Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 21 - Infernal Angels (10 page)

It started with a discreet rumble, insulated by glass packs in the twin pipes. The transmission shifted smoothly and there was little play in the wheel. Just in case Hornet or Thaler was double-teaming me, I drove around the block, but no one who was behind me when I pulled out was still there when I finished.

I called Gale Kreski on the cell. He put me on hold to deal with a music-store customer, then came back on. A beat pulsed in the background: the same basic broth every rapper in two continents used for stock. That answered a question I hadn’t intended to ask him, whether anyone in creation listened to hip-hop when he was alone.

I said, “There’s been a development.”

“Yeah, I watch the news. That your client in the morgue?”

“He paid up front. My offer’s still good.” I’d thought his generation got its current events from late-night comedy. “Just a couple of follow-up questions.”

“I heard he was beaten to death. I didn’t do it.”

“That answers one.” I wanted to ask him about MacArthur Industries. I’d been distracted the first time by his tale of personal woe, but I wasn’t about to do it over the telephone. I wanted to see him to find out if he’d react to the name the way Eugenia Pappas had seemed to.

“Listen, I got an appointment with my lawyer in thirty minutes. Try me this afternoon.”
Just try
, his tone seemed to say. I said I would and hit END.

Ouida, the personal assistant, answered at the Pappas number. She sounded a little more friendly this morning, but in an impersonal professional way. She said her employer was out tending to charitable business.

“That’s okay. It’s you I wanted to talk to.”

“I wouldn’t waste your time, Mr. Walker. I’m still waiting to hear back from the people Mrs. Pappas asked me to make contact with. I’ll call once I have—after I report to her.” She hung up in my face, but not without saying good-bye, in an impersonal professional way.

I punched in another number and got the pawnbroker who’d put me on to Pappas, Bud Lite, and Johnny Toledo. Him I asked point-blank about MacArthur. There was no getting a significant reaction from him, in person or over the air.

He at least didn’t seem to have seen the news. “I admire your faith in the inflation rate,” he said. “That money was for services rendered, not a deposit on the future.”

“I’m headed away from your shop. Give me something worth turning around for at today’s gas prices and I’ll shower you with euros.”

“The name don’t ring a bell, but drop in sometime after I get a chance to poke around. I’m getting a little sick of buying back the same toaster oven from Mr. Willis.”

I put away the cell. I don’t know how I’d ever gotten along without it.

Sometimes the second day of an investigation is just a carbon copy of the first. You go back and plow the same tired ground hoping for a quarter acre of something more promising than dust.

Meanwhile I had some fun for as long as I had the loaner. Pulling away from a stop sign at the beginning of a long deserted block, I laid parallel black stripes on the asphalt and topped sixty before I had to slow for a changing light at the next intersection. The noise was a kind of mating call. As I sat waiting, feeling the idle vibrating in my crotch, a couple of kids with too much metal in their faces to have come from anywhere but the scrubbed-white suburbs slid alongside me in the outside lane.

They were driving a Plymouth Roadrunner rusted through at the wheel wells, as holey as Venetian lace. That meant they’d invested more of their parents’ money in the plant than in the body. Recognizing the Gran Sport for a fellow dark horse, the kid in the passenger’s seat hung a billy-goat beard out his window with a grin in it. I bared my teeth back. His buddy behind the wheel gunned twice and tore off at the green with a fine shriek of rubber he wasn’t paying for, adding black smoke to his pre-existing carbon footprint. I gave him half a block for confidence, then blasted past his little 383.

I shot past a city cruiser tucked nose out inside a cracked half driveway ending in a tangle of weeds belonging to one of the fabled local empty lots. I throttled down, but the lights and siren came on. Just then the Roadrunner, accelerating to catch up, skinned within a sixty-fourth of an inch of the cruiser’s left front fender. The officer in the driver’s seat forgot about me and went after the bird in hand. As the kids turned obediently into the curb I gave them the Red Baron salute and spun around the corner. Okay, I’m a kid too. The piercing’s optional.

Slowing to the limit, I slid the AM needle all the way left and right looking for something appropriate from Jan & Dean. I got a string of conservative yellfests and switched off. The ’60s just aren’t coming back.

Rain splatted the windshield out of a clear blue sky. The drops turned elliptical, then broke left and right in crooked patterns propelled by the slipstream. The sun stayed out. “The devil’s whipping his wife,” my grandmother used to say of that state of affairs; the drops were her tears. They’re a prediction of doom of some kind. Nearly everything is, when you study the science of soothsaying. The tea leaves, sheep’s entrails, and cast bones turn up positive omens about as often as valuable rookie cards.

*   *   *

The gaunt HUD house stood resolvedly in its garden of orange barbed wire and purple loosestrife, flora’s attractive answer to the zebra mussel. The galvanized aluminum inner sleeve the city had installed to discourage squatters had been peeled back sardine-can fashion from the windows to let in air and light. Nothing appeared to have changed there since yesterday, or for that matter since the Pet Rock. The city continued its slug’s crawl toward bleak oblivion around all four sides.

The rain, such as it was, had stopped short of wetting the earth. A rat the size of a young coyote was foraging inside a Dunkin’ Donuts box in a burned-out patch in the grass. The rattling went on without pause as I climbed out of the driver’s seat and thunked the door shut. It might have been a coyote at that; at night they gather in the basement of the demolished downtown Hudson’s Department Store to howl at streetlights. Civilization isn’t in nature’s weight class when skunk cabbage grows wild in the neighborhoods.

I stood outside the ramshackle entrance Johnny Toledo had cut in the side of the house and called his name; called it twice. No one answered. He never left home. To do so in a wheelchair invited every bipedal predator from the primordial urban ooze to fall on him and strip him to his colostomy sack. I checked the load in the Chief’s Special that had grafted itself to my skin, settled it gently into its clip for quick release, and heaved aside the jagged piece of siding that covered the hole, stepping back to fist the revolver. His boys’ size .22 rifle carried a small round, but a greasy one that encouraged infection, gangrene, and a slow odoriferous death. I’d read
The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

Nothing stirred except the rat grazing on crumbs and wind slithering through weeds.

The voice of experience told me not to go in. Not into a building that should have been torn down during another corrupt administration. The voice of experience should be a
basso profundo,
like Tennessee Ernie Ford’s. Instead it’s a mealy little whisper, like the teller’s at a window informing you your acount’s overdrawn.

In any case I was too old to wait for an administration that wasn’t corrupt. I went in.

ELEVEN

At a glance, the place hadn’t changed much in a day. There were more catalytic converters; the
Free Press
had reported a rash of thefts from cars and trucks parked on the northwest side overnight, probably for the platinum they contained. Like the other scrap they had their own pile. It was an orderly system despite appearances. An overturned wheelchair meant nothing because he had several in various stages of disassembly. You had to be a special kind of paraplegic to traffic in stolen wheelchairs; but Johnny never asked for any more sympathy than he gave. Business is business is business.

Then I saw something that reminded me I had a gun.

I tightened my grip on the butt and reached down with the other hand to lift a golden statuette off the floor where it had fallen when the folding TV tray had collapsed from under it. A fresh dent on the side of its head had turned the cherub into a mongoloid. It seemed a hell of a way to treat the only memento Johnny Toledo had of his father’s adventures in the scrap trade.

As I was lowering it back to the floor, trying not to make any more noise than I already had, a floorboard shifted upstairs.

It wasn’t Johnny. The house’s second story had ceased to exist for him when he’d lost the use of his legs. As far as I could tell he slept in his wheelchair.

Sneaking up those stairs was impossible. If they’d ever had a padded runner, scavengers had made off with it before the Supremes broke up, and decades of unheated winters and humid summers had split and warped the boards into driftwood shapes; I’d have made less noise scampering across a piano keyboard. I took a deep breath and ran up them, feet and heart pounding, the gun heavy in my hand, hoping I wouldn’t put a foot through and shoot myself in the head.

I stopped before my head came level with the landing. That easy I wasn’t going to make it for anyone waiting up there with a gun. I waited, counting my heartbeats. He’d have to go through me to get out.

Wrong again. With a melancholy crash, the last glass pane in the house gave way.

I took the rest of the steps at a dead run and got to the open door of the first room off the stairs just in time to see a head of brown curls vanish through the window.

Three strides took me across the bare floor. At the window I flattened my back against the wall and edged an eye past the frame. No one shot at me. A small figure in a red jersey jacket with his shirttail flapping below the hem made a broken-field dash around the debris in the adjoining lot and grabbed a lightpole for balance as he swung around the corner. His other hand clutched the waistband of his baggy dungarees to keep them from slipping below his knees and tripping him up. It looked comic but he sure could fly.

I absorbed all this in a fraction of a second. I holstered the .38, grasped the top of the window frame in both hands, and swung feet first through the opening, taking out the rest of the glass from the edges and tearing my suit coat. It was an eight-foot drop to the ground, but I bent my knees to dampen the impact and broke into a sprint before my nerve endings could get word to my brain. I hurdled an exploded trash bag filled with dirty diapers, did the stripper’s turn around the light pole, fixed on a flash of pale shirttail rounding the corner of a house, and pounded the sidewalk in pursuit.

He had youth and speed, but my legs were longer and I was desperate for his story. I fell back on jungle training, measuring my breathing and letting the noise of my soles slapping the concrete put me in a trance where fatigue and the sawing in my throat and the pain in my side had no meaning.

I caught a break when he changed directions to duck through a hole in the bottom of a chain-link fence barely large enough to admit a muskrat; I grasped the top with one hand and vaulted on over, gaining a couple of yards. If I’d had time to think I couldn’t have managed it. There was nothing inside the fence, which seemed to have been erected only to prevent cars from cutting across the corner of the empty lot to avoid a stoplight. Cockleburs snatched at my socks, a solitary feral sunflower nearly as tall as I was smacked my shoulder with its big heavy head. I ran, and fed on running.

The small figure lost ground turning its head to see if I was still behind. A young, mixed-blood face, male, twisted with terror. He accelerated; so did I. I found a higher gear I hadn’t known I had.

We crossed a couple of streets and barreled through a service station, startling the attendant into dropping the aluminum pole he was using to hike the prices on the tall sign. He thought the revolution had come. We charged across a parking lot. I lost a few steps galloping between cars as my quarry pounded up over the hoods and roofs and down the trunks. I couldn’t do that without caving something in and falling farther behind.

We passed pedestrians: old women in black coats with head scarves, young blades brushing up their boulevard strut, a couple in matching warm-up suits out jogging, a kid carrying a big padded envelope reading addresses. It was one of those neighborhoods that is going from something toward something else. We got some startled gasps, but mostly they just made way. Street theater is a daily event.

In a chase, it’s the one being chased who plots the course. When a cab pulling an empty flatbed trailer shifted down to obey a yellow light, my witness turned at a right angle, leapt up onto the bed, and off the other side. I let my momentum do the thinking and followed. Just then the driver decided he could make the light after all and shifted back into second. I lost balance as he accelerated and tumbled off the far edge on my hip. On the dismount I managed to throw my weight forward and avoid slipping under a wheel.

I lost my subject for a second, but heard the
rat-a-tat-tat
of his footsteps when I held my breath and took off after the noise. He came into view weaving around a pile of broken furniture in front of an apartment house.

Passing the pile I pressed two fingers to the side of my neck. The Surfaris were playing “Wipeout” in my carotid. In the pursuit of my profession I’d been shot, beaten, coldcocked, drugged, and threatened with death. I had my own parking space outside Traumatic Care. It would be a good joke on a lot of bad people if it was a heart episode that took me. I ran as if I was the one being chased.