Stress

by Loren D. Estleman

  “What’s that?”

  “Throw Dexter out. I’m sick of looking at the perverted son of a bitch.”

  That was more than two years ago, and Wolf had almost walked out himself more times than he could count. He had never known anyone to be more caught up in his own orbit than Wilson McCoy. The former Panther—he could only bespoken of as former, because he had had no contact with the rest of that decaying society in all the time Wolf had been with him, or with almost anyone else, for that matter—seemed convinced that every member of every law-enforcement organization in the country was spending every conscious moment on the effort to bring Wilson McCoy to justice. He pored over each issue of the News, Free Press, and the national news magazines Wolf brought him, and when there was no mention of him—which was usually the case—he was certain that a blackout had been declared to cover an all-out campaign to pry him loose from his safe house. At first Wolf thought him paranoid. In time he realized Wilson was far less afraid of being caught than he was of being forgotten, and that he had constructed the fantasy of The United States v. Wilson McCoy out of his own superinflated, easily torn ego. And as Wolf watched this sworn enemy of the white conservative establishment assembling his meager press clippings like some half-remembered starlet, he knew, ahead of all the pundits, that the sixties were over.

  Why he had remained loyal to a pile of quivering self-delusion was harder to understand. He supposed it had to do with his lost heritage. Try as he might, the twentieth century had destroyed his ability to believe in the old gods; his exposure to others of his kind, desperately denying the gulf of decades that separated them from the ancient ways, had made him feel alone in a way he had never felt before he went in search of his origins. He had no tribe, no village of his own to look after and to look after him. What he had was Wilson McCoy. It was a poor enough totem, but unlike the legends this one had substance. It didn’t die down with the coals when the sun came up, and it could be depended upon to remain, which was more than could be said about union solidarity. Wilson was there. It didn’t matter that he had no choice. Better to worship the twig caught in the snag than the limb speeding by in the current.

  No, there were no pure races.

  All this fluttered through Wolfs mind as he waited for the public telephone to ring outside the emergency room at Harper Grace Hospital. Standing guard by the instrument, he had fended off two people who wanted to use it. One, an old woman leaning on a cane who had come in a few minutes earlier with an old man whom Wolf took to be her husband, called the Indian a name in a language that might have been Hungarian and hobbled back to her seat. The other, a man about Wolfs age and weight but three inches taller, a heavy lifter by the look of him, had stormed up demanding he surrender the receiver, then shut his mouth when Wolf reached conspicuously into his jeans pocket for the buck knife he carried whenever he left his magnum in the car, and joined the line behind the teenage girl who was using the only other telephone. That was the thing about Detroit: Go for any place where you might be keeping a weapon and the gesture was understood.

  Calling Wilson was a chore the Indian tried to avoid. No lines ran to the condemned building where the wanted man lived and worked, so Wolf had to dial the number of the rib place around the corner and wait more often than not for one of the restaurant’s two fulltime employees to free himself up long enough to go fetch Wilson. Ten minutes was the record. While he was waiting, the Indian slid a sample vial of Brut from the inside pocket of his quilted vest and slapped a third of its contents onto his neck and cheeks. Any time he went too long between applications he smelled fish.

  After eighteen minutes the telephone rang. “I hope to hell this is good,” Wilson said without greeting. “I froze my favorite testicle off getting down here.”

  As if you ever used the son of a bitch, Wolf thought. Aloud he said, “Opal Ogden’s at Harper Grace. Her mother came with her by ambulance an hour ago.”

  “What’s she got, honky’s disease?”

  “Pneumonia, they think. Anyway that’s what I overheard. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself by asking. If they hold her it’ll probably be at Hutzel. That’s the children’s facility here.”

  “She going to croak?”

  “I doubt it.” Actually pneumonia scared the shit out of him. He had seen it carry off relatives and acquaintances in epidemic numbers. The Upper was a severe place, and especially hard on the constitutions of a people given to alcoholism. But the Crownover-Ogden thing was the first real action Wolf had persuaded Wilson to take part in as long as they’d been together. He wasn’t about to discourage him. “I’m thinking this could be a break for us.”

  Wilson said nothing, but Wolf could hear him breathing. He went ahead.

  “By now the Ogden place is screwed down tighter than Fort Knox. Casing the house all over again to see what they’ve done will take another six weeks.”

  “Time enough for ’em to get lazy. We talked about that.”

  “You talked about it. I said at the start we had to do this fast or forget it.”

  “I ain’t in no hurry.”

  “You should be. We don’t know that Piper will hold the merchandise six weeks.”

  “Oh, he’ll hold it. After what happened here a couple weeks back he’ll hold it between his knees.”

  “That razor of yours won’t reach to Pontiac.”

  “You got wheels. There ain’t no FBI paper out on you.”

  “I didn’t hire on for that shit,” Wolf said. “Listen. The stuffs burning a hole in his supplier’s pocket. Once Piper takes possession of the merch he’s going to move it as fast as he can. The longer he sits on it the better his chances of going to Marion on a federal firearms rap.”

  “He won’t stand trial.”

  The Hungarian woman was coming his way, clutching the arm of a hospital security officer. The guard was close to sixty, white-haired, with thick glasses and a belly that hung down over his belt buckle. Wolf turned his back on them, shielding the receiver with his body.

  “You’re not listening,” he said. “I’m saying maybe we won’t have to wait.”

  Wilson sucked air, which meant he’d lit a joint.

  “I got ears.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  FRIDAY NIGHT WAS RUSSELL’S NIGHT.

  The rest of the brothers and sisters could have Saturday night: Buy a number at Benny’s Flamingo Barber Shop on Twelfth, pick up a bottle of Ripple at one of the markets with plywood in the windows since ’67, hook a pair of big tits and legs all the way up to her ass on Euclid, groove out to some tenth carbon of Aretha or Little Stevie at the Chit-Chat Lounge, show off that new yellow suit from Didney’s Bottom of the Barrel on Burlingame. Sleep it off all day Sunday and back into the coveralls Monday morning. Live one Saturday to the next till you were too old or too full of clap to work, then sit on your welfare checks at the Shrine of the Black Madonna and bitch about your landlord.

  Not for Russell. He hated crowds, drinking took too long, and sex never went right for him somehow, he always wound up disappointed or disappointing his partner. Fridays were quieter and less congested. He stopped off at home after work, changed from his marina clothes into anew pair of striped jeans with flared legs—no fucking bellbottoms—and a sunset-colored shirt with long collar tabs and four buttons on each cuff. On Twelfth he bought a Chronicle, read it on a bench in Virginia Park until his connection showed, bought five capsules, and with the prospect of a mellow evening warming his insides, went on to Greenleaf’s and finished the newspaper while waiting to be served his ham hocks and rice. The urge was just beginning to claw at his stomach—a pleasant flutter, actually, this early and with the capsules safe in his pocket—when he left the restaurant and stopped to play a little air ball at his favorite basketball court on Clairmount. Kareem, you better watch your ass.

  The streetlamps plinked on as he was leaving. He was starting to get serious cramps. He’d waited a little too long. He stretched out his arms, spread his fingers. Picked u
p the pace.

  He’d left the Bronco at a vacant service station on Chicago, by a rusting pump frozen at twenty-two cents per gallon. It was his favorite street in the area his parents still referred to as the Black Bottom, with its median of well-kept grass and trees on both sides. As he turned the corner, the door of a big Plymouth parked against the curb popped open in front of him. He stopped short, then started around it.

  The man behind the wheel came out fast for his bulk. A vise closed on his wrist and drew it across his middle, pivoting him. His back hit the side of the car hard enough to empty his lungs. Before he could fill them, a thick hard forearm pressed against his throat, shutting off his windpipe. Instantly he was strangling.

  The burst of breath in his face was hot and sour with beer and bad digestion. “Russell, Russell. You shouldn’t run when there’s ice on the street. You could break your fucking neck.”

  He was trying to identify the voice when the hand holding his wrist let go. Before he could react, something blunt drove deep into his belly. The street went red and white. His bladder let go. His knees liquefied and he grasped at the arm across his throat. In his last conscious moment he thought it was the shits what a man would reach out for to keep himself from slipping beneath the surface of his own urine.

  PART THREE

  The Taking of Opal Ogden

  Chapter Seventeen

  AFTER SIX YEARS, JOE PIPER WONDERED WHEN HE would come to think that his house was worth the crap he had gone through to build it.

  For two years after the death of his first wife Maureen, the gun dealer had effectively gone on living in one room of the little house they had shared on Trumbull. Unable to sleep in their old bedroom, he had camped out on the sofa, fully intending to move back in after he had sold or given away their five-piece Joshua Doore bedroom set and donated Maureen’s clothes to the K of C. Only he never got around to it. A chill gripped him every time he passed the uninhabited room on the second floor. When he could no longer bear to climb the stairs, he bought new clothes to replace the ones in their closet. Finally he sold the house and every stick of furniture in it to a well-dressed black real estate agent from Redford. He knew the man was only looking to bring down the housing values in the predominantly Irish neighborhood by renting the place to a black family, after which he would acquire the adjoining properties for a fraction of their former value and sell the lots to the city for parking for nearby Tiger Stadium, but he didn’t care; although he had to stop going to the Shamrock Bar for a while after on of his old neighbors offered to throw a bowl of peanuts into the face of “the nigger-loving bastard” if he attempted to take a seat in the establishment.

  The next year found him relatively contented, renting an apartment in one of the newer complexes on the northwest side and dealing guns and explosives out of a barn he leased in Washtenaw County from one stupid son of a bitch of a German farmer who believed him when he said he sold bottled salsa to Mexican restaurants. Then he met Dolly, nearly half his age and twice as pretty on her worst day as Maureen was on her best, God rest her immortal soul, and almost before he knew it he was getting married again and throwing himself into hock for thirty years on a 2,800-square-foot pile of redwood and fieldstone in a glorified trailer park of a walled subdivision in Pontiac. Or rather the promise of one, because when he laid down his $23,900 deposit there wasn’t but one house in the tract, a model unit complete with Palladian windows, a slate-gray kitchen, and underground sprinklers in the front and back yards.

  By the time the house was finished, four months later than the projected completion date, Joe and Dolly Piper were barely speaking to each other. He had sold most of his school and hospital bonds, a portfolio he’d fondly expected to see him through a comfortable old age, to cover the closing costs at the bank, and having been overcharged, duplicate-billed, double-talked, piggy-backed, raked off, skimmed, scalped, skewered, shilled, and taken to the cleaners on every item from the staircase in the front hall to the porcelain knobs on the closet in the laundry, the lord of the manor decided he had too much conscience ever to go into legitimate enterprise.

  The first jolt was small but irritating. Ceremoniously putting away their first two sacks of groceries in the new house, the Pipers found that none of the cupboard shelves in the kitchen was tall enough to contain a cereal box standing up. By the end of that day, faced with windows that either wouldn’t open or refused to stay up, a door that swung the wrong way so that the person entering the room had to walk around it to operate the wall switch, and an almost studied lack of straight lines and level surfaces anywhere on the premises, the prospect of having to lay their Post Toasties horizontal for the rest of their lives hardly seemed worth mentioning. It was as if a construction firm that had been in business since 1936, and whose reception room walls were papered over with awards and citations, had suddenly and with breathtaking thoroughness come down with advanced senility.

  Flushed, however, with the fever of ownership and a little high on turpentine fumes and the odor of fresh sawdust, the couple had shrugged off each unpleasant discovery. They agreed that in time none of the things would matter.

  They mattered.

  Six years later, as he sat drinking Cutty-and-water in front of some dumbass cop show in the room he called the living room and Dolly insisted on referring to after the brochures as the lounging area, he had only to turn his head a quarter to the left to see the fireplace whose sunken hearth he had specifically requested be raised to create an extra seat, while a full turn to the right would confirm that the blue Mexican tiles Dolly had ordered for the foyer had during the process of installation magically transformed themselves into wall-to-wall carpeting over plywood; and he saw again the curl on the kid contractor’s fuzzy upper lip and heard his bullshit Boston accent as he pointed out that since neither of these details was on the work order, Mr. Piper must have mistaken his intention to discuss them with the act of doing so. The changes would of course be made, but Mr. Piper must understand that he will be charged for the extra labor and material. Mr. Piper was too gentle-mannered, with his new wife at his side, to tell the little prick to invest some of his own labor and shove the material up his pimply Harvard ass. He often thought his sanity, during those next two years of working evenings and weekends to increase business and cover the mortgage payments, depended upon the belief that some of the people who wound up standing in front of the guns he sold were bound to be in construction.

  For all that, the house was a showplace. Joe Piper had to employ all his Irish charm to keep the woman who organized the local home tour from adding the house to the itinerary, and once House &Garden had called. Dolly was disappointed, but she understood the necessity of avoiding attention. Photos and floor plans of houses where the IRS and burglars of the community imagined valuable guns were kept made their jobs a little too easy for the homeowner’s comfort. It was a handsome place to begin with, and Dolly Piper had worked miracles with the interior details. Her husband had never lived in a house to compare with it; but more and more his thoughts went back to that little brick saltbox on Trumbull, with its faded wallpaper and pervading scents of corned beef and cabbage, and the gone past struck him in the chest like a blow from a baseball bat. That house had been one of a group built and owned by Big Jim Dolan, an old-time political boss who believed in keeping his family around him for their protection and his. From its cramped attic to the dugout basement Joe Piper had felt the old fixer’s presence: big-bellied, red-whiskered, stinking of whiskey and cigars, secure in an environment that had remained fundamentally unchanged between County Cork and Detroit, and safer in the three steps that separated him from the street than Joe Piper felt inside his ring of burglar alarms and closed-circuit cameras. It was a world that had vanished with the onset of Prohibition, buried as deeply beneath the rubble of three wars as Troy. Now the house itself was a memory, even its basement filled in and covered with asphalt.

  Change. It seemed to him the world kept on turning, and every time it
turned it leaned on him.

  Immersed in this sour reflection, he jumped when the telephone rang. On TV, the cop in the fedora with a nose that looked like a baboon’s ass was boondocking a big black Bonneville over one of those ball-busting hills in Frisco while Kirk Douglas’s kid chased a dope dealer down an alley filled with dumpsters and the cleanest garbage this side of Beverly Hills. Joe Piper got up and turned off the set, then went over and lifted the receiver.

  “Piper, this is Scott.”

  “I don’t know any Scotts. You got the wrong Piper.” He started to hang up.

  “Scott, you bricklaying son of a mick bitch. Winfield Scott.”

  Joe Piper’s eyes went to the big glossy picture book of the Civil War lying on his glass coffee table, a gift from Homer Angell. Angell, it had turned out, modeled himself after General Winfield Scott, distinguished veteran of every American war from 1812 through Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Like many of Joe Piper’s business contacts, the former militiaman was wary of wiretaps and used the name as a code when identifying himself over the telephone. The gun dealer, who employed a Jap to sweep his house monthly for electronic devices, and who didn’t know General Sherman from General Foods, thought it was a dipshit affectation on the part of a man who he was convinced played with toy soldiers in his bedroom.

  “Okay, Scott. What’s the rumpus?”

  “That salsa I picked up for you is giving me heartburn. When can you come get it?”

  Puzzled, he turned that one over. He was getting old, having to drag himself out of his reverie to remember the shipment of Ingrams he was arranging for Wilson McCoy. Instinctively he stroked his neck. The bandage had come off finally, but a long thin crusty line remained, tracing the path of the former Black Panther’s razor. He wondered what Big Jim would have made of that.