The Skeleton's Knee by Mayor Archer

Author:Mayor, Archer [Mayor, Archer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: USA
ISBN: 9781939767042
Publisher: MarchMedia
Published: 1993-03-27T13:00:00+00:00

19

I SAT IN MY CAR for a good twenty minutes, watching the last known address of Robert Shattuck. It was an odd building, tall, bland, and gray, its first floor blatantly commercial—with a sandwich shop and a shoe-repair place, both closed now that it was long after hours—while its upper floors remained vaguer in purpose. Some windows were lit, most were not. It was hard to tell what the place was used for.

The neighborhood appeared similarly ambiguous. From my vantage point in the deserted parking lot across the street, I was conscious of emptiness and silence, despite the fact that I was within walking distance of where the Chicago River’s north, east, and south branches converge, right across the water from the famed Chicago Loop. None of that was readily apparent, however—the looming cliff-like mass of the darkened Merchandise Mart just behind me blocked all sights and sounds of anything lying beyond it.

Indeed, it was perhaps the stultifying influence of that one building, second only to the Pentagon in sheer mass, that affected the entire area around it. There were few people on the sidewalks, few cars passing by. Only the occasional rumbling of the elevated train around the corner disturbed what appeared to be the sole grave-still pocket in this otherwise teeming city.

I’d been waiting for signs of life either entering or leaving the building, if only to locate which of several unpromising candidates was the building’s front door. I was finally rewarded by a small, bent-over man coaxing a small dog on a leash, who briefly appeared under the streetlight near the middle of the building’s west wall before shambling off into the gloom.

I slowly got out of my car, looking around, sensitive to the echo that greeted my slammed door. I’d been expecting something entirely different after reading Shattuck’s rap sheet. Knowing nothing of the address at the time, I’d envisioned him as the only white holdout in a ghetto slum, true to his reformist soul; or, alternatively, in a not uncommon about-face, inhabiting the quintessential suburban home, complete with an aged Volvo bedecked with environmental bumper stickers. This austere gray huddling of faceless concrete walls, as hospitable as an abandoned factory, fit neither image and left me nothing to go on.

I crossed the dark, empty street, my eyes warily on the windows above me, and entered the side street into which the old man had stepped with his dog. Opposite the streetlight that had briefly caught him, almost flush with the cement wall, was a metal fire door, one of several I’d noticed. I turned the knob, expecting resistance, and instead stepped into a half-lit hallway, lined on one side with copper-colored mailboxes and blocked at the far end by a locked glass door with a speaker by its side.

I studied the rows of mailboxes, each one of which, under its keyhole, had a nameplate slot and a buzzer to gain admittance. Many of the boxes had no names, others were obviously businesses, their official cards

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.