The Night Shift

The Night Shift by Frank M. Robinson - Werewolves are supposed to haunt lonely, back-country roads. That seems a little silly, when you consider that most beasts of prey go where the game is thickest. Now at night, in the larger cities...

I sat there letting the smoke drift out of my nostrils and running my fingers idly over the typewriter keys. The ideas weren’t coming tonight; I couldn’t concentrate. I’d start to think and my mind would twist away, as if it was tired of working and wanted to relax and think about the movies or what was on TV or what I had for supper that night.

The paper in my typewriter was discouragingly blank except for the heading: The Night Shift, by Nick Golata. There wasn’t anything underneath it and I didn’t have any idea of what should go there. I took another drag on my cigarette, opened the window a little, and flicked it out, watching the tiny red ember fall through the night to the empty streets twenty stories down. The column was usually a natural for ideas. What goes on in Chicago after dark, when all the eight-to-fivers have gone to bed and the rest of humanity congregates in small, neighborhood bars or the big movie palaces downtown or scrubs its lonely way down the miles of corridors in deserted office buildings.

I filled my lungs with the cold, clean air and looked out over the city at night, a sea of blackness spotted here and there with the glare of neon and threaded with shining catwalks of strings of street-lamps. The city grows on you, like an old typewriter or a faithful automobile. You fall in love with the bright lights and the rumble of the ancient elevated and the characters who work the night shift downtown.

It was mine, I thought, all mine. The darkness and the shadows and the few people on the deserted sidewalks. I took one last look and then closed the window. This was going to be one of those nights when I had to call Sammy Baxa for material.