John Steel Collection - Books 1-3

Chapter 15

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

It was another warm, cloudless night and the stars in the heavens glistened like the millions of lights of the city below them. A huge super moon seemed to fill up the sky. Its brightness illuminated the city, painting it a shade of icy blue.

Cars eased their way down the busy streets, most sharing the same agenda of going home.

John Steel had returned to the alleyway where the body had been discovered that morning. He hadn’t had time to do a thorough search before. But now, he had the time and the silence to do it. John Steel had taken a cab to the end of the street and walked the rest of the way. He didn’t want to draw attention to his approach. People remember vehicles more than people. And a cab late a night, people would remember.

Steel checked he was alone, then slipped unnoticed into an alleyway.

Silent as a whisper, John Steel made it to the corner of the darkness of the passage, then knelt and scanned the area. Then, seeing the coast was clear, Steel moved to the row of heavy garbage dumpsters.

Steel’s glasses reacted to the lack of light. They activated the automatic night vision display as he got to the dumpsters. In addition, it was only in the glasses' left lens, which meant that his right eye could quickly adjust if there were a sudden beam of light.

Suddenly, something between the dumpsters caught his eye, causing Steel to kneel and carefully slide his hand between the two metal containers and grasp something.

Slowly he pulled his arm back, the find still held tightly in his grasp. It was a dirty pair of gloves, tatty enough to have been owned by a homeless person. He examined them for a moment, slipped them into a plastic zipper bag, and stuck it into his pocket.

From down the far end near the entrance, two beat cops with flashlights approached the white coloured outline of a figure on the ground.

The pair discussed how they'd be detectives in a couple of years, busting heads and getting rid of scumbags like the man who did this murder.

Suddenly, they looked up to see a shadowy figure in front of them.

‘What the…!’ one of them yelled. ‘Hey, you ain’t meant to be down here, buddy!’ He reached for his pistol. Right at that moment, the moon’s bright light faded as a cloud covered it, rendering the alley pitch black for a few seconds.

The cloud passed, and the alleyway was lit up like a winter’s morning. However, the cops stood alone. The man had disappeared.

‘Frank, let’s not tell anybody about this, right?’ the larger of the two men said.

His colleague just nodded, and they both got out of there as if they had seen the devil himself.