was.
Then a light pierced my world of darkness.
It sprang toward me, then away, playing games. Damn childish, that light. I started pulling my way toward it. Hand over hand, wobbling on round heels. Whoever had been holding down my eyelids before was now standing on my feet, and he’d brought a friend. I dragged them along. The light didn’t look any closer. It was like that nightmare in which something you want, something you have to have, is always just out of reach, and the harder you work the slower you move. I started to cry.
“Hold on there, hoss. You drunk or what?”
I stopped crying and started laughing. The line, and its guttural delivery, were strictly Randolph Scott. Instead of the end of the alley, I had reached that point in the nightmare where since nothing made sense anyway, I had no trouble accepting the presence under a city street lamp of a bearded giant in a ten-gallon hat and checked shirt, grinning at me over a .44 magnum that would have knocked all three Earps and Doc Holliday out of their high-topped boots at the OK Corral before they had a chance to draw.
And like all nightmares, this one ended before my face hit the pavement.
“Drink this here.”
I had been suspended for some time in that phantom world between light and dark, aware of my surroundings, of activity going on around me, of the unfamiliar sensation of something soft and wet dragging itself over my face like a big dog’s tongue, and yet unaware of what it all meant or what it had to do with me. My first realization was that I was lying naked to the waist under a sheet, and I wondered if all the corpses were this alert on the slab. When my eyes focused on a big seamed face with a shaggy red beard, it struck me that the Wayne County Morgue was looking pretty far afield for its personnel. The owner of the face and beard was dressed in a red-and-black-checked shirt, and his big cowboy hat was hanging on the back of his chair beside the bed. I was still having that same wacky dream.
“This here” was a pungent brew in an insulated mug held under my nose, steaming hot and reeking of childhood remedy and a familiar, acrid something that stood for everything that was right about America.
“What is it?” My vocal cords squeaked against each other, and the lips I was using had been donated by someone else. I hadn’t got the hang of them. They were a couple of sizes too large, for one thing.
“Chicken soup and Kentucky sippin’ whiskey,” said Redbeard, in a southwestern drawl gone gravelly around the edges. “The soup part’s got something to do with one or two sheenies skulking around amongst the
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