Ed Gorman - Cold Blue Midnight

He went up to the wooden door marked ERIC BROOKS, was surprised to find it unlocked, and peeked inside.

'Hello?' His voice sounded kind of eerie in the stillness.

He wondered why the door was unlocked. Brooks was usually the last one out of here (a lot of times he had babes with him, beautiful babes) and he always locked up.

No answer.

He went inside.

He was scared. He didn't know why.

Odd, too. All these months going up and down inside dark skyscrapers and he hadn't once got scared.

But tonight, now

'Hello?'

What was he scared of? Guy goes off and forgets to lock the door. Big deal. Probably had some babe on his arm who made him forget everything else.

He went into the plum-colored reception area. Paused. Heard nothing. Decided to take a right and go down the short hall leading to Brooks' own office.

'Hello!'

Didn't want to find Brooks bopping somebody on his desk or something. Didn't want to get fired.

By now he was right up to Eric Brooks' office. The door was open.

He peeked in.

The first thing he saw was the blood sprayed and splashed all over the gray fabric wall.

The second thing he saw was Eric Brooks' head sticking out from behind the desk. On the floor. At a very odd and painful-looking angle.

The third thing he saw were the bloody orange-handled scissors several feet from Eric Brooks' head.

'Oh God,' said the formerly unimportant Andre Sovic. 'Oh God oh God oh God.'

Took him three minutes to gather himself sufficiently to lift his communicator from his belt and talk to his black bastard of a boss.

'You botherin' me again, Sovic.'

'You gotta get up here.'

'You got some chicks up there, all right. Otherwise forget it.' Then he seemed to sense Sovic's mood. He dropped his street-jive accent and said in a perfectly normal middle-class voice, 'What's wrong, Sovic?'

'Just get up here. Pleaseget up here real fast.'

Andre Sovic had become important at last. To the police, who would question him. To the press, who would quote him endlessly. To his family, who would forever more tell stories about the night Dad found that rich guy all cut up in his office.

But as Andre Sovic looked at the bloody body, he wondered if he really liked being important after all.

Not even in Vietnam had he seen corpses this savagely cut up.

Marcy Browne had been sitting there in her cute little hooker costume for maybe thirty, thirty-five minutes when the blue Volvo showed up.

She had been listening to a country and western stationthe title of the last song being 'I Cheated With My Body But Not My Soul'because she planned on taking up line dancing very soon. Line dancing was becoming very big in the United States among people who fancied themselves real cowboys and cowgirls, though it was highly unlikely that a real cowboy would ever have done a dance called the Tush Push.

She was thinking about Tush Pushes, her mind drifting the way it always did when she pulled surveillance, when the blue Volvo eased past her on the opposite side of the street.

She spotted the guy driving immediately.

Same white-haired James Coburn kind of guy as in the photo Jill had given her. Same deep blue Volvo Jill had described.

She sat up good and straight, still feeling a little self-conscious in her hooker get-up, turned on the lights and prepared to make a U-turn.

The blue Volvo wasn't stopping at Jill's but it was slowing so the guy could look at the second floor and see that Jill was home.

She started into her U-turn.

This was great.

Real excitement.

The kind of thing that happened to TV private eyes all the time but that almost never happened to them in real life.

An honest-to-goodness tail job!

She was going to get his license number and then she was going to follow him and then

And then, because she'd been so excited she hadn't seen it coming, the gray Plymouth drove straight into her. Marcy had been halfway through her U-turn and

There was a great and calamitous ripping and rending of metal, a loud and ugly shattering of glass, and an angry blast of horn that could probably be heard half a mile away.

Only now did March realize what had happened. She'd swerved out into the traffic lane without seeing him coming.

He was big, truck-driver big, and mean, thug-mean, and he fairly tore off his door getting out of the car. He stalked up to her with ape-drooping arms and said, 'You little bitch, I should slap the shit out of you.'

It was enough to make her want to go back to community college and find herself a new line of work.

After Mitch had left, Jill went downstairs to the darkroom and developed some film from an agency shoot she'd done a few days earlier.

As she worked, clipping the film up to dry, she tried very hard not to think about Mitch Ayers. Or how, despite all her words to the contrary, she'd been happy to see him tonight. Even worse, she sensed that he just might be telling the truththat his long and difficult and failed marriage might finally be over at last.

No. Don't get sucked back in.

This was how it went for an hour, yin and yang, to and fro, back and forth. She wanted to see more of Mitch; she dreaded seeing more of Mitch. Mitch was honest and trustworthy; Mitch was selfish and deceitful.

This was one of those times when she wished she'd had more experience with men. In all, she'd slept with five men in her life, one of them (she smiled wryly) who wouldn't take a shower unless she threatened to cut him off from sex. She didn't really have enough experience to know if Mitch's behavior was typical of a man in the middle of a divorce, or whether Mitch was just cynically using her.

She concentrated on work, developing six contact sheets. She had to get back to the client in the next few days. Like most ad men, he believed in starting projects only a few hours before they were due.

She was just choosing shots, marking off the preferred ones on the contact sheets with a grease pencil, when she heard a loud pounding on her apartment door.

She thought of two people: Mitch or the man in the blue Volvo.

This time she didn't have her gun.

She had to go up the stairs to her apartment then back down a different set of stairs to the ground-floor door.

She peered out through the eyehole.

Kate stood there, shivering in the chill wind.

Jill took off all three locks and opened the door.

Slender, regal Kate, who might have been a taller version of Audrey Hepburn if only she weren't such a rubber-faced wise-ass, looked suspiciously subdued. Despite her years as a highly paid runway model, Kate usually opened with a dirty joke or two. But tonight there were no smiles, no joke.

'Have you been listening to the news?'

'No,' Jill said. 'Why?'

'Eric Brooks was murdered tonight.'

'What?'

Kate nodded somberly, drawing herself deep into her cape-like black coat.

'Let's go upstairs. Get WGN on. Their news starts in a few minutes.'

'Prominent Chicago advertising executive Eric Brooks was found murdered in his office in downtown Chicago tonight. Police aren't saying how he was killed or if they have any suspects. Witnesses at the scene at Brooks' office say there was a great deal of blood on the floor and carpet, indicating an act of extreme violence. We'll bring you a live update later in this newscast.'

Jill thumbed OFF on the remote.

The two women sat in silence, sipping at the dregs of Mr Coffee Jill had poured them.

'You saw him tonight, right?'

'Right,' Jill echoed. She felt dazed, unreal. For all that the crime rate was going up in Chicago, she had remained untouched by it. A friend of hers had once been robbed in a parking ramp, while another friend had found evidence that somebody had tried to jimmy open her back window, but the worst of itthe muggings, the stabbings, the shootingshad not touched her.