American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel

by Loren D. Estleman

  I waited in a patch of shadow. When the light goes and there’s no traffic noise, bodies of still water turn into amphitheaters, magnifying a single footstep on loose gravel into an avalanche. I was stuck in that spot as long as they stayed outside the car.

  But I had allies.

  Something went twee in my ear, then stuck a tiny needle into my cheek. I flinched but let it drink its fill and stagger off through the air, full as a tanker and drunk on hemoglobin, the red-blooded American detective kind. When another stung my forehead I reached up and squeezed it between thumb and forefinger, feeling the pop and the wetness of my own blood. There in the reeds they grow them as big as crows, but not as big as in Southeast Asia, and that was never far from my thoughts. The two men in uniform were only old enough to have read about it in school. If I had to wait much longer I’d be lumped all over, but I didn’t think I had that much longer to wait.

  From their direction I heard the first wet smack of a palm on the back of a neck, then another and another. It sounded like two Bavarians dancing.

  “Son of a bitch!” The deputy from the driveway swung open the door on the driver’s side and threw himself into the seat. His partner spiked his cigarette into the grass and joined him a moment later. Doors slammed.

  I gave it another minute, then stepped away from the road into a gap between the tile-and-tar-paper shack and a redwood fence belonging to a converted mobile home two doors from Darius Fuller’s cabin. There I stopped and began a new period of waiting. Out on the lake, the last blush of the sun faded. What light remained lay like bright metal on the water, then began its slide toward the horizon. A bird singing out its boundaries stopped in midmeasure as if a switch had been thrown. Crickets played their kazoos and somewhere in the isthmus of weeds that separated the top half of the figure eight from the bottom a bullfrog gulped. Everything out there was hungry or on the make or both. I was the only thing around without some sort of plan.

  When I could no longer distinguish my nails from the tips of my fingers I started toward the lake. Dew clung to the grass with the consistency of mucilage, soaking through my shoes and socks. It was dark as hell. The moon was new, a black hole punched in a spray of stars, and starlight is a poet’s conceit. After traveling forty billion miles there was barely enough to illuminate themselves.

  But no one is ever in complete darkness where people live. Buttery squares showed among the houses on the far shore, a blue mercury dot atop a tower, a lantern at the end of a dock. My pupils gathered it all in, backlighting trees, structures, the little motorboat lying as still as a toppled idol alongside the Krazy Kat pier behind the shack. I picked my way down the slope that ended at the water, steadying myself with a hand against the pilings, and selected my spot, leaning against the one second to last in the shadow of the warped decking above my head. I folded my arms, crossed my ankles, wanted a cigarette, and took my satisfaction from the craving.

  It might have been fifteen minutes, it might have been five or thirty. I was pretty familiar with the lake’s breathing patterns by then, the plops and slaps and occasional startling gasp of some aquatic mammal coming up for air between dives, a woodchuck or a muskrat, and the new sound was nothing like any of those. It was a long drawn-out note, a climbing chord; the tension spring of a screen door pulled to its limits when the door opened, three feet above my head. A long time seemed to go by before the door bumped back into its frame, guided gently by a hand to avoid a bang. The Luger was in my hand by then. I didn’t remember drawing it.

  Boards creaked overhead. A little spill of dirt and sawdust fell onto my shoulder. I smelled mold.

  The pier swayed under the movement. At least one of the pilings had rotted through at ground level and swung free, like a peg leg. I shifted my weight onto my heels in case the whole affair decided to collapse on top of me.

  Something moved between me and the lake, and as it did so the timbers heeled in that direction, pulled by a sudden change in the balance: a body lowering itself into a boat. Resonant thumps sounded like coconut shells on a hollow plank. The figure let go and the pier righted itself.

  When he bent to remove the canvas tarp from the motor, I recognized his clean profile, the chin a little fuzzier than usual, the pale pompadour of hair looking neglected rather than artfully untended. The loop in his left ear glittered.

  He’d come prepared. Something sloshed and sharp fumes bit the inside of my nostrils. A cap was unscrewed. Liquid gurgled. I waited until he set down the gasoline can and replaced the cap on the tank. When he grasped the handle of the pull rope to start the motor, I stepped from under the pier with the Luger raised just high enough to catch the light. Hilary Bairn saw the movement in the corner of his eye, straightened, and turned my way, reaching across his body with one hand. I tightened my finger on the trigger, but I didn’t fire.

  “Drop ’em or I’ll drill you both!”

  This was a new voice. I turned my head just enough to see the silhouette on the pier above, a figure in a ball cap pointing a handgun down at us across the railing in a two-handed police grip.

  I dropped mine. Bairn raised his hands above his shoulders. They were empty.

  FIFTEEN

  Even in the dark without his sunglasses on, I recognized Fred Loudermilk, the security captain employed by the lake owners’ association, by his body language and the curl of his cap. I remembered his service piece was a deep-bellied Ruger with a fisted grip, good at twice the range, especially with elevation on his side.

  I spread my hands to show they were empty. “Amos Walker, Captain. I was making a citizen’s arrest. Meet Hilary Bairn, your shooter.”

  “Move on up the bank, away from the gun.”

  “What about Bairn?”

  “Move!” He drew back the hammer.

  My skin puckered with a sudden chill. I started up the slope.

  “Okay, Bairn,” Loudermilk said. “Before I change my mind. No, not that. The other.”

  There was a brief, puzzled silence, then the whir of the pull rope.

  It hadn’t been used in a while, or the motor wasn’t primed, because it whirred twice more before compression. The motor coughed, sputtered, and started with a roar. And I knew, as Bairn tipped the propeller overboard and the blades churned the water into foam, that if I took another step or even stayed where I was another second, I was as dead as Ernesto Esmerelda.

  I threw myself hard down on my shoulder and rolled.

  In the direction of least resistance, down the slope and into the lake. The water was cold and boxed my ears when my head went under, but not before I heard the first report, sending a slug through the air where I’d been standing.

  It was a braver act than it sounds, or more accurately a dumber one. It was dark, and I had a better than 50-percent chance of Loudermilk’s missing me entirely or not hitting anything vital, against a nearly 100-percent chance of drowning. I can’t swim. But a gun will make you forget the odds.

  I gulped air just before I hit the water, but it burned my nostrils anyway as I slid down the greasy underwater slope on my belly toward deep water. Something zipped past me, burning a phosphorescent path through the black like a tracer and illuminating the cloud of earth it kicked up when it struck bottom, and I clawed with my hands and feet until the slope fell away and I pushed off into an alien element that figured in all my worst nightmares. My lungs expanded to the bursting point; I let some of the air out in bubbles, executed a somersault in agonizingly slow motion, and stabbed with my feet in the direction I hoped was down. They collided with something solid and I stumbled, but overcame momentum and straightened my knees. My head broke the surface, and when I’d swallowed enough air for it I laughed. The lake was only a little more than five feet deep at that point.

  Something smacked the water a yard away from me, an oar or a beaver tail. Then I heard the shot. I filled my lungs again and did a deep knee bend. Back under, I made circular motions with my arms to keep from losing my balance. There was an undertow, probably par
t of the channel that connected the local chain of lakes, and it pulled at the upper half of my body like a slipstream, trying to snatch me off my feet. If that happened, I might as well have stayed onshore and taken a bullet through the head. I saw myself dragged from the bottom with grapnels, or floating to the surface after three days with a belly full of gas, arms and legs stuck out and bloated, a parade balloon drifting toward a slab at the county seat next to Ernesto Esmerelda’s.

  When I straightened my legs again, more carefully this time so only my eyes and nose pierced the surface, no shot greeted me. I got my bearings from the huge house directly across from Darius Fuller’s and turned slowly, trying not to make a splash or a ripple, toward the shack and the pier Loudermilk was using for a shooting stand. There was light where there hadn’t been before: the glaring twin stars of a pair of headlamps on high beam. I figured the two deputies stationed in front of Fuller’s place had driven their cruiser across the lawn to investigate the shots from next door. I saw Loudermilk’s slender silhouette and one other standing on the pier, the security captain gesturing across the lake. I didn’t know what story he was telling, but when another light sprang on, brighter than the others, and scraped its heavy beam over the surface of the water—the cruiser’s searchlight, swung by the second deputy—I got ready to go under again.

  But the light stopped swinging twenty yards to my left. My ears popped then, and I heard the puttering of an outboard motor evaporating in the distance. The deputy next to Loudermilk leveled both hands across the pier’s railing in a stance I recognized from recent experience, but there was no shot. Hilary Bairn had reached the opposite side of the lake, out of pistol range. I realized then that less than five minutes had passed between the time I rolled down the slope into the water and came up for a second look. It had seemed like I’d been out there half an hour.

  Loudermilk’s story for the deputies was easy to guess: He’d been shooting at a fugitive from justice making his escape in a stolen motorboat. I was a detail to be dealt with later.

  Suddenly he was alone on the pier. An automobile engine whined, reversing for a hasty turn, blue-and-red lights flashed, a siren wound up, a door slammed—the deputy from the pier pulling it shut after the cruiser was in motion. The law was in pursuit. In a little while the lake roads would be crawling with backup.

  I was holding my breath as if I were still underwater. I let it out and gulped fresh air. It dragged in my throat and boomed in my ears, covering whatever noise the frogs and crickets made as they took back the wilderness from the interlopers from civilization. I closed my mouth, breathing through my nose, trying not to move or make a sound that would draw attention to where I was crouched to my chin in Black Squirrel Lake, because Fred Loudermilk remained at the end of the pier, leaning motionless against the railing, peering out over the water. I was the crack at the point of pressure that could bring his story down in pieces, and there was nothing now to keep him from patching it up.

  I don’t know how long I waited. I’d lost all sense of time, also sensation in my limbs. I wondered how cold the water had to be for hypothermia to set in. I’d heard it didn’t have as much to do with the actual temperature as with the length of time of exposure. When at long, long last Loudermilk pushed himself away from the railing, hesitated with his gun drawn, then turned and walked back in the direction of the shack where Bairn had been hiding, I had to concentrate all my will into my lower muscles to get them to move, then began the long, long wade back to shore.

  SIXTEEN

  When the water had receded to my waist I adjusted my course, away from the pier and across the front of Darius Fuller’s cabin toward a seawall built of concrete blocks and driftwood to keep the lake from flooding the homely little house on the other side when it rose in the spring. It looked uninhabited. Except in the dead of winter, there’s nothing more deserted than a vacation community the week before the weekend of Independence Day. For a few minutes, waterlogged and aching all over from cold and muscles held too long at tension, I sat on the damp earth with my back to the seawall, waiting for my heart to slow to a sprint. Then I got up and climbed the incline toward the road, putting the house between me and Fuller’s place. It didn’t seem likely that Loudermilk would still be staking it out, but on the other hand I hadn’t heard him start up his Jeep and pull away. Then again, I hadn’t heard it coming when I set my trap for Bairn, so he might have parked somewhere else and come in on foot. I didn’t hold the patent on that.

  So apart from the fact that I didn’t know why he’d kill me to help Hilary Bairn get away, I didn’t know where the security captain was, or what tree he might jump out from behind to finish the job.

  A sheriff’s cruiser swept down the road, siren off but its spotlight swiveling. I ducked it, a suspicious person dripping wet, and it swept on, dragging a train of dust. Not long after came a chain of civilian cars. The dinner hour was over, the patrons of the Wooden Duck Bar and the Chain O’ Lakes Diner were headed home to their families. A few of the cars slowed as they passed Darius Fuller’s cabin; the story of the body in the car and the shooting behind the house next door would have spread around the lake by now. That was the difference between country and city. In Detroit, people sped past crime scenes all the time without a second look.

  The last vehicle passed and the neighborhood got quiet again. I let it, then started again for the road.

  I was passing a tall cedar when something hit the ground with a thump at the base, standing every skin cell I owned on end. I leapt back—and saw something black and glistening and no longer than my foot thump through the grass in the collateral light of a latecoming vehicle accelerating to catch up with the others. Black squirrels are genetic freaks, not really a breed, rarely seen in the Great Lakes and almost never anywhere else, and seeing one is supposed to be good luck; but if they were common enough where I was to have a lake named after them, I wasn’t putting any store in it.

  I crossed the road without any more incident and turned toward the little commercial strip, barren-looking now with fewer cars in front, with a gap of darkness between the bar and the diner where the daytime businesses had turned out their lights. On the other side of the road, both the cabin and the tar-paper shack remained dark. The deputies hadn’t returned from their search for Bairn on the other side of the lake. That was no surprise. Loudermilk had taken just long enough to explain the situation to give him time to beach the motorboat and lose himself in the copses and fields and acres of trailer parks beyond.

  Country music, the old-time variety, twanged and thumped through the walls of the Wooden Duck, where the diehards would still be sitting huddled over their bottles and glasses like cavemen protecting their food from one another. Their wired-together pickups and scabrous SUVs were parked in the side lot where I’d left my car. I tore my pocket disentangling the keys from the wet lining and inserted one in the lock.

  “Don’t move.”

  This time the command came in a hoarse guttural, but I recognized the voice and saw Fred Loudermilk’s reflection in the glass on the driver’s side window. The muzzle of his Ruger pointed at the back of my head. He’d remembered my car from before, spotted it in the lot, and waited for me to return to it, around the corner of the building or between parked vehicles.

  I froze in a half stoop with the key in my hand. He stepped forward, tickling the nape of my neck with the big revolver while he slipped his free hand under my arms and moved down toward my waist.

  “Hey, Fred! What happened out at the Fuller place?”

  Hand and weapon came away from me, clothing rustled as the security captain took his gun out of sight and turned to deal with the newcomer from inside the bar. I didn’t pause to look at him. I spun around, struck something with my elbow, and followed through, raking the jagged end of the key across the face under the ball cap. The gun went off, glass shattered. I went with my momentum, bodychecking Loudermilk out of my path; then a pair of arms as big around as pilings closed around me from behind
and I felt hot breath on my cheek and smelled beer and pork rinds. In every bar there is at least one good samaritan willing to step forward and give local authority a hand. This time he just had to be the first one on the spot.

  A pair of hands built for wrapping around glass mugs clamped under my solar plexus and squeezed. I lifted my knee to my chin and slammed my heel down on an instep. The man blew out a fresh blast of fried pig and ferment and broke his grip. I took off running. There was no time to unlock the car and start the motor. My only chance was the lake, always the lake.

  The Ruger barked again as I cleared the road. Gravel skittered, a piece stung my ankle. I thought it was a bullet. I kept moving, aiming again for the deep shadow between Fuller’s cabin and the shack next door. I didn’t know what excuse Loudermilk had given his helpful friend or if he’d tabled that for later. I’d gotten away from him twice, and if I made it this time he would be the one who had to run. You can always think up a plausible story once you’ve taken out the only witness against it.

  On the slope my feet went out from under me and I rolled again, but this time I braked myself with a foot partway down and threw myself sideways, sliding into home plate under the old pier that belonged to the shack, where I’d been standing the first time Loudermilk drew down on me. There I rose into a crouch, breathing too heavily to listen for footsteps closing in, and scraped at the bare earth with my foot, then fell down again on my hands and knees and groped. If I lived through this it would pay to drop a dollar on a key-chain flashlight.

  Boards creaked above me. Dirt and sawdust hissed down from the cracks between. I was back where I’d started.