Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss (24 page)

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 without 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.

O
K,”

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.

Outside, the moon stood on edge, pouring light onto the snow and splashing it through the window. The furniture in the bedroom made hand shadows on the walls. Even my cane looked sinister leaning against the chair where I’d Hung my clothes. Wind whimpered around the edges of panes, the proverbial wolf at the door.

I was thinking more clearly asleep than awake. I got up, clambered into my robe and slippers, and hobbled out into the living room and the only comfortable chair I owned, next to a lamp and the metropolitan telephone directory on their little table. I hauled the big book onto my lap and lit a cigarette one-handed while I paged through Automobile Maintenance in the yellow section.

OK Towing & Auto Repair was the oldest continually operating professional garage in a city that had spent the last generation eradicating every link to its historical past. I brought my Cutlass there for tune-ups and repairs: had bought it there, in fact, after the
owner of the shop had found it abandoned in a field in rural Washtenaw County and dropped in a new engine and transmission. He hated collectors for babying their machines instead of driving them as God and Henry Ford intended, but he did all their work for triple what he charged his other customers, and they shut their mouths and paid up, because as mechanics went he was a Picasso in a world of Sunday painters. He was German, of course; and of course he was working at three o’clock in the morning. For all I knew he lived there, against all the zoning ordinances in his neighborhood. But then the only laws that meant anything to him were the laws of bodies in motion. He refused to report cash expenditures in excess of ten thousand dollars, as required by Washington to discourage the cash-and-carry trade in illegal narcotics, which was another reason why his operation was popular. When a fugitive like Jeff Starzek needed work done on his classic transportation, OK was the only place he could go in the state of Michigan,

“OK.” Ernst Dierdorf’s High German accent cut through the animal wail of air wrenches in the background.

“Amos Walker, Ernst. Nineteen-seventy Cutlass? I’ve got a question.”

“Lay off premium. It’s a car, not a racehorse.”

“It’s not about the Cutlass. It’s about someone else’s car.”

“We open at eight. Come in then.”

I blew smoke at the dial tone. He was just old enough to have served with the Hitler Youth, and his bedside manner was in keeping. I started to call him back, then hung up. He changed his mind as often as the Vatican changed popes, and if you annoyed him sufficiently, you were dead to him for months. Half the races in the old Detroit Grand Prix had been lost by drivers who’d found that out firsthand.

I put out the cigarette, stumped back into the bedroom, checked the load in the .38 for the eighth time that night, and tucked it back under my pillow. In spite of the package I’d received, I had an idea that when they came for me it wouldn’t be with a bow and arrow.

At six o’clock I was up again, microwaving last night’s coffee while I got dressed. It tasted like boiled socks, but the caffeine chased the pixies out of my head. I swallowed two Vicodins and pounded the second half of the cup down on top of them. Then I went out into the granite cold of predawn.

Barry Stackpole was awake when I got to his condo. He slept about two hours in the afternoon, hanging upside down. He heard me out, woke up a couple of people on the telephone, hacked into a top-level database on the computer, and gave me a printout. In return I drank his coffee and told him everything that had happened since we’d seen each other last. He took no notes—he never did—and said he’d sit on it until I gave him the sign. The only way you could tell he was excited was his eyelids looked sleepier than usual.

It was a white glazed-brick building on the east side, with a Standard gasoline pump rusting out front and an electric fence in back to protect the rolling stock. Dead birds littered the ground around the fence, but that was just staging. Dierdorf had barely ducked a conviction for reckless endangerment after a prowler tried to climb the wire and lost the use of one kidney. The owner cut back on the current on the advice of his attorney, but he’d made his point. There had been no attempts since.

I passed a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Detroit muscle up on hydraulic lifts and what looked like a bathtub-gin Duesenberg rendered down to its basic molecules on the concrete floor on
the way to the office. A half-dozen overgrown Oompa Loompas in greasy coveralls splattered sparks off cracked frames, balanced wheels, and puzzled over parts older than their grandfathers to the accompaniment of a raunchy roadhouse beat galloping out of loudspeakers mounted near the roof. Dierdorf, a German national who’d been registering as a resident alien for sixty years, held a deep fascination for homegrown American culture that didn’t include Americans themselves, whom he’d never forgiven for
Hogan’s Heroes
. A professionally painted mural of Larry, Moe, and Curly Joe trying to crank-start a Model T covered the back wall of the garage.

A three-by-five card with a black thumbprint in one corner commanded me to
KNOCK, THEN ENTER
. I rattled my knuckles against the opaque windowpane, purely out of courtesy, and opened the door. A gasoline-tank explosion couldn’t have penetrated the din.

Dierdorf, seated at his Edwardian rolltop heaped with insurance forms, bills of lading, a two-year run of J.C. Whitney catalogues, and empty Beck’s bottles, recognized me and threw the switch on a power strip, cutting off the stereo on its shelf. Now only the silken whisper of pneumatic hammers drifted into the cramped space.

“You’re at least a thousand miles past due for an oil change,” he said by way of greeting. He knew me by sight, and could dredge up my name with a little effort, but the calendar in his head was always turning, on every vehicle he maintained on a regular basis. He could detect a faulty timing gear by the sound and a loose piston ring by the smell, but he’d never mastered English subjunctive. “I sold you that four-fifty-five, and I can sell it out from under you if you don’t treat it properly.”

He had a dashboard clock of some Art Nouveau design in pieces on a cleared section of desk and was poking at the cogs and
wheels with a precision screwdriver. It might have belonged to the Duesenberg, or he might have found it rooting around in a pile of scrap iron. His hands, blue-black with grease, were coarse and misshapen, like his body, with knuckles flattened and scarred, but tapered into fingers with spatulated tips like a concert pianist’s. His head, although white-haired now and sagging under the chin, belonged to a Nazi sculptor’s idea of a Roman god. His coveralls were Homerically filthy. Contact with them alone would soil whatever he wore underneath. My theory was it was his own naked skin. For all I knew he lived in the garage like the Phantom of the Opera and never went out, except on midnight raids of all the salvage yards in the area. I knew he never bothered to test-drive the results of his skill. Once they left the floor he stopped thinking about them until their next service period.

“I’ll make an appointment next week,” I said. “It’s a Hurst Olds I’m interested in. Sixty-nine, powder blue. Stripped for speed.”

“If one comes in here painted blue I take it away on principle. I told them fockers in the Woodward Dream Cruise I shit on their mutant spawn.” He blew metal shavings off a tiny part and began reassembling the clock. His fingers seemed to work independently, each with its own brain. The muscles of his face were locked in concentration.

“Well, it’s blue. This is the owner. Maybe you’ve done business with him in the past.” I got out the picture of Jeff Starzek with Rose Canon and laid it on top of a 1939 Chevrolet owner’s manual. I didn’t hold out much hope he’d make the connection. I think when he looked at his customers he saw headlights, grilles, and manufacturers’ insignia instead of faces. Just to tilt the odds I included a folded fifty I’d broken out of the safe in my office on the way there.

His gray eyes flicked toward the photo, then back to his work. His hands never seemed to leave the project, but when I looked
again the fifty was gone. He’d snatched it away without disturbing the picture on top.

The clock was mechanical. He opened a tiny drawer next to the pigeonholes in the rolltop, rummaged among a pile of Dumbo-shaped brass keys, selected one apparently by feel, fitted it in place, and wound it three or four times. The clock ticked and the sweep hand went into orbit. He set the time against the MobilGas advertising clock on the wall and stood it on its pedestal on the desk. Then he pulled out a deep file drawer and handed me a rounded paper cup with an elastic band from an assortment inside. “Put it on.”

I stuck my head through the band and adjusted the cup over my nose and mouth. “Bank or party store? I left my gun in the car.”

He said nothing, which after abandoning German was the only language he spoke fluently. He got up and led the way out of the office, walking stooped over with his arms bent in the permanent crook they’d acquired lifting engines without benefit of a chain fall. I figured he’d gotten the rest of his physical complaints during the sorting-out process at Nuremberg.

In the garage he stopped to fit together two deformed-looking parts of the Duesenberg for a mechanic seated on the floor amidst the carnage, then continued to the airtight metal door of the paint room.

“Where’s your mask?” I said.

He tugged open the door and went on through, no response.

This room, a former bay no longer used for maintenance, was windowless and displayed all the colors of the spectrum on walls, floor, and ceiling, along with a few others invented by the design departments of all the major automakers past and present. Notwithstanding an elaborate ventilation system, it reeked of ozone and acetate. Steel shelves encircling the room held spray guns, portable drying lamps, and cans and cans of paint labeled in
every language. The air swam with fumes. I sucked what oxygen I could through the paper mesh in my mask and still felt woozy. Dierdorf must have had his lungs removed and gills installed.

“Is it ready?” he asked.

“I was just about to rip off the tape.”

The reply came muffled through a Neoprene gas mask covering the features of the man who occupied the room. It covered his head as well. The shape of his body was invisible under a loose smock that hung to the tops of his shoes. He stripped off a pair of rubber gauntlets.

The car parked in the middle of the room was a 1966 Hurst/Oldsmobile, still futuristic in line after all those years. Silver vinyl draped all four tires and miles of masking tape secured scraps and patches of brown paper to windshield, windows, headlights, taillights, and chrome. The exposed sections gleamed warm white with twin gold stripes bisecting trunk and hood and limning the sides, the original factory color scheme. The paint man tore loose the tape alongside a stripe with a shrill zipping sound.

I heard thumping. I thought at first it was a worker in the garage pounding out a ding with a rubber mallet. It was my heart.

“Let me. For this I live.” Dierdorf snatched the vinyl off the tire nearest him, threw it aside, and walked around the vehicle, stripping off tape and crumpling paper as he went. He almost whistled.

Jeff Starzek tore off his gas mask and ran his stubby fingers through his chestnut hair. He grinned at me. “How about a spin?”

J
eff gave Dierdorf a tight roll of bills as big around as a soup can and we strapped ourselves in and took off through the bay door before they had it all the way up. I confirmed there was no backseat. “Speed or cargo space?”

“Speed. Since the last tax hike you can carry a couple hundred grand in the trunk easy.”

“Are we?”

He smiled at the windshield. He wore wraparound shades that made his round face look like a well-fed Steve McQueen’s. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“Where we going?”

“Around. I like to drive.”