Stress

by Loren D. Estleman

  Which of course was what the old ones up North dismissed as making dreams. He was tied to Wilson, if for no other reason than that a man who wasn’t tied to something risked having his spirit float away.

  Opal’s condition was a good omen. Whether because of Greek medicine or the healing properties of time and her own youth, the little girl had improved steadily since Mary Margaret Whitehorn’s visit, sleeping comfortably when she slept and from fatigue alone, and asking questions nonstop when she was awake: “Who are you?” I’m a friend of your mother’s; she asked me to look after you while she’s busy. “Are you really an Indian?” Yes, I’m an Ottawa brave. I’d show you my bow and arrows, only I loaned them to a neighbor. “Did you see Jeremiah Johnson? You look like the Indian in that, the one at the end. Can I have something to eat?”

  That one came up a lot. He hadn’t realized a small child could put away so much food. Fortunately, he’d laid in a sufficient supply of kid-pleasing dishes, franks and beans and all kinds of canned fruit and puddings, and there was plenty of propane in the tank attached to the little four-burner stove. It beat all hell out of forcing Crations between stubborn young lips, as he assumed most kidnappers did. He held that fifty-thousand-dollar packages should be treated with some care. Anyway he wasn’t capable of burying a child alive or binding and gagging it and locking it in a dark closet, or committing any of the other excesses that had given the simple practice of person-stealing for profit such a bad reputation going back to the Lindbergh case.

  She could identify him, of course. He didn’t dwell on that. The die was cast, had been when his capital-raising scheme had shifted from robbery to ransom, and his part in it from supernumerary to major player. He’d been lost so long, wandering between worlds like the slain warrior in the old legends whose eyes had been poked out by his enemies after death, and now he had found his place. If that meant a lengthy prison sentence, he felt he could face it as a man who had made his choice and seen it through. This aimless meandering from one pale cause to the next; that was confinement of the crudest sort.

  His only fear—and it gnawed at him—was that he would be interrupted before the thing was finished.

  It was dark outside. Nearly forty-eight hours had passed since he’d taken the girl; time enough even by Wilson’s schedule for her parents to submit readily to the instructions the pair had worked out. In his pocket was a scrap of paper containing the Ogdens’ unlisted telephone number, courtesy of Kindu Nampula’s caterer girlfriend. He sure didn’t miss Kindu. The man was an ambulatory volcano, even less predictable in his moods than Wilson. You never knew who he was going to erupt all over or what would set him off.

  Opal was sound asleep. Noiselessly, Wolf slipped on his quilted vest and pulled out one of the trailer’s built-in storage drawers, peeling back his shirts and underwear to expose the big nickel-plated .357 magnum Wilson had given him. That had been a special moment, although the former Panther had tried to play it down by saying that he was sick of seeing the Indian run around half-naked. The gift meant that Wilson, who trusted no one, trusted Wolf. The Indian checked all the chambers and slid the revolver down inside the waistband of his jeans, shifting the walnut grip so that the vest concealed it. The metal felt cold through the thin cotton of his undershorts.

  With one hand on the doorknob he stole another look at the six-year-old. She’d lost a lot of strength during her illness and slept hard, snoring a little, like a puppy.

  In the old times, Wolf had read, braves preparing for battle stripped down so their wounds would bleed clean; but the braves of old never did battle in winter. Certainly not in winter in Michigan. Anyway, he was just going out to make a telephone call.

  “How sure are you of your man on the roof?” Riordan asked in a low voice. There was a stiff, freezing wind and he had to bring his lips almost to Inspector Boyer’s ear to keep his words from being snatched away.

  The sheriff’s inspector, a red-faced walrus in winter uniform with a pile collar and Tibetan-style cap, simply shouted over the wind, which made Riordan wince, although he was pretty sure nothing could be heard inside the trailer. “He’s been in this situation a hundred times. He won’t fire until he has a clear target.”

  “Just so he understands ‘clear’ doesn’t mean pacing past the window. A thirty-thirty can pass straight through his target and bounce around inside a metal box like that from now till Sunday.”

  “We don’t even know the girl’s in there with him.”

  “We don’t know she isn’t.”

  They were silent for a little, watching the restless silhouette moving in the window. Riordan and the other agents, wearing long-billed caps and loose windbreakers emblazoned with the FBI legend in bright yellow lest they be shot by their own allies, were crouched behind decorative evergreen bushes and nearby trailers, working their toes and fingers from time to time to keep the ice out of the joints and expelling vapor as thick as hoarfrost. Riordan hoped the guns carried by the borrowed Oakland County sheriff’s deputies and Detroit city police weren’t seizing up in the cold. Bureau firearms were lubricated with a polymer composition laboratory-tested to perform efficiently in temperatures as low as -40 Fahrenheit.

  Squinting against the stinging wind, he peered toward the battered red taxi parked on the edge of the trailer park drive, and was annoyed to see exhaust smoke boiling from the tailpipe. He’d specifically instructed Mapes not to start the engine unless he absolutely had to. But the cab driver was getting on, and the cold probably affected him severely. The FBI man hoped he’d be alert when Porterman showed himself. If he recognized the Indian who’d paid the medicine woman’s fare the previous night, he was to inform the agents by flicking on his left turn indicator briefly. That would be the signal to close in.

  “Who do we have across the street?” Riordan asked the inspector.

  “Two Detroit plainclothesmen. STRESS. The best they’ve got, or so I hear tell.”

  “That’s what I asked for. The farther we get him away from that trailer the better.”

  “What if he doesn’t come out?”

  “Look at the way he’s moving around. He’ll explode if he doesn’t.”

  “If I were running this show I’d punch in the trailer and drag him out by his balls.”

  “That’s one good reason why you’re not running this show.”

  “Suits me fine. You can take the flak when he trickles through your fingers. I’m—”

  Riordan shushed him violently. “He’s coming out.”

  Wolf had to lean into the door to force it open against the wind, and hang on tight to the knob once he had it open to keep the gale from snatching it out of his hand and slamming it against the side of the trailer. Bits of crystallized snow stung his face like ground glass. At the bottom of the steps he tugged his cap down over his ears and turned up the collar of his flannel shirt. The shirt and the down-filled vest might have been made of cheesecloth for all the protection they gave him. The wind chill must have been down around twenty below.

  As he trotted across the drive, a glint of orange caught his eye. A car parked down at the end had its turn signal flashing.

  He picked up his pace, crunching through the frost-killed grass that separated the park from Northwestern Highway, paused to check traffic, and sprinted across both lanes, hands tucked inside his armpits.

  No one was using the telephone at the Shell station, a break. He’d been afraid someone might be calling home to report a delay caused by a rundown battery.

  When he stepped under the light mounted above the telephone, something struck sparks off the instrument’s steel cowling. The rifle report reached him an instant later, warped and drawn out by the wind. Seeing movement in the corner of his eye, he pivoted, drawing the.357, and fired. There was a loud, breathy gasp and a man in a tan coat with epaulets fell forward, skidding on the icy asphalt nearly into his feet.

  A boulder struck Wolf in the chest then. His legs jerked out from under him and he sat down hard, jarring his
tailbone. The big revolver spun away. When he opened his eyes a thickly built man in a long topcoat, hatless, his coarse graying hair moving in the wind, was standing over him with a big .45 army automatic clamped in both fists. The wind caught the smoke twisting out of the muzzle and tore it apart.

  “Guess who, cocksucker,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  FUNNY, THE THINGS YOU THINK OF WHEN YOU’VE GOT someone else’s finger up your ass.

  Leaning forward on the examining table with his drawers down around his knees, Joe Piper considered that the cutaway schematic drawing of the male urinary tract pinned to the bulletin board across from him resembled the map of California.

  But then it occurred to him that after clouting his way down Telegraph Road to the doctor’s office through two-foot drifts in the middle of a raging fucking blizzard, almost anything would.

  Lowell Ridgley, M.D., urologist, Knights of Columbus sergeant-at-arms, and one piss-poor cribbage partner at Joe Piper’s old house in the city back when they’d both had time for such things, skinned off and disposed of his rubber finger and washed his hands in the stainless-steel sink.

  “Well, pull ’em up Joe. What are you waiting for, a tattoo?”

  He pulled them up. “No, and if I was, it wouldn’t be you I’d be getting it from. You got a touch as light as a punch press. So what’s the verdict, do I go ahead and get dressed, or is it just going to slow things up at the autopsy?” He sat down on Ridgley’s stool and tugged on his socks.

  “Oh, you’ll be around for a while yet. How long depends on whether you follow up on what I’ve got to tell you.”

  Standing now, Joe Piper paused in the midst of reaching for his shirt. Jesus, he loved physicals. They beat Vincent Price and the rolly-coaster for scaring the shit out of you.

  Ridgley paged through the sheets on his clipboard. He was a tall skinny fifty or so who appeared to have grown right up through his ring of black hair. “I won’t load you down with numbers. Blood pressure’s high, cholesterol’s high, you could lose forty pounds—”

  “Cholesterol, what the fuck’s cholesterol?”

  “Too much of it’s bad news, trust me. Your stool’s okay. I wish I had your prostate.”

  “What about the chest pain?”

  “No sign of serious heart disease or angina. Your EKG shows some arrhythmia, but you’ve had that since you were a kid. We’ll continue to keep an eye on that. Off the top of my head—”

  “Yeah, that’s what I want for my sixty bucks besides the chance to pee in a cup and cough when you grab my nuts: Your best guess.”

  The physician peered over the tops of his reading glasses. “You want to hear this?”

  Joe Piper flicked a hand and went on buttoning his shirt.

  “The pains are stress-related. You weren’t always this irritable and short-tempered, so I assume you’re under a great deal of pressure. What kind isn’t my business.”

  “It sure as hell is mine.”

  “Medical science is just waking up to stress and its effect on health. It’s inevitable, you can’t duck it; just trying makes it worse. But you can step back from it now and then. When was the last time you took an honest-to-Christ vacation?”

  “That’d be my honeymoon. We spent the weekend in Chicago.”

  “That was it? One weekend!—what, seven or eight years ago?”

  “No, no. Dolly and me ain’t got around to a honeymoon yet. We were too busy building that fucking house. I’m talking about Maureen.”

  Ridgley took off his glasses. “You haven’t left work in twenty years?”

  “Twenty-three, come May. Hey, it takes time to get a successful cement business off the ground. My old man ran it into nothing before he died.”

  “You’re in worse shape than I thought. According to all the actuarial charts, you died in 1960.”

  “Charts, shit.” He stepped into his trousers. “Gimme something for my dough. A prescription.”

  “Have you considered retirement?”

  “Only every day for the past five years. Who’s going to buy me out, you?”

  “Would that be so ridiculous?”

  “Oh, no. ‘Doc Ridgley’s Better Cement.’ Good for what ails your sick foundation. C’mon, Lowell.”

  “Not the business. You still own that place up in Pontiac?”

  “Detroit Manufacturers owns it. They let me live there as long as I keep sending them fifteen hundred a month.” He pulled up his suspenders. Dolly had been after him to switch to a belt; she said he was starting to look like an old potato farmer. He was considering it.

  Ridgley hiked a hip up onto the examining table, scratching his ear with the eraser end of his gold pencil. “The investment group I belong to is looking for residential property in all the northern suburbs. We’re speculating that the white flight from the city that’s been going on since the riots is just the beginning. If Coleman Young wins in November, property values above Eight Mile Road could double the first year. You’ve got a pretty nice lot, as I recall.”

  “Pretty nice mortgage, too. I got twenty-four years left to pay.”

  “We’d pick it up, of course.”

  Joe Piper zipped his coat. “So I get out clean, and you and the orthodontist and the gynecologist and the ear, nose, and throat man make a killing. What’s to stop me from hanging on till the values go up and cutting my own deal without you guys?”

  “Nothing. In fact as your friend I’d recommend it. But as your doctor…” He pointed his pencil at the clipboard on the sink counter.

  “My Uncle Seamus had a saying,” the gun dealer said. “ ‘Don’t sell your sheep to the same guy who tells you wool’s down.’ Suppose after I sign the papers I get a check-up from another doc who says I’m going to live to be a hundred?”

  “That’s a fucking insult.” Ridgley spoke mildly. “You’re free to get a second opinion. I wasn’t thinking real estate when I was going over the results of your examination.”

  “Don’t get your shorts in a wad, Lowell. I got to have some fun. I got a hundred and thirty-two thousand tied up in the place. How much you offering over that?”

  “I’d have to talk to my partners. They’ll want to look at the house and lot.”

  “Yeah, yeah. How much?”

  “Say fifty thousand.”

  His heart thumped against the wall of his chest. “Hell, I can say fifty thousand with my eyes closed.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  Joe Piper turned toward the door. “Now I just got to find a buyer for the business.”

  “I’m sure you will. Everybody needs guns.”

  He turned back.

  Ridgley hoisted his eyebrows toward his bald crown. “We played cribbage. You never could bluff for shit.”

  The drive home took two full hours. The snow had stopped falling, but the wind had increased, blowing the powder into big pillowy drifts. He got stuck twice and had to detour via Square Lake Road and I-75 for a fender-bender involving a Gremlin and a VW Super Beetle on Telegraph.

  The radio was jammed with commercial spots extolling the virtues of cruises to the Bahamas and barefoot strolls along Malibu.

  Unwinding at last in front of the big color console TV in his living room, with his feet propped up in warm dry socks and his hands wrapped around a glass of the Irish whiskey he’d been saving since Christmas, Joe Piper watched the man he knew as Wolf being rolled on a gurney from the box of an EMS van through the wide emergency-room doors at Detroit Receiving Hospital. Although he only got a brief glimpse of the Indian’s face behind an oxygen mask before it was obscured by a gang of paramedics, nurses, and Detroit police officers, the gun dealer immediately recognized the man who had frisked him in McCoy’s quarters on Twelfth Street nearly a month ago.

  The scene shifted abruptly to another emergency room at another hospital, Harper-Hutzel, where a man in FBI cap and windbreaker was shown carrying a little girl wrapped in a yellow blanket into the building from an unmarked sedan.

&nb
sp; “…six-year-old was reported in good condition,” announced Channel Seven newsman Jack Kelly. “The name of the slain Detroit police officer is being withheld pending notification of relatives.”

  The doorbell startled Joe Piper. He got up, turned off the set in the middle of a scene of snowy vehicular mayhem on Outer Drive, and opened the door to Homer Angell.

  The former militiaman filled the doorway in a huge inflated army-issue parka whose hood framed his face in thick fur, dyed olive-drab to match the material. Below this were jodhpurs and black leather boots laced to his knees. His fair skin was flushed cherry-red.

  “Jesus Mary,” said the gun dealer. “I thought you were Bigfoot come to call.”

  “Well, do I come in or what?”

  Joe Piper moved out of the way and closed the door behind his visitor. Standing in the entryway, Angell stripped off his big mittens, the coat, the boots, an insulated Korean War-surplus jacket whose insignia had been removed, and six feet of green knitted scarf wound around his telephone-pole neck. His host hung the garments in the hall closet and left the boots in a puddle of melted snow on the floor. Angell had to duck to clear the living room archway. He looked around with bright blue eyes. “You’re alone?”

  “I was till you came. Dolly’s stuck at her sister’s till the plows get out. How’d you get here, by helicopter? I thought everything was shut down.”

  “The Cherokee eats this stuff up. When was the last time you swept the place?”

  “Sunday. This too hot for the phone?”

  “We’ve been using the same code for too long. Six weeks is my limit.” The big man occupied Joe Piper’s chair. “What’ve you got to drink?”

  He named Scotch and bourbon. He wasn’t going to waste his good Irish on this company.