Free Midnight Haul by Max Allan Collins Page B

Nikon.
    Despite the sun, it was chilly. Crane buried his hands in his jacket pockets. The air here had a funny smell; not like the acrid industrial odor he’d noticed earlier, but something not unlike an unpleasant perfume, and reminiscent at the same time of rubber.
    To the left of the loading dock a door opened. A short, stocky man in a blue quilted work jacket and brown slacks leaned out. He had a pale face in which thick black streaks that were eyebrows obscured all else.
    He yelled at them: “Hey! What’s the fuckin’ idea?”
    Boone stopped taking pictures and gave the man, who was about ten feet away, a bigger smile than she’d given Crane so far and said, “We’re taking some pictures for our school paper. We’re trying for a mood, here, you know?”
    The eyes below the bushy black streaks narrowed: the guy didn’t seem to be buying Boone as a teenager. It seemed a little lame to Crane, too, actually, but he didn’t figure at this point he had much choice but to go along with it.
    He moved toward the man, who was still in the doorway, and got between Boone and the guy, blocking her from view—Crane figured he had a better chance of passing for a school kid than she did—and said, “We’re going for contrasts, like, uh, things that’ll look neat in black and white.”
    “Horseshit,” the man said, and moved forward, brushing Crane aside, and pointing a finger at Boone like a pissed-off father. He stopped in front of her, his finger almost touching her nose.
    “I remember you,” he said. “You were around here last summer asking questions. Taking pictures. Right before the state came down on our butts.”
    Boone kept smiling, but the manner of it changed.
    The guy returned her smile, but his was as heavy with sarcasm as hers. “Honey,” he said, “it’s been many moons since
you
were a teenager.”
    “Go fuck yourself,” Boone told him.
    The guy didn’t take that well. He grunted, and reached at the camera with one hand, latching onto one of her arms with the other, and squeezed. Boone yelped. But she didn’t let loose of the camera.
    Crane grabbed the guy by a depressingly solid bicep and tugged, but the guy didn’t give any ground.
    “Let her alone,” Crane said, still tugging, still getting nowhere. “Let her alone, will you? We’re leaving now, all right?”
    The guy turned away from Boone, though he still held her by the arm, and said, with a spray of bad breath that almost matched the rubbery perfume of the air around them, “You’re goddamn fucking well told you’re leaving, but the film in that fucking camera isn’t,” and he ripped the camera out of her hands, opened the back of it and tore the film out, and flung the film against a nearby wall of barrels.
    Then he handed the camera back to Boone and smiled and nodded and Boone swung a small fist at his face and connected, leaving the man’s mouth bloody, the red looking garish in his pale face. He pushed her face with the heel of his hand, like Cagney in the old movie, but minus the grapefruit.
    Boone was on the ground, but she wasn’t hurt; she was sitting there swearing up at the guy, who was laughing at her, sort of gently, and Crane swung a fist into the man’s stomach, and surprisingly, doubled him over.
    If they had run for it, then, it might have been over, but Crane got greedy. He took another swing, toward the guy’s face this time, and the guy batted it away, even while doubled over, and then came out swinging himself, first into Crane’s stomach, then into the side of his face, and Crane was unconscious for a while.
    When he woke up, a minute or so later, Boone was cradling his head in her lap, sitting on the cinders, saying, “Crane? Crane?”
    “Is he gone?”
    “He went inside.”
    “Good. Can we go now?”
    “Yes.”
    “He didn’t break your camera did he?”
    “No. The film is good and exposed, though. Did he break anything of yours?”
    “My self-esteem. Otherwise, I’m fine.”
    “You’re