Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss Read online

  NICOTINE KISS

  BOOKS BY LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

  Kill Zone

  Roses Are Dead

  Any Man’s Death

  Motor City Blue

  Angel Eyes

  The Midnight Man

  The Glass Highway

  Sugartown

  Every Brilliant Eye

  Lady Yesterday

  Downriver

  Silent Thunder

  Sweet Women Lie

  Never Street

  The Witchfinder

  The Hours of the Virgin

  A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

  City of Widows*

  The High Rocks*

  Billy Gashade*

  Stamping Ground*

  Aces & Eights*

  Journey of the Dead*

  Jitterbug*

  Thunder City*

  The Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association*

  The Master Executioner*

  White Desert*

  Sinister Heights

  Something Borrowed, Something Black*

  Port Hazard*

  Poison Blonde*

  Retro*

  Little Black Dress*

  The Undertaker’s Wife*

  Nicotine Kiss*

  *A Forge Book

  NICOTINE KISS

  An Amos Walker Novel

  Loren D. Estleman

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  NICOTINE KISS: AN AMOS WALKER NOVEL

  Copyright © 2006 by Loren D. Estleman

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Edited by James Frenkel

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Estleman, Loren D.

  Nicotine kiss : an Amos Walker novel / Loren D. Estleman.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN 0-765-31223-9

  EAN 978-0-765-31223-5

  1. Walker, Amos (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Michigan—Fiction. 3. Missing persons—Fiction. 4. Counterfeiters—Fiction. 5. Michigan—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS03555.084 N53 2006

  813’.54—dc22

  2005057454

  First Edition: April 2006

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For John and Mary Ann Verdi-Huss:

  patrons of the arts, with the patience of saints

  NICOTINE KISS

  ONE

  Someone had disinterred “Big John” from the back of the vintage Rock-Ola. Jimmy Dean’s bass struck bedrock on the big, bad refrain, buzzing the speakers and rippling the surface of my Carling Black Label, the muscatel of bottled beer. The neon tubing behind the bar cast rose-petal light over everything.

  Spike’s Keg o’ Nails smelled of beer and cedar and mothballs, the last from the blaze-orange and red-and-black-check coats that had hung in upstairs closets from January to November. Two hunters with sooty eleven o’clock shadows taught body English to the shuffleboard table and some smoke-cured campers from outside town trumped one another at euchre with loud oaths every time a card smacked their table. A graying couple danced, dressed identically in jeans and flannel, and a waitress built like Johnny Bravo fox-trotted between crowded tables hoisting a cityscape of longnecks on a round tray. It was opening day of firearms deer season in Grayling, Michigan, where they close the schools as if it’s the Fourth of July, and I was the only relatively sober customer on the premises. Even the ninety-year-old moose head on the wall was listing slightly to the left.

  Spike’s hadn’t changed a tick since I was fourteen and hunting with my father and his friends, and he’d said then it hadn’t changed in twenty years. He’d pointed out the corner where he’d once seen Cesar Romero, grinning dazzlingly in his three-day whiskers and ordering rounds for his rumpled party. What might have been the same rickety table and captain’s chairs were now occupied by a heavyset blonde with a map of every motel in the northern Lower Peninsula on her face and three National Guardsmen in fatigues from Camp Grayling, plying her with beers. She was older than any two of them combined and looked as if she could drink off a case with one hand and arm-wrestle all three of them with the other. She’d practiced on Cesar and his friends.

  I wasn’t hunting deer, although I’d dressed for the part in a woolen shirt and lace-up boots and let my beard grow for two days to fit in. A lawyer in Royal Oak had hired my agency of one to find a man named Hegelund and keep him in sight until an officer could arrest him on a warrant for nonpayment of child support. He’d quit his job, canceled his credit cards, and left town, and his ex-wife was at the top of the list of people who hadn’t heard from him since June. But he hadn’t missed an opening day in Grayling in seven years. Going after deadbeats is a lot like deer hunting: You pick your spot, sit tight, and wait for your trophy to come along. Sooner or later everyone passed through Spike’s on his way to the woods.

  My heart wasn’t in it. The lawyer’s client had gotten the house, the car, and the dog, and the sixteen-year-old daughter had moved in with her thirty-seven-year-old boyfriend in Clarkston. Hegelund had walked away from the marriage after years of stagnant counseling, giving up grounds, and hadn’t contested a single claim. The picture in my pocket showed a tired face with white flags all over it. Hunting him was like cutting the weak and aged from the herd. But I had winter taxes to pay and deadbeat dads are 15 percent of my income.

  An hour before closing, the hardcore sportsmen who got up at 5:00 A.M. started evaporating, the juke ran out of dead country singers and sausage tycoons, and the clinking bottles and loud card tournament became the only ambient noises in the room. Then the piano began to tinkle.

  I hadn’t even known the place had one, but there it was, a basic upright no one had tuned since the moose had reached the age of consent. The party seated on the bench was built close to the ground and wide across the back, like the concrete stop at the end of a railroad. He had a full head of chestnut-colored hair, razored carefully at the nape, and wore a brown leather Windbreaker too thin for the North Country and tan cords rubbed shiny in patches, scuffed white high-tops on his feet. He wasn’t my man, but I recognized him from behind. I got up and carried my beer over.

  “I wouldn’t wear that outfit into the woods.” I parked the bottle next to his glass on top of the piano. “You could wind up on the buck pole downtown.”

  Jeff Starzek didn’t look up. His glass wasn’t for drinking. It was filled with clear liquid, probably water, and reflected most of the room like a convex mirror. That wasn’t any more an accident than hi
s fingering. He was playing Rachmaninoff. I could tell, because there were too many notes and they were batting away at one another like hockey players. “They better shoot fast. I can do eighty on those sand trails.”

  “Still driving that Charger?”

  “Challenger.” His stubby fingers scampered across the bridge. “Not anymore. I cracked the block in Kentucky. It’s hard to read a ‘Water Over the Road’ sign when you’re topping a hill at a hundred and five.”

  “You must’ve been running hot for some time.”

  “Still am. How about you, Amos? Still climbing trellises?”

  “I’m climbing one now.”

  “Not mine. I wouldn’t have seen you coming.”

  “You’re federal game,” I said. “I can’t meet their dress code.”

  “I can outrun the feds okay. These days they’re spread pretty thin. It’s the troopers I have to watch out for. That new tax hike’s got them all angling for commander.”

  I asked him what he was driving. He smiled at the keys. He had a moon face and a delicately curved mouth with hard muscles at the corners. A lock of hair broke over his left eyebrow. No face or body looked less like Ben Affleck’s, yet women responded to him. It wasn’t the danger, because he didn’t tell them what he did for a living. He didn’t talk much at all, in fact, which may have been the secret. People who don’t have a lot to say get the reputation of being good listeners. In his case it was true. But he could always talk about cars.

  “Hurst Olds,” he said. “Sixty-nine.”

  “Four fifty-five. I’ve got that in my Cutlass.”

  “I bought it for the trunk. I can squeeze in a dozen more cartons than I could in the Dodge.” He screwed up his face. “You think you could blow that somewhere else?”

  I’d lit a cigarette. I laid it in a tray on an empty table. “What are you hauling?”

  “Kiddie cigs. Marlboros.”

  “You smuggle ‘em, but you don’t smoke ‘em?”

  “Ever hear of Larry Fay?”

  “Old-time song-and-dance man.”

  “That’s Eddie Foy. Fay was a big-time bootlegger in New York during Prohibition. Never touched a drop.”

  “Rumrunners are a lot more popular now than Big Tobacco.”

  “Better PR. And I’m not big.”

  I’d met Jeff Starzek when he was running interference for truckloads of cargo hijacked from Detroit Metropolitan Airport. He’d painted his 1970 Dodge Challenger a shade of orange you could see from outer space and averaged thirty miles over the speed limit all the way to Chicago, drawing cops, like Buster Keaton, toward him and away from the big rigs and their contraband. He had more license suspensions than a drunken congressman and no convictions for anything more serious than reckless driving. At the time I’d been tracing a teenage runaway who’d mixed himself up with the operation. If Starzek hadn’t broken precedent and told me what I’d needed to know, the kid might have gone on jumping from one felony to another until he wound up behind chain-link and razor wire. He might have anyway, for all I knew, but I returned him to his parents for however long he stayed.

  The next time I’d seen Starzek, he’d gone into business for himself, hauling much smaller shipments of cigarettes bought in lower-tax states and on Indian reservations where no taxes were paid and selling them to wholesalers and party stores at a profit. The merchants sold the cigarettes over the counter and pocketed the amount that would have gone to Lansing. That time, the smuggler was a client; someone had sold a store in Eastpointe a case of menthols laced with pesticide, Starzek had been arrested on a tip, and although charges were dropped for lack of evidence, the family of a customer who’d died of poisoning had brought civil suit against Starzek, who claimed he’d never done business in Eastpointe. Everything I turned pointed to the store manager’s son-in-law, who’d stolen the case from a shipment targeted for destruction after a crop-dusting blunder in Virginia.

  By then, of course, Starzek was known to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and just repainting his Challenger an unassuming brown wasn’t enough to keep agents from hauling him over and running him through the system.

  “I thought you’d retired,” I said.

  “Diversified is the word.” He trilled a finger down the keyboard Jerry Lee Lewis style. “I’m carrying something else back down the coast.”

  “I won’t ask what.”

  “Honestly, who cares?”

  I gave him the point. It wasn’t anything to me whether he smuggled Lucky Strikes or fake Beanie Babies. The tax just went into the bail fund for state senators.

  I swigged beer. It was warm already. The bar was overheated, like every other place up there in late fall. “Well, good luck. That lake effect from Chicago’s a bitch when it snows.”

  “Wrong coast. I like the little towns on Huron. Everybody minds his own business and the feds stick out like ears on a frog.”

  “In nineteen-fifty, maybe. They’re as suspicious as in the city.”

  “Cynic.”

  “Pirate.”

  The square-shouldered waitress box-stepped our way to announce last call. Starzek, who hadn’t touched his water, shook his head. I was looking at my watch and wondering if waiting twenty more minutes would make any difference when Hegelund came in.

  His face looked sadder and more tired under an orange cap with a buck silhouetted on the front. He wore a camouflage coat with splashes of orange on it and insulated boots that flapped about his ankles. I ordered another beer and started back to my table, not making eye contact.

  Maybe I was too conscientious about it. You try to make your mind blank, just in case there’s something to telepathy, but prey always has the advantage. Hegelund didn’t know me from J.D. Salinger, but he stopped when he saw me, turned around, and trotted back out. I gave him fifteen seconds, then left cash for the beers including the one I had coming and followed, casual as a picnic.

  I’d parked in the dirt lot next to the building, pale under the phantom glow of a mercury bulb with a light dusting of snow. My breath curled. There among the campers, pickups, and RVs was Starzek’s Hurst/Olsmobile, painted light blue—that year’s version of plain brown—and built along the lines of my Cutlass, but with twin scoops punched into the hood. He’d have reinforced the springs to keep the rear end from sagging under its load and bolted the bumpers with angle irons to the frame, in order to run roadblocks and sustain ramming from behind. I didn’t get down to look. It would have a new transmission and a rebuilt engine. Everything else that might have slowed him down—radio, heater, rear seat, spare tire—would have been stripped away. It was a power plant on wheels, with space for cargo and an operator.

  Hegelund was driving an eight-year-old Jeep Cherokee, parked on the edge of the lot near the street. The lawyers hadn’t left him enough to buy anything younger. Rust had nibbled at the wheel wells and someone had taped thick plastic over a missing window in back. He’d had luck; a shaggy spikehorn buck lay on the roof, lashed in place with clothesline around its hooves fore and aft. Shaking loose my keys, I watched Hegelund out of the corner of my eye as he bent to reach into the backseat. I was walking down a rutted aisle between rows of cars.

  I heard the crash and felt the jolt when my shoulder hit the ground. My leg never felt the impact and for an instant I thought I’d slipped on a patch of ice. Then I felt the numbness below my waist and knew I’d taken a lead slug big enough to change my life. I began to float away from the light. The second crash belonged to something that had no connection with me.

  TWO

  Imissed the second half of November, which in Michigan is no great loss, but I was out of the hospital in time for Christmas, which was. Herds of fat busted cops in gamey security uniforms prowled the malls, and everyone who had ever been rejected by American Idol seemed to have released a holiday album. My little monastic cell on the third floor of an office building as old as gunpowder looked like a heap of boiled rice after all the colored lights.

  I was getting arou
nd with a cane, which an emergency room nurse told me would have been a plastic leg if a “short fat guy” hadn’t scooped me up off the parking lot and delivered me to the Grayling hospital in less time than it took to put an ambulance on the scene. He hadn’t stayed long enough to give his name, but I knew Jeff Starzek from the description, even if it wasn’t strictly accurate; his bulk was mostly muscle and he was taller than he looked. I didn’t mind his not checking in later to find out my condition. Cops swarm thick around hospitals and some of the incoming calls are recorded. He could have left me there to bleed out and avoided all risk.

  An ambulance with twice the horsepower of his Hurst/Olds couldn’t have done anything for Hegelund. The way the police worked it out, he’d put a .30–30 round through his head from the same deer rifle he’d used on me while I was still trying to figure out what had happened. I was his last defiant act, and maybe his only one. He had long arms, a carbon test on his hands and clothing indicated his wound was self-inflicted, and none of the patrons and employees of Spike’s reported seeing anyone else in the lot when they piled out after the shots. No one knows anyone, not well enough to predict what he’ll do in a corner, fight or surrender. He’d done both. Maybe his blood had been up from the deer kill. In any case, it didn’t last. I said he’d looked tired.

  Cranked up in bed in ICU I told the cops who I was working for and why. They didn’t believe me when I said I didn’t know who the short fat guy was and that I’d only struck up a conversation with him in the bar because I liked the way he played piano, but they didn’t lean too hard. They don’t get many shootings up there except the accidental kind in the woods, and when they get one all sealed in shrink-wrap they don’t poke at it. Also I’d just been upgraded from critical.

  I never found out how Hegelund knew I was looking for him, or even if he did. Putting aside metaphysics, I guessed he was suspicious of everyone, and I fit the mold. You don’t do what I do for as many years as I’ve done it without taking on some of the physical characteristics of a rat terrier. Whoever had represented him in the divorce might have had an informant in his ex-wife’s legal firm, who’d seen me in the office and had a gift for description. It’s screwy to give a lawyer the benefit of the doubt when it comes to ethics. None of this was as certain as the throbbing in my leg when it rains, or the limp when I’m tired or forget myself.