The Glass Highway (22 page)

“Horn!”

The amplified address squeezed past the ringing in my ears. It must have been nearly as loud as the shots. Horn froze. He was holding the automatic by its butt now, standing halfway between me on the floor and the girl half-reclining on the dislodged table and the debris that had scattered when it fell.

“Horn!” repeated the deep voice. “This is the police. All the exits are covered. Throw out your weapon and come out with your hands on top of your head or we’ll open fire.”

I started to get up. Horn switched hands on the gun and covered me. “You stay there!”

I sank back down on one hip. My breath was rasping in my throat. Horn reached down and grabbed Paula’s arm and yanked her stumbling to her feet. She was still trying to catch her balance when he flung an arm around her neck and propelled her toward the open door that led to the stairs. His right side under the coat was slick with blood where the bullet from the .32 had grazed him.

“I got a woman hostage here!” he shouted. “Anyone gets near me I blow her backbone out her belly.” He jammed the gun into her ribs and twisted it until she squealed.

There was a short silence. Then:

“What do you want, Horn?” The voice sounded weary and vaguely familiar over the bullhorn. My ears were beginning to open up. The voice belonged to Captain Quincannon.

The killer chortled. “That’s better. I want all you cops to clear out. Out of the building, off the street. I got a nice new car parked down the block. I see a uniform or anyone who looks like he’s someone who might be a cop on my way there, it’ll be just too bad for the woman. Got that?” Another pause. “I said, ‘Got that?’ ”

“Can’t do it. Why don’t you just give yourself up and save us the trouble of shooting you?”

“I’m not in the business of saving cops trouble! You want raw meat? We deliver. I got nothing to lose.”

“He means it, Captain,” I called.

“Walker? That you?”

I said it was. “Horn’s a professional. Pros don’t have to bluff.”

Silence again. Quincannon broke it, without the bullhorn this time.

“You win, Horn. Give us ten minutes to clear the street.”

“You got five!” He winked at me. “You and me next time.”

I said nothing.

A general rustle of movement floated up the stairs. Horn nudged the door farther open with the end of his gun to watch down the stairwell, holding Paula in front of him.

I glanced around the room quickly. My revolver had come to rest against the base of the stereo cabinet. Well, it was the next logical step, logic being what it had been lately. I took a breath and rolled.

Horn shouted and fired. I didn’t bother to see where the bullet went. It didn’t hit me, anyway. I fell on top of the .38 and scrambled to get it and me into position. While I was doing all this I was dead five times. But Paula was struggling to get loose, kicking him in the shins with her bare heels and jostling his gun arm. I shot him under that arm. At that instant, several guns rattle-banged in jackhammer succession, punctuated by the shuddery boom of a shotgun going off in close quarters. Horn slammed backward against the door casing and slid down spraddle-legged. He sat on the floor with his chin in his throat and most of his chest gone.

Munchkin voices yammered hysterically under the echo of the blast. It was the telephone alarm, telling us the receiver was off the hook.

Dick Bloodworth came to the door cradling a riot gun that went like hell with his jacket and tie. Blue smoke curled up the stairwell and parted around him. His eyes lighted on Horn just long enough to determine he wasn’t worth looking at, then went to the pale-faced girl leaning against the edge of the door, and finally to me. I was still kneeling on the floor with the gun dangling between my palms.

“You should’ve done your praying when it counted.” He tried to sound bantering and came up yards short. His face was gray under the pigment.

“I did.” I got up, holstering the .38. “He isn’t the one I called Proust about. She flew the coop.”

“If you mean the tall redhead,” said Captain Quincannon from the staircase landing, “we got her downstairs. She was coming out as we were coming in.”

“She’s Fern Esterhazy, Charles Esterhazy’s daughter. She killed Bud Broderick.” I paused. “Meet Paula Royce, the only one in this room who never killed anybody.”

They looked at her with new interest but said nothing. Some uniforms were on the landing behind Quincannon and Bloodworth, murmuring among themselves and gaping at the corpse on the threshold. Sergeant Zorn, wearing his overcoat and jaunty fur hat with feather, elbowed his way through and whistled. “Looks like he bought the full load.”

Bloodworth was starting to feel the impact. “He called it. Why don’t they just let us do our job without killing them?”

“The hell with him and everyone like him.” I righted the overturned table and put the telephone on top of it and thumbed down the plunger, releasing it for the dial tone. Then I turned to Paula. “Where’s that card with Uncle Sam’s number?”

Outside, an ambulance wheeled whooping into our street.

A
NOTHER NEW YEAR’S EVE
at the end of another year. The temperature had dropped fourteen degrees since noon and the National Weather Service had issued a travelers’ advisory for all of southeastern Michigan, predicting eight to ten inches of snow by morning. The police were broadcasting huffy warnings to partygoers: “Space out your drinks before hitting the road or see in the new year behind bars.” The spirit of brotherhood was already fraying around the edges.

I emptied my Christmas bottle into a pony glass and sat down in front of the stereo, considering Ella Fitzgerald’s invitation to follow her and climb the stairs to where love was for sale. She would find me lousy company. My muscles ached and it hurt to swallow. After three days I could still feel Horn’s fingers on my throat.

I had spent the better part of two of those days driving back and forth between two police departments, giving the same story to bored sergeants seated at antique typewriters. At least they gave me coffee in Grosse Pointe. In the Heights I got blamed for screwing up the year-end crime statistics and I could dry up and blow away for all they gave a damn. Cecil Fish was especially grumpy because the incumbent whose state senate seat he was after had announced shortly after Christmas that he had decided to run again after all. So in Iroquois Heights they gave me to a cop who was deaf in one ear and typed with one finger.

I never saw any of them again, except of course the cops and Sandy Broderick, who got his network spot. A son killed being chivalrous swung a big club in the Nielsens.

The telephone interrupted Ella while she was peddling old love and new love and everything but true love. I turned down the volume and answered.

“Thought you bachelor types were all out partying,” Dick Bloodworth’s voice announced.

I set down my glass. “No you didn’t, or you wouldn’t have called. Where are you?”

“Station, where else? I pulled night watch, what else? I thought you might like to know; Fish is holding Paula Royce as a material witness in the Broderick case. She’s got more guards on her than Fern Esterhazy had up at County before her old man bailed her yesterday.”

“She’s out and Paula’s in. There’s a moral under there someplace, but I’m too sore to dig it up.” I breathed some air. “It seems to me that witness Horn smoked was under heavy guard too.”

“Thank God there aren’t many like him.”

“One was too much,” I said. “And you know damn well there are getting to be more just like him all the time. What happens after the trial? To Paula, I mean.”

“That’s the feds’ headache. New name, new place, I guess. Until someone recognizes her again. Those Colombians put on a lot of miles.”

“I never got around to thanking her. She had a chance to rabbit when Horn and I were scuffling, but she gave it up to save my hide.”

“It evens out. You saved hers. Besides, you’ll get your chance when Fish subpoenas you to testify.”

“Like hell. He’ll jerk her in and out of the courtroom like a piece of chicken in a four-bit pot of soup and I’ll still be sitting there with my mouth open when she’s gone.”

“Yeah, well.” His tone lightened. “I hear you’re getting your ticket back.”

“By slow freight. Proust’s a man of his word when you get one out of him that doesn’t have just four letters in it, but he’s not fond of my guts. I’ll be back in harness by Groundhog Day if he doesn’t decide to take a vacation first.” I wet my lips on the edge of my glass. The stuff tasted like sour grapes. “How’s the cop business?”

“We drag ’em in, their lawyers pull ’em out. What’s to say?” He stopped talking. In the background a two-finger typist pecked two keys and said, “Damn!” Someone had the squad room radio tuned in to a ball at the Hyatt Regency in Dearborn; the reporter was shouting at the top of his lungs to be heard over the music and buzzing crowd noise.

“I’m leaving the department,” Bloodworth said. “Today’s my last day.”

“Sorry to hear it. God knows Iroquois Heights needs all the good cops it has. Where do you go from here?”

“I haven’t thought about it. I don’t plan to for a while. I’ve got some money saved up. First I’ll take a little vacation, but I won’t go anywhere. Sleep with my wife. Play with toy planes. Go out and look at a movie. They tell me they talk now. Then maybe I’ll sit down and think about what it is I want to do. I sure don’t want to be a cop.”

“I know the feeling.” Once I was virgin. Once I had never killed anyone. Once.

I wished him luck. He thanked me. We didn’t have anything to say to each other after that except good-bye, and we made a mess of even that. For a long moment we listened to each other’s breathing. Then he broke the connection.

I picked up my drink and went to the window. The first flakes were just starting to come down, spinning out of the black pall above the light, no two alike, spinning down and down toward the smug shiny slickness of the deserted street. Delicate flakes, the first of the first big snow of the long nightmare of winter in Michigan.

“Lose a killer, lose a cop.” I drank liquor and watched the snow cover the glassy surface stretching on and on into darkness.

Loren D. Estleman (b. 1952) is the award-winning author of over sixty-five novels, including mysteries and westerns.

Raised in a Michigan farmhouse constructed in 1867, Estleman submitted his first story for publication at the age of fifteen and accumulated 160 rejection letters over the next eight years. Once
The Oklahoma Punk
was published in 1976, success came quickly, allowing him to quit his day job in 1980 and become a fulltime writer.

Estleman’s most enduring character, Amos Walker, made his first appearance in 1980’s
Motor City Blue
, and the hardboiled Detroit private eye has been featured in twenty novels since. The fifth Amos Walker novel,
Sugartown
, won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for best hardcover novel of 1985. Estleman’s most recent Walker novel is
Infernal Angels
.

Estleman has also won praise for his adventure novels set in the Old West. In 1980,
The High Rocks
was nominated for a National Book Award, and since then Estleman has featured its hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, in seven more novels, most recently 2010’s
The Book of Murdock
. Estleman has received awards for many of his standalone westerns, receiving recognition for both his attention to historical detail and the elements of suspense that follow from his background as a mystery author.
Journey of the Dead
, a story of the man who murdered Billy the Kid, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

In 1993 Estleman married Deborah Morgan, a fellow mystery author. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Loren D. Estleman in a Davy Crockett ensemble at age three aboard the Straits of Mackinac ferry with his brother, Charles, and father, Leauvett.

Estleman at age five in his kindergarten photograph. He grew up in Dexter, Michigan.