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

  The bullet had gone clean through, missing the bone but taking away enough meat and muscle to stuff a softball, and the surgeon who cleaned and dressed the canal told me I’d owe whatever mobility I regained to muscles designed for another purpose. The client paid me for my time and took care of the medical expenses, including six weeks on the parallel bars at Henry Ford Hospital. All in all, it was the most I’d ever made from one case, even if it had all been spent on probes and painkillers. I hadn’t been armed that night; it didn’t seem to be that kind of job, and anyway I wouldn’t have gotten the chance to fire anything but a distress signal into the air from a prone position. It had happened that fast.

  Barry Stackpole, an old friend, drove the six-hour round trip to bring me home after my release from Grayling, and drove it again a month later to retrieve my Cutlass when I had enough strength in my leg to work the pedal. Since one of his legs was man-made and he had a steel plate in his skull, I didn’t complain about my infirmity, just the loss of work. He offered a loan, which I declined. One of the advantages of living so close to the poverty level is you’re never paralyzed worrying about money. It’s just like being rich, only without the good Scotch and cigars.

  “I can swing something your way,” he said when we were cruising between two solid banks of motels with vacancies along the strip outside town; one month earlier they’d been booked to the roofs. “I’m negotiating a ghost job on the memoirs of a Korean mobster currently in the witness-protection program. He says. I want his background checked.”

  Barry’s a freelance crime reporter, the author of several books on the Mafia and all its franchises, and a long-standing speed bump in the road to ill-gotten gains. That’s how he got the leg and the hubcap in his head.

  I said, “I didn’t know there were Korean mobsters.”

  “These days they come in all colors. This one says he swung asylum from the Justice Department after he ratted out some fellow racket guys in Seoul. He could be a mob plant to find out what I know about a couple of parties I steered into witness protection. They’re all pretty much scum, but I’m not going to turn finger for a six-figure deal and a spot on the Book Channel.”

  “Check him with Justice.”

  “That would be awkward. They don’t know I know what I know. If they suspect, I might have to join the program myself. The government boys play for blood since nine-one-one.”

  I plucked out a cigarette. Before I got it lit, he had the window down on my side. Barry was on a health kick: no liquor, no secondhand smoke, fresh box of condoms first of every month even if he hadn’t used up last month’s supply. I threw the match into the slipstream. It froze my fingers on contact. “I don’t know how you keep it all straight.”

  “That’s because you keep company with a different class of crook.” He buzzed the window back up partway.

  I’d told him about Starzek. We hadn’t any secrets from each other except when one of us was working. “There are crooks and crooks,” I said. “This one never stole a dollar or an election.”

  “I’d keep my distance. Cigarette smugglers have terrorist ties. I read it in USA Today.”

  “That’s just a dodge to shame people into paying the tax.”

  “Either way it’s heat. Where’s the impound?”

  He’d stopped for a light at the main four corners. There were sporting-goods stores in both blocks with survival gear in the windows and a concrete movie house playing one feature three days each week. Everything had the trod-on look of a neglected dog. Strip malls are called strip malls for a reason.

  I got out the paper with directions and read them off. We went there and I paid my fee and found him still sitting behind the wheel when I came out of the office. He was driving a brand-new maroon Lincoln that year, shaped like a cough drop. It would be registered to someone else. He was a professional sociopath, never left a paper trail.

  When he opened his window I leaned on the sill. “Thanks for waiting. Also the ride. Can I let you know about the godfather of Seoul?”

  “Sure. I can always stall him by demanding an ‘As Told To’ credit. If he’s legit he’ll never agree to it.”

  “In that case, you might not need the background check.”

  He gave me his slow easy smile. “Well, once you’ve been blown up, you tend to double-team.”

  I gave him back a wave and limped around to the garage side. Behind me I heard his engine start and when it didn’t explode this time he drove off.

  Nothing came of the Korean job. I was still thinking about it when Barry called and said his would-be collaborator had turned out to be a Hyundai dealer from Phoenix who’d made up the story to impress a girlfriend and hadn’t known when to bail out. The confession had come under pressure from Barry; the man knew too much about the details of zero-percent financing for an ordinary thief.

  By then I had an employee-fraud job, nothing too strenuous, just a couple of hours in the evening parked behind the Troy K-Mart, videotaping stockroom clerks stashing new DVD players in a Dumpster. My leg interrupted my concentration when I’d been sitting too long, but changing positions took care of that. By the time I’d gathered enough evidence to prosecute, I’d found new uses for the cane, such as flipping the telephone receiver out of its cradle into my hand when I didn’t feel like tipping my office chair forward. I was getting to be as good with it as Charlie Chaplin.

  The nightmares took longer to get used to. You hear a lot about wound trauma in the physical sense, but no matter where you get shot it always ends up in your head. I woke up plenty of times with my sheets soaked through with sweat, sure it was blood. I wished the Hyundai dealer hadn’t let Barry down. I needed the work more than my bank account did.

  Christmas came and went, as it will despite Marshall Field’s best efforts to keep it alive through Super Sunday. The all-purpose, no-offense holiday display in front of the City-County Building came down, spruces and Scotch pines turned orange in the gutters. Most of the toys were broken and the kittens had all outgrown their red ribbons and started in on the furniture. I made a host of calls, but I couldn’t even land a security job until I could outrun an old-lady shoplifter in a slick parking lot.

  Dick Clark doddered in the new year, and I reminded myself to use it when I postdated my checks. I stayed home on the holiday to look in on the multimillionaires in pads and helmets, woke up the next dawn lying in a pool of blood behind Spike’s Keg o’ Nails, and instead of going back to sleep got dressed and made coffee. Twenty minutes later I let myself into the office from a street swept bare of life. Behind the desk I dozed until the first spasm of the day sent me into the water closet for Vicodin.

  While I was washing it down with water from the tap, I heard the door from the hall open and close. The buzzer had been out of service since September. I hadn’t bothered to have it fixed because there is little off-the-street trade in the investigation business, and none at all on my street. I stumped to the connecting door and opened it on the first knock.

  “Are you Walker?”

  I confessed to that condition and hooked the cane over my left wrist to shake the man’s hand. He gave mine a brief squeeze that would have bunched my fingers like copper wire if I hadn’t shoved them deep into his fist from instinct. He was my height, with the sloped shoulders of a tired grizzly and a head the size of a soup kettle and just about as easy to dent. He was completely bald—not even a fringe—wore no hat on the coldest January day in recent memory, and burned cranberry red from his crown to the coarse black hairs twisting out of his open collar. I placed him at forty; he could have been fifty-five and cured in the barrel. He had on a blue Detroit Edison uniform and tractor-tread boots with the toes worn down to the steel caps.

  “I’m Oral Canon,” he said. “It’s pronounced like the artillery piece, only you spell it with two n’s, not three.”

  “Like the camera. Any relation?”

  “Not the money side.”

  He had a deep, burring voice, like a circular saw on idle.
I said I had the same arrangement with my cousin Hiram and pointed the cane at the customer’s chair. He used two inches of the seat, bracing his hands on his thighs. They were big-veined hands, the kind that were comfortable in work gloves, and wore a class ring and a plain gold wedding band on the usual fingers. “I’m a splicing technician. I’m supposed to be on the job now.”

  “What’s a splicing technician?” I sat down behind the desk.

  “A guy that climbs poles in a blizzard so’s you can make pop-corn in the microwave.”

  “A lineman.”

  He swiveled his eyes. “Sure, if you’re Glen Campbell.”

  That explained his coloring. The sun bounces hard off the snow when you’re thirty feet up.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Canon-with-two-n’s?”

  “You can pay your phone bill for starters. I tried to call twice, in case I dialed wrong first time. You’re disconnected. That’s why I had to take off work and come downtown.”

  I lifted the handset. I got a dial tone and hung up. “What number did you call?”

  He unbuttoned the flap over a breast pocket, drew out a narrow pasteboard slip, and handed it across to me between two fingers. The business card was soiled and fuzzy around the edges and the corners were dogeared. I read A. WALKER INVESTIGATIONS, the office number and building address, and the telephone number.

  “I haven’t had this number in two years,” I said. “It was one digit off from the Venus Escort Service. I had to keep turning away calls from the mayor.” I held out the card.

  He didn’t take it. “It was all I had. My wife’s brother sent it to her in a Christmas card. It came the day after Christmas. He never has been on time for anything except his damn drop-offs.”

  “Who’s your brother-in-law?”

  “Jeff Starzek. I figure you must know him or he wouldn’t have sent the card.”

  I fingered the worn edges. Jeff must have been carrying it around in his wallet for years. I didn’t remember giving it to him. “He say why he sent it?”

  “I don’t even know for sure it was him sent it, except Rose recognized the writing. There wasn’t a return address and the postmark just said ‘U.S. Postal Service.’ He didn’t even sign the Christmas card. All he wrote’s there on the back.”

  I turned over the business card. I’d never seen a sample of Starzek’s handwriting, but the pencil script looked like him, no frills and impossible to misunderstand:

  Rose—if you don’t hear from me by the first of the year, hire this man.

  THREE

  My leg twinged. I let it. The Vicodin had blunted the sharp point. I made a meaningless little cricket noise on the desktop with the edge of the card. Oral Canon watched me. If he’d blinked since he came in I’d missed it.

  “When was the last time you heard from him before he sent the card?” I asked.

  “First week of November. Rose invited him for Thanksgiving and he called to say he was making a run up north and probably wouldn’t be back in time. You know he’s a smuggler.”

  I nodded. “I ran into him in Grayling on the fifteenth. He said he had a load of Marlboros and another delivery to make down the Huron shoreline afterwards.”

  “Well, that’s more than he told his sister. I guess you’re an accomplice.” He got everything you can out of the word, and there’s plenty to get.

  “I just smoke ‘em. Did you file a missing-persons?”

  “I wanted to, but Rose said no. She don’t want to have to go down to Milan once a month just to see him. It didn’t do any good to tell her she’d be seeing him more often than she does now. It sure wouldn’t make her any more miserable. She’s soft on him, always has been. That’s why he went bad. She as good as raised him after their mother walked out. The old man was a drunk.”

  “She didn’t do as bad a job as you think. That day in Grayling he saved my life.”

  “That how you got crippled?”

  I gave that one a pass. I’d been tested enough for one season. “I can find him, if he wants to be found. It won’t be easy. He doesn’t file flight plans.”

  He unbuttoned the other flap and smacked a roll down on the desk. Ben Franklin’s face looks swollen on the new currency.

  “I’m not angling for cash,” I said. “Your wife should know it will take time.”

  “I just came off five solid days on duty after that blow in Oakland County last week, with double time for the holiday. It’s either this or a plasma TV. I don’t watch that much.”

  I separated three C-notes from the bale and parked them under the stapler. “Expenses. I figure I owe Jeff the rest.”

  “This ain’t for him, it’s for Rose. We never took a penny from that damn crook. I pay you or I pay somebody else that ain’t so shy.”

  I blew air. I didn’t know if I wanted to shake his paw again or break my cane over that head.

  “Twelve hundred more for the retainer,” I said. “I refund the time I don’t use. Have you got a recent photo? I know what he looks like, but the people I’ll be showing it to won’t.”

  He peeled off a dozen more bills, got a wallet-size out of the same pocket, and laid it on top. Starzek had a smile on his face I’d never seen and one arm around a good-looking brunette in her middle thirties. “Rose?”

  He nodded, and the expression on his big face when he looked down at the picture made me dislike him a little less. “You know how you see the prettiest women hanging all over the asshole-ugliest apes? I figure I had the brother-in-law coming.”

  “Where can I reach you?”

  He made another trip to his portable office and planted a DTE Energy card—what they’re calling it now—on the pile. It contained his name, the company’s business number, and the number of a cell phone. “Home’s on the back. Don’t call it over any old thing. The baby might be sleeping.”

  I reeled it all in. “I don’t guess you or Rose would know if he was in trouble.”

  “No, and that’s the only good thing I can think to say about him. This is the first flare he ever sent up.” He looked at a watch strapped to his wrist; not pointedly, but no sneaking either. You can tell a lot about a man by the way he looks at his watch. This one only wanted to know what time it was. He stood up.

  “I’ll be in touch when I have something,” I said; and he was gone. The outer door closed on him as quietly as drifting snow.

  I was putting the cash in the safe, minus a few hundred for gas and desk clerks, when the telephone rang.

  “I wasn’t sure I’d get you this early,” said the voice in my ear. “I thought all you plastic badges staggered in two hours late the day after New Year’s.”

  Lieutenant Mary Ann Thaler doesn’t sound half as sexy as she looks, and the way she sounds turns 911 into 900. She’s with Felony Homicide, which is the closest thing the Detroit Police Department has to a detective without portfolio. Every crime in the city falls under her jurisdiction as long as it includes a citizen at room temperature.

  “I staggered in at seven,” I said. “What’s the body count so far this year?”

  “I missed the box scores. How long are you there?”

  “About six feet, same as at home.”

  She closed the curtain on the act. “Company manners. I’m bringing a guest.”

  I said I’d clear my calendar. She said she’d be there in thirty minutes.

  Welcome to the new year.

  The twinge in my leg didn’t qualify as a twinge anymore. It felt like a root canal starting at the knee. I went into the water closet and studied the little folding program that came with the bottle of Vicodin. I wasn’t to take it with alcohol under any circumstances; but it had been twenty minutes since I took it.

  That was the loophole I’d been looking for. I went back to the desk and poured an inch and a half from the bottle of single malt I’d bought myself for Christmas. I wanted a healthy glow, not the three days in Tijuana I get from the radiator wash I drink the rest of the year. When the glass was empty the pain was still
there, but I had paying work, an appointment with a cop, and a mysterious visitor. Liquor was mandatory.

  The outer door opened at thirty minutes on the point. I’d left the connecting door open. She found me standing behind the desk without the support of the cane: male vanity, and trouble for nothing. She spotted the stick leaning against the windowsill.

  “Where’s your straw hat?”

  “Where are your glasses?”

  “Lasik. I only need them for reading now.”

  “Put them on. Only plain women are safe on this street.”

  That irked her in a way it only does women who would never be described as plain. “So what happened?”

  “I got shot. And how was your holiday?”

  She had her brown hair pulled back, but it only called attention to the long smooth line of her neck. She’d wrapped herself in one of those knee-length glossy black all-weather coats, with a tall collar and a belt around the waist. Fur-topped boots and a shoulder bag big enough to hold a SIG-Sauer automatic, three clips, and the usual feminine bric-a-brac. She looked like a Midwestern version of Marlene Dietrich. A pretty woman, and a cop who liked her job just a little too much.

  “Amos Walker, this is Herbert Clemson. Clemson’s with Homeland Security.”

  I gave her companion some attention then. He was thirtyish, slim, dark, and curly-haired, in a long charcoal coat trimmed with fur grown in some lab. He had chilly gray eyes and a carefully tended five o’clock shadow, the kind you see in men’s cologne ads. His chin was deeply cleft. I hated him with all the healthy instincts of the alpha male.

  He showed me a gold badge and his picture in a pigskin folder. Of course I shook his hand. Here was another healthy grip, but he wasn’t too generous with it. I asked him who was winning the war on terror.

  He smiled. “We are, at the moment. It’s still early innings.”