Chill of Night Read Free

not to die. Tried to get up.
    The light was fading. She was staring up at one of the dangling brass fixtures, and it was like a distant star, moving even farther away.
    There was no pain, she realized. Incredible! No pain! For that, at least, she was grateful.
    If there’s no pain, why should there be fear?
    Evening in Paris enfolded and embraced her like a warm, welcoming shroud.

4
    To his friends and enemies, Artemis Beam was simply “Beam.” Ella, the waitress at the Chow Down Diner on Amsterdam Avenue, thought of him as “Over hard.” The way he liked his eggs. The way she figured he was.
    Beam sat in his usual booth near the window, where he could look out on the street over coffee and his folded Times, at people who had places to go in a hurry. He had no particular place to go, but he thought that if need be, he could still get somewhere in a hurry. Though he walked with a long, limping lope, the truth was that the leg didn’t hurt much anymore, and he was still in pretty good shape and could move fast.
    Another truth was that Beam hadn’t been eased out of the NYPD four months ago only because of the gunshot wound. Politics had been involved. Beam had never been in his element within a bureaucracy—which the NYPD was—and had stepped on the wrong toes.
    The resultant trouble had been all right with Beam, except that his job was at least partly the cause of his wife Lani’s bouts of depression. Almost a year had passed since Lani’s death leap from the apartment balcony near Lincoln Center.
    Beam was still grieving for his wife, still trying to come to terms with the hard fact that she was actually gone, that the dark winds of her tortured mind had finally claimed her, and that in part it had been his fault. Because of who he was, because of not quitting the department sooner, because of all the things he hadn’t done and all the words he hadn’t spoken and she would now never hear. She had left him behind in a cold world that denied him peace and comfort.
    Still feeling the effects of the Ambien he’d taken last night to get to sleep, he sipped his coffee and gazed out at the crowded sidewalks and stalled morning traffic on Amsterdam Avenue.
    New York. His city, like clustered Towers of Babble, that he used to protect, that he still loved. Where he was born to a Jewish father and Irish mother, and, with Cassie, raised on the Lower East Side. His father, who’d been a cop.
    The city still needed protection, needed to be set right again and again because that was its raucous, rowdy, and sometimes deadly nature.
    The hell with it! Not his problem anymore.
    Beam was getting accustomed to not thinking about his past, but it still scared the hell out of him to contemplate his future. His future alone.
    He still didn’t mind stepping on toes. And he didn’t feel like being involved again with the NYPD.
    He knew Andy da Vinci was going to ask him to do both those things.
    Â 
    Beam’s eyes narrowed at the invasive morning light beyond the window. There was da Vinci, picking his way like a nifty broken-field runner through the stalled traffic before the signal at the intersection changed, engines roared, horns blared, and he might be run down and over and dragged. He was grinning, obviously relishing the challenge.
    Dumb! Beam thought, but he liked da Vinci. It was just that needlessly risking a life wasn’t Beam’s game.
    â€œTopper?”
    Ella was standing next to his booth, holding the round glass coffee pot, staring down at him with a questioning look on her long, bovine features.
    â€œSure,” Beam said.
    Horns honked wildly outside. Da Vinci hadn’t quite made it all the way across and was really dancing now, his moves a graceful series of passes within inches of bumpers and fenders. He was still grinning, now and then waving, or flipping off an irate driver.
    â€œLook at that idiot,” Ella said, staring out the window as