Master of Noir-Volume Three by Anthology

Author:Anthology [Anthology]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: mystery, detective, noir, anthology
Publisher: Wonder Audiobooks, LLC
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

GRAVEYARD SHIFT by STEVE FRAZEE

Dozing in front of the microphone in the radio dispatcher's office, Joe Crestone blinked groggily when one of the heavy side doors downstairs whushed open and then started rocking back to center. Since midnight the building had been dead still.

The footsteps swung out briskly on the tiles of the lobby. They made quick taps on the steel steps leading up towards the dispatcher's room. Crestone was wide awake. The clock on the radio reeled up another minute. It was 2:17. He swung his chair to face the counter.

She was close to six feet. Her hair was dark, her eyes soft brown: She wore a fur jacket and under that a green woolen dress caught high at her neck with a silver clasp. Her smile was timid. “I—I thought Mr. Walters would be here again.” She studied the work schedule of the Midway police department on the board.

"He's got the flu. It was my day off so I'm sitting in for him."

"I see.” She stared at the maps on the wall. “I—I just don't know exactly how to start it."

She was white and scared. Crestone let her make up her mind. On the model side, he thought, the kind who pose in two thousand dollar dresses. Plenty of neck above the silver clasp, more gauntness in her face than he had observed at first.

"Hit and run deal?” he asked, eyeing her sharply.

Before she could answer, state patrol car 55 checked in from Middleton, eighteen miles north on Highway 315. A woman dispatcher in Steel City read a CAA flight plan to Bristol for relay to Cosslett. Webster came in with a pickup-and-hold on a 1949 blue Chev with three men. Crestone sent out the information on the pickup-and-hold.

When he swung to the log sheet in the typewriter at his left, she asked, “Do the state cars patrol the old highway from the boarded-up brick works east toward Steel City?"

"State 7? No, not unless there's a crash out there.” He wrote a line on the log. “Did you have a wreck?"

She hesitated. “In a way."

He turned back to the desk and pulled a pad to him. “Name?"

"Judith Barrows."

"Address?"

When she did not answer he twisted his head to look at her. He looked into a snub-nosed .38. For one fractured moment the bore was big enough to shoot a golf ball. Crestone sucked in his breath.

"Give me the log sheet,” she said. “Don't even brush your arm near the mike or you'll get it in the liver."

He stripped the log sheet from the machine and put it up on the counter. She drew it to her with long, thin fingers that bent into carmine-tipped hooks. “Now, a copy of the code sheet, and not the old one with blanks behind some of the numbers."

Crestone took a code sheet from a folder. When he put it on the counter he saw that she had shrugged out of her fur jacket. He heard the power hum and then Bud Moore said in his bored after-midnight voice, “Seven fifty.

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