The Hidden Man Read Free Page A

heat waves. The faces in the audience appeared to be painted on balloons.
    And yet the Golden Moment carried him. His standard opening run of hypnosis jokes came out of his mouth as easily as his breath. Their sole purpose was to relax and disarm the audience, to get them synchronized. And during the familiar introduction, he was able to sit back inside himself and let the long years of practice guide his performance while the hidden man ruminated behind the mask.
    Something about a door backstage, but what? Did someone sneak in just to slip this massive dose into his tea? Why would anyone know about this incredible elixir, and
not steal
it?
    But before he could expend any energy on the mystery, he had to demonstrate the color of his smoke and the glint of his mirrors to the movers and shakers of San Francisco. He had to give the folks a solid sample of what they had bought from James “J.D.” Duncan for the full duration of their Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
    If he failed to give them a show, an entire year’s worth of steady work would be lost. Worse: The gossip factor would be unendurable.
    Now that he was in his sixth decade among a population who frequently lived no longer than that, any sort of sullied reputation—say, a story about an aging performer who might be losing his special powers—would be a kiss from the Grim Reaper. James “J.D.” Duncan could not afford to take any backward steps at this late point, or backward might well become the only direction that the folks allowed him to travel in.
    So he kept his mouth moving with the familiar words, tried not to listen to himself too hard—and hoped like hell that he was making sense to the folks out there in the house.

SIMULTANEOUSLY
    THE PACIFIC MAJESTIC THEATRE—SAN FRANCISCO’S FINEST
    D ETECTIVE R ANDALL B LACKBURN WAS in a dark mood. He was a damned
homicide
investigator, far too valuable to be wasted on an evening of private guard duty for some show business bigwig. He tried to remember when he had ever suffered through such an idiotic waste of his time, even back during his days of walking a beat. Nothing came to mind.
    Blackburn stared out through the hallway window on the theatre’s second floor, but the late evening darkness was thickened by an inbound fog. There was little to look at. Along the upper reaches of Market Street, where the streetlamps were still only powered by fragile gas lines, the best that the lamps could do was to provide glowing place markers in the featureless night. He could see the faltering yellow-orange gaslights for no more than two blocks in the distance, and between them only flat darkness littered with charcoal shadows.
    “Crime weather,” Blackburn muttered under his breath. He pushed his gaze a little harder into the night.
    Pitch-black. One of the two ways that criminals like it best. Pitch-black, or sunny and clear. Rain keeps them home.
    He pulled the silver watch from the inside chest pocket of his coat. The open face showed nine-twenty. The silver plating was rubbed through in some places, right where the fingers go. He had also replaced the crystal face six times, so far, courtesy of half a dozen of the countless petty crooks and vicious killers over the years who forced him to take them down with brute force. He pocketed the watch again, protecting it out of long habit.
    At the age of forty-one, Blackburn knew that he could still dominate most men in their twenties. But he also felt the speed leaving his legs, felt the knees giving in to frequent snaps of pain that came out of nowhere. On some of the worst mornings, he awoke with knuckles too swollen to make a solid fist or to hold his nightstick with any real grip. He could work the fingers back into action, but it sometimes took a few minutes of vigorous rubbing.
    And now he was a detective, by God. Entitled to thrill and amaze his superior officers by sniffing out criminals while leaving the eager up-and-comers to vie for the endless honors