Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 21 - Infernal Angels (6 page)

“Record producers make child pornographers look like Bambi, and Winfield made other record producers look like Saint fucking Joan. He hired armed Chamorro to patrol his grounds day and night because of all the death threats he got. My guess? Somebody paid one of his Chamorro to cap him, ten minutes after I left his place. We were yelling loud enough to be heard in American Samoa.”

“No wonder they call it rap.”

The smile stuck. “Ever investigate homicide?”

“Not in Guam.”

“I couldn’t afford it anyway. Converters, you said?”

I nodded; realized I was still holding the revolver and returned it to its clip. “Twenty-five of them, still in boxes. They’re all that was taken, so the burglars knew what they were after. They’ll try to unload the shipment in a lump. Piecing it out takes too long and burns gas.”

“Price at the pump affects everything, even larceny. I’m told. I haven’t seen ’em, but like I said.”

Not being a fence was the part of his story I didn’t believe, but life’s too short to argue with a black belt. “They might try to move them through a music shop, to throw off the cops. You didn’t ask what converters are, so the businesses must overlap.” I put a card on a padded stand supporting an arrangement of amplifiers on different levels. “My cell’s on the back. I can throw a hundred or so into your defense fund if the sellers show up and you can keep them around.”

“A hundred’d buy a half-hour with my counselor.”

“That’s the job. It isn’t a big job as jobs go, but they don’t fall off overpasses like chunks of concrete. The governor says we’re in a one-state recession.”

“How about something on account?”

“Sorry. A judge could revoke your bail any time and whisk you off to that shithole in the Philippines.”

“I can make a lot more off the converters themselves. If I were in the racket.”

“I’d find out. I wouldn’t make a good character witness at your trial.”

He flushed again. I let myself out, elaborately in no hurry. Back on the street I resumed breathing. My quick-draw is only good for one charge.

SIX

My walk-in trade had stood still since
Saw II
, but I swung by the office to throw away my mail on the way home. That was two flights of stairs too many for the leg. Back in the house I left the pills alone and fixed myself some old-school relief from the vintage in the kitchen cupboard. It wouldn’t win me any marathons but it would hold me until bedtime and the next round of vehicular nightmares.

I played with my Scotch and watched the local stations run ten minutes of news on a loop for an hour and a half. There were more fatal drug overdoses around town than usual, I thought, but being a borderline addict myself maybe I was just more sensitive to it. Even so, on the evidence, some souped-up grade of heroin from Asia or the Middle East was blasting its way through a network more accustomed to friendly old Mexican brown. Every twenty years or so these things swept in like an Alberta Clipper, clearing out the shelters and rehab clinics, then moved on to wealthier markets in Hollywood and D.C. Somewhere along the line the city had become a testing laboratory for new product.

Reuben Crossgrain, my client, got his fifteen seconds between spots for a burger chain and a treatment for hemorrhoids whose side effects included cholera. The only reason his B and E got any air at all was it allowed a consumer affairs reporter to lead into a canned feature about truckloads of analog TVs rolling into landfills: Another great day for planet Earth.

Crossgrain showed off his sample box and managed to get the name Past Presence into the sound bite. I made a mental note to hit him up for another advance when the three days were up, based on the business it brought in. If he’d mentioned me at all it was lost in editing.

If my profit margin were wider than a worm’s whisker I’d offer the first day free. It’s almost always squandered on leads that don’t lead and tips that don’t tip. I’d made practice casts over two counties and pulled up a pawnbroker with a heart as well as a change-maker, a tough secretary to a smuggler’s widow, Johnny Toledo, the Donald Trump of the inner-city junk pile, and a kid who should have been hammering out engine blocks like his great-grandfather and playing in a garage band on weekends but was instead about to go to prison on a patch of volcanic ash that was only barely U.S. soil. A cross section of the community, when you thought about it, now that all the auto millions were draining into the eastern hemisphere. In one way or another I’d made all their troubles my own.

But that’s my working method. Whenever I’m faced with a problem, I identify it, analyze it, and make it bigger.

*   *   *

There wasn’t much to watch after the news now that my basic cable had been shut off for bills outstanding, just a lot of people yelling at one another without a script and a drama about a fifty-year-old woman and her three forty-year-old daughters. I turned in early.

The dream was the same, but I’d been through it so often I recognized it for what it was and did some light editing. Knowing the impact was coming front and rear, I slumped down in the driver’s seat and let my muscles go limp. The crunch when it came was just as sickening, with the novelty of having become dreary from repetition. I might as well have stuck with the tube.

I sat up, groped among the day’s refuse on the nightstand, and lit a cigarette, watching the smoke drift toward the source of light, in broken frames like an image in a silent film. For some reason it always seeks the light.

My head cleared a little more slowly. I realized the smoke was going in the wrong direction, away from the moon shining through the window and around the edge of the bedroom door standing half open. The lamp was on in the living room.

As I was trying to remember whether I’d turned it off, something clinked. It sounded like metal on glass.

I screwed out the cigarette in the ashtray on the nightstand—it seemed to make as much noise as someone dragging an iron safe through gravel—and reached inside the drawer I kept open with the .38 inside.

With my fingers closed around the cold grip I slid the covers to one side and tried to keep springs from scraping against each other as I swung bare feet to the floor. The nights were getting cooler. The touch of the boards made me feel naked in my shorts.

The something clinked again as I eased around the edge of the door. Once clear, I paused to let my eyes catch up to the light. The lamp was on its lowest setting, a soft yellow glow in a room crowded with the unfamiliar shadows that gathered in a place I knew well every other hour of the day and night. Someone was sitting in my armchair. I couldn’t tell if the figure was male or female.

It moved then. Something glittered, accompanied by that metallic sound. Then it settled back into motionless silence.

I kept close to the wall far from the light, but I wasn’t fooling anyone. Two sharp clicks broke the stillness into three pieces and I blinked in the glare of the bulb at full power. My finger tightened on the trigger.

Mary Ann Thaler was looking at me with the same quiet tension she brought to bear on every situation. Her legs were crossed and an inch and a half of medium-dark liquid glistened in the bottom of one of my old-fashioneds. She lowered her other hand from the switch on the lamp, lifted the glass, and sipped, causing the ice cubes floating inside to shift and touch the side with a clink. My blood resumed circulating with a rush like warm water. I relaxed.

“There’s nothing wrong with your lock,” she said. “Just your door. The wood’s shrunk away from the frame. I used an emery board on the latch.”

“It’s a wonder there aren’t more woman burglars.” I laid the revolver on the end table by the sofa.

I didn’t feel any more self-conscious than usual. She’d seen me in my underwear under similarly unromantic circumstances. I watched her, fascinated. I’d never seen her drink anything stronger than white wine.

She swirled the stuff in the glass. “So this is what the fuss is about. They should stick to golf.”

“My brand barely qualifies as Scotch. Are you going to finish it?”

“Be my guest.” She set it down next to the lamp.

When I stepped forward to pick it up, she uncrossed her legs in transparent hose and crossed them the other way. Her years with the Detroit Police Department and now with Washington probably showed somewhere, but not in that light. She was slender and brown-haired, wearing it long now, and had on something tailored with an above-the-knee skirt that looked like tweed but moved like silk when she moved. Her shoes, narrow pumps with low heels for chasing terrorists, were on the floor beside the chair, one over on its side. I’d always admired her feet. I emptied the glass in one slow smooth motion and crunched the cubes.

She shuddered. “I hate a man who chews ice. If you ever wondered why we never hooked up, that’s reason three hundred and ninety-nine.”

“I thought I was the one playing hard to get.” I got rid of the glass. “How are you, Marshal?”

“Deputy. I’m three suicide bombers shy of a promotion. I’m tired, if you really want to know. My section chief got me out of bed.”

“Did he break in?”

“We reserve that for civilians. Get dressed. There were laws in this town last I heard.”

“You haven’t been listening very hard. Are we going anyplace special?”

“Not far. You know the way. We found this on the body.”

I took the card she’d slipped from inside her blouse. It felt warm. I read my name on the front and my cell written on the back in my scrawl. “Could you narrow it down?”

SEVEN

“We’ll talk in the car,” she said. “We may both be back in bed before the fighting roosters crow in Mexicantown.”

There were several responses to that, but only one that would sustain what good relations we had. I put on loafers, slacks, a T-shirt, and came out shrugging into a Windbreaker to find her standing with her shoes on. I glanced at my revolver on the end table. She opened her coat to show me a Smith & Wesson Ladysmith on her slim suede belt, a semiautomatic designed for small hands and large exit wounds. I accompanied her unarmed.

She’d drawn a Chrysler with a government plate, black trim on a white finish, with an interior done in shades of gray.

“See the news last night?” She drove with her seat shoved all the way back and both arms extended straight to the wheel, like the pilot of a street chopper.

“Not since six o’clock. Did another mayor resign?”

“It’s the same show three times a day. They should tape it at noon and send the personnel home.”

“I saw the stuff on heroin O.D.s.” I was cagy suddenly. I had an idea now where we were headed.

“That’s city, and the boys in Narco are welcome to it, the arrogant pricks. One of our local entrepreneurs—in an honest racket—lost some merchandise in a break-in. If you left the room to pee you missed it.”

“I leave the room more often than I used to. What made it worth sending a TV crew?”

“It had to do with high-definition electronics. They can tie that into advertising revenue. A neighborhood shopping sheet, that’s what journalism’s turned into. The entrepreneur used part of his face time to show off something the burglars missed on the first pass.”

“The first pass?” I regretted chewing those ice cubes. They made a ball in my gut.

“They came back for it, we think. Anyway it isn’t there.”

“Who’s we?”

“The DPD and the U.S. Department of Justice. Well, me. I got the account because of my long and cordial association with local authority.”

“Long, anyway. Why the interest at Justice?”

“That’s classified for now.”

“You don’t even sound like a cop anymore.”

“Don’t try to flatter me.”

We cruised for a while in silence. The same ragged man was sitting on the same curb with all his chattel tied up in bags, distributed the same way as the morning before. He wasn’t eating this time—hadn’t, maybe, since he’d finished whatever he’d had in the greasy paper—just dangling his hands between his knees in jersey gloves with the fingers cut out, staring into the middle ground and waiting for the bus to a better place.

More intersections, and we were the only traffic crossing; we might have been in an automobile commercial. The Walgreen’s where I’d run into Sergeant Mansanard rolled past, drenched in brilliant incandescence with the identical number of cars parked in a protective cluster in the vast lot. I had the feeling that if I went inside I’d find the big cop staked out on the same patch of linoleum, as if the last twenty-four hours hadn’t happened. He, the store, and the homeless man on the curb might’ve been part of another recurring dream. Maybe I was dreaming now. Nothing is real at that hour of the morning.

Thaler was thinking along similarly cosmic lines. “I keep expecting something about this place to change, even for the worse. Any variety would do. There’s a Taurus in a ditch off the Reuther that qualifies for historic status under the charter. Probably a whole family of Micronesians living there behind the citations on the windshield.”

The conversation was turning in a safe, direction. I nudged it farther off the burner. “What made you put in for this job?”