Sinister Heights

by Loren D. Estleman

  Back in the living room I scratched my temple with the muzzle of the .38. My ankle was throbbing from all the walking and climbing and my neck hurt. With those things on my mind it was a couple of seconds before I realized there was a part of the house I hadn’t searched.

  On my way through the kitchen I used the gun to root among the teeming food boxes, not expecting to find anything except more ants. I was getting too cynical. The black plastic oblong of a key tag lay on the table with a key attached to the ring, its tab insulated in more black plastic. It was right where it would have skidded to a halt when whoever had used it last had tossed it. I scooped it up and opened the door that led down to the garage.

  Something crunched when I put my foot down on the first gridded step. It might have been stale breadcrumbs. I switched on the light in the stairwell. The trail of ants that had started in the kitchen continued across the step, down the side onto the next step, and on from there. One, daunted at first by the obstacle of my foot, pulled itself up over the lip of the sole and trekked across my toe. Others followed in a straight line, as determined as private detectives to move on to the next step. I wondered what the attraction was. I shook them loose and went on down.

  Glendowning’s white Dodge Ram pickup stood a couple of feet over from where I’d first made its acquaintance, encroaching on the half of the garage where his wife had parked when she was living there. I heard a metallic tick and then a few seconds later a little hissing sigh, as of an engine cooling slowly. I grasped the handle on the passenger’s door, tightened my grip on the Smith & Wesson, and swung the door open. Both seats were vacant.

  I glanced inside the box behind the rear window. A full set of fat snow tires on titanium wheels lay on their sides in the bed, one to each corner. The extra weight had enabled the truck to hold the road at 120 on I-75. I let the door drift shut, not quite latching, walked along toward the front, and laid a palm on the hood. The metal was warm. It must have been scalding when he’d parked it after the drive back from Trenton. Without moving from the spot I glanced around the garage, then turned to go back upstairs.

  Something crunched. I’d forgotten about the ants.

  At the base of the stairs they formed again into a straight line on the concrete floor. The line extended beneath the pickup. I walked around the truck and looked at where the line continued on the other side. Glendowning lay in a heap in the center of the floor, wearing the same blue twill shirt and old jeans he’d had on when we met, and which from the look of them he hadn’t had off since. His feet were still shoeless, the socks even blacker than before and worn through at the soles. One arm sprawled across the dark patch where Constance Glendowning’s Chrysler had leaked oil. It wasn’t all oil anymore.

  His head angled down from his shoulder onto the concrete, his one visible blue eye glimmering with a flat shine, like paint on tin. The blue was darker now, the white around the iris no longer bloodshot. The blood had settled somewhere else. His mouth was open.

  I squatted on my heels and felt his throat. The skin was stiff and cold, colder than Iris’s had seemed. I made a face, reached out, lifted the hand at the end of the sprawled arm, and let it go. It lifted all of a piece with the arm and came down with a clunk like dry wood.

  His spiky hair was matted at the temple where the bullet went in. The ants were busy there. The hairs close to the wound were blackened. I leaned close and sniffed. Then I blew out to clear my nostrils.

  “That’s the part I can’t get used to, that burnt stink,” said a voice behind me, ringing in the mostly empty garage. “Like scalding a hog. That’s why I left the farm, and here I am, still scalding hogs. Now slide the gun across the floor and stand up, slow as the mail.”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  Military training is clear in situations like that: Swing and shoot, and dive for cover while you’re jerking the trigger. But it had been a long time since the military, there was a chance I’d be shooting at some kind of cop, along with everything that entailed, and anyway my neck hurt. I laid the revolver on the floor, gave it a push, and rose slowly.

  “Smart boy. Now turn around, not too fast. You ain’t Tonya Harding.”

  I did that, keeping my hands clear of my sides. There was a shallow alcove this side of the pull-up door, with a step-up for storing lawn mowers and garden equipment and creepers for the amateur mechanic. But the untidy human factor had kicked in, and junk had accumulated atop those items: dusty cardboard boxes, broken chairs awaiting repair or more likely some future trash day, odd scraps of lumber, a rusted charcoal grill. There had barely been room for him to stand back around the corner where he wouldn’t be seen until it didn’t matter, and from the looks of the jumble he had cleared it himself.

  He was standing near the edge now, a middle-size slab of casual muscle and serious flab in a corduroy sportcoat, white Oxford shirt buttoned to the neck without a tie, wine-colored slacks, and brown wingtips. The sportcoat was mousy gray, worn smooth at the elbows, and the scoop neck of a white undershirt showed through the cheap shirt. The slacks bagged at the knees. His face was large and pitted and also wine-colored. The biggish nose was broken, not recently but often, and he combed his nearly white hair straight down all around in bangs like Moe Howard. His hairless right fist was wrapped around the handle of what appeared to be David Glendowning’s modified Beretta.

  He looked like a strikebreaker, which he might have been once. When I knew him he’d been a Detroit police inspector, and later assistant chief of police in Iroquois Heights; a position from which I’d helped get him busted. His name was Mark Proust.

  “You remember me, I guess.” His voice had a rough burled edge, as if he was used to shouting. “I remember you. I think about you sometimes.”

  “I think about you, too,” I said. “You’re usually in jail denims.”

  “Never did a day. They let me resign.” He laughed, apropos of nothing. The sound reminded me of Carla Witowski’s dog. Someone sometime had poked him in the windpipe with an iron bar or an elbow, but hadn’t finished the job. “When I see Cecil Fish I’ll tell him you said hello.”

  “I heard the voters flushed him out of the city prosecutor’s office finally.”

  “Recall. Where a malcontented minority subverts the will of the, majority.”

  Now I laughed. “Every thug and screwup out of a job knows that one by heart.”

  “Anyway he landed on grass. He’s a paid lobbyist, tells Mayor Muriel to sign next to the X. Soon as the election fallout clears he’s going to get me an appointment at City Hall. Head of security.”

  “When Chernobyl stops glowing, maybe. You stunk up the place.”

  “I got a grandson in Minnesota, my daughter bought him a book. Everybody Poops, it’s called. So everybody does it, but I’m the only one got pointed at.” He’d stopped laughing. “That’s what I think about when I think about you.”

  “Come on, Proust,” I said. “If it was just that, you’d have come for me before this. Who’s paying your freight?”

  “Generous Motors; pipe that, will you? Biggest fucking corporation in the world, employing little old Mark Proust from Elk Rapids. I stop company property from walking out and mad bombers from walking in.” He clamped his mouth shut then, as if to stop the flow. That was habit. I wasn’t going to leave that garage and repeat the conversation to anyone. I wasn’t going to leave that garage, period.

  I needled him. I’d begun to get the idea, but I wanted to hear him say it, and the more he talked, the less he shot. “No kidding, they give you a whistle?”

  “I’m the one gives out the whistles, smartass. I drill the troops and check ’em for missing buttons. It’s just one plant, but I got more men under me than I had when I was with the city. GM’s got big plans for the place.”

  “Which plant would that be, the Stutch plant?”

  “Still the detective, I see.” He waggled the gun in the direction of Glendowning’s body. “Care to detect what happened to Davy, there?”
r />   “I nailed that one in two seconds. You let yourself in while he was passed out in his recliner and shot him with his own gun. You’d have brought one anyway, but as long as he wasn’t stopping you, you frisked the place and found the Beretta. It made the suicide angle play better.”

  “It was suicide. You smelled the powder burns. Poor little Davy got all weepy over what he’d done, running a car off the road with his wife and kid in it and killing somebody, and decided to stop the tears. Just like a drunk.”

  “What about Matthew?”

  He looked blank for a second. “Oh, the kid. Wandered off, the little shit, the way kids do. I guess we’ll all get a flyer in the mail someday with his picture on it, toss it out with all the rest of the junk. Too bad.”

  “Uh-huh. Who’s got him, really?”

  “What’s it to you? You’re part of the suicide now.” He raised the gun a notch.

  “I get it. He shot me, then used the gun on himself. I came here all hotted up over Iris and we had it out. You put that together just since I broke the window?”

  “Before. When I found out you were coming I hauled Davy out here where you wouldn’t see him from the window and staked him out. You took your own sweet time. We both of us got stiff waiting.” He laughed wheezingly. “Iris, that her name? You fuck her?”

  “You knew her,” I said. “You worked the Shanks case back in Detroit.”

  “Christ, how many years ago was that. But the name wasn’t Iris. It was Maria something. Old Ben Morningstar’s foster kid. Wait, there was a heroin whore, a nigger. Wouldn’t be her, would it? You like the dark stuff?”

  Now it was him twisting the needle. Either he needed the excuse to shoot or he wanted to prolong the moment. It was a moment he’d been waiting for since long before Glendowning or the job at the Stutch plant.

  He didn’t need the excuse. He hadn’t needed one to press the muzzle of a pistol against a helpless man’s temple and pull the trigger. He’d been living with the pain of a rotten tooth so long, and now he was probing with his tongue at the pulpy socket.

  I made an infinitesimal turn to the left. The hour hand of a clock never moved more slowly. I talked; whether to distract him or myself from what I was doing, I wasn’t sure. “The angle doesn’t play,” I said. “Not if you want to tie it into the other thing. Rigor mortis takes four hours to kick in, minimum; not nearly enough time for Glendowning to have run me off the road near Trenton and make the turnaround and get back here and shoot us both.”

  “It won’t matter. You’ll both be stiff as doors by the time they find you. Davy don’t get many visitors these days.”

  “That’s about to change. The cops will want to talk to him about what happened on I-75.”

  “They’ll just ring at the door. When he don’t answer they’ll get a warrant. That takes time.”

  “You’re forgetting the window I broke. That’s probable cause for a search.”

  He thought about that. I turned a little more, trying to place my right side between him and my left pants pocket, where I’d put the key to the pickup. He moved a shoulder. I stopped.

  “Cops like a pretty frame,” he said. “One little crack won’t hurt.”

  “These are Michigan state troopers. They’ll have Toledo cops with them. They don’t do things the way you did in the Heights.”

  “Cops are cops. Quit fidgeting or I’ll shoot you in the belly.”

  “My ankle’s killing me.”

  “That makes two of us.” He showed his Dutch teeth, “Go ahead and lean on Davy’s truck. He won’t mind if you scratch it.”

  I did that, turning to plant my left shoulder against the door, and lifted my bad foot, letting it dangle like a broken wing. My left hand slid into my pocket.

  “Well, I’m due back at my desk at eight. No rest for the working man, right, Walker? Except for you.” He leveled the Beretta at my chest.

  The key tag had three raised buttons on it. I didn’t know which operated what, so I pressed them all, squeezing hard with my fist. I hoped they didn’t cancel one another out.

  The Ram flashed its lights and blasted its horn in short staccato bursts, to warn everyone in the parking lot its owner was under attack. Proust jerked that way, firing spasmodically. Something clunked against the side of the truck. I was moving, pushing myself away from the door and diving across Glendowning’s body. I struck the floor shoulder first. A blue light snapped in my brain—pure pain from my neck—and I blacked out for an instant, but I must have rolled according to plan, because when the light came back on in a stunning burst, I saw my .38 right in front of my face. I seized it, threw myself over onto my back, and fired from a two-handed grip. I didn’t aim. I was just pushing lead in Proust’s general direction. He returned fire. The slug twanged off the firewall and then off a steel joist and then the floor, changing chords with each hit as it lost shape and passing close to my right ear with a wobbling buzz.

  My first slug punched a hole in the garage door. A round spot of daylight opened in one of the wooden panels like a furious eye. I took aim the second time, concentrating on Proust’s thick mid-section, but I was panting, from panic as much as from effort, and pain blurred my vision. Blood plashed straight out from his left knee in a powdery spray, like dust from a blown tire. He yelled and went down hard. The Beretta jumped out of his hand.

  I clambered up and lunged and kicked away the gun before he could recover it. I needn’t have hurried. He was rocking from side to side on the floor with his knee drawn up to his chest, gripping it in both hands and cursing in his rough burled voice, an octave higher than normal.

  My ears rang. An enclosed space like a garage is no place to discharge percussion weapons. I holstered the revolver, bent over Proust, and held him by one corduroy lapel while I slid my other hand under his left arm and released a plated automatic from its clip. It was a Glock, the Budweiser of personal firearms, same caliber as the Beretta. I went over the rest of him for good measure, then pocketed the Glock in my Windbreaker and shuffled over and sat down on the step where he’d stood among the other rubbish. It felt good to take weight off my ankle, and for a couple of minutes I sat with my head down and my forearms resting on my thighs, listening to my lungs filling and emptying and Proust blaspheming.

  I raised my head and looked at him. “Sure it hurts. You ought to have expected that, being an ex-cop. That’s why they teach you to swing your stick at their knees when they try to make a break.”

  “I’m crippled,” he said. “Oh, Jesus Christ. Fuck me. Jesus H. Fucking Christ.”

  “You’re still three-quarters of a man. You want to try for half?” I slid out my .38 and took aim at his right knee, swinging the barrel from side to side like a metronome as he rocked.

  “What? What’s that? Oh, Jesus.” His eyes fixed on the gun. His face was gray beneath the congestion, slimy-slick. He stopped rocking.

  “You weren’t listening before,” I said. “Bad habit. Among a couple of hundred other things, it’s what made you a rotten cop. I told you Glendowning had been dead at least four hours. That’s why he couldn’t have been driving his truck when it ran me off the road. Who paid you to kill him and then come after his wife and kid?”

  “Who what? I need a hospital.”

  I fired at the floor between his feet. The slug knocked a chip out of the concrete and buried itself in the Sheetrock lining the outside wall. His voice went up another octave and he scrambled backward on hands and heels. His wine-colored trousers were stained black at the left knee. Splinters of white bone clung to the torn cloth. He was going to need a new kneecap, if anyone thought the rest of him was worth the investment. “You’re a psycho!” he shrieked.

  “Psychos don’t have this much fun. Knick-knack on the other knee next time. Who picked up the bill?”

  He was silent, except for some wheezing breaths. I leveled the barrel.

  “It was Thorpe! Connor Thorpe! Jesus God, don’t shoot me again!”

  “Right answer. I guessed that
when you said you worked security at the Stutch plant. How about me? Was this your bright idea or Thorpe’s?”

  “Thorpe’s. He said we might as well take you down too, avoid a second front.”

  “Right again. He was the only one who knew I was coming here, except Constance’s mother, and she didn’t fit the frame. What did he mean about avoiding a second front?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Final answer?”

  “What?” His eyes had lost focus behind a film of pain and fear.

  “You know the rules: No lifelines. No fifty-fifty, no poll-the-audience, no phone-a-friend. If you miss this one you leave here on a gurney.”

  “I’m telling you I don’t know. I was just a hired hand. He knew I had a mad on against you and he said this was my chance to blow it out. He didn’t say what his end was. Men like him don’t. They just put in the order.”

  That disappointed me, because I knew he’d answered right again. The .38 was still aimed at his remaining kneecap; comically, he unclasped the one I’d shattered and covered that one with both hands, as if that would lessen the damage.

  “Okay, you’re one question away from the million,” I said. “What did you do with the boy?”

  No hesitation this time. He could see I was hoping he’d get it wrong.

  “I took him to Thorpe. I don’t know why he wanted him. He didn’t at first. He said do Glendowning and use his truck so it looked like it was his thing. After that piece-of-shit Cutlass went off the road I pulled over and poked around inside. Everybody looked dead, especially the—I forgot her name.”

  “Iris.”

  “Yeah. I could see she was dead for sure, not having a head anymore. The boy was okay. Screamed like hell and tried to take a bite out of my hand when I unsnapped him from the kiddie seat. I had to give him a smack to quiet him down. Thorpe was sore as hell I didn’t do more, but he said bring him to the plant. Your call came in while I was there. That made him madder. He said I should have torched the car.”