Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss (25 page)

“You’d think you’d be sick of it.”

“Didn’t Seabiscuit like to run?” He swung right and let out the clutch. The big plant under the hood gulped air through its scoops and we lifted away from the pavement. Neither of us worried about cops. One thing they let you do in Detroit is drive.

“I guess you got tired of blue.”

“I never liked it. It was my cloak of invisibility.”

“Are you looking to get pinched?”

“They have to catch me first.”

We rocketed through the East Side, scattering Sunday supplements and one cock pheasant, which took off with a white blur and turned into the sun, glistening russet and turquoise with an arrogant cackle that drowned out the rumble of the 455. Jeff’s engine was the same size as mine, but he’d science-fictioned it into a barely earthbound Concorde. Squat brick titty bars and patches of weedy vacant real estate shot past in a smear.

“Oral moved out on Rose,” I said. “He found out you’re not related by blood.”

“It had to happen sometime. There’s a brain in that big bald head. You tell him?”

“He figured it out for himself. She told him the rest.”

“Well, I’m sorry about that. I never saw her as anything but a sister. Mother, too. She raised me from a stray pup.”

“She told me that. I found out the rest for myself. My head’s smaller than Oral’s, but I flush it out with alcohol now and then.”

“How’s the leg?”

“Follows me around like an old dog. I’m told I have to get used to that.”

“Bullshit.”

“That was my reaction. Where’ve you been keeping yourself?”

“I been everywhere, man. Hotels, motels, YMCAs, the long open road. Did you know the Michigan coastline’s the longest in the United States, not excluding Hawaii and California?”

“I heard. And there’s a hundred public telephones to every mile.”

“An exaggeration. For every working instrument there’s five bird’s nests and one honking big nest of seriously pissed hornets.”

“You don’t look stung.”

“I’m a fugitive, son. I don’t own a cell, for damn good reasons,
and every time I stop long enough to make a call, five branches of law enforcement are waiting with nets. You’d think I was Ted Kaczynski. All I ever did was feed the good old American craving for nicotine.”

“True. Well, there was that counterfeiting thing.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with that. I never take delivery on cargo I can’t carry in one trip. And I never took a flyer on a rap I couldn’t beat. Uncle’s one unforgiving son of a bitch.”

“Your brother did. He’s dead.”

“I heard. We weren’t close.”

We climbed the ramp onto 1-94, the Edsel Ford Expressway, downshifting behind a Saturn trying to enter at thirty. At the last second he gunned it, shifted again, and we slipped into the passing lane through a space no wider than a pantry door. A Greyhound bus let him know what it thought about that. I took my foot out of the floorboards. “What brought you into contact with him after all those years?”

“Herbert Clemson. I’m betting you’ve met.”

“Why’d he turn you?”

“You mean how.”

“Start there.”

“Saginaw cops pulled me over in November, ran my sheet, and frisked the car. I was hauling three hundred cartons of Tareytons, a real dog of a brand, but I had a buyer lined up in Toledo. Turns out my source had kicked in a big-box store in Midland Halloween night. He told me he’d bought the cigs wholesale in Tennessee. I was looking at three felony counts, including an ADW on a security guard he’d bopped on the head. Clemson came in and just took me away from them.”

“Him and his John Does. He tried the same thing with me. How far back do you figure he set you up?”

“Midland. Maybe as far back as Tennessee. He’s one bad hat. I was supposed to be his mule. You can pass a lot of phony paper when all the people you work with deal strictly in cash.”

“That’s his signature. It’s the same with small churches and roadside motels. You were part of his fleet. He has a territory the size of Brazil.”

“He said it was an inside sting to crack a terrorist counterfeiting ring. I was to pick up my first shipment from Paul.”

“Clemson was rigging you to take the fall for Paul’s murder. He’d already decided he had to go.”

“Something of the sort occurred to me. I went to Paul and warned him he was in over his head. He was a crackpot and a crank, but he was the only family I ever had except for Rose. He called me a foul trafficker and sent me on my way. I’ve been burning rubber ever since. I guess you got my note.”

“You know I did.” I moved my leg into a position that didn’t make me want to scream. “Clemson isn’t the type to let a good frame go to waste. After you dropped off his screen, he used your brother’s corpse to set me up the way he did you. What was the something else you told me in Grayling you were carrying down the coast?”

“A big load of government bullshit.”

I waited, but nothing else came. His concentration was fixed on a street with plenty of visibility and no other traffic.

“Normally I don’t even have to pump you for the brands you’re smuggling,” I said.

“That was before I got on this lifesaving jag. This is secondhand smoke you don’t want.”

“Life meaning mine.”

“Mine too, if I can work it.” He exited at Grand and we cruised past the Fisher Building and the former corporate headquarters of
General Motors, already losing some of its Art Deco shine to an indifferent city government now in residence.

I waited until we stopped for a light, then took out the computer printout Barry had given me and snapped it open in front of his face. He took it and read it.

“ ‘Operation suspended pending review.’ What’s it mean?”

“It means Clemson’s freelancing. No help from Washington. He’s been recalled, and he’s taking his own sweet time about answering.”

“Where’d you get this?”

“A friend. He’s busting up his hard drive as we speak. It’s evidence to prosecute if the FBI traces the hack.”

“Hell of a friend.”

“We saved each other’s life a couple of times.”

“That’s long coin with you.”

“You should know.” I watched the scenery pass in a white wipe. “Clemson told me himself this Treasury-paper thing was too big for anyone but a well-funded gang of terrorists. The Mafia’s gone bust and the independent crooks don’t have the organization. Setting aside terrorists, that leaves just Uncle Sam.

“He’s poured billions into the war on terror,” I went on. “Who’s to notice if one of his own people diverts a few hundred thousand from the operating fund to open his own shop?”

“Someone did. They’re calling him in.” The light changed. He chirped his tires crossing the intersection.

“That action’s recent. He’s been recruiting his people—people like you and Paul and a woman named Miss Maebelle—out of his operation’s budget. Maybe it was serendipity at the start. Maybe he stumbled on a genuine counterfeiting mill in the course of his smuggling investigation and saw his chance to cash in. Look at the code name he picked out.”

He took his eyes off the road long enough to look again at the printout on the seat between us. “I see what you mean.”

“Call it Paul Starzek’s legacy. We may never know how your brother came by that Treasury stock. Could be someone in his congregation caught a strong case of guilt and picked the wrong clergyman to hear his confession. They’re all getting close to judgment. Whatever you say about Paul, he was devoted to his do-it-yourself church. He bought himself a state-of-the-art printer and spent his first dividend on a new statue of St. Sebastian. Clemson saw it in less spiritual terms. He may not even be guilty of treason, just misappropriation of funds and a count or two of conspiracy to commit forgery. And murder, of course.”

“You’re sure he killed Paul?”

“Paul was a liability. Clemson said so himself, when he was putting the rap on terrorists. Paul mixed up the stock with the paper he used to print his advertising circulars. If he was that unreliable, he’d have shown it in other ways as well. Clemson neutralized him and moved the inventory to another safe house.”

“The Sportsmen’s Rest. I heard about that business on the lake. It sounded a little like you.”

“It couldn’t have come as much of a surprise. You stopped to play the piano in Miss Maebelle’s neighborhood Christmas Eve.”

He used a right-turn lane to beat a red light, swerving around a cautious driver in a hatchback. “Paul bragged a bit. He wanted to impress me with his missionary work. Anyway I wanted to see how deep Clemson was in. I thought it might come in handy.”

“I got a good look at Miss Maebelle when I showed her your picture,” I said. “She didn’t know you from Andy Jackson.”

“I didn’t get that far. I’m as good as I am at what I do because when I’m driving, driving’s all I think about. I get most of my thinking done about other things when I stop. I had a swallow of
beer, I played a little Bach and Fats Waller. Then I reverted to instinct and ran like hell.”

“Like hell is right.”

We went a block in silence.

“Pull over a minute,” I said. “I want to show you something else.”

He frowned, but took his foot off the accelerator and let the drag carry us onto a patch of gravel by the Grand Trunk tracks. Low empty buildings dotted the landscape like an adobe village. He braked. A lump of humanity in tattered Carhartt and a backpack looked over at the car from fifty yards down the rails, then resumed scouring the cinderbed for jetsam.

I’d lied to Ernst Dierdorf about leaving the gun in my car. I hadn’t taken two steps from it since leaving Port Sanilac. I took it out and pointed it across my lap at Jeff.

He smiled, but he didn’t try to pass it off as a joke. The world amused him. He saw most of it blurring past at eighty-five. He let one hand dangle over the steering wheel and faced me. Two seasoned duelists watching each other over their choice of weapons.

“Let’s revise,” I said. “You knew I’d come looking for you in an obvious place like a truck stop on the route you told me you’d be taking. You stayed long enough to leave an impression with the bartender. You had a conversation with him. You never do that. Why didn’t you just go ahead and leave a trail of bread crumbs?”

“The Rest isn’t easy to find from the state highway. I couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t miss it.”

“How long have you been in Detroit?”

“Just long enough to pick up a couple of things. Change of socks. A new paint job. Clemson was looking for a blue car. I’ve done a lot of business over the years with OK. Who do you think
recommended you when he was looking for a buyer for that Cutlass?”

“Were you planning on dropping by my place?”

“No.”

“A man in your tight needs all the friends he’s got.”

“Open the glove compartment,” he said.

I didn’t even look at it. “Turn off the motor.”

He twisted the key in the ignition. When the rumbling stopped, the silence hurt my ears. He’d torn out all the carpeting and insulation that muffled the noise from under the hood. Heater, too; our breath curled.

“Key,” I said.

“Gun.”

After a second I laid the .38 on the dash. He took the key out then and put it next to the revolver. I popped open the glove compartment.

It didn’t contain any of the usual junk, not even an insurance card or registration. All it held was a No. 10 envelope. I slid it out. It was blank. I lifted the flap, spread it open to look at the Michigan driver’s license inside. His picture looked recent.

“ ‘Jason Argo,’ ” I read. “You better hope you don’t get stopped by a classical scholar.”

“What are the odds?” He smiled, waggled the hand hanging over the wheel. “I’m a romantic. It’s always been about the driving. The money was just for gas and oil.”

“There’s always NASCAR.”

“Too many rules. Too many logos. Too many yellow flags. My parents were hippies, don’t forget. It’s in the blood.”

“Paul must have gotten a transfusion somewhere else.”

“Not true. He didn’t have to start his own church. He could’ve been a Baptist.”

I flicked a finger at the license. “This is good work.”

“It better be. It cost me five cases of Luckies.”

“Where’s the Social Security card?”

“You don’t need one in Canada.”

I put the license and envelope back and shut the compartment. “Take the tunnel. Trucks on the bridge back up for hours. If you’d asked me to keep Clemson and his people busy, I might have said yes. You didn’t have to snag me in with a phony cry for help.”

“It wasn’t phony. Cops and hijackers I can handle. I know the playbook. The spooks change the rules as they go. I needed another guerrilla to split their concentration.” He spread his fingers. “I didn’t know you well enough to ask. You might have said no.”

I leaned back and closed my eyes. I was tired, my leg hurt.

“I didn’t mind so much,” I said. “Not even screwing up the leg. You pulled me out of that parking lot. I might have, if I knew I was just there to drag a dead skunk across Clemson’s path. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have done all the same things. It just would have been different.”

“Does he know about Rose?”

I looked at him. I felt lonely suddenly. Whistling in the wind will do that.

“Not yet, but he knows where you went to school. He knows I have a client, from a bank deposit I made. He’s closing in.”

“How do you figure he got all that without help from Washington?”

I sat up. “He’s got a mole. Probably the same one who forwarded all his calls and mail from the Detroit office. He said it took three days for a note I sent from Port Sanilac to reach him. He’d have found Rose long before this if he could go through regular channels. He can’t pay for the service much longer. He put a match to his working capital.”

“He’s folding his tent.”

I lit the cigarette I found between my lips. I didn’t remember
putting it there. “His cards, maybe. He doesn’t usually overplay his hand.”

“He doesn’t have to. He owns the deck.”

I shook out the match. While I was doing that he snatched the key off the dash. The Hurst’s engine grumbled to life. I made a move for the gun. Then I saw the blue-and-red flashers in his mirror.