Free Night Work by Steve Hamilton Page B

back of the building, to the door that led up to my apartment, but then he happened to glance up at my window.
    “JT,” he said.
    “What the hell’s going on?” I said. “Why are you here?”
    “What was her name?”
    “What?”
    “The woman you went out with,” he said. “What was her name?”
    “Marlene.”
    “What was her last name?”
    I had to think about it for a second. How strange not to remember her last name, this woman I had been so intimate with not twenty-four hours ago.Did I actually have to go look it up on her profile? I had it printed out, I thought. It was right over here somewhere …
    Then it came to me. “Frost,” I said, leaning out the window. “Marlene Frost.”
    He looked up at me. He didn’t say anything for a moment, just long enough for that same feeling to come back to me, from a night two years in the past. The same taste in my mouth, the alcohol and the fear and the iron sickness of knowing you’re about to hear something you don’t want to hear.
    “Joe,” he said, “you’d better come with me.”

FIVE
     
    Howie drove. I sat up front and kept looking at him, expecting him to say something, to start explaining everything, where we were going, why he was driving too fast down the dark streets of a town we had both grown up in.
    “Howie,” I finally said. “What happened?”
    He took a hard left on Foxhall Avenue, rumbling over the railroad tracks. “I don’t know, exactly. I was only there for a minute.”
    “Where?”
    “Up here. Next to the cemetery.”
    “The cemetery …”
    “By the other tracks.”
    “It can’t be Marlene,” I said. “I was just—”
    I stopped.
    “What?” he said.
    “I was going to say I was just calling her.”
    “When? Just now?”
    “Yeah. I called her this morning, too.”
    “No answer either time.”
    “No.”
    “Joe,” he said, using my real first name, somethinghe never did. To him, I’ve been JT since the fifth grade. “It’s just a guess at this point, okay? We don’t have a definite identification yet. There was no purse, no driver’s license. Nothing positive.”
    “Then how—”
    “She had these orthotics in her shoes. You know, to correct problems with your feet? Imbalances, or whatever. I know a few runners who wear them.”
    “Yeah?”
    “They’re expensive as hell, because they’re custom made. Usually, they have the doctor’s name printed on them, with a special number, because everybody’s is unique.”
    We were in the old industrial part of Kingston now. The old warehouses, the worn-out gray buildings with the thick glass-brick windows. Everything was dark.
    “So if each one is unique,” I said slowly, “then you must know by now.”
    “We called the podiatrist, but we couldn’t give him the whole number. Some of it had rubbed off.”
    “So you don’t know for sure yet?”
    “We have it narrowed down to a few names. One of them is Marlene Frost.”
    “My God …”
    “Take it easy,” he said. He came up to a red light, looked both ways, and then shot through the intersection. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
    “I need to be ready for this, Howie. What if it’s her?”
    “If it’s her … Then you identify her. That’ll makeit easier on somebody else. You know, her parents, whoever. They won’t have to see her this way.”
    This way. The words hung in the air between us.
    “How bad is it?” I finally said.
    “It’s bad.”
    As we came to the railroad tracks, the lights were flashing and the gates were going down. I could see that Howie was thinking about jumping the tracks. He craned his neck to get a good look at the oncoming train. For one second I thought he was going to go for it, and in the next second after that I was sure we’d both get demolished—but he didn’t go. I closed my eyes and listened to my heart beating in my chest.
    “Perfect timing,” he said. He pushed the gearshift into park and leaned back in his seat. “Although I guess she’s not