Free The Midnight Man by Loren D. Estleman Page B

of another “Where I grew up a man didn’t ask questions like that. He knew the answer.”
    “Code of the West, huh?”
    “I reckon it sounds sort of funny, put like that. But there’s sense behind it. Women don’t get raped and murdered out on the plains because somebody’s scared to dial a phone. One scream and the whole neighborhood’s out with Winchesters and lynch ropes.”
    “As long as the right person gets lynched.”
    “Maybe not always. But for every innocent that swings there are ten less women raped and murdered.” He paused. “Question now is, what do I do with you?”
    “What’s the matter, you run out of closets?”
    “I got to go places, but someone’s got to stay here and look after you.” He stood, and suddenly the trailer was crowded. There must have been three hundred pounds stuffed into his flannel shirt and brown-faded jeans, but though his waist was leagues from narrow there wasn’t enough fat on him to fry an onion. He had to stoop to avoid putting his head through the roof.
    “I won’t swipe anything I can’t pocket.” I put some ashes in a coffee can reeking of tobacco juice on the floor between the bed and the wall. No wonder he didn’t smoke; he could stink up a room without striking a match.
    “It ain’t that. I know where you live in case anything comes up missing, and Bum’s righteous wrath is a terrible thing to behold. I just don’t cotton coming back here to find you on the floor choking in your own blood. That’s not what I scraped you out of that alley for. I’ll send back a doctor, but I need a tough nurse to hold you down meanwhile.”
    “I know one,” I said, and gave him a name and number.
    He wrote it down with a pencil stub in a pad with bent corners, both taken from a hip pocket. “I’ll call her from a booth. Ain’t got no telephone hookup to this trailer. Sometimes I got to move out fast.” He demonstrated what he meant by reaching the door in half a stride, cowboy hat in hand. He scooped the big .44 off the table into a snap holster inside his waistband.
    “Got a lead?”
    He looked back disapprovingly. “Did I ask you that?”
    “Sorry,” I said. “Occupational hazard. Good hunting.”
    His departure left a very large empty.

8
    I SLEPT; I DON’T know for how long. The crystal on my watch was shattered, the hands frozen at 9:37, recording for posterity the exact moment when I gave up membership in the human race and became a soccer ball.
    Suddenly I was ravenous. Last night’s dinner was coagulating in the alley off McDougall, and but for the soup Bassett had supplied, now ice-cold on the lamp table next to the bed, I hadn’t eaten anything else in twenty-four hours. I tore aside the sheet, rested, lowered one foot to the floor, rested, lowered the other, clenching my teeth against the pain in my side. My knees didn’t like the idea of having to bend. I had a stiff neck, and the pattern of bruises on my leaden arms made them look tattooed. I still didn’t have any feeling in the fingers of my left hand.
    A dizzy spell struck when I got up. I braced myself on the lamp table, waiting for my center of gravity to catch up. Then I started walking. I only bounded off two walls on my way to a wash basin and chemical toilet behind a folding screen at the rear of the trailer. A bloody cloth was crumpled in the basin, which explained the soft wet thing on my face earlier.
    There was a shaving mirror screwed to the wall above the basin. My face didn’t look too bad for chopped beef. About the only thing that wasn’t swollen was my nose—a relief, because I’d broken it once boxing in college and the septum hadn’t been the same since. The water jug was three-quarters full. After filling the basin, I splashed tepid water over the wreckage, fumbled a towel off a plastic rack, and patted it dry. Naked air stung the lacerated flesh.
    The activity was loosening my cramped muscles, but the Russian saber dance was definitely out of the question. At