Shadow Games by Ed Gorman Read Free Book Online

about the serious, formal phase of the investigation, which usually meant interviewing friends of the man.
    Listeners loved it.
    The vampire hour had come. He called it that because, with darkness, they would appear, the freaks and geeks and victims and observers of the night. They would be furtive, little old ladies robbed by gangs of twelve-year-olds for a few dollars; half-naked dancers of many sexes enjoying the noisy, incandescent kiss of the disco spotlight; a farmer from Iowa coming out of his third-rate hotel to find that his two-year-old Dodge had been stripped clean of everything valuable; the junkie so desperate for a fix he decides to share a needle despite seeing the way his friend died of AIDS last year; a priest in a runaway shelter counseling a fourteen-year-old Michigan girl to at least call her parents and tell them she is all right; an S&M participant feeling the first lash of the whip ripping his flesh as his scream of pleasure and fulfillment sings on the air; a little girl hearing the brawl between her mother and drunken father, whispering frantic prayers that her mother won't be beaten as badly as she was last time; a very angry black youth sticking up a liquor store owned by a very angry Korean man, both so filled with hatred and rage they can barely contain it.
    This was Chicago, but it could just as well have been Los Angeles or Detroit or Miami...
    This was night, and sometimes Puckett thought he should go back to the old family farm in Maine and live out his life there. No vampires there, except maybe for those in Stephen King's books.
    He was contemplating all these things—he was a great, if useless, contemplator, was Puckett—when a familiar name came on the radio talk show he'd been vaguely listening to.
    "Our guest tonight is Anne Addison, one of the best-known non-fiction writers in the United States. Anne is in Chicago doing an interview with Cobey Daniels, the former teen-star whose new play is dazzling everybody who sees it. Good evening, Anne, and welcome to our studios."
    "Good evening, Ron. I'm pleased to be here. Thanks for asking me."
    "Why don't we talk a little bit about how you prepare for an interview, and then we'll take some calls from our listeners?"
    Puckett tried hard not to be seduced by that soft, intelligent, but completely unaffected voice of hers. He tried to concentrate on his surveillance job and he glanced determinedly up the hill at the dark outline of the apartment house.
    He had left Los Angeles yesterday because the man he'd been tailing was originally from Chicago and consequently—and unbeknownst to his wife—kept a place here.
    The Ardmore was a big playpen for wealthy adults. In this case, the toys were three swimming pools, a physical training room that would rival the most sophisticated gym, tennis courts, squash courts, a jogging path and a "social" room so splashy and upscale that very good rock bands often showed up for a set or two. The Ardmore was constructed of unfinished wood and sprawled over a hillside that pitched perilously toward a raw, jagged ravine below. There were enough floodlights on the ground to make you think there was maybe a movie premiere going on here tonight.
    Puckett was here because of a geezer named Fenwick, a round, bald, sunburned man who had impulsively deserted his wife of forty years for the receptionist he'd hired six months ago. Said receptionist had previously been an aerobics instructor, a flight attendant and a runway model for several second-tier department stores. She had also put most of her hard-earned money back into her one and only product, which was herself. Puckett had discovered that she'd had plastic surgery on her breasts, her nose, her chin and her bottom.
    Mrs. Fenwick, or Mildred, as she insisted Puckett call her, was actually a very nice, rich, older woman who just wanted some photos of her husband making a fool of himself—on the dance floor, poolside with his considerable belly hanging over his