Desperate Detroit and Stories of Other Dire Places

by Loren Estleman

  “That’s George’s shank, all right,” said the black man. “He carries it open when he has to walk more’n a block to his car. He’s almost as scared of muggers as he is of guns.”

  The sandy man slapped Iiko’s face. She remained unmoving. She could feel the hot imprint of his palm on her cheek.

  “One more time before we disturb the peace, Dragon Lady. Where’s George Myrtle?”

  She turned and went through the door behind the counter. The two men followed.

  In the massage room the sandy man felt behind Mr. Ten Fifty-Five’s ear, then said, “Deader’n Old Yeller.”

  “I don’t see no marks,” Leon said.

  “Of course not. Look at him. He as good as squiffed himself the day he topped two forty and started taking elevators instead of climbing the stairs. I bet he never said no to a pork chop in his life. Check out his clothes.”

  Leon returned the big gun to a holster under his left arm and quickly turned out all the pockets of the coat and trousers, then with a grunt held the coat upside down and showed his companion the place where the lining had been pulled loose.

  The sandy man looked at Iiko. She saw something in his pale eyes that she remembered from the day her brother was killed.

  “This ain’t turning out like I figured,” the sandy man said. “I was looking forward to watching Leon bat around that tub of guts till he told us what he done with them hot rocks. I sure don’t enjoy watching him do that to a woman. Especially not to a pretty little China doll like you. How’s about sparing me that unpleasantness and telling me what you did with the merch?”

  “Not know merch,” she said truthfully.

  Leon started toward her. The sandy man stopped him with a hand. He was still looking at Iiko.

  “You got more of these rooms?” he asked.

  After a moment she nodded and stepped in the direction of the curtain over the doorway. The black man’s bulk blocked that path.

  “Search the rest of the place, Leon. I’ll take care of this.”

  “Sure?”

  “Sure.”

  Leon went out. Iiko led the sandy man through the curtains and across the narrow hallway. This room was larger, although still small. A forest of bottles containing scented oils stood on a rack beside the massage table. The sandy man seized her arm and spun her around. They were close now, and the light in his eyes had changed. She could smell his aftershave, sticky and sharp.

  “You’re sure a nice little piece for a slant. I bet old George had some times with you. Especially at the end. It’s gonna take the undertaker a week to pry that grin off his face.”

  Iiko didn’t struggle.

  The sandy man said, “I could use a little rub myself. You rub me, I rub you. What do you say? Then we’ll talk.”

  After a moment she nodded. “Take off clothes.”

  “You first.”

  He let go of her and stepped back, his small, hard fists dangling at his sides. He watched her unbutton and peel off the smock. Without hesitating, she undid her halter top and stepped out of her shorts. She wore no underthings. She knew her body was good, firm and well-proportioned for her small frame. She could see in his eyes he approved.

  He took a long breath and let it out. Then he took off his shiny black coat. He hung his suit carefully on the wooden hanger on the wall peg, folded his shirt, and put it on the seat of the chair. His ribs showed, but his pale, naked arms and legs were sinewy, the limbs of a runner.

  He saw that she saw. “I work out. I ain’t going to do you no favor like George and clock out on the table.”

  She said nothing. He stretched out on his stomach on the padded table. “No oil,” he said. “I don’t want to ruin my clothes. Just powder.”

  She reached for the can of talcum. While her back was turned to him, she laid down the folding knife she had removed from the sandy man’s pocket while he was holding her, poking it behind a row of bottles.

  She sprinkled the powder on his back, set down the can, and worked her hands along his spine and scapula. His muscles jumped and twitched beneath her palms, not at all like the loose, unresisting flesh of Mr. Ten Fifty-Five. She had the impression the sandy man was poised to leap off the table at the first sign of suspicious behavior. She heard glass breaking in another part of the building as Leon continued his search for the blue stones.

  Iiko was a skilled masseuse. Unlike some of her fellow employees, who merely went through the motions until the big moment when they asked the customers to turn over, Iiko had been trained by a licensed massage therapist. She flattered herself that she still managed to give satisfaction even under the strictures of probation. Gradually she felt the sandy man’s body relax beneath her expert hands.

  To maintain contact, she kept one palm on his lower spine while with the other she retrieved the knife from its hiding place on the rack of bottles, pried it open with her teeth, and with one swift underhand motion jammed the blade into his back as far as it would go and dragged it around his right kidney as if she were coring an apple. The sandy man made very little noise dying.

  When the body had ceased to shudder, she dressed and left the room. She’d dropped the knife; she’d come to regret that. The sound of a heavy piece of furniture scraping across a wooden floor told her that Leon was moving the desk in Mr. Shigeta’s office. The way to the front door and out led directly past that room; she did not want to take the chance of running into the black man as he came out. She let herself into the Mystic Arts Bookshop by way of the fire door in the wall that separated the two establishments.

  The shop had been closed for hours. She groped her way through darkness to the front door but found that exit barred by a deadbolt lock that required a key. The same was true of the back door. An ornamental grid sealed the windows. For a moment Iiko stood still and waited for her thoughts to settle. There was a telephone on the counter, she knew; but that must wait. However much time she’d bought must be invested in action. It would not be long before Leon discovered the sandy man’s body, and then he would find the fire door. The lock was on the massage parlor side.

  She switched on a light. Tall racks of musty-smelling books divided the room into narrow aisles. She removed a heavy dictionary from the reference section, carried it to the common wall, and set the book on the floor in front of the steel door. She repeated the procedure with another large book and then another. At the end of ten minutes she had erected a formidable barrier. Then she lifted the telephone.

  She jumped when the thumb latch went down, stood and backed away from instinct when the door moved a fraction of an inch and stopped, impeded by the stacked books. She dialed 911, and when the operator asked what was her emergency, she laid the receiver on its side facing the fire door.

  Just then Leon pushed the door hard. Two of the stacks fell, creating an avalanche. A pause, and then the black man gave a lunge. More books tumbled, but now the pile was wedged between the door and a metal rack weighted down with scores of books. It would not budge another inch.

  Iiko switched off the light. A bank of deep shadow appeared on the side of the fire door nearest the latch, and she slipped into it noiselessly. She was just inches away from the black man. He’d worked up a sweat searching the Mikado for the missing stones and wrestling with the door; she could smell the clean sharp sting of it.

  Nothing stirred in the bookshop. She heard the black man’s heavy breathing as he paused to gather strength, heard the buzzing queries of the 911 operator coming through the earpiece of the telephone a dozen steps away.

  With an explosive grunt, Leon threw all his weight against the door. The pile of books crumpled against the base of the rack, the covers bending.

  Another pause, this one shorter. Two hundred pounds of solid muscle struck the door with the force of a battering ram. The rack teetered, tilted, hung at a twenty-degree angle for an impossible length of time; then it toppled. Books plummeted from its shelves; steel struck the floor with a bang that shook the building. To the operator l
istening at police headquarters it must have sounded like an artillery barrage. Leon thrust his arm and shoulder through the gap. The big silver gun made the arm look ridiculously long. His entire body seemed to swell with the effort to squeeze past the edge of the door. Now would have been a good time to have that knife Iiko had left behind, but her life had taught her that regrets were time wasted for a life that was already short. He grunted again, and the noise turned into a howl of triumph as he stumbled into the bookshop.

  But his eyes were unaccustomed to the darkness, and he set his foot on a spilled stack of books that turned under his weight. He sprawled headlong across the pile.

  The opening into the massage parlor was more than wide enough for Iiko. She darted through, and before Leon could get to his feet, she seized the door handle and yanked it shut behind her, flicking the lock button with her thumb.

  In the next minute it didn’t matter that the 911 operator could hear the black man pounding the steel door with his fists. The air was shrill with sirens, red and blue strobes throbbed through the windows of the Mikado. Gravel pelted the side of the building as police cruisers skidded around the corner into the parking lot of the Mystic Arts.

  Iiko did not pay much attention to the bullhorn-distorted demands for surrender next door, or even the rattle of gunfire when Leon, exhausted and confused by the turn of events since he and the sandy man had entered the Mikado, burst a lock and plunged out into the searchlights with the big silver gun in his hand. She was busy with the narrow metal dustpan she used to clean out the brazier in the sauna, sifting through the smoldering bits of charcoal in the bottom. The stones were covered with soot and difficult to distinguish from the coals, but when she washed them in the sink they shone with the same icy blueness that had caught her eye in the massage room.

  The glowing coals had burned away the green cloth bag as she’d known they would. She wrapped the stones carefully in a flannel facecloth, put the bundle in the side pocket of the cloth coat she drew on over her smock, and started toward the front door. Then she remembered the fifty-two dollars the sandy man had taken from her and put in the pocket of his shiny black suit.

  The sandy man was as she’d left him, naked and dead, only paler than before. She thrust the money into her other side pocket and went out.

  Waiting at the corner for the bus, Iiko thought she would take the stones to the pawnshop man who bought the jewelry and gold money clips she managed from time to time to take from the clothing of her customers. The pawnshop man knew many people and had always dealt with her honestly. She hoped the stones would sell for enough to settle some of Uncle Trinh’s doctors’ bills.

  How’s My Driving?

  My dad would have liked this one, I think; he drove a big rig twenty years and belonged to Teamsters Local 299 in Detroit, when Jimmy Hoffa ran it before stepping up to assume the national presidency. If you disparaged Jimmy in front of my old man, you’d have lived to regret it.

  • • •

  The truck stop was lit up like a Hollywood movie premiere, an oval of incandescence in an undeveloped landscape where a county road ducked under the interstate. I parked my rig in the football field–sized lot and went into the diner, a little unsteady on my pins. I’d been stuck for an hour in a snarl caused by someone’s broken axle and a thousand cars slowing down to gape at it, and I’d hit the flask a few times to flatten my nerves. If I missed my contact tonight it would be another week before he came back the other direction.

  Brooks & Dunn were whining on the retro-look juke as I took a stool at the end of the counter. Most of the other customers were seated in booths. I counted eleven, shoveling out their plates and blowing steam off their thick mugs. It was late and there was a lull between early escapees from the traffic jam and the next batch backed up at the scales. The waitress, a tired-looking blonde of forty or so, came over with a clean mug and a carafe. In those places they put coffee in front of you the way they do a glass of water in others.

  I nodded at the question on her face and watched her pour. “I bet you hate these slow times,” I said.

  She was silent for a moment, looking at me, and I knew I was being sized up for a pickup artist or just friendly. “I don’t know which is worse,” she said then, “this or the rush. When it’s on I need six hands to keep up and when it isn’t I don’t know what to do with the two I’ve got.”

  “My old man said he’d rather work than wait.” I sipped. She made a pretty good pot. There’s a trick to brewing strong coffee without making it bitter.

  “He a trucker too?”

  “He was a hood. They’ve got him doing ninety-nine years and a day in Joliet for murder.”

  “Well, there’s a conversation starter I don’t hear every night.” But I could tell she didn’t believe me.

  I didn’t try to set her straight. The whiskey had loosened me up too much. I needed to put something on top of it. “You serve breakfast all the time?”

  She said sure, it’s a truck stop, and I ordered scrambled and a ham steak. She gave it to the cook through the pass-through to the kitchen without writing it down and left the counter to fresh the other customers’ coffee. When she got back she served me and refilled my cup. She watched me eat.

  “You seem pretty well-adjusted for the son of a convict.”

  “I was grown when he went in,” I said, chewing. “It wasn’t his first time, though. He did two separate bits for manslaughter on plea deals. Cops figured him for at least fifteen, but they only got him good on the last one.”

  She hoisted her eyebrows. “He was a serial killer?”

  “Hell, no. Serial killers are loonies who slept with their mothers. He was a pro.”

  “A hit man? Like for the mob?”

  “Most of the time. Sometimes he freelanced, but you can get jammed up working for civilians. I wouldn’t touch one of those.” I realized what I’d said and changed the subject in a hurry. “Got any more hash browns?”

  She put in the order. A trucker came in, one of the sloppy ones with a belly and tobacco stains in the corners of his mouth, and sat down at the other end of the counter. She ordered him a burger and a Coke and came back with the hash browns. “You’ve got a real line of crap, but it’s one I never heard. So how’d the cops trip him up?”

  “Circumstantial evidence. He ran a bar in Jersey, and guys kept going in and never coming out. His lawyer objected, but the judge was a hardcase and allowed it in. There was some other stuff, but the past history’s what clinched it for the jury.” I poured ketchup on the potatoes. “That was his mistake, always operating in the same place. The best way to avoid drawing suspicion is to move around a lot: one hit in Buffalo, the next in Kansas City, another in Seattle. Get yourself a front that involves plenty of travel.”

  “Like truck driving.”

  I took a long draft of coffee. I was going to have to change my brand of booze. The one I drank talked and talked.

  “Sure. Or sales. The bigger the territory, the less chance of the cops getting together and comparing notes. Anyway, that’s how I’d do it.”

  “Trucking’s better,” she said. “No one looks twice. You all run to the same type.”

  I turned my head to look at Big Belly waiting for his hamburger. Then I grinned at her.

  “Okay,” she said, “two types. One looks like a pro wrestler gone to seed, the other like Randy Travis. The point is there’s a lot of both. Traveling salesmen are about extinct. You notice the ones that are left.” She folded her arms and leaned them on the counter. There were circles under her eyes and she was older than I liked them in general, but she had good cheekbones and serious eyes. I’d had my fill of the playful kind. “How do you work it? Do they call you or do you check in?”

  Just then the cook set the burger and a plate of slimy fries on the sill. She delivered them without comment and took up the same position at my end, arms folded on the counter.

  I pushed away my plates, unrolled the pack from my sleeve, and held it up. A NO SMOKIN
G sign hung in plain sight on the wall behind her, but she shrugged. I got out two, gave her one, and lit them both. “If I went in for that work,” I said, blowing smoke, “I’d have them call that eight-hundred number on the back of my truck. You know the one.”

  She nodded. “‘How’s My Driving?’ with the number to call and complain. I can’t remember the last time I saw a truck that didn’t have it.”

  “That’s what’s beautiful about it. I’d have it forwarded to my cell. If I cut someone off in traffic and he called, I’d tell him I’d look into it, blow him off, like I’m a dispatcher. The other kind, the paying kind, if the cops trace it I can always say it was a wrong number. If there were no complications I’d adjust my route and take care of business.”

  “Pretty smart.”

  “Smarter than my old man, anyway. Smart enough not to go in for that line of work.”

  She straightened up and put out her cigarette in what was left of my eggs. “I thought so. Just another pickup. The trouble with you guys is you’ve seen Bonnie and Clyde one too many times. You think every girl who slings hash is just waiting for her chance to hook up with some road-show Jesse James.”

  “Badlands, actually. But you’ve got me pegged.”

  She figured my bill, slapped it on the counter, and left to bus tables. I finished my cigarette and paid, leaving fifteen percent. I wanted to leave more, but I’d done too much already to make her remember me. I went back out to my rig.

  It’s a nice one, a secondhand Freightliner with an orange tractor and a shiny silver trailer; when new it had set someone back the price of a house on the beach. In the sleeping quarters behind the seat I switched on the light, went over my notes one more time and looked at the driver’s license photo blowup and telephoto candids once again for luck, then fed them to the cross-shredder I’d added to the standard equipment. I looked at my watch. I had better than an hour to kill. His company had him on a tight schedule, and he couldn’t afford to lose another job. The feds had told him he had no more coming if he expected any more help from them.