Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss Page 7

  “I thought you were busy ghosting for fake gangsters.”

  “That’s cold. I thought we were good.”

  “I can’t make promises, Barry. There’s federal interest. You know where that always leads.”

  “Tell me. My FBI file has sequels. Is it them?”

  “Higher.”

  He rotated his chair, an ergonomic item he’d smuggled out of Rockefeller Center when NBC gave him his walking papers. “Attorney general? Don’t tell me you’ve got me in bad cess with the Pentecostals.”

  “Not that high.”

  “Homeland Security. Son of a bitch.”

  “I was impressed myself.”

  “This have anything to do with what happened in Grayling?”

  I wanted to smoke. I didn’t know what it might do to his equipment. “That’s a personal debt. If I can help you out I will. I can count the friends who’d drive six hours to take me home from the hospital on the fingers of a leper. If it turns out I can’t, it’ll have to be a favor to be named later. Right now I’m walking backwards in the dark.”

  “Well, if it’s as bad as what happened to this poor bastard, CNN will get it before I do.” He drummed a tattoo on the keys. The text vanished and his screensaver popped up. He’d traded his montage of classic gangster movies for a still life of Frank Nitti sprawled dead in an alley.

  He had two emotions he shared with the world, flippant and petulant. He was as high maintenance as a prom queen.

  “What do you know about the Church of the Freshwater Sea?”

  “Sounds like a brand of canned tuna.” He went back online. I couldn’t read the response, but no flags went up. “Just a lot of crap on the history of the Great Lakes. Is it a terrorist cell?”

  “I’d hate to think my tax dollars were being spent fighting a pole barn in Port Huron.” I told him what I knew about Paul Starzek.

  He typed in the name, waited. “Nothing. Which means it’s something. It’s much harder to stay off the Net than get on it. It sucks up everything.”

  “Not if you never go near it. This guy’s just a little bit right of Amish. Bill Gates couldn’t find him without a two-dollar map of Michigan counties.”

  “So Jeff Starzek’s the job?”

  “I didn’t say that. But yeah. He’s in a hole of some kind. I may not be the rope, but since I didn’t bleed to death on a patch of frozen dirt, I can’t not try.”

  “Yeah. If I ever disappear, I know someone will look. It’s a comfort, like knowing where you’ll be buried. The family plot’s in Grand Rapids, by the way. Call my sister. She’s in the book.”

  “You did disappear, and I went looking. Our friendship hasn’t been the same since.”

  “I like to think the patch job held.”

  “November went a long way in that direction. Thanks, Barry. If they don’t slam the lid too tight I’ll let you in.” I levered myself off the stiff chair and tried not to suck in air through my teeth. I’d sat too long. He leaned back in his trick chair, watching me with eyes as clear and untroubled as a boy’s. He’d stopped aging twenty years ago.

  “I can float Paul Starzek and his church among the boys on the street,” he said. “It’s probably not his street.”

  “I wouldn’t risk it. If we all wind up in the same hole, who’ll throw us the rope?”

  “Good point. Back to Port Huron?”

  “I might cut a hole in the ice and drop in a line.”

  “Put an anvil in your lap. The big ones pull back.”

  Clouds sagged a few feet above the Huron channel as if they were filled with lead shot. Out on the white ice, some fishermen were hiding from their families in shanties built of scrapwood and galvanized iron; the smoke sliding out of their stovepipes was no darker than the overcast. The iron-nuts diehards sat exposed to the elements on fish buckets, holding short brightly painted rods above the holes they’d punched in the surface and getting up occasionally to swish away the rapidly re-forming ice with their bare hands. You have to really like the sport, or need the fish, to pursue it under those circumstances. I’d tried it just once, a long time ago, and hadn’t gotten the chill out yet. I don’t even care for fish.

  The tension of the coming snow pressed at my temples like a carpenter’s clamp. I had my blower on full blast against the icy air sucking at spaces where the rubber had checked away from the glass. When I adjusted its direction my forehead prickled with sweat and my feet turned into flat stones. When I turned it back, my socks soaked through and my ears stung. The weatherman on the radio advised listeners to give up any hope of a January thaw before February. He sounded giddy about it, as if he had all his money in flannel. I switched to an oldies station in search of the Beach Boys and got Dean Martin crooning, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” The knob came loose in my hand as usual when I turned it off. I put it in the ashtray next to the cigarette lighter that had stopped working that morning.

  The lights inside Vic’s Super Senter glimmered sullenly under the cloud ceiling, which was growing blacker by the minute. I turned off before it, slewed and spun my wheels on the glazed surface of Old Carriage Lane, and jerked down the decline, gently pumping my brakes, until it leveled out. It was coming on noon but looked like twilight. The tangle of trees and underbrush that separated the neighborhood from the money property on the lake was primordial black, and as I rolled past a thousand-square-foot crackerbox sided with yellow tile, all the lamps in all the windows sprang on in response to a light-sensitive switch. Most of the other houses, hooked up to twelve-hour timers or nothing at all, were telltale dark. Out of season, breakins would keep the local law busier than anything else.

  Just as the thought occurred to me, a low-slung, wide-bodied St. Clair County sheriff’s cruiser came drifting up at crawl speed from the lake end. As we passed within inches of each other, the deputy in the driver’s seat glowered at me from behind walrus whiskers, but he kept rolling. I watched in my rearview mirror as the cruiser topped the hill and flared its brake lights. I got out for their entertainment, mounted the porch of a converted house trailer two doors down from Paul Starzek’s, tapped on the door, waited, then went back to the car. I did a little acting with the cane, as if it were the only thing holding me up. Anyway it seemed to work. By the time I turned around and got back to the highway, the cruiser had disappeared.

  I picked it up again on the other side of Vic’s, where it boated out from the other side of an orange tanker blocking the pumps and hung three car lengths behind me for the next mile and a quarter. I drove just below the limit with my shoulders tensed, just as if I were guilty of something. I had a pair of bolt cutters in my trunk.

  A side road led inland between an empty-looking farmhouse and a sign announcing the site of a future subdivision. Dry snow swirled and settled in its wake. I relaxed my shoulders. I had a sore spot between them that felt as if an ice pick were sticking out of it.

  I turned around again in a gravel clearing belonging to a fruit and vegetable stand and went back the way I’d come. There was no sign of the cruiser on the side road. It ran straight as a knife for a mile and ducked over a hill.

  Time seemed to have stood still around Paul Starzek’s old trailer. Windblown snow half covered the steps and nothing larger than a squirrel had made tracks in it. Snow fleas speckled the bread-colored stuff frozen around the Dodge Club Cab’s tires, which were dusted with fresh powder from the lake. I drove around the truck and parked behind the trailer, out of sight from the private road. I got out, snicked the door shut, and stood looking and listening. The Cutlass’ motor ticked as it cooled, then fell silent.

  The icicles hanging from the roof of the metal building behind the house hadn’t grown any longer; you need a thaw for that, and the last sluggish drip at the end of the longest bayonet had frozen into a glassy knob the size of a marble. Wind soughed in the pines, a haunted sound. My ears numbed. My nose dripped. My leg hurt. I got the bolt cutters out of the trunk and went to work.

  TEN

  Right away I k
new I wasn’t going to need them.

  It wasn’t premonition, but detective’s instinct; the kind judges throw out but everyone in real law enforcement from the prosecutor’s office on down takes to the bank, with manacles and Miranda and a cautiously worded statement to the press—and, with some artful exaggeration, to a request for a search warrant for the judge who issued it to throw out in open court.

  The basis was the chevron tread of a tire belonging to a tractor or some other piece of heavy equipment, clearly visible in the flat, recently swept surface of the hard frost coating the drive leading from Old Carriage Lane to the Church of the Freshwater Sea. I hadn’t seen it from the car, but when I started across the no-man’s-land between the house trailer and the pole barn behind it, the long-handled bolt cutters swinging from my right hand in time with the cane in my left, I felt something crunch beneath my foot and looked down at the intaglio engraving left by the space between two rectangles of rubber set at right angles and knew the movers had been at work. When I got to the door, the combination padlock that had barred me on my last visit lay, sheared through and crooked, in the fan-shaped depression left by the door when someone had opened it against the snow that had drifted to the sill. The lock had been pressed into the snow by a boot with a tread not unlike the tire’s. The door was secured only by the hasp, swung by an afterthought into place with the naked loop poking through the slot.

  I placed my foot inside the bootprint. I felt like a tourist at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. The depression stuck out a full two inches all around. I don’t take ballet shoes myself. If the rest of him ran true to his shoe size, he was an animal, and probably no one’s ideal partner for the science fair. He would be paid in cash, with a bonus to forget what he didn’t know in the first place: a state senator in the making.

  Not wanting to make any more noise than I already had, I leaned down and laid the bolt cutters gently on the ground. The cane was a better weapon, and as usual I’d left my gun in the car when I most needed it. Breaking and entering and armed invasion were mutually exclusive crimes in my view. It was a definite flaw.

  But I was pretty sure a gun wasn’t needed, or the equipment would still be there. I knew when I pulled open the door, the hinges grating against days of regular disuse, that I was as alone as an igloo on a floe in the Arctic Sea. The interior of the metal barn, open to the rafters where birds’ nests waited glumly for tenants, yawned at me, dank and cold and deserted. Anyone waiting for me, crouched behind the trestle-table altar or under the blue plastic tarp that lay in a crumple in the aisle between the rows of folding metal chairs, was frozen as stiff as—well, something frozen and stiff. I’d run out of brute poetry.

  The naked store mannequin maintained its vigil behind the wooden lectern, its vinyl smile stuck in its sartorial smirk. It reminded me a little of Barry Stackpole, aged and ageless and cynical to the end. The arrows sticking out from it at all angles were props after all. The two wood burners that kept Paul Starzek from shivering through his fire-breathing sermons and his parishioners from blowing on their hands instead of clasping them in prayer were gray and cold, the coarse ash in their bellies like the remains of sacrifices in a pagan temple as old as Emperor Diocletian, whoever he may have been. Just another profile on a coin.

  Twenty-four hours ago, I’d peered through cupped hands at the window at a bulked tarp covering all manner of storage of no interest to me—bags of rock salt, maybe, as ancient Vicki of Vic’s Super Senter had suggested. The tarp was still there, but the bulk had gone. I reached down, took hold of a corner, and threw it into a heap. I looked at a snow shovel, a long-handled spade, a leaf rake with twigs and pieces of calcined leaves caught in the tines.

  There was a tented corner in the tarp opposite the one I’d tossed aside, nearly my own height. It might have been covering a string trimmer or some other upright implement. I stepped across the abandoned tools, gathering up folds of plastic as I went, and twitched it aside. I jumped back, fisting the cane. I stood face to face with a naked man.

  It was a face twisted in anguish, with mouth agape and eyes turned upward, as if anticipating reinforcements from the rafters. It was as gray as frozen liver, but uncannily alive. Two arrows pierced it from opposite angles, one through the brow, the other the tender skin beneath the corner of its jaw; they were perfectly in line, and at first I thought it was one long shaft transfixing the brain. A dozen or more arrows stuck out randomly from its chest, the rib cage on both sides, its sternum, left thigh, and right calf, the one in the thigh having tunneled clear through the fascia muscle and stuck out on both sides. The figure’s arms were clasped behind its back, as if fastened with manacles or a rope. It wasn’t quite naked. A twist of plain cloth encircled the pelvic area in the modest tradition of the otherwise bold Renaissance. The statue appeared to be a faithful copy of the figure in the Andrea Mantegna print framed on the wall above Paul Starzek’s sofa, with one or two interpretations added. The expression on the face reflected a good deal more of the agony of the situation. Whoever had fashioned it understood pain, and not by rumor.

  I reached out and touched the figure’s right pectoral. It was smooth as glass and cold, but not quite as cold as ice. Marble has its own source of heat, as the sculptors claim. It was beautiful work, more lifelike than a cadaver, yet somehow just as corporeal. You don’t find that kind of craftsmanship at Pottery Barn.

  What a cheap plastic dummy was doing standing in for St. Sebastian while the real thing stood under wraps joined the long list of questions I needed to ask Dr. Starzek.

  I cleared more floor space and walked around in a circle. The floor was a concrete slab, treated and coated with a polyurethane finish in a honey shade with a satin sheen. It wore a fine coat of dust everywhere but where feet had tracked through and a vaguely rectangular expanse of clean floor. Something large and square had lain there until recently. The shape corresponded roughly to what I’d seen through the window the first time. Whatever it was, it held more value for whoever had removed it than the marble statue. I don’t know much about art, but I know about money. Someone had paid thousands to carve that slab into a saint. Even the arrows and loincloth had been shaped from the stone.

  A mouse scampered the length of a rafter overhead. It was the owner of the only other heartbeat in the place.

  The house of worship held nothing more for me. I’d fallen out of the fold years ago, in a jungle God had rented out, and just regarding the figure Starzek’s congregation had chosen for its conduit reminded me of all the places I’d been poked and punctured in the course of my work. I had the stigmata without the beatification. Starzek was the man I wanted to see, and the pastor had left the building. Also the house. Nothing had disturbed the snow around it since I’d been there last.

  I went outside where the cold settled a little less close to the bone and leaned on my cane and smoked. A snowmobile whined like an asthmatic mosquito from the direction of the lake, oblivious to the fishermen and the fish it was scaring away. Fortunately for the murder statistics, winter anglers are a gentle lot. The noise Dopplered away. It was just me and the pines and the first translucent flake from the heavy black udders of the clouds, turning and sailing on the currents like a moth that refused to land.

  My gaze settled on the firewood stacked against the barn’s outside wall. It was a standard cord, eight feet long and four high, frosted like a cake on top with a heap of snow that had slid off the edge of the roof. The impact had dislodged several chunks from one end, sending them rolling into a pile. I went over and pushed at the stack with one hand. It swayed and another chunk came loose atop the collapsed end and tumbled down among the others.

  I didn’t like that by half. People who are practiced at stacking wood make a better job of it, to get the most into the least space and keep it from falling apart before the first gust. They have competitions where you need a half stick of dynamite to break loose the runners-up. Paul Starzek didn’t seem the type to compete, but he’d been through too many northern w
inters to slap the dash. I ground the tip of my cane through to the frozen earth, braced myself, and pushed the end of the pile high up with the heel of my good leg. It was an amateur job, all right. The stack canted toward the other end, twisted in the middle, and spilled most of its top three layers into a heap. A three-quarter round of hickory wobbled drunkenly on its square edges and bumped my cane. If I hadn’t been leaning all my weight on it the collision would have swept it out from under me.

  When the avalanche stopped I went over, cleared away the bottom layers to the dirt beneath, brown and flecked with black bark but no snow, and tested it with the cane. The original stack had been erected before the first frost, insulating it from the cold. It was the only patch on the property you could penetrate without a jackhammer.

  I went back inside the church, traded my cane for the long-handled spade, and used it as an alpenstock on my way back to the demolished stack of firewood, the blade ringing every time it struck hard earth. During the next twenty minutes I forgot the cold. Just clearing away the fallen wood had me sweating, my leg throbbing like a flashing red bulb precisely where the bullet had gone in. The dirt was unfrozen but packed hard, compressed by the weight of the firewood, and I hadn’t the leverage to shove the blade in deep with my foot. I took shallow scoops and made slow progress. After five minutes of digging I climbed out of my overcoat and suit coat and flung them down on the ragged pyramid of hickory and chestnut and white birch.

  They hadn’t gone very deep. About two feet down something scraped and a patch of electric blue showed for just a second before the loosened earth slid back down to cover it. I bent over and brushed it away with my hand. The place was rotten with blue plastic tarp. I lifted the shovel to clear away the rest. The blade zinged against something hard underneath the tarp, a sound that made me sick at heart. I tossed aside the shovel, fished out my folding knife, straddled the blue cocoon on my knees, and slitted the plastic from the near end to eight inches. The frozen gray face that stared up at me when I spread the material might have belonged to another marble statue, but it wasn’t lifelike enough for that. It was just dead, with one eye shut and the other not seeing. It seemed to be including me in a private joke.