The Shadow Man Read Online Free Page B

Buffalo.
    Gabe stepped up onto the iron-railed plank porch and knocked. He got no answer. He knocked again, waited, then twisted the knob and found the door unlocked.
    At that moment Gabe felt a prickle of dreadful certainty whose very lack of foundation scared him. He was sure that something was wrong, unnaturally wrong, inside the house. He couldn’t say how he knew, but by all of his faith in God and the Virgin, he knew. He pushed open the door and stepped into the house.
    As soon as he was inside, he saw the door to the basement hanging wide open. He was drawn to the darkness beyond the door.
    Quiet. Everything was so quiet. Even the floor beneath his feet didn’t creak in the slightest.
    When Gabe switched on the basement light, he was so positive of what he’d see that he wasn’t really surprised.
    Carla, clad in her disheveled yellow uniform, lay sprawled at the bottom of the basement stairs. The instant he saw her, Gabe knew she was dead. Her head was turned impossibly far to one side, her eyes open, as if over her shoulder she were surveying in alarm the jagged run in the panty hose on her long, exposed leg.
    “Carla!” Gabe called instinctively. Then, knowing she was dead, he stepped back in the irrational fear that she might answer. The fear bored its way into the pit of his stomach and made him nauseated and dizzy.
    For a long time he stood gazing down the sloping tunnel of the stairwell. At the other end, Death seemed to have created a dark vacuum, gently, somehow enticingly, drawing him. The perfect stillness of Carla amazed and fascinated.
    Gabe backed away slowly, pausing between steps, gaining strength with distance. He turned and made his way to the phone on the table in the tiny entrance hall and awkwardly dialed the first number he could think of, the restaurant number. Emma answered.
    “I ain’t gonna be back for a while,” Gabe told her. “And I ain’t feelin’ so well. You do me a favor, will you, and phone the law and send them on over to Carla’s place?”
    “Sure,” Emma said, sounding surprised and curious. “What’s Carla done now?”
    Gabe leaned weakly against the wall and stared out the door at the brightness of the sun on green shrubbery. Over and over in his mind, Carla was stumbling and pitching headfirst down the basement stairs, frightened and screaming.
    “What Carla’s done,” he told Emma, “is had herself a fatal accident.”
    He was vaguely aware of Emma hanging up.

Chapter Five
    A week later, at ten o’clock on an unpredictably gusty evening, Andrews parked his car on Hyde Boulevard and walked a few blocks farther to the Adelaire Hotel. The night was cool, and it was beginning to drizzle, forming dark, wind-rippled puddles and spotting Andrews’ lined raincoat. Sewer grates steamed with the unexpected warmth.
    The neighborhood once had been one of Washington’s better areas, had declined and now was being revitalized by fresh federal funding and construction. The buildings were old, many of them Georgian, and lately had acquired a refurbished colonial charm that mixed curiously with the angular new construction on the street.
    A traffic light in the next block changed to green, and half a dozen cars swished past on the wet street like intense caged animals suddenly released. Andrews brushed the rain from his hair and began unbuttoning his coat as he stepped into the Adelaire’s lobby.
    The hotel was one of the older ones that recently had been redecorated. It was a good, even a plush, hotel, but still not regularly frequented by the real movers and shakers, the politicos of the city. It was where Andrews could be certain of privacy whenever Pat Colombo came into Washington to see him.
    There were quite a few people in the opulently furnished blue-carpeted lobby, most of them probably tourists, none of them familiar to Andrews. He walked past the entrance to the small, dim lounge and crossed to the elevators. Pat had given him her room number when she’d