Out There in the Darkness by Ed Gorman

Chapter 1
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    T he night it all started, the whole strange spiral, we were having our usual midweek poker game—four fortyish men who work in the financial business getting together for beer and bawdy jokes and straight poker.   No wild card games.   We hate them.
    This was summer, and vacation time, and so it happened that the game was held two weeks in a row at my house.   Jan had taken the kids to see her Aunt Wendy and Uncle Verne at their fishing cabin, and so I offered to have the game at my house this week, too.   With nobody there to supervise, the beer could be laced with a little bourbon, and the jokes could get even bawdier.   With the wife and kids in the house, you’re always at least a little bit intimidated.
    Mike and Bob came together, bearing gifts, which in this case meant the kind of sexy magazines our wives did not want in the house in case the kids might stumble across them.   At least that’s what they say.   I think they sense, and rightly, that the magazines might give their spouses bad ideas about taking the secretary out for a few after-work drinks, or stopping by a singles bar some night.
    We got the chips and cards set up at the table, we got the first beers open (Mike chasing a shot of bourbon with his beer), and we started passing the dirty magazines around with tenth-grade glee.   The magazines compensated, I suppose, for the balding head, the bloating belly, the stooping shoulders.   Deep in the heart of every hundred-year-old man is a horny fourteen-year-old boy.
    All this, by the way, took place up in the attic.   The four of us got to know each other when we all moved into what city planners called a “transitional neighborhood.”   There were some grand old houses that could be renovated with enough money and real care.   The city designated a ten-square-block area as one it wanted to restore to shiny new luster.   Jan and I chose a crumbling Victorian.   You wouldn’t recognize it today.   And that includes the attic, which I’ve turned into a very nice den.
    â€œPisses me off,” Mike O’Brien said.   “He’s always late.”
    And that was true.   Neil Solomon was always late.   Never by that much but always late nonetheless.
    â€œAt least tonight he has a good excuse,” Bob Genter said.
    â€œHe does?”   Mike said.   “He’s probably swimming in his pool.”   Neil recently got a bonus that made him the first owner of a full-size outdoor pool in our neighborhood.
    â€œNo, he’s got Patrol.   But he’s stopping at nine.   He’s got somebody trading with him for next week.”
    â€œOh, hell,” Mike said, obviously sorry that he’d complained.   “I didn’t know that.”
    Bob Genter’s handsome black head nodded solemnly.
    Patrol is something we all take very seriously in this newly restored “transitional neighborhood.”   Eight months ago, the burglaries started, and they’d gotten pretty bad.   My house had been burglarized once and vandalized once.   Bob and Mike had had curb-sitting cars stolen.   Neil’s wife, Sheila, was surprised in her own kitchen by a burglar. And then there was the killing four months ago, man and wife who’d just moved into the neighborhood, savagely stabbed to death in their own bed.   The police caught the guy a few days later trying to cash some of the traveler’s checks he’d stolen after killing his prey.   He was typical of the kind of man who infested this neighborhood after sundown: a twentyish junkie stoned to the point of psychosis on various street drugs, and not at all averse to murdering people he envied and despised.   He also knew a whole hell of a lot about fooling burglar alarms.
    After the murders there was a neighborhood meeting and that’s when we came up with the Patrol, something somebody’d read about