Night Freight Read online

  The Majestic was five stories of old wood and plaster and dirty brick, just off Howard Street. In front of its narrow entrance, a crack dealer and one of his customers were haggling over the price of a baggie of rock cocaine; neither of them paid any attention to me as I moved past them. Drug deals go down in the open here, day and night. It's not that the cops don't care, or that they don't patrol Sixth regularly; it's just that the dealers outnumber them ten to one. On Skid Road any crime less severe than aggravated assault is strictly low priority.

  Small, barren lobby, no furniture of any kind. The smell of ammonia hung in the air like swamp gas. Behind the cubbyhole desk was an old man with dead eyes that would never see anything they didn't want to see. I said, "Eddie Quinlan," and he said, "Two-oh-two" without moving his lips. There was an elevator but it had an out of order sign on it; dust speckled the sign. I went up the adjacent stairs.

  The disinfectant smell permeated the second floor hallway as well. Room 202 was just off the stairs, fronting on Sixth; one of the metal 2s on the door had lost a screw and was hanging upside down. I used my knuckles just below it. Scraping noise inside, and a voice said, "Yeah?" I identified myself. A lock clicked, a chain rattled, the door wobbled open, and for the first time in nearly seven years I was looking at Eddie Quinlan.

  He hadn't changed much. Little guy, about five-eight, and past forty now. Thin, nondescript features, pale eyes, hair the color of sand. The hair was thinner and the lines in his face were longer and deeper, almost like incisions where they bracketed his nose. Otherwise he was the same Eddie Quinlan.

  "Hey," he said, "thanks for coming. I mean it, thanks."

  "Sure, Eddie."

  "Come on in."

  The room made me think of a box—the inside of a huge rotting packing crate. Four bare walls with the scaly remnants of paper on them like psoriatic skin, bare uncarpeted floor, unshaded bulb hanging from the center of a bare ceiling. The bulb was dark; what light there was came from a low-wattage reading lamp and a wash of red-and-green neon from the hotel's sign that spilled in through a single window. Old iron-framed bed, unpainted nightstand, scarred dresser, straight-backed chair next to the bed and in front of the window, alcove with a sink and toilet and no door, closet that wouldn't be much larger than a coffin.

  "Not much, is it," Eddie said.

  I didn't say anything.

  He shut the hall door, locked it. "Only place to sit is that chair there. Unless you want to sit on the bed? Sheets are clean. I try to keep things clean as I can."

  "Chair's fine."

  I went across to it; Eddie put himself on the bed. A room with a view, he'd said on the phone. Some view. Sitting here you could look down past Howard and up across Mission—almost two full blocks of the worst street in the city. It was so close you could hear the beat of its pulse, the ugly sounds of its living and its dying.

  "So why did you ask me here, Eddie? If it's information for sale, I'm not buying right now."

  "No, no, nothing like that. I ain't in the business anymore."

  "Is that right?"

  "Prison taught me a lesson. I got rehabilitated." There was no sarcasm or irony in the words; he said them matter-of-factly.

  "I'm glad to hear it."

  "I been a good citizen ever since I got out. No lie. I haven't had a drink, ain't even been in a bar."

  "What are you doing for money?"

  "I got a job," he said. "Shipping department at a wholesale sporting goods outfit on Brannan. It don't pay much, but it's honest work."

  I nodded. "What is it you want, Eddie?"

  "Somebody I can talk to, somebody who'll understand—that's all I want. You always treated me decent. Most of 'em, no matter who they were, they treated me like I wasn't even human. Like I was a turd or something."

  "Understand what?"

  "About what's happening down there."

  "There? Sixth Street?"

  "Look at it," he said. He reached over and tapped the window; stared through it. "Look at the people . . . there, you see that guy in the wheelchair and the one pushing him? Across the street there?"

  I leaned closer to the glass. The man in the wheelchair wore a military camouflage jacket, had a heavy wool blanket across his lap; the black man manipulating him along the crowded sidewalk was thick-bodied, with a shiny bald head. "I see them."

  "White guy's name is Baxter," Eddie said. "Grenade blew up under him in 'Nam and now he's a paraplegic. Lives right here in the Majestic, on this floor down at the end. Deals crack and smack out of his room. Elroy, the black dude, is his bodyguard and roommate. Mean, both of 'em. Couple of months ago, Elroy killed a guy over on Minna that tried to stiff them. Busted his head with a brick. You believe it?"

  "I believe it."

  "And they ain't the worst on the street. Not the worst."

  "I believe that too."

  "Before I went to prison I lived and worked with people like that and I never saw what they were. I mean I just never saw it. Now I do, I see it clear—every day walking back and forth to work, every night from up here. It makes you sick after a while, the things you see when you see 'em clear."

  "Why don't you move?"

  "Where to? I can't afford no place better than this."

  "No better room, maybe, but why not another neighborhood? You don't have to live on Sixth Street."

  "Wouldn't be much better, any other neighborhood I could buy into. They're all over the city now, the ones like Baxter and Elroy. Used to be it was just Skid Road and the Tenderloin and the ghettos. Now they're everywhere, more and more every day. You know?"

  "I know."

  "Why? It don't have to be this way, does it?"

  Hard times, bad times: alienation, poverty, corruption, too much government, not enough government, lack of social services, lack of caring, drugs like a cancer destroying society. Simplistic explanations that were no explanations at all and as dehumanizing as the ills they described. I was tired of hearing them and I didn't want to repeat them, to Eddie Quinlan or anybody else. So I said nothing.

  He shook his head. "Souls burning everywhere you go' he said, and it was as if the words hurt his mouth coming out.

  Souls burning. "You find religion at Folsom, Eddie?"

  "Religion? I don't know, maybe a little. Chaplain we had there, I talked to him sometimes. He used to say that about the hardtimers, that their souls were burning and there wasn't nothing he could do to put out the fire. They were doomed, he said, and they'd doom others to burn with 'em."

  I had nothing to say to that either. In the small silence a voice from outside said distinctly, "Dirty bastard, what you doin' with my pipe?" It was cold in there, with the hard bright night pressing against the window. Next to the door was a rusty steam radiator but it was cold too; the heat would not be on more than a few hours a day, even in the dead of winter, in the Hotel Majestic.

  "That's the way it is in the city," Eddie said. "Souls burning. All day long, all night long, souls on fire."

  "Don't let it get to you."

  "Don't it get to you?"

  ". . . Yes. Sometimes."

  He bobbed his head up and down. "You want to do something, you know? You want to try to fix it somehow, put out the fires. There has to be a way."

  "I can't tell you what it is" I said.

  He said, "If we all just did something. It ain't too late. You don't think it's too late?"

  "Me neither. There's still hope."

  "Hope, faith, blind optimism—sure."

  "You got to believe," he said, nodding. "That's all, you just got to believe."

  Angry voices rose suddenly from outside; a woman screamed, thin and brittle. Eddie came off the bed, hauled up the window sash. Chill damp air and street noises came pouring in: shouts, cries, horns honking, cars whispering on the wet pavement, a Muni bus clattering along Mission; more shrieks. He leaned out, peering downward.

  "Look," he said, "look."

  I stretched forward and looked. On the sidewalk below, a hoo
ker in a leopard-skin coat was running wildly toward Howard; she was the one doing the yelling. Chasing behind her, tight black skirt hiked up over the tops of net stockings and hairy thighs, was a hideously rouged transvestite waving a pocket knife. A group of winos began laughing and chanting "Rape! Rape!" as the hooker and the transvestite ran zigzagging out of sight on Howard.

  Eddie pulled his head back in. The flickery neon wash made his face seem surreal, like a hallucinogenic vision. "That's the way it is," he said sadly. "Night after night, day after day."

  With the window open, the cold was intense; it penetrated my clothing and crawled on my skin. I'd had enough of it, and of this room and Eddie Quinlan and Sixth Street.

  "Eddie, just what is it you want from me?"

  "I already told you. Talk to somebody who understands how it is down there."

  "Is that the only reason you asked me here?"

  "Ain't it enough?"

  "For you, maybe." I got to my feet. "I'll be going now."

  He didn't argue. "Sure, you go ahead."

  "Nothing else you want to say?"

  "Nothing else." He walked to the door with me, unlocked it, and then put out his hand. "Thanks for coming. I appreciate it, I really do."

  "Yeah. Good luck, Eddie."

  "You too," he said. "Keep the faith."

  I went out into the hall, and the door shut gently and the lock clicked behind me.

  Downstairs, out of the Majestic, along the mean street and back to the garage where I'd left my car. And all the way I kept thinking: There's something else, something more he wanted from me . . . and I gave it to him by going there and listening to him. But what? What did he really want?

  I found out later that night. It was all over the TV—special bulletins and then the eleven o'clock news.

  Twenty minutes after I left him, Eddie Quinlan stood at the window of his room-with-a-view, and in less than a minute, using a high-powered semiautomatic rifle he'd taken from the sporting goods outfit where he worked, he shot down fourteen people on the street below. Nine dead, five wounded, one of the wounded in critical condition and not expected to live. Six of the victims were known drug dealers; all of the others also had arrest records, for crimes ranging from prostitution to burglary. Two of the dead were Baxter, the paraplegic Vietnam vet, and his bodyguard, Elroy.

  By the time the cops showed up, Sixth Street was empty except for the dead and the dying. No more targets. And up in his room, Eddie Quinlan had sat on the bed and put the rifle's muzzle in his mouth and used his big toe to pull the trigger.

  My first reaction was to blame myself. But how could I have known, or even guessed? Eddie Quinlan. Nobody, loser, shadow-man without substance or purpose. How could anyone have figured him for a thing like that?

  Somebody I can talk to, somebody who'll understand—that's all I want.

  No. What he'd wanted was somebody to help him justify to himself what he was about to do. Somebody to record his verbal suicide note. Somebody he could trust to pass it on afterward, tell it right and true to the world.

  You want to do something, you know? You want to try to fix it somehow, put out the fires. There has to be a way.

  Nine dead, five wounded, one of the wounded in critical condition and not expected to live. Not that way.

  Souls burning. All day long, all night long, souls on fire.

  The soul that had burned tonight was Eddie Quinlan's.

  There is a tale behind this tale. It was nominated for an Edgar for best short story of 1978 by the Mystery Writers of America, and didn't win for one major reason: I didn't vote for it. It so happened that in 1979 I was chairman of the five-person MWA committee whose task it was to select five nominees and a winner from among the previous year's short story crop. "Strangers in the Fog" was nominated by one of the other committee members, received two first-place votes, and would have won on points if I'd put it at the top of my own list. Instead, suffering from a crisis of conscience, I cast my ballot for the story with the other two first-place votes, even though I wasn't convinced—still am not convinced after a recent rereading—that it was any better than mine. I've never won an Edgar, despite five other nominations in various categories, and chances are I never will. So . . . did I do the right thing, the wise thing? What would you have done?

  Strangers in the Fog

  Hannigan had just finished digging the grave, down in the tule marsh where the little saltwater creek flowed toward the Pacific, when the dark shape of a man came out of the fog.

  Startled, Hannigan brought the shovel up and cocked it weaponlike at his shoulder. The other man had materialized less than twenty yards away, from the direction of the beach, and had stopped the moment he saw Hannigan. The diffused light from Hannigan's lantern did not quite reach the man; he was a black silhouette against the swirling billows of mist. Beyond him the breakers lashed at the shore in a steady pulse.

  Hannigan said, "Who the hell are you?"

  The man stood staring down at the roll of canvas near Hannigan's feet, at the hole scooped out of the sandy earth. He seemed to poise himself on the balls of his feet, body turned slightly, as though he might bolt at any second. "I'll ask you the same question," he said, and his voice was tense, low-pitched.

  "I happen to live here." Hannigan made a gesture to his left with the shovel, where a suggestion of shimmery light shone high up through the fog. "This is a private beach."

  "Private graveyard, too?"

  "My dog died earlier this evening. I didn't want to leave him lying around the house."

  "Must have been a pretty big dog."

  "He was a Great Dane," Hannigan said. He wiped moisture from his face with his free hand. "You want something, or do you just like to take strolls in the fog?"

  The man came forward a few steps, warily. Hannigan could see him more clearly then in the pale lantern glow: big, heavy-shouldered, damp hair flattened across his forehead, wearing a plaid lumberman's jacket, brown slacks, and loafers.

  "You got a telephone I can use?"

  "That would depend on why you need to use it."

  "I could give you a story about my car breaking down," the big man said, "but then you'd just wonder what I'm doing down here instead of up on the Coast Highway."

  "I'm wondering that anyway."

  "It's safe down here, the way I figured it."

  "I don't follow," Hannigan said.

  "Don't you listen to your radio or TV?"

  "Not if I can avoid it."

  "So you don't know about the lunatic who escaped from the state asylum at Tescadero."

  The back of Hannigan's neck prickled. "No," he said.

  "Happened late this afternoon," the big man said. "He killed an attendant at the hospital—stabbed him with a kitchen knife. He was in there for the same kind of thing. Killed three people with a kitchen knife."

  Hannigan did not say anything.

  The big man said, "They think he may have headed north, because he came from a town up near the Oregon border. But they're not sure. He may have come south instead—and Tescadero is only twelve miles from here."

  Hannigan gripped the handle of the shovel more tightly. "You still haven't said what you're doing down here in the fog."

  "I came up from San Francisco with a girl for the weekend," the big man said. "Her husband was supposed to be in Los Angeles, on business, only I guess he decided to come home early. When he found her gone he must have figured she'd come up to this summer place they've got and so he drove up without calling first. We had just enough warning for her to throw me out."

  "You let this woman throw you out?"

  "That's right. Her husband is worth a million or so, and he's generous. You understand?"

  "Maybe," Hannigan said. "What's the woman's name?"

  "That's my business."

  "Then how do I know you're telling me the truth?"

  "Why wouldn't I be?"

  "You might have reasons for lying."

  "Like if I was the escaped lu
natic, maybe?"

  "Like that."

  "If I was, would I have told you about him?"

  Again Hannigan was silent.

  "For all I know," the big man said, "you could be the lunatic. Hell, you're out here digging a grave in the middle of the night—"

  "I told you, my dog died. Besides, would a lunatic dig a grave for somebody he killed? Did he dig one for that attendant you said he stabbed?"

  "Okay, neither one of us is the lunatic." The big man paused and ran his hands along the side of his coat. "Look, I've had enough of this damned fog; it's starting to get to me. Can I use your phone or not?"

  "Just who is it you want to call?"

  "Friend of mine in San Francisco who owes me a favor. He'll drive up and get me. That is, if you wouldn't mind my hanging around your place until he shows up."

  Hannigan thought things over and made up his mind. "All right. You stand over there while I finish putting Nick away. Then we'll go up."

  The big man nodded and stood without moving. Hannigan knelt, still grasping the shovel, and rolled the canvas-wrapped body carefully into the grave. Then he straightened, began to scoop in sandy earth from the pile to one side. He did all of that without taking his eyes off the other man.

  When he was finished he picked up the lantern, then gestured with the shovel, and the big man came around the grave. They went up along the edge of the creek, Hannigan four or five steps to the left. The big man kept his hands up and in close to his chest, and he walked with the tense springy stride of an animal prepared to attack or flee at any sudden movement. His gaze hung on Hannigan's face; Hannigan made it reciprocal.

  "You have a name?" Hannigan asked him.

  "Doesn't everybody?"

  "Very funny. I'm asking your name."

  "Art Vickery, if it matters."

  "It doesn't, except that I like to know who I'm letting inside my house."

  "I like to know whose house I'm going into," Vickery said.