Read Dead of Night for Free Online

casual that might be.
    İkmen went outside and lit up. The snow was falling so hard that he could barely see the apartment block opposite. Shivering
     underneath someone’s battered concrete balcony, he thought he was alone until he heard a voice say, ‘Another sinner. I like
     that.’
    Gerald Diaz had a Lucky Strike hanging out of the corner of his mouth, and he smiled broadly at the Turk.
    ‘Lieutenant Diaz,’ İkmen said. ‘I didn’t know you . . .’
    ‘You think all Americans are health freaks?’ He shrugged. ‘This isn’t California, Inspector. Motor City folk make up their
     own minds.’
    He moved across to stand next to İkmen. ‘You got some attention in there,’ he said as he nodded his head back towards the
     community centre.
    ‘The old man,’ İkmen said. ‘I think he’s one of those people who really likes Elvis Presley.’
    Gerald Diaz drew on his Lucky and let the smoke out on a long, low sigh. ‘Not Elvis Presley, no,’ he said.
    ‘No? But I heard him . . .’
    ‘Elvis is, or was, the name of Ezekiel’s son,’ Diaz said. ‘He died back in the 1970s. Shot in the head.’
    ‘Oh.’ Another child lost to a gunshot. Like Martha Bell’s boy, like his own dead son, Bekir. The only İkmen child to go ‘bad’,
     Bekir had been a drug trafficker. He’d been shot dead by jandarmes in the eastern Turkish town of Birecik less than eighteen
     months before. He’d been trying to escape into Syria. In spite of what Bekir had been, every part of İkmen still mourned him.
    ‘Poor old Zeke never got over it,’ Diaz continued. ‘Left his wife shortly afterwards. Spent years on the street until Martha
     took him in. Went crazy.’
    ‘The death of a child is not something that one can get over,’ İkmen said.
    Diaz clearly saw at least some of the pain in the Turk’s eyes, and he looked away until the other man had composed himself.
     Then he said, ‘You being Turkish brought a smile to Zeke’s face.’
    ‘Yes. He tried to say “hello” in my language.’
    Diaz laughed. ‘Oh, Zeke does try out Turkish! God knows! Whacked-out people from the south, you know, Inspector! Ezekiel Goins
     comes originally from Georgia, Virginia, some place like that,I don’t know exactly. But they have some racial types down there, I can tell you.’ He put one cigarette out and then immediately
     lit another. İkmen was impressed. ‘You ever heard of the Melungeons?’
    İkmen hadn’t.
    ‘Dark folk, but not Hispanic, not like me,’ Diaz said. ‘Mainly Protestant; they’re mountain people, hillbillies, some would
     say. But unlike most hillbillies, they don’t claim origin in Scotland or Germany or England. Some say they’re gypsies, some
     Native Americans; some even claim to come from Portugal. And there are some say they’re actually Turks.’
    Lighting up a second cigarette too now, İkmen frowned.
    ‘Reckon they’re descended from the crew of a Turkish ship that got wrecked off the eastern seaboard,’ Diaz said. ‘Back in
     the sixteenth, seventeenth century. Zeke Goins’ family, according to him, was one of them. He believes it. And even if you
     and I think it’s so much bullshit, it has to count for something, even if it is only in old Zeke’s head.’
    It was rather extraordinary and strange, but İkmen said, ‘Yes.’
    ‘He saw you as kin,’ Diaz said, ‘family.’
    ‘Yes.’ But then İkmen recalled something else that Ezekiel Goins had said to him, about a criminal being brought to justice.
    Diaz sighed. ‘Ah, well, you see, he doesn’t trust the Detroit Police Department with regard to that,’ he said.
    ‘With regard to what?’
    The snow, if anything, was coming down still harder, and İkmen, at least, was shivering with cold. But what Diaz was saying
     was fascinating. Also, rightly or wrongly, he felt that the American would not be so forthcoming about the old man if he were
     with his colleagues back inside.
    ‘There’s an old white guy, lives in one of the rotten