Murder in the Wings by Ed Gorman

couch, where I eased her gently back. She said, "Wouldn't the bed be better?" but for some reason the couch had great appeal at that moment. Then all she said was, "I just put in a Tampax." I said, "I'll buy you another one," and she went off to the bathroom, where she spent what seemed like four or five hours. When she came back I turned out the light, and we made a slow sort of protective love with the rain and the violence unable to touch us as long as we were in each other's arms.
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    "I thought we were going to meet Wade," she said. This was half an hour later in my car. It was still pouring.
    "We've still got an hour."
    "So where're we going?"
    "Over to the recreation center where Reeves held his acting classes for the ex-convicts."
    "Why?"
    "Well, first of all because that board at the halfway house said that Anne Stewart teaches tonight. Second, maybe some of the men there will know where Lockhart might be. I still want to know what he wanted in Reeves's office yesterday."
    "Right. I forgot about that. I wonder what he was doing with Evelyn Ashton this afternoon, back at the cabin, I mean."
    "Exactly."
    "Boy, this is starting to be fun again, Dwyer."
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    T he Stanley Recreation Center shows the scars of being located in what passes for a ghetto in this city. It's a small brick building that used to be a school, but you wouldn't know it the way graffiti covers its walls and hundreds of yards of tape cover the cracks in its windows. Even in the rain there were teenagers out prowling, white and black alike, their eyes filled with fear and hunger. I read a book once about juvenile delinquency in the original thirteen colonies. I read it while I was in jail the weekend of my sixteenth birthday for going on a joyride in a stolen car. I wasn't driving but I knew it was stolen. Anyway, things changed after that weekend. The book taught me that there was nothing unique or special about being a punk, and forty-eight hours in the county lockup taught me that there were guys far more terrifying than I'd ever imagined and that I didn't want to be like them at all. That night, in the gloom and the downpour, I glimpsed kids as angry as I'd been and prayed they'd have the same kind of luck I'd had.
    We parked next to a new tan Saab and got out. "Anne's car."
    "Well, so far so good."
    "Yeah, and remember that the next time you question what I do."
    She goosed me hard enough that I gave out an unmanly yelp and jerked away from her. She's good at tickling, but she's twice as good at goosing.
    The interior of the place changed our playful mood abruptly. The institutional green walls were lit by naked bulbs hanging from an exposed electric cable. Unused desks were piled along the walls, which were swollen with moisture. A tidy pile of petrified dog crap had been pushed off to the side of a door, and the graffiti alluded to virtually every part of the human anatomy. Down the corridor was a small gym where two young black men took turns taking devastating shots from past the free-throw line. Next to this was a smaller room where a group of elderly women listened to a public health nurse talk about Medicare benefits, or what was left of them now that the boys in Washington had decided to turn the country into an arsenal. A hand-lettered sign said ACTING CLASS and an arrow pointed upstairs. The deeper into the place we went the more it smelled like the schools of my memory—the aromas of floor wax and chalk dust, window panes cold with rain, steam heat, and the most ineffable smell of all, wood aging over the decades, a smell peculiar to old schools and old garages. J ust before we entered the classroom, I thought I heard a noise at the opposite end of the corridor in the deep shadow. I waited thirty seconds but heard nothing else, so I followed Donna up to the threshold.
    There were half a dozen of them, all but one seated in ancient cane chairs. They were watching a tall guy in the center of the big empty room as he put his face in