Free Night Sins by Tami Hoag Page A

but the nickname stuck with him and he made no effort to lose it. He figured the less anyone knew about the real him, the better—an attitude he had developed in childhood. Anonymity was a comfortable cloak, truth a neon light that directed unwanted attention on the unhappy story of his life.
    Mind your own business, Leslie. Don't be proud, Leslie. Pride and arrogance are the sins of man.
    The lines that had been hammered into him in childhood with iron fists and pointed tongues rang dully in the back of his head. The mystery had always been what he could possibly have to be proud of. He was small and ugly with a port wine birthmark spreading over a quarter of his face like a stain. His talents were small and of no interest to anyone. His experiences were the stuff of shame and secrets, and he kept them to himself. He always had, shrugging off what few concerns were expressed on his behalf, denying bruises and scars, excusing the glass eye as the result of a fall from a tree.
    He had a clever mind, a head for books and studies. He had a natural aptitude for computers. This fact he kept mostly to himself as well, cherishing it as the one bright spot in an otherwise bleak existence.
    Olie didn't like cops. He especially didn't like men. Their size, their strength, their aggressive sexuality, all triggered bad feelings in him, which was why he had no real friends his own age. The closest he came to having friends at all were the hockey boys. He envied their exuberance and coveted their innocence. They liked him because he could skate well and do acrobatics. Some were cruel about his looks, but mostly they accepted him, and that was the best Olie could ever hope for.
    He stood in the corner of the cramped storage room he had converted into an office of sorts, his nerve endings wiggling like worms beneath his skin as Chief Holt's tall frame filled the doorway.
    “Hey, Olie,” the chief said. His smile was fake and tired. “How's it going?”
    “Fine.” Olie snapped the word off like a twig and tugged on the sleeve of the quilted flight jacket he'd bought at an army-navy store in the Cities. Inside his heavy wool sweater, perspiration trickled down his sides from his armpits, spicy and sour.
    A woman peeked in around the chief's right arm. Bright green eyes in a pixie's face, dark hair slicked back.
    “This is Agent O'Malley.” Holt moved no more than a fraction of an inch to his left. The woman glanced up at him, her jaw set as she wedged herself through the narrow opening and into the little room. “Agent O'Malley, Olie Swain. Olie's the night man here.”
    Olie nodded politely. Agent of what? he wondered, but he didn't ask.
Mind your own business, Leslie.
Good advice, he'd found, regardless of the source. Early in life he had learned to channel his curiosity away from people and into his books and his fantasies.
    “We'd just like to ask you a couple of questions, Mr. Swain, if that's all right with you,” Megan said, loosening the noose of her scarf in deference to the heat of the room.
    She took in everything about Olie Swain in a glance. He was jockey-size with pug features and mismatched eyes that seemed too round. The left one was glass and stared straight ahead while the other darted around, his glance seeming to bounce off every surface it touched. The glass eye was a lighter shade of brown than the good eye and ringed in brighter white. The unnatural white was accentuated by the scald-red skin of the birthmark that leeched down out of his hair and across the upper left quadrant of his face. His hair was a patchwork of brown and gray and stood up on his head like the bristles of a scrub brush. He was probably in his late thirties, she guessed, and he didn't like cops.
    That was, of course, a hazard of the job. Even the most innocent of people became edgy when the cops invaded their territory. And then again, sometimes it turned out to be more than routine jitters. She wondered which explanation applied to