Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss (2 page)

“I bought it for the trunk. I can squeeze in a dozen more cartons than I could in the Dodge.” He screwed up his face. “You think you could blow that somewhere else?”

I’d lit a cigarette. I laid it in a tray on an empty table. “What are you hauling?”

“Kiddie cigs. Marlboros.”

“You smuggle ‘em, but you don’t smoke ‘em?”

“Ever hear of Larry Fay?”

“Old-time song-and-dance man.”

“That’s Eddie Foy. Fay was a big-time bootlegger in New York during Prohibition. Never touched a drop.”

“Rumrunners are a lot more popular now than Big Tobacco.”

“Better PR. And I’m not big.”

I’d met Jeff Starzek when he was running interference for truckloads of cargo hijacked from Detroit Metropolitan Airport. He’d painted his 1970 Dodge Challenger a shade of orange you
could see from outer space and averaged thirty miles over the speed limit all the way to Chicago, drawing cops, like Buster Keaton, toward him and away from the big rigs and their contraband. He had more license suspensions than a drunken congressman and no convictions for anything more serious than reckless driving. At the time I’d been tracing a teenage runaway who’d mixed himself up with the operation. If Starzek hadn’t broken precedent and told me what I’d needed to know, the kid might have gone on jumping from one felony to another until he wound up behind chain-link and razor wire. He might have anyway, for all I knew, but I returned him to his parents for however long he stayed.

The next time I’d seen Starzek, he’d gone into business for himself, hauling much smaller shipments of cigarettes bought in lower-tax states and on Indian reservations where no taxes were paid and selling them to wholesalers and party stores at a profit. The merchants sold the cigarettes over the counter and pocketed the amount that would have gone to Lansing. That time, the smuggler was a client; someone had sold a store in Eastpointe a case of menthols laced with pesticide, Starzek had been arrested on a tip, and although charges were dropped for lack of evidence, the family of a customer who’d died of poisoning had brought civil suit against Starzek, who claimed he’d never done business in Eastpointe. Everything I turned pointed to the store manager’s son-in-law, who’d stolen the case from a shipment targeted for destruction after a crop-dusting blunder in Virginia.

By then, of course, Starzek was known to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and just repainting his Challenger an unassuming brown wasn’t enough to keep agents from hauling him over and running him through the system.

“I thought you’d retired,” I said.

“Diversified is the word.” He trilled a finger down the keyboard
Jerry Lee Lewis style. “I’m carrying something else back down the coast.”

“I won’t ask what.”

“Honestly, who cares?”

I gave him the point. It wasn’t anything to me whether he smuggled Lucky Strikes or fake Beanie Babies. The tax just went into the bail fund for state senators.

I swigged beer. It was warm already. The bar was overheated, like every other place up there in late fall. “Well, good luck. That lake effect from Chicago’s a bitch when it snows.”

“Wrong coast. I like the little towns on Huron. Everybody minds his own business and the feds stick out like ears on a frog.”

“In nineteen-fifty, maybe. They’re as suspicious as in the city.”

“Cynic.”

“Pirate.”

The square-shouldered waitress box-stepped our way to announce last call. Starzek, who hadn’t touched his water, shook his head. I was looking at my watch and wondering if waiting twenty more minutes would make any difference when Hegelund came in.

His face looked sadder and more tired under an orange cap with a buck silhouetted on the front. He wore a camouflage coat with splashes of orange on it and insulated boots that flapped about his ankles. I ordered another beer and started back to my table, not making eye contact.

Maybe I was too conscientious about it. You try to make your mind blank, just in case there’s something to telepathy, but prey always has the advantage. Hegelund didn’t know me from J.D. Salinger, but he stopped when he saw me, turned around, and trotted back out. I gave him fifteen seconds, then left cash for the beers including the one I had coming and followed, casual as a picnic.

I’d parked in the dirt lot next to the building, pale under the
phantom glow of a mercury bulb with a light dusting of snow. My breath curled. There among the campers, pickups, and RVs was Starzek’s Hurst/Olsmobile, painted light blue—that year’s version of plain brown—and built along the lines of my Cutlass, but with twin scoops punched into the hood. He’d have reinforced the springs to keep the rear end from sagging under its load and bolted the bumpers with angle irons to the frame, in order to run roadblocks and sustain ramming from behind. I didn’t get down to look. It would have a new transmission and a rebuilt engine. Everything else that might have slowed him down—radio, heater, rear seat, spare tire—would have been stripped away. It was a power plant on wheels, with space for cargo and an operator.

Hegelund was driving an eight-year-old Jeep Cherokee, parked on the edge of the lot near the street. The lawyers hadn’t left him enough to buy anything younger. Rust had nibbled at the wheel wells and someone had taped thick plastic over a missing window in back. He’d had luck; a shaggy spikehorn buck lay on the roof, lashed in place with clothesline around its hooves fore and aft. Shaking loose my keys, I watched Hegelund out of the corner of my eye as he bent to reach into the backseat. I was walking down a rutted aisle between rows of cars.

I heard the crash and felt the jolt when my shoulder hit the ground. My leg never felt the impact and for an instant I thought I’d slipped on a patch of ice. Then I felt the numbness below my waist and knew I’d taken a lead slug big enough to change my life. I began to float away from the light. The second crash belonged to something that had no connection with me.

I
missed the second half of November, which in Michigan is no great loss, but I was out of the hospital in time for Christmas, which was. Herds of fat busted cops in gamey security uniforms prowled the malls, and everyone who had ever been rejected by
American Idol
seemed to have released a holiday album. My little monastic cell on the third floor of an office building as old as gunpowder looked like a heap of boiled rice after all the colored lights.

I was getting around with a cane, which an emergency room nurse told me would have been a plastic leg if a “short fat guy” hadn’t scooped me up off the parking lot and delivered me to the Grayling hospital in less time than it took to put an ambulance on the scene. He hadn’t stayed long enough to give his name, but I knew Jeff Starzek from the description, even if it wasn’t strictly accurate; his bulk was mostly muscle and he was taller than he looked. I didn’t mind his not checking in later to find out my condition. Cops swarm thick around hospitals and some of the incoming calls are recorded. He could have left me there to bleed out and avoided all risk.

An ambulance with twice the horsepower of his Hurst/Olds
couldn’t have done anything for Hegelund. The way the police worked it out, he’d put a .30–30 round through his head from the same deer rifle he’d used on me while I was still trying to figure out what had happened. I was his last defiant act, and maybe his only one. He had long arms, a carbon test on his hands and clothing indicated his wound was self-inflicted, and none of the patrons and employees of Spike’s reported seeing anyone else in the lot when they piled out after the shots. No one knows anyone, not well enough to predict what he’ll do in a corner, fight or surrender. He’d done both. Maybe his blood had been up from the deer kill. In any case, it didn’t last. I said he’d looked tired.

Cranked up in bed in ICU I told the cops who I was working for and why. They didn’t believe me when I said I didn’t know who the short fat guy was and that I’d only struck up a conversation with him in the bar because I liked the way he played piano, but they didn’t lean too hard. They don’t get many shootings up there except the accidental kind in the woods, and when they get one all sealed in shrink-wrap they don’t poke at it. Also I’d just been upgraded from critical.

I never found out how Hegelund knew I was looking for him, or even if he did. Putting aside metaphysics, I guessed he was suspicious of everyone, and I fit the mold. You don’t do what I do for as many years as I’ve done it without taking on some of the physical characteristics of a rat terrier. Whoever had represented him in the divorce might have had an informant in his ex-wife’s legal firm, who’d seen me in the office and had a gift for description. It’s screwy to give a lawyer the benefit of the doubt when it comes to ethics. None of this was as certain as the throbbing in my leg when it rains, or the limp when I’m tired or forget myself.

The bullet had gone clean through, missing the bone but taking away enough meat and muscle to stuff a softball, and the surgeon who cleaned and dressed the canal told me I’d owe whatever mobility
I regained to muscles designed for another purpose. The client paid me for my time and took care of the medical expenses, including six weeks on the parallel bars at Henry Ford Hospital. All in all, it was the most I’d ever made from one case, even if it had all been spent on probes and painkillers. I hadn’t been armed that night; it didn’t seem to be that kind of job, and anyway I wouldn’t have gotten the chance to fire anything but a distress signal into the air from a prone position. It had happened that fast.

Barry Stackpole, an old friend, drove the six-hour round trip to bring me home after my release from Grayling, and drove it again a month later to retrieve my Cutlass when I had enough strength in my leg to work the pedal. Since one of his legs was man-made and he had a steel plate in his skull, I didn’t complain about my infirmity, just the loss of work. He offered a loan, which I declined. One of the advantages of living so close to the poverty level is you’re never paralyzed worrying about money. It’s just like being rich, only without the good Scotch and cigars.

“I can swing something your way,” he said when we were cruising between two solid banks of motels with vacancies along the strip outside town; one month earlier they’d been booked to the roofs. “I’m negotiating a ghost job on the memoirs of a Korean mobster currently in the witness-protection program. He says. I want his background checked.”

Barry’s a freelance crime reporter, the author of several books on the Mafia and all its franchises, and a long-standing speed bump in the road to ill-gotten gains. That’s how he got the leg and the hubcap in his head.

I said, “I didn’t know there were Korean mobsters.”

“These days they come in all colors. This one says he swung asylum from the Justice Department after he ratted out some fellow racket guys in Seoul. He could be a mob plant to find out what I know about a couple of parties I steered into witness protection.
They’re all pretty much scum, but I’m not going to turn finger for a six-figure deal and a spot on the Book Channel.”

“Check him with Justice.”

“That would be awkward. They don’t know I know what I know. If they suspect, I might have to join the program myself. The government boys play for blood since nine-one-one.”

I plucked out a cigarette. Before I got it lit, he had the window down on my side. Barry was on a health kick: no liquor, no secondhand smoke, fresh box of condoms first of every month even if he hadn’t used up last month’s supply. I threw the match into the slipstream. It froze my fingers on contact. “I don’t know how you keep it all straight.”

“That’s because you keep company with a different class of crook.” He buzzed the window back up partway.

I’d told him about Starzek. We hadn’t any secrets from each other except when one of us was working. “There are crooks and crooks,” I said. “This one never stole a dollar or an election.”

“I’d keep my distance. Cigarette smugglers have terrorist ties. I read it in
USA Today.”

“That’s just a dodge to shame people into paying the tax.”

“Either way it’s heat. Where’s the impound?”

He’d stopped for a light at the main four corners. There were sporting-goods stores in both blocks with survival gear in the windows and a concrete movie house playing one feature three days each week. Everything had the trod-on look of a neglected dog. Strip malls are called strip malls for a reason.

I got out the paper with directions and read them off. We went there and I paid my fee and found him still sitting behind the wheel when I came out of the office. He was driving a brand-new maroon Lincoln that year, shaped like a cough drop. It would be registered to someone else. He was a professional sociopath, never left a paper trail.

When he opened his window I leaned on the sill. “Thanks for waiting. Also the ride. Can I let you know about the godfather of Seoul?”

“Sure. I can always stall him by demanding an ‘As Told To’ credit. If he’s legit he’ll never agree to it.”

“In that case, you might not need the background check.”

He gave me his slow easy smile. “Well, once you’ve been blown up, you tend to double-team.”

I gave him back a wave and limped around to the garage side. Behind me I heard his engine start and when it didn’t explode this time he drove off.

Nothing came of the Korean job. I was still thinking about it when Barry called and said his would-be collaborator had turned out to be a Hyundai dealer from Phoenix who’d made up the story to impress a girlfriend and hadn’t known when to bail out. The confession had come under pressure from Barry; the man knew too much about the details of zero-percent financing for an ordinary thief.

By then I had an employee-fraud job, nothing too strenuous, just a couple of hours in the evening parked behind the Troy K-Mart, videotaping stockroom clerks stashing new DVD players in a Dumpster. My leg interrupted my concentration when I’d been sitting too long, but changing positions took care of that. By the time I’d gathered enough evidence to prosecute, I’d found new uses for the cane, such as flipping the telephone receiver out of its cradle into my hand when I didn’t feel like tipping my office chair forward. I was getting to be as good with it as Charlie Chaplin.