Mr. Midnight by Leverone Allan

Author:Leverone, Allan [Leverone, Allan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: DarkFuse
Published: 2013-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 28

Franklin Marchand climbed the tenement’s rickety back stairs as quietly as he could. He had no small amount of recent life experience in stealth, it being a necessary prerequisite to survival as a vagrant.

Early in his time on the streets, an older homeless man had taken Franklin under his wing and shown him the ropes—how to panhandle without frightening the mark away, how to pick a cheap lock to find shelter during the bitterly cold nights of winter, how to fade into the background of life to avoid drawing the attention of the police—so sneaking around this drafty old building presented little challenge.

Franklin had seen Strange Dude depart earlier, walking resolutely, with a spring in his step that indicated he had important business to attend to, so there was no danger the man would be inside his apartment when Franklin broke in. But he had no idea where Strange Dude had gone, and thus no idea how long he would be gone. Maybe the guy had only walked to the convenience store on the corner to buy booze and was even now on his way back, the spring in his step only because he was in a hurry to get home and start drinking.

The thought gave Franklin pause. He did not want to be caught by Strange Dude, especially not in his apartment going through his stuff. The guy gave Franklin the creeps, a serious case of the willies, and he had no interest in finding out how the guy would react if he walked into his place to find Franklin with his hands in the cookie jar.

But still, Franklin couldn’t stop thinking about the unsettling situation with the girl last night—Strange Dude forcing her into the tenement building at knifepoint—and all of the other nights when similar things had happened. Something was going on, something bad, Franklin could just tell, and one of the few things he still cared about in this fucked-up world was his little girl. Samantha was twenty-two now, no longer little and not even a girl, she was a full-grown adult woman, but to Franklin she would always be that tiny whirlwind in blonde pigtails running around the house, her bare feet slapping the linoleum tiles of the kitchen floor.

If Strange Dude was raping girls Samantha’s age, or, God forbid, raping and then killing them, Franklin knew he could no longer stand by and allow it to happen. Every young girl was someone’s daughter. More to the point, who was to say the next young girl to be ushered up here at knifepoint wouldn’t be his daughter?

That was assuming his suspicions were even correct. Maybe there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for the things Franklin had seen. For the life of him he couldn’t imagine what that explanation might be, but that didn’t mean there couldn’t be one.

So he had waited across the street from Strange Dude’s tenement building, sitting on the sidewalk with his back propped against the stained red brick façade of

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