Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 21 - Infernal Angels (25 page)

An engine roared. Rubber shrieked. Something as big as a building hurtled along the curb. I rolled again to clear myself from its path. I came to rest on my face just as something struck something else with the thud of a baseball bat colliding with a side of beef. A high thin scream pierced the echo of torn tires.

I got a palm on the pavement and pushed myself up onto my good leg. Everything is relative; it had been my bad leg until a moment ago. Chang’s face was a mask of agony, and then it was gone. He slumped forward over the boxes in the trunk. He could fall no farther. His legs were pinned between the Cutlass’ rear bumper and the front bumper of Kreski’s truck.

“Ogodogodogodogodogodogodogodogodogod.”

This went on as I hobbled around to curbside and snatched open the passenger’s door. It cut off on the instant. I took Ouida’s chin and turned her face toward me. Her eyes were white around the irises and a shadow was spreading under the skin of her forehead where it had struck the padded dash, but that seemed to be the extent of the damage.

Well, I’d have cried too. I smiled at her, watching the hysteria fade. She rested her cheek on the back of my hand. After a moment she nodded and I shut her back in.

Kreski was standing outside his cab. His cell phone screen glowed in one hand. His thumb twitched toward a button.

“Hang on,” I said.

He lifted the thumb. “New plan?”

“I never really cared for the first one.” I frowned. “I brought you in for hand-to-hand combat. I didn’t say anything about a lead foot.”

He grinned, an event as rare as solar eclipse. “Yeah, well, what’re you gonna do? It’s Detroit.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

When Kreski backed up his truck, Chang slid into a pile on the street. I approached him carefully, but his whirling-dervish days were over; he’d need braces in the exercise yard. The bump had shattered both legs as thoroughly as he had any of his victims’. He was breathing shallowly, whistling in his throat when he exhaled. Barely conscious.

Kreski stood over us. “We can’t leave him like this.”

“You’re right. Get something to tie him up.”

“I meant a hospital.”

“A boy inside needs it more. This one can still crawl. You want to wonder where he is a year from now when the bones knit?”

He trotted over to his truck and cane back with a coil of piano wire. Disregarding Chang’s gasps I dragged him over to the street lamp, heaved him into a sitting position with his back against the base—he screamed—and wired his wrists together on the other side.

Kreski watched me tie off the wire. I made it bite. “He’ll slash himself to the bone if he tries to get loose.”

“That’s the idea.” I snatched the cutters from Kreski’s hand and snipped the coil free. My hands shook. I was going through some post-trauma of my own.

“You okay?”

“I’m a little worked up.” I staggered to my feet and gave him back the wires and cutters. “I need you to take Ouida home.”

“What about you?”

“I’ve got to get the boy.”

“Who’s in there with him?”

“Just one person. A woman.”

“A
woman’s
behind all this?”

“If you knew this woman you wouldn’t be surprised.”

He helped me take Ouida from the car and went ahead to wait by the truck. She seemed steadier now, taking some weight off me. “I—I have the impression I was unkind to you.” I had to strain to hear her.

“I bring that out in people.”

“That horrible woman. Is she—?”

“The Queen of Cuckoo? She belongs in a Saturday morning cartoon. That’s where we keep the really dangerous ones.”

“Do you think she knows something went wrong?”

“I don’t know. If sound travels through the walls the way it does inside, yeah.”

“What will you do?”

“Wait for the cops,” Kreski said. He took Ouida’s arm gently. The other slid through my hand, paused when our palms touched. I squeezed hers quickly and let go. He helped her up onto the seat beside the driver’s.

“Can’t,” I said. “Give it fifteen minutes, then call both numbers I gave you. Tell them to come to the equipment room. Someone must have a plan of the building. Fifteen,” I repeated. “I want her in reach before she hears so much as a hinge squeak.” I showed him the revolver.

“Shouldn’t you reload?”

“I didn’t bring extra shells.”

“What are you going to do, throw it at her?”

“That’s what they do in movies.”

“You just make this up as you go along?”

“It makes itself up. I just follow.”

I watched the panel truck pull out, then fished out the last of the pills Barry had given me and crunched them thoughtfully. Chang breathed in broken moans, the back of his head resting against the lamppost. His ruined legs were spread out in front of him like a doll’s. He didn’t exist for me.

I swallowed, tasting the bitter medicine in the roots of my tongue. The Cutlass’ trunk stood open. I holstered the .38 and lifted out a box containing an empty TV converter.

The gate I’d come through with Chang was still unlocked. Out in the moonlight he’d abandoned the lantern, the kerosene burning low now on the ground. I shifted the box under my arm, lifted the lamp by the bail. It lit my way only a yard at a time, but the weight of it quieted the tremors in my hand. Navigating by memory and the odd familiar feature I found my way through the building’s entrails. The route back inside seemed three times as long as the way out. Twice I stopped, second-guessing myself; had I taken a wrong turn? But even a place built in so lopsided a circle led eventually to the right spot.

The opening to the equipment room made a black rectangle in the pale wall. Was she waiting there in darkness? It was inconceivable that Charlotte Sing, who’d seen the way to freedom and power from the bottom of the human compost, hadn’t made provisions for so small a comfort as a source of light. Or could she see in the dark? Maybe her eyes were all pupil after all.

I stepped inside and stopped, holding the lantern high. In that primitive cave in the center of a city of just under a million people I made a swell target for something ancient and evil.

I stepped forward. Anything was better than standing still and inviting paralysis.

Luis lay as I’d left him, rolling his head now from side to side in some restless dream. I propped the lantern on an empty utility shelf high enough to shed light down on the cot and felt again for his pulse. It seemed stronger than before; then it didn’t. His young system seemed to be tiring of the struggle to survive.

“Hang on, muchacho. Those bulls in Mexico don’t stand a chance.” I was talking in a singsong rhythm, like someone saying grace.

He whimpered, shifted a leg under the blanket. The long muscle stood out in his thigh. He was running down some adobe-lined street.

“You’re short nine boxes and one man.”

The low contralto, too scrupulously separated from any hint of regionality, made me shudder. It was like coming upon a snake when you were expecting something else. I willed the tension out of my shoulders and turned around, sliding the revolver out of its holster in the same movement. Charlotte Sing stood at the other end of the narrow aisle between the wall and the rack of shelves, hands folded at her waist. Her gaze slid from the .38 to my face.

“You should consider carrying a semiautomatic pistol,” she said. “The light shows through the empty chambers in a revolver.”

I hung on to it anyway. From my angle I couldn’t tell if that was true. “You’ve got about five minutes before the cops come. Plenty of time to run—if you’re right about the gun.”

She didn’t move. “This is the second time Chang has disappointed me. It was clumsy of him to allow himself to be photographed. Did you overcome him alone?”

“I had a couple of tons of help. They can pin him back together or deport him as is. What’s the appeals process for Paper Dog killers in China?”

“If you came back for the boy, why did you bring any boxes at all?”

“I thought you might like to take a look inside.” I let the shipping carton fall to the floor and kicked it her way. It slid to a stop at her feet.

She remained unmoving for a moment, then bent a knee to lift it. She let it drop and rose. “Did you remove the contents?”

“I’m not sure it ever had any. How much do you trust your people?”

“They know the penalty for theft and betrayal. This is the work of the Pappas woman.”

“It’s possible. Her caretaker never even knew the boxes were in the warehouse. Her people could have gutted them any time and resealed the cartons while he was busy messing with his plastic models, or they might have arrived empty, having been harvested somewhere along the way. You can fund a lot of charities with twenty kilos of souped-up heroin. After that, Ouida was intended to track down the boxes in the system and report them. Maybe she was supposed to take the fall for what was missing.”

“And you consider
me
wicked.”

“You and Eugenia are both as screwy as a couple of dancing caterpillars. She thinks she can buy her way into Paradise, and you think you can bring the country to its knees with an army of strung-out drug addicts.”

“And how do I think I can do that?”

“I tried it out on a police inspector I know, before either of us suspected you were involved. If we had, he might’ve spent more time on it. As long as the dope keeps circulating, the worst thing the cops have to deal with is a hike in the mortality rate among junkies. They only get desperate when it stops. The price goes up and so does the crime rate. Once they’ve had a taste of that supersmack and they can’t get any more, every city in the country is in for a major crime wave, the president declares martial law, and the American idea is dead for at least a generation.”

“So that’s my plan. It seems sound.”

“I’m sure you thought so when you issued that recall. You explain too much to be a first-class liar. You didn’t underestimate the impact of prime cut on a place like Detroit. You shut off the tap here to see how well it worked before you went national.” I shook my head. “It isn’t sound. In fact, it’s shaky as hell. There’s always a Eugenia Pappas, a Johnny Toledo, a donkey wrangler in the desert, or someone on your own export team on the other side of the world; some greedy little leak to spoil the grand scheme. No one can interrupt the supply when there’s so much money to be made by keeping it flowing. In this case, one nut canceled out the other.”

“Do you imagine you can insult me by calling me insane?”

“Lady, you’re a loon. Take it or don’t.”

Something crashed in the distance; a gate flung open or a sledge hitting a fire door. Charlotte Sing turned her head.

I cocked the .38. The noise drew her attention back to me. I told her to hold still or I’d shoot. She smiled, shook her head, and backed into darkness. Tiny feet rattled on concrete and were gone.

TWENTY-NINE

“I don’t see why this man has to be here. He has no clearance.”

The party’s name was Messarian, or something similarly Armenian in origin, and he seemed to be flaking away before our eyes. Whenever he shook his head, a fresh fall of dandruff drifted to the shoulders of his charcoal-gray suit like snow in a globe. I never got his title or which Cabinet department he was with, but he gave the impression of having something to do with Homeland Security and Immigration. He was a sour thirty, with glasses and a flag pin.

John Alderdyce said, “At this point Walker’s the only witness who can place Charlotte Sing in Detroit. The boy, Luis, is being treated for narcotics poisoning; any statement from him is bound to be spongy, given the hallucinogenic properties of heroin and methadone. The Chinese is still on the table at Receiving Hospital, and we haven’t been able to locate Ouida Rogers. A neighbor heard her going out early this morning, but she never showed up at work. We’re questioning her employer, Eugenia Pappas, right now. Walker thinks she knows something about the missing dope.”

It was the first time I’d heard Ouida’s last name. I figured she’d gone off somewhere to take stock. There’s nothing like an overnight abduction to inspire you to reexamine your prospects.

“You’re placing a great deal of faith in just his word. I understand your own forensics team has yet to raise physical evidence that Sing was ever in the manager’s office or the equipment room at Tigers Stadium, much less this country. The assertion alone is a slap in the face to the officers who guard our borders.”

Mary Ann Thaler spoke up. “That includes all three of us, metaphorically speaking; personally, I can take a little smack in the kisser if it means making good on a blunder. And you’re forgetting the prints on that shipping carton. If Walker hadn’t gotten her to touch it, he wouldn’t have been invited to this meeting. That’s just about the only thing he did last night that wasn’t dumb.”

“Thanks,” I said. “The dummy’s right here, by the way.”

Here
was a conference room in the MacNamara Federal Building, complete with a gold-fringed flag on a staff, portraits of Washington, Lincoln, and the current holder of their office, and upholstered chairs all around a walnut-veneer table you could play shuffleboard on. Thaler’s office downstairs was too small to sew a button on a shirt without leaving the door open and Messarian said his was filled with boxes of files he hadn’t unpacked yet. Apparently he wasn’t the first bureaucrat to hold his post since the beginning of the year, or even the second. The job involved directing traffic between the FBI and the headquarters in Washington and the local Arab community, the largest outside the Middle East, and the burnout factor was high. I was pretty sure the boxed files were an excuse and wondered where they’d hidden the microphone.