American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel (21 page)

“Nothing that drastic. Just the cops and the U.S. Marshals.”

She shifted a little, drew the robe over her leg. She said nothing.

“You didn’t come to Charlotte Sing looking for work,” I said. “She came to you. She told me herself she hires her people first on their merits, then on whether they’re Asian. If a licensed realtor with Eastern blood was all she wanted there are plenty of Asian names registered. You came with other skills.”

“Man trap?” Her smile would frost a flower bed.

“Among others. I’m holding the bait. You don’t stock a show house with liquor you can only get in Scotland.” I sniffed the old heather in my glass, but didn’t drink. I put it on my end of the table. “I don’t think many moves ahead. By the time I find out I’m playing chess and not Parcheesi, it’s usually too late. Meanwhile I have to fake it and keep my eyes open. I didn’t put it all together until you showed up in that robe. Sometimes the camouflage calls attention to itself. But not in Esmerelda’s case.

“It’s no wonder he didn’t see you coming,” I went on. “He wasn’t expecting a woman in a company blazer.”

She’d been lounging with one arm dangling off the arm of the sofa. When it moved I reached for my holster. I had the revolver on her before she cleared the cushions with the shiny .44 she’d planted there.

I
wondered how you’d worked it,” I said. “I didn’t think you’d put all your chips on one number, but you couldn’t hide a pen knife under a kimono that thin.”

She let the magnum slip back between the cushions and rested her hand on the arm of the sofa. “You might’ve been gay or impotent. Are you?”

“That won’t work either. I’ve been called worse by my friends. Was the plan to do me right here or wrap me up to go?”

“Right here. I like things simple.”

I shook my head. “You’d lie to the hangman. With a realty sign out front you never know when someone might come to browse. Better to pin me down until the reinforcements get here and take me out after dark. That’d give your boss time to land in San Francisco and be seen there.”

“You’re smarter than Bairn. He came straight to me after the deputies shifted their search away from the lake, just like I told him when I left him. He thought the enemy of his enemy was his friend.”

“Murder wasn’t his lay. Deirdre Fuller was just an accident.
Or was that arranged? Not your work, I don’t think. A lethal hit to the head without a weapon is a specialized skill, and you’re too cool to have done it by accident.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” she said. “I wasn’t in on that end. I only came in when it looked like he might run to cover at the lake. That was a lucky bounce. Madame Sing has us spotted all over to cut down on response time, but the job doesn’t often come to the jobber. Esmerelda was my first real assignment since I came to work for her. I’ve made a lot more money off sales commissions than I did off that job. Actual rental fees.”

“Deep cover’s like that. No one can afford to maintain a full-time force of killers otherwise. But why take one off the leash on Bairn’s behalf? What’s a bookkeeper with a courier service have to do with smuggling illegal aliens into the country?”

“That’s not my end either. The work’s strictly need-to-know.”

“Whose end is it?”

The ceramic shards she used to see through took a sharp jig, then returned to center. Her will was as hard as her eyes, but she hadn’t been able to kill the reflex. I leaned back to broaden my field of fire. I was too casual about it, too goddamned sure of my ability to adapt to a sudden change in the status quo. Movement flashed in the corner of my eye and my head went flying off my shoulders.

I
welcomed the nausea. You have to accept it anyway if you’re going to enjoy a mild concussion, and when you’re throwing up you’re not dead.

I’d experienced that lightbulb-in-the-throat sensation enough times to be able to swallow it and keep it down with my teeth gritted until it washed away with the tide. Light came dusky pink through my eyelids, but I kept them shut. I sensed eyes on me, and if I opened them, came either another knock on the head or The Speech, and I wasn’t up to either with my brains trying to squeeze out through the throbbing pulpy patch on the back of my skull. Fortunately it’s thickest there, a combination of scar tissue outside and calcium reinforcement inside, supplied by my own chemistry to fill the gap where the gray matter had shrunken away from the bone. It slowed my thinking, but helped protect me from some of the consequences.

I was reclined, not quite flat on my back, on a less cushy surface than the carpet where I’d fallen when I slid off the sofa. I remembered the falling and the dull impact at the end, then nothing as I’d plunged down knockout alley, a place
I knew too well. I felt movement and the vibration of a powerful motor, and beneath that contact with a solid surface rolling away under big wheels. At least I wasn’t in a boat. I’d hoped not to find myself on, under, or near the water for a long time.

Then came a kind of yaw, and a brief feeling of weightlessness as whoever was at the controls made a gentle turn, shifted gears, and fed fuel to the system. Air sucked at weatherseal and whistled around the corners. The surface smoothed out. We’d left asphalt behind and started up the concrete bed of the entrance ramp to an expressway.

Somewhere on the other end of what I pictured as a large flat craft, something thumped out of time with the beat in my head: a rap CD or a hip-hop radio station. That confused me for a moment, but as my brain cells stuttered on like a series of worn-out fluorescent tubes it started to make sense. It always does when the bad guys come with their own theme music.

Something, a crane or a robotic arm or a claw machine from an arcade, lifted my left wrist, pressed the vein on the underside, lowered it, and withdrew. I felt a thin sheet of fabric under my palm and beneath that steel decking. I knew what I was in then, apart from trouble.

“Possum deal’s bogus, Walker. Your head’s harder than the Takarov.”

I recognized that voice, too high and reedy for the barrel it came from. I didn’t open my eyes. “One more argument in favor of buying American.”

The syllables didn’t come out in that order. The beat of silence that answered told me Elron had failed to reassemble them into coherence. He raised his voice. “Coming around. Bop him again?”

“Certainly not. You of all people should know a blow to the head can be fatal.”

“I told you I didn’t have nothing to do with that.”

The voice that had answered Wilson Watson’s hyperthyroid general factotum sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. It was mild, masculine, and touched slightly by the musical accents of the Far East. I’d heard it a long time ago, if not on the other side of the world. I opened my eyes then and found my face six inches from the slender features and balding forehead of Victor Cho, the owner of the unlicensed casino standing on property belonging to Charlotte Sing in Detroit Beach. His blue tie and white shirt were the same heavy grade of silk. The eyes under the hooded lids were intense as the tips of a slender thumb and forefinger prised my own lids apart, right, then left. A pencil flash snapped on, throwing purple halos. It went out. He straightened, sitting back on his heels on the deck of the Hummer, and held up a hand. “How many?”

“How many you got?” This time it came out right.

“Seriously. There is a risk of coma.”

“In that case, two.”

“Two it is. Elron was right about your head. That doesn’t change the fact I disapprove of deliberately causing cranial injury. I saw so many of those in Pyongyang. A criminal invasion of one of God’s greatest miracles.”

“Speaking of those, where’s Wilson?”

“Present.” Watson’s voice drifted back a hundred yards, all the way from the rear seat. “A good labor leader gets out in the field.”

“How would you know?”

“Shut him up, Doc. This here’s my favorite part. Bump it up.” The volume went up on the radio. I felt the bass in my shoulder blades.

Cho nodded, then turned out of my field of vision. When he turned back he was holding a syringe.

I tried to sit up. Elron’s icebreaker head pushed past Cho’s and a manual typewriter struck me full in the chest. I fell back.

“Just a mild sedative, Mr. Walker.” The Korean squirted a short thin arc of liquid from the end of the needle to bleed air from the barrel. “It won’t hurt as much as the one you got from Elron.” A hand a lot closer to human than Elron’s touched my wrist with something soft and moist. A sting of alcohol pricked my nostrils. I tried to jerk my arm away, but Elron sighed and the claw machine closed on the wrist and jerked it straight.

“No need to be frightened,” Cho said. “I was a doctor in my country.” That last part sounded bitter.

It was a sharp needle. I didn’t even feel it go in. The Hummer’s fat tires left the earth and carried me toward Mercury.

I was back underwater, flailing my legs and doing wingovers and tucking myself into a tight ball to avoid the green phosphorescent tracers slicing past me from the muzzle of Fred Loudermilk’s relentless Ruger. I was a better swimmer than I was when conscious, but something was clutching my ankle, slowing me down and spoiling my maneuvers. I tried to shake it off, but it was holding on as hard as one of Elron’s big paws. I looked down into Ernesto Esmerelda’s dead face, gray and slick as silver paste, bobbing up and down and side to side in the turbulence, the body refusing to let go. Sharp pain lanced up to my knee, and I knew then that with his last breath he’d nailed one of his hands to my ankle, using the hammer from his trademark black toolbox; I was bleeding
where the spike had gone in, the blood making a long smear in the water, ideal for attracting sharks. I wondered, not entirely with zoological interest, if sharks lived in fresh water.

Just as the thought occured to me, something clipped my shoulder, sending me into a spin toward the bottom of the lake, away from the bullets but deeper into the black and in the opposite direction of light and air and life.

“Slide, Walker! Slide!”

This was Darius Fuller, the stud in the Tigers’ bullpen. It sounded like good advice, but I didn’t know where the bases were, couldn’t see them through the murk, and all the time that dead man nailed to my ankle was slowing me down worse than the instant replay. I clawed fistfuls out of the black water, moving slower and slower as the bullets streaked faster and faster along their green glowing tracks.

I wasn’t alone. There were faces in the water: Deirdre Fuller’s, empty-eyed and frozen in anger, as I’d seen it the last time coming away from the pawnshop in Ypsilanti; Hilary Bairn’s, Eurotrash fashionable even in death, with a boil in the forehead where Violet Pershing’s slug had not quite managed to exit; and finally Charlotte Sing’s, painted white like a geisha’s with the jet-track eyebrows of the Dragon Lady’s in a comic strip most of the world had forgotten, mouth open wide in laughter that pounded in my head in a hip-hop bass. Hallucinations only reinforce ethnic stereotypes. If it was a hallucination. Insanity yawns wide beyond a thin line where you can no longer separate fantasy from fact, as in reality programming.

When I opened my eyes this time, I was alone. It was dark, and for a long moment I thought I was still swimming toward the bottom of Black Squirrel Lake. My nostrils burned as if I’d been breathing nothing but water, but my throat was
parched. I was cold. My arms and legs were as heavy as anchors. My left leg—the one Esmerelda had nailed himself to—wouldn’t move at all, and when I gathered all my strength and pushed it in that direction, something dragged with the unmistakeable sound of metal on concrete, stopping with a clunk when it came to the end of its chain. I was shackled.

I was hyperventilating. I had no access to my lungs, only to a shallow pocket of air just behind my throat that would run out if I didn’t break through to the stores beyond. I caught my breath and held it tight. My pulse hammered in my ears—a welcome sound, not only because it meant my heart was still beating, but because it lacked the hypnotic regularity of rap. I counted to twenty, my eyeballs straining out of their sockets, then let it out in a whoosh that smelled stale even to my own nostrils. I had a terminal case of morning mouth.

I sucked at the air anyway. It was proof that my lungs still worked, and consequently my heart. I’d given up on both for a while there.

Now all I had to do was explore the dimensions of the coffin in which I’d been buried alive.

I sat up. A boom swung down and smacked me in the face, but I ignored it; I’d had Sunday mornings that packed more punch. I explored my immobile leg, starting with my hand on my thigh and working down over the mountain of my knee to my ankle, stopping at the thing that restrained it. It felt slippery, not at all like metal, but heavy when I groped beyond it; a steel cable in a thick plastic sheath. I retraced it to my ankle and explored the dimensions of the bulk that rested there. A turnbuckle, nothing less ordinary than that.

I found the butterfly-shaped key that held it taut, gripped it in my fist, and turned. The world was locked no tighter in its orbit than that simple device. I wouldn’t have had the strength to budge it even if I hadn’t been seduced, bludgeoned with the butt of a Russian semiautomatic pistol, and had my veins pumped full of morphine, or some less organic substance that was about as mild as a buffalo stampede in a dynamite plant.

That was as far as my reserves went. I laid back to recharge, and as the thumming in my head receded I felt the more stylized throb of powerful engines, a thousand times more powerful than the one that had propelled Wilson Watson’s Hummer, but without the comforting presence of solid earth rolling under wheels bound by the forces of gravity.

A boat.

Jesus.

No, not a boat.

A plane.

The whine of the jets was so incessant I hadn’t heard them until I managed to eliminate every other form of transportation. If there’s anything worse than drowning it’s falling from a great height, aboard a craft that has no more business being in the air than a sperm whale: thousands of tons of sheet metal and wire and oil and fuel under high pressure and the iron smile of flight attendants that can plunge thirty thousand feet on nothing more substantial than a bubble of air in a rubber hose.