Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss

by Loren D. Estleman

  He swung his leg twice, stopped. “You might have started with that.”

  “You asked about the motel.”

  “He’s sure it was Starzek?”

  “He knew he was driving a Hurst Olds. I didn’t prompt him on that. Ask for Buzz.” I got tired of leaning my hands on the cane and laid it across my lap. “Tell me about the fire.”

  “Locals suspect arson, but then they always do when it involves a vacant vacation stop. The fire-department investigators aren’t too happy with me. I’ve got them sitting on their hands until the federal team arrives. Someone saw flames around eleven o’clock last night. Firefighters managed to keep them from spreading to the other buildings and more importantly a five-thousand-gallon propane tank, but Cabin Twelve was a total loss.”

  “Think the mop-up squad got the Treasury paper out before they torched the place?”

  “Maybe not. The story about your little excursion didn’t break until yesterday, and the heavy equipment they used to deliver it in the first place was out of service thanks to you. They might not have had time to replace it. Anyway there was no sign in the snow of any other big rigs. My thought is they set a match to the evidence and cut their losses. We won’t know for sure until we sift through the ashes.”

  “Jeff didn’t deliver the paper,” I said. “Not in his little muscle car, and probably not in the truck. He was overqualified for that. Any lug can drive a truck; look at me.”

  “Well, we won’t know that either until we debrief him. Which means finding him.”

  “You think he’s alive?”

  “I think he’s been a busy little bee.” His mouth formed a straight line.

  “Double agent?”

  “Why not? We don’t have the monopoly. And we sure can’t match whatever the competition’s offering.”

  “I don’t see it. Jeff’s an honest crook.”

  “Once you cross that first line, the others get harder to see.”

  “It isn’t that. You don’t change your lay in the middle of your career.”

  “Don’t put too much store in his Albert Schweitzer act. Lots of times the people you can’t buy or intimidate are surprisingly easy to back into owing you a favor.”

  “He isn’t the one who shot me.”

  “True. I read the police report. But his reflexes were too good to let an opportunity pass.” He hopped off the table, stretched. He looked a little worn around the edges. He’d been busy since he got my message: driving, violating the seal of the medical profession, making enemies for life of state and local authorities. “After we tossed Paul Starzek’s place in Port Huron, the research librarians in Washington went to work on his church’s boss martyr.”

  “I hope you don’t pay them too much. A friend of mine got all that off his PC.”

  “I bet he didn’t take it as far forward as they did. During the Crusades, the Knights Templar formed a sect called the Order of St. Sebastian. His symbol’s the arrow, so they took up the practice of forging and sending solid-gold arrows to suspected informers as a warning not to betray their secrets. The implication was the next one would be traveling much faster. It wasn’t as extravagant as it sounds. They’d looted the gold by the ton from what was then called the Near East, and nine times out of ten they could reclaim the arrow, since its most recent owner wouldn’t be using it anymore. After that I suppose it was just a matter of sending the same arrow to the next name on the list.”

  “Cheap sons of bitches.”

  “The order was wiped out during the Inquisition—executed, tortured to death, imprisoned for life. Seems the Catholic Church wasn’t amused by the infidel ways they’d acquired while raping their way through Jerusalem. I suspect our little terrorist sympathizer in the woodpile had a pretty good founding in that area of medieval history.”

  “So why didn’t his friends send him an arrow first? Too hard to wrap?”

  “That’s just it. They did. Only they sent it parcel post, and at holiday time, yet. It showed up at his place the day after you found him. One of my men signed for it. That’s what put us on the trail of the order.”

  “Solid gold?”

  “Painted. There’s just no glamor left in the underworld.”

  “It still seems a little gaudy for your garden variety holy warrior. Why warn your victim in the first place? It just makes the job harder.”

  “Could be they intended for it to arrive late. It makes a nice object lesson for other screwups.”

  I lowered the tip of the cane to the floor. “We through here?”

  “Can you drive?”

  “I just can’t walk.” I levered myself to my feet. Blood slid from my face. I tightened my grip on the crook until the dizzy spell passed.

  He watched me. “You headed straight home or over to your client’s?”

  “We’ve been through that. I’m working off a debt. Jeff didn’t rig it.”

  “Your life hardly seems worth all the trouble.”

  “I’ve only got the one. I’m used to it.” I dragged my foot toward the door. He didn’t step forward to help.

  “I took a look at your bank account yesterday.”

  I grasped the knob tight. It felt cold in my palm. “How’s it doing?”

  “Better than I would’ve thought based on your last tax return. You finished out the year with six hundred and change. On January second you deposited twelve hundred. That’s just three hundred less than you soak your clients to start an investigation. I figure you needed the rest to walk around.”

  “What if I told you I tapped the blackjack table at Motor City?”

  “Too easy to check. They withhold taxes and report to Uncle. There’s a sizeable gap in Starzek’s history between his parents’ deaths and his first arrest. We found his school district, but they lost years of records when they converted from file cases to computers. We’re requisitioning that equipment. You’d be surprised how much a geek with determination can get off a crashed hard drive.”

  “Like maybe Jeff’s grade-point average?”

  “Like maybe who signed his report cards. He had a family we haven’t been able to track down because there was no official paperwork involved in the transfer of guardianship. You can save us some overtime and give up your client.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  My Cutlass was where I’d left it, with my overnight bag in the backseat. The air in the motel lot stung, but it was clean and clear after the stifling heat in Herbert Clemson’s Chrysler, and the sun felt good on my back. I left his overcoat on the passenger’s seat and shook out my keys.

  There was no outlet. The federal agent turned around at the end of the lot and crept past as I swung open the door. His window squeaked down.

  “That’s two you owe me,” he said. “From now on I charge interest. Meter’s running.” His rear tires spun, caught hold, and catapulted him around the corner of the building.

  I drove slowly, leaving plenty of room between me and the other cars in my lane. My legs had turned to lead and I needed a winch to lift my foot off the accelerator and press down the brake. My thoughts were slower still, from the lingering effects of morphine and the loss of adrenaline out on the lake. I hadn’t taken Clemson’s bait, but he’d find out about Rose and Oral Canon soon enough. They needed preparing. I turned north toward the Air Horn Truck Stop and a public telephone.

  Overnight, a Hooverville had sprung up on the ice. Shanties occupied every square yard not left to the fanatics who sat on minnow buckets out in the open, dandling lines inside their chopped holes, and hundreds of spring-operated tip-up rods with no attendants in sight. When a fish struck at one, the rod would jerk upward, setting the hook and ringing a bell. The temporary shelters were commercially manufactured from canvas and nylon and homemade of plywood, Cellotex, and old metal roofing. Arranged in neat rows, with aisles running north and south and east and west like a street grid, they formed the world’s most organized hobo jungle. Concession trucks sold pretzels, roast bratwurst, elephant ears, and hot and col
d drinks from the side of the highway. A prefab gazebo made to look like a Swiss chalet spread its shelter over a brass band playing something buzzy and flatulent. A bullhorn squealed the score so far: Fishermen 62, Fish 11. It was the liveliest and most temporary of civilizations since Deadwood.

  Highway traffic lock-stepped past cops directing the flow around several hundred vehicles parked bumper to bumper along the gravel apron. Some of those same polar-coated officers would have been with the crew diving for bodies and vehicles in the subzero waters beneath the ice only days before. One life more or less seemed to have had no effect on the festival atmosphere.

  At the Air Horn I filled the tank, bought cigarettes, and poked my head into the bar, but Buzz wasn’t on duty. A capable-looking Marine type with a brush cut and tattoos was busy rubbing the chrome off the fixtures with no customers to watch. They were all busy drowning worms. A canned-looking feature on bow hunting for bucks droned away on the TV monitor.

  I got change from the clerk on the convenience-store side and dropped some of it into a telephone in the short hallway leading to the restrooms and showers. Rose Canon answered. The baby jabbered cheerfully in the background. I gave her a quick update on events, punctuated by sharp silences on her end, and told her Clemson was closing the gap in Jeff Starzek’s history.

  “You didn’t tell him about me?”

  “No, but he’s got the scent. Expect a visit. When he makes it, tell him everything. You’ve got nothing to hold back now that Oral knows about you and Jeff.”

  “There is no me and Jeff. Jeff always saw to that.” She paused. Little Jeffie gurgled. “Oral’s left.”

  “Left for where?”

  “Left me. I don’t know where. We thought it was best we separated for a while until he can sort things out.”

  “We or he?”

  “Mostly it was his idea. I’ve made such a mess of things. I should’ve told him years ago the way it was.”

  “He might have left you then. And you wouldn’t have Jeffie.”

  “He asked me if Jeffie was his.”

  “He’d be an idiot not to wonder. Did you set him straight?”

  “I told him he was. I don’t know if he believed me. Do you?”

  “I’ve seen the kid. A head like that can come from only one source. Anyway, there’s no sense in lying to the hired help. Call if Clemson or his people give you any trouble. I’ll check in regularly with my service.”

  “Just how much trouble am I in?”

  “None. Not that it carries any weight with Gestapo Light. These cloak-and-dagger clowns will protect you at the cost of your life.”

  “Now I’m really afraid. What did I do wrong?”

  “Right or wrong’s an outmoded concept. These days it’s all gray areas and nuance.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Nope. Someone told me just today once you cross that first line, the others get harder to see. You can hide a whole Holocaust behind mist and smoke. For the record, you haven’t done a thing wrong from the start.”

  “I shouldn’t have lied to Oral.”

  “He canceled that out when he went looking for Jeff on his own and lied about that. It’s the truth that split you up. If you want him back, you need to put together a whole new set of lies.”

  “Are you married, Mr. Walker?”

  “I’ve been divorced most of my life. The question is, do you want him back?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do. I may be in love with Jeff, but it’s Oral I love. I’ve only had a day or so to myself to think about it, but I know now what’s important.”

  “Mazel tov.”

  “For what?” She sounded suspicious.

  “It took you only twenty-four hours what it took me twenty-five years to figure out.”

  I said I’d be in touch and pegged the receiver. Her good-bye was tentative. The problem with having a reputation for irony is no one knows when you’re sincere.

  It hadn’t snowed while I was in the hospital. What had fallen before lay white and polished-looking on either side of dry asphalt, with treacherous patches of black ice on bridges and underpasses. Traffic was heavy in the northbound lane as I approached Detroit, with helicopters whuppering above to tell the motorists with their radios on how heavy it was, but it thinned out before I crossed Eight Mile Road and entered the city limits; my lane was deserted for blocks. The sun was perched on the rooftops of the northern suburbs. I adjusted the mirror to keep the glare out of my eyes, throttled down, and let the gray tangle of overpasses weave their net overhead. The snow was shoved into clumps in the gutters, bleeding rust like iron ore, and a stray dog plugged along one of the broken sidewalks with head and tail hanging, misery dripping in icicles from its chin. It might have been a coyote. The city’s ratio of buildings demolished to new buildings erected remained at two to one, and as unpopulated country reclaimed it block by block, various forms of wildlife had set up housekeeping among the thistles and Burger King cups. The place wasn’t nearly as lively as Tip-up Town, and didn’t look any more permanent.

  I’d given up on Detroit’s ever returning to what it had been before 1967. There’d been a brief flurry of construction and hope after the death of the old mayor, but then the casinos had come in with their on-site restaurants, ATMs, bars, and cabarets, each shrink-sealing its own self-contained community inside four walls, and the life they brought with them was strictly the shambling walk of the living dead. The next change of administrations had rebuilt the old party machine that had never worked well to begin with, not like the ones in Chicago and San Francisco, slick and silent, where the graft was spread evenly. Here it wasn’t so much a political system as an evangelical clip joint, pumped up with sermons and fireworks and supported by the lowliest members of the congregation, with no hope of return this side of the ghostly pale. The money came in on the hips of the faithful and went out over the Net to Switzerland, and the dopes who opened the accounts didn’t know how much richer they could be if they’d put some of it back in the collection plate. They were an insult to the fine old art of corruption.

  But that was just my mood talking. I’d finished out the old year with a hole in my leg and started the new one with my pants full of buckshot. I’d been chased, shot at, pumped full of painkillers, and threatened with arrest by two counties, the State of Michigan, and Washington, which was my personal best; drowned Mrs. Butterworth, been jumped by my own client outside my place of business, told I’d enter my golden years with a limp I’d take to my grave, and broken up a marriage, and the year was still new. I wasn’t just wallowing in self-pity. I was swimming around it in laps.

  I put the car in the garage, left the overnight bag, and let myself into the kitchen with no small support from my life’s companion of polished wood. The fluorescent ring in the ceiling took full eight seconds to respond to the switch, then flickered awake like a rheumatic old dog, the way it always does when there’s snow on the roof. The insulation in the attic is as thick as a typewriter pad, and asbestos to boot. I can’t replace it without involving three government agencies.

  The house smelled as dank as the crawl space at the Sportsmen’s Rest. It had been shut up for days and I’d cranked the thermostat down to sixty before I’d left. I ran it up to seventy-two. I was shivering, partly from cold, partly from my old friend shock. Fever and morphine had only bought me a reprieve. The furnace thumped on and then the fan kicked in with a rattle of bearings that needed replacing, had needed replacing for two winters, filling the place with the smell of dusty ductwork. I knew the smell, but something new had crept in. It had gone beyond the homely stink of bachelor living into the beginnings of a lonely old age. I was still swimming laps.

  I got coffee going. The aroma when I took the lid off the can lightened my mood a notch. In the morning, after a full night’s sleep in my own bed and my first cigarette, more coffee, eggs in my belly, I’d be as chipper as Dr. Kevorkian.

  My body was as sore as my leg. I couldn’t raise my hands above my head w
ithout crucifying pain across my shoulders and up the back of my neck, so I leaned on the stove and used the cane to open the cabinet and hook the kitchen bottle off the shelf, catching it against my chest with one arm. That hurt, too, but relief was in sight.

  When I saw the label I decided against doctoring the coffee. I’d thought it was bourbon. Scotch and caffeine make carbolic. I propped my hips against the stove and took a long gurgling swig straight from the bottle. While I was waiting for the tingle to reach my toes I took another. The alcohol cauterized my throat, still scratchy from pneumonia, and made a cartoon kettle-drum sound in my ears when it hit my stomach. I stood the bottle on the range, left the pot percolating, and went to the back door to collect my mail.

  It was in four bundles on the little covered porch, bound with rubber bands: catalogues, bills, an alumni newsletter from a college I hadn’t attended in almost thirty years, several opportunities to dig myself a credit hole and pull the sod over my head, and a cardboard tube about two feet long, gaily emblazoned with the red, white, and blue of Priority Mail. I shook it. No sound. I used the knife on my key chain to cut the tape and pry the plastic plug out of one end. They’d packed it with crumples of blank newsprint. I pulled some out, got hold of something narrow and unfamiliar to the touch, and tugged out eighteen inches of hunting arrow, spray-painted gold from the feather fletching to the razor-sharp point.

  There was no note, no return address. The postmark was generic. I didn’t need any of that. I knew who’d sent it, and who had killed Paul Starzek. Now I needed to find Jeff more than ever. He was next.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  OK,”

  The voice sounded real, and weirdly familiar. I sat up straight in bed with those two initials echoing in my skull. I’d spoken them into my own ear.