Stress (25 page)

“I don’t imagine Watergate’s greasing any gears either.”

“Please. I’m just hoping nothing important winds up getting shredded in the confusion.”

“There’s someone outside you might want to talk to,” Grunwald said. “He says he’s on his break and he can’t hang around long.”

“At least that lets out the Art Linkletter guy. He’s retired. Did you check his shoes for Mars dust?”

“He seems stable enough. I can run interference if you want to go home and catch some sleep.”

Riordan stood and hooked his jacket off the back of his chair. “Remind me to recommend you to this job when I quit to open a haberdashery.” Then his resolve faltered. He caught sight of his reflection in the night-backed window at the end of the desk, smoothed the comma of hair back into place, straightened his tie, and sat back down. “Cripes. Shoo him in before I change my mind again.”

Grunwald opened the door and held it. “Please come in, Mr. Mapes.”

The visitor, a lean black crowding sixty with a CORE button pinned to his Tigers cap, came in and goggled at the room, mahogany-paneled with a lighted ceiling well and the Great Seal of the United States embossed six feet across on the wall behind the desk.

“Nice dump,” he said. “I wondered what become of that nine hunnert bucks you fellows withheld from me last year. You got any smokes?”

“Sorry, I don’t use them. Do you have some information for us?” Riordan lifted the sketch from the desk. He had done that so many times in the past fifteen hours the sheet had begun to curl away from the surface.

Maþes glanced at it briefly. “Him okay. Nose was bigger.”

“Where do you think you saw him?”

“Oh, I seen him all right. I don’t guess you know I’m a hackie. Picked up this fare earlier tonight. Rochester Hills it was. Sitting Bull there is waiting for her. He paid for the cab. It was this little shit trailer park way out on Northwestern.”

Riordan wrote the information on a legal pad. “Did you notice anything else about him?”

“No. Well, he smelt like he took a bath in Brut.”

Riordan stopped writing and stared at him.

“Brut, yeah.” Mapes nodded, apparently to himself. “You get to be a expert when you lock yourself up in a car all the time with folks. You be surprised how many ways a person can stink.”

He stopped and grinned, recognizing a rapt audience in the two agents. “I don’t guess either of you fellows know what’s a shaman.”

Before Mapes left, Riordan’s secretary, a tall redhead awaiting the results of her bar examination, with aspirations to enroll in the field training course at Quantico, entered and placed a green-and-white computer printout on Riordan’s desk. He left it there unread while he stood to shake the cabdriver’s hand.

“You’re a good citizen, Mr. Mapes. I’m going to ask you to be even better. Will you remain available? We may need you to identify the suspect.”

“You mean, be in on the bust?”

“We’ll keep you out of harm’s way. And you’ll be reimbursed by Washington for the time off work.”

“I’ll give you my hack number. Dispatcher knows where to find me.”

“Fine. Leave it with Miss Green.”

Alone with Riordan, Grunwald said, “A medicine woman?”

“It’s too nutty even for the crackbrains to have dreamt up. And the girl
is
sick. Ring in the sheriffs on this one. Detroit too; the snatch took place in their jurisdiction. We need their good feelings if we’re ever going to clean up our rotten record in this town.”

“The Chief wouldn’t approve.”

“The Chief’s deader than the Nehru suit. Oh shit.” Riordan was reading the printout.

Grunwald, who had never heard his superior curse, said, “Don’t tell me they deleted a file.”

Riordan handed him the sheet.

SUSPECT IDENTIKIT GEOMATCHES PORTERMAN ANDREW NO MIDDLE A/K/A WOLF B ALLENVILLE MI 9/12/46 BELIEVED ACTIVIST ALCATRAZ 1969 PHOTOS TO FOLLOW CRIM-REC 6MOS WCJAIL DETROIT MI MDOP REL 2/09/70 KNOWN ASSOCIATE WILSON MCCOY SEE MCCOY WILSON FRANKLIN MOSTWANT FILE G315442/004

W
OLF FIGURED HE’D PICKED THE WRONG PLACE TO PULL
off a kidnapping.

Had he been spotted someplace out West, Oklahoma say, or even in his own North country, his face all over television and in the newspapers wouldn’t have concerned him; but this was Detroit, where being invisible meant being black, not Indian, and he stood out like a redskin peanut in a bowl of raisins. At the hospital he’d been especially careful not to show himself too much to the nurses behind the desk, but the God’s own truth was when you looked like him, one sighting was as good as three.

Ever since the kidnapping story broke the night before, he felt as if he were being watched; a sensation he knew well from his visits to Wilson McCoy, all of whose callers had been photographed by an FBI long lens so many times the file of their pictures alone would fill a Time-Life series:
Dastards, Douche-Bags, and Desperate Characters.
But then this was his first experience as a fugitive from justice and he wasn’t sure how much of that was mere projection, as the government-paid shrink who used to drop by the tribal council chamber in St. Ignace explained the term. Indians, according to him, were notorious projectors. In any case the wheels were in motion and he had to see the thing through. If the ransom came off and things got hot he could always nick a little and take to the mountains.

Which of course was what the old ones up North dismissed as making dreams. He was tied to Wilson, if for no other reason than that a man who wasn’t tied to something risked having his spirit float away.

Opal’s condition was a good omen. Whether because of Greek medicine or the healing properties of time and her own youth, the little girl had improved steadily since Mary Margaret Whitehorn’s visit, sleeping comfortably when she slept and from fatigue alone, and asking questions non-stop when she was awake: “Who are you?”
I’m a friend of your mother’s; she asked me to look after you while she’s busy.
“Are you really an Indian?”
Yes, I’m an Ottawa brave. I’d show you my bow and arrows, only I loaned them to a neighbor.
“Did you see
Jeremiah Johnson
? You look like the Indian in that, the one at the end. Can I have something to eat?”

That one came up a lot. He hadn’t realized a small child could put away so much food. Fortunately, he’d laid in a sufficient supply of kid-pleasing dishes, franks and beans and all kinds of canned fruit and puddings, and there was plenty of propane in the tank attached to the little four-burner stove. It beat all hell out of forcing C-rations between stubborn young lips, as he assumed most kidnappers did. He held that fifty-thousand-dollar packages should be treated with some care. Anyway he wasn’t capable of burying a child alive or binding and gagging it and locking it in a dark closet, or committing any of the other excesses that had given the simple practice of person-stealing for profit such a bad reputation going back to the Lindbergh case.

She could identify him, of course. He didn’t dwell on that. The die was cast, had been when his capital-raising scheme had shifted from robbery to ransom, and his part in it from supernumerary to major player. He’d been lost so long, wandering between worlds like the slain warrior in the old legends whose eyes had been poked out by his enemies after death, and now he had found his place. If that meant a lengthy prison sentence, he felt he could face it as a man who had made his choice and seen it through. This aimless meandering from one pale cause to the next;
that
was confinement of the crudest sort.

His only fear—and it gnawed at him—was that he would be interrupted before the thing was finished.

It was dark outside. Nearly forty-eight hours had passed since he’d taken the girl; time enough even by Wilson’s schedule for her parents to submit readily to the instructions the pair had worked out. In his pocket was a scrap of paper containing the Ogdens’ unlisted telephone number, courtesy of Kindu Nampula’s caterer girlfriend. He sure didn’t miss Kindu. The man was an ambulatory volcano, even less predictable in his moods than Wilson. You never knew who he was going to erupt all over or what would set him off.

Opal was sound asleep. Noiselessly, Wolf slipped on his quilted vest and pulled out one of the trailer’s built-in storage drawers, peeling back his shirts and underwear to expose the big nickel-plated .357 magnum Wilson had given him. That had been a special moment, although the former Panther had tried to play it down by saying that he was sick of seeing the Indian run around half-naked. The gift meant that Wilson, who trusted no one, trusted Wolf. The Indian checked all the chambers and slid the revolver down inside the waistband of his jeans, shifting the walnut grip so that the vest concealed it. The metal felt cold through the thin cotton of his undershorts.

With one hand on the doorknob he stole another look at the six-year-old. She’d lost a lot of strength during her illness and slept hard, snoring a little, like a puppy.

In the old times, Wolf had read, braves preparing for battle stripped down so their wounds would bleed clean; but the braves of old never did battle in winter. Certainly not in winter in Michigan. Anyway, he was just going out to make a telephone call.

“How sure are you of your man on the roof?” Riordan asked in a low voice. There was a stiff, freezing wind and he had to bring his lips almost to Inspector Boyer’s ear to keep his words from being snatched away.

The sheriff’s inspector, a red-faced walrus in winter uniform with a pile collar and Tibetan-style cap, simply shouted over the wind, which made Riordan wince, although he was pretty sure nothing could be heard inside the trailer. “He’s been in this situation a hundred times. He won’t fire until he has a clear target.”

“Just so he understands ‘clear’ doesn’t mean pacing past the window. A thirty-thirty can pass straight through his target and bounce around inside a metal box like that from now till Sunday.”

“We don’t even know the girl’s in there with him.”

“We don’t know she isn’t.”

They were silent for a little, watching the restless silhouette moving in the window. Riordan and the other agents, wearing long-billed caps and loose windbreakers emblazoned with the FBI legend in bright yellow lest they be shot by their own allies, were crouched behind decorative evergreen bushes and nearby trailers, working their toes and fingers from time to time to keep the ice out of the joints and expelling vapor as thick as hoarfrost. Riordan hoped the guns carried by the borrowed Oakland County sheriff’s deputies and Detroit city police weren’t seizing up in the cold. Bureau firearms were lubricated with a polymer composition laboratory-tested to perform efficiently in temperatures as low as -40 Fahrenheit.

Squinting against the stinging wind, he peered toward the battered red taxi parked on the edge of the trailer park drive, and was annoyed to see exhaust smoke boiling from the tailpipe. He’d specifically instructed Mapes not to start the engine unless he absolutely had to. But the cab driver was getting on, and the cold probably affected him severely. The FBI man hoped he’d be alert when Porterman showed himself. If he recognized the Indian who’d paid the medicine woman’s fare the previous night, he was to inform the agents by flicking on his left turn indicator briefly. That would be the signal to close in.

“Who do we have across the street?” Riordan asked the inspector.

“Two Detroit plainclothesmen. STRESS. The best they’ve got, or so I hear tell.”

“That’s what I asked for. The farther we get him away from that trailer the better.”

“What if he doesn’t come out?”

“Look at the way he’s moving around. He’ll explode if he doesn’t.”

“If I were running this show I’d punch in the trailer and drag him out by his balls.”

“That’s one good reason why you’re not running this show.”

“Suits me fine. You can take the flak when he trickles through your fingers. I’m—”

Riordan shushed him violently. “He’s coming out.”

Wolf had to lean into the door to force it open against the wind, and hang on tight to the knob once he had it open to keep the gale from snatching it out of his hand and slamming it against the side of the trailer. Bits of crystallized snow stung his face like ground glass. At the bottom of the steps he tugged his cap down over his ears and turned up the collar of his flannel shirt. The shirt and the down-filled vest might have been made of cheesecloth for all the protection they gave him. The wind chill must have been down around twenty below.

As he trotted across the drive, a glint of orange caught his eye. A car parked down at the end had its turn signal flashing.

He picked up his pace, crunching through the frost-killed grass that separated the park from Northwestern Highway, paused to check traffic, and sprinted across both lanes, hands tucked inside his armpits.

No one was using the telephone at the Shell station, a break. He’d been afraid someone might be calling home to report a delay caused by a rundown battery.

When he stepped under the light mounted above the telephone, something struck sparks off the instrument’s steel cowling. The rifle report reached him an instant later, warped and drawn out by the wind. Seeing movement in the corner of his eye, he pivoted, drawing the.357, and fired. There was a loud, breathy gasp and a man in a tan coat with epaulets fell forward, skidding on the icy asphalt nearly into his feet.

A boulder struck Wolf in the chest then. His legs jerked out from under him and he sat down hard, jarring his tailbone. The big revolver spun away. When he opened his eyes a thickly built man in a long topcoat, hatless, his coarse graying hair moving in the wind, was standing over him with a big .45 army automatic clamped in both fists. The wind caught the smoke twisting out of the muzzle and tore it apart.

“Guess who, cocksucker,” he said.

F
UNNY, THE THINGS YOU THINK OF WHEN YOU’VE GOT
someone else’s finger up your ass.

Leaning forward on the examining table with his drawers down around his knees, Joe Piper considered that the cutaway schematic drawing of the male urinary tract pinned to the bulletin board across from him resembled the map of California.