We smoked in the dark. After a while she said, “Karen confides in me. I know what happened between you.”
I said nothing.
“She’s a foolish girl,” she went on. “I told her that. You are like my late husband Michael. I had thought he was the last of the kind.”
“Karen will always do what’s right for her. She’ll marry her med student and have three kids and they’ll all grow up solid. None of them will wind up a bushed P.I. running a one-man show in a depressed area.”
“She would not know a solid man if one fell on her.”
I felt a grin forming. “You’ve been spending too much time with me. Next you’ll be spouting dirty limericks and picking your teeth with a stiletto.”
She made a hoarse sound in her throat. Her cigarette-tip came up and flared, casting orange light over her high cheekbones and thick curved nose.
I read the luminous dial on my watch and got up. “It must be coming on your bedtime. I’ll be missing when Karen comes in to help you.” I put on my hat. “The cops are hanging on to the cross. You should get it back after the inquests on Woldanski and Mayk.”
“I care nothing for it now,” she said. “Michael is alive.”
She asked me to turn on the light on my way out — Karen scolded her for sitting in the dark — and we said good-bye. I stepped out into the early-evening cool. My clothes felt clammy on my frame. I felt the cold dried sweat on my back and under my arms and in the bends of my elbows. The lights of St. Clair Shores glittered like stars fallen from the brushed black sky. There were no blanks as there would be in Poletown, where the lights that had drawn so many pilgrims from the tired Old World had been extinguished by bulldozers and iron balls and men with wrecking bars and sledges.
My crate was parked on the street. I climbed under the wheel and pulled the door shut, but I didn’t start the engine right away. I lit a cigarette and sat there and smoked it and put it out and lit another. After a while a dusty-gold Plymouth rolled past and swung into Martha Evancek’s driveway. The taillights went off and Karen McBride stepped out, wearing her white nurse’s uniform under a light topcoat, and walked up to the door leading into the back half of the duplex and rapped and waited and then went inside without once looking in my direction. Something tiny and bright glinted on the back of her left hand.
In a little while I ground the starter and it caught and I drove home the long way around Hamtramck.
A Biography of Loren D. Estleman
Loren D. Estleman (b. 1952) is the award-winning author of over sixty-five novels, including mysteries and westerns.
Raised in a Michigan farmhouse constructed in 1867, Estleman submitted his first story for publication at the age of fifteen and accumulated 160 rejection letters over the next eight years. Once The Oklahoma Punk was published in 1976, success came quickly, allowing him to quit his day job in 1980 and become a fulltime writer.
Estleman’s most enduring character, Amos Walker, made his first appearance in 1980’s Motor City Blue, and the hardboiled Detroit private eye has been featured in twenty novels since. The fifth Amos Walker novel, Sugartown, won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for best hardcover novel of 1985. Estleman’s most recent Walker novel is Infernal Angels.
Estleman has also won praise for his adventure novels set in the Old West. In 1980, The High Rocks was nominated for a National Book Award, and since then Estleman has featured its hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, in seven more novels, most recently 2010’s The Book of Murdock. Estleman has received awards for many of his standalone westerns, receiving recognition for both his attention to historical detail and the elements of suspense that follow from his background as a mystery author. Journey of the Dead, a story of the man who murdered Billy the Kid, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.
In 1993 Estleman married Deborah Morgan, a fellow mystery author. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Loren D. Estleman in a Davy Crockett ensemble at age three aboard the Straits of Mackinac ferry with his brother, Charles, and father, Leauvett.
Estleman at age five in his kindergarten photograph. He grew up in Dexter, Michigan.
Estleman in his study in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, in the 1980s. The author wrote more than forty books on the manual typewriter he is working on in this image.
Estleman and his family. From left to right: older brother, Charles; mother, Louise; father, Leauvett; and Loren.
Estleman and Deborah Morgan at their wedding in Springdale, Arkansas, on June 19, 1993.
Estleman with actor Barry Corbin at the Western Heritage Awards in Oklahoma City in 1998. The author won Outstanding Western Novel for his book Journey of the Dead.
Loren signing books at Eyecon in St. Louis in 1999. He was the guest of honor.
Estleman and his fellow panelists at Bouchercon in 2000. From left to right: Harper Barnes, John Lutz, Loren D. Estleman, Max Allan Collins, and Stuart M. Kaminsky.
Estleman and his wife, Deborah, signing together while on a tour through Colorado in 2003.
Estleman with his grandson, Dylan Ray Brown, shown here writing an original story on “Papa’s” typewriter at Christmastime in 2005 in Springfield, Missouri.
Estleman with his granddaughter, Lydia Morgan Hopper, as he reads her a bedtime story on New Year’s Eve 2008. Books are among Lydia’s favorite things—and “Papa” is quick to encourage this.
Estleman and his wife, Deborah, with the late Elmer Kelton and his wife, Anne Kelton, in 2008. Estleman is holding his Elmer Kelton Award from the German Association for the Study of the Western.
Estleman in front of the Gas City water tower, which he passed by on many a road trip. After titling one of his novels after the town, Estleman was invited for a visit by the mayor, and in February 2008 he was presented the key to the city.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1984 by Loren D. Estleman
cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
978-1-4532-2052-8
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
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