Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (50 page)

I got out the envelope and held it in front of his face. It was addressed to the Detroit office of the Drug Enforcement Administration. His lips moved as he read. His hair was moussed forward rather than slicked back and he had on turquoise-colored contacts, but the rest of him had plainly come from someplace where the written language included tildes and accent marks.

“Yeah?” he said. “So?”

“Oh, the repartee.” I pocketed the item. “You probably saw the messenger deliver it in a different envelope. It was sent by Owen Subject’s wife. She found it among his papers. You know, ‘To be opened in the event of my etcetera.’ It’s going to a safe deposit box I keep up in Iroquois Heights.” I pointed at the blue cellular telephone standing to attention at his elbow. “Tell Milton he knows where to reach me when he’s ready to deal.”

“Milton who? I don’t know you, mister.”

Grinning, I holstered the .38 and walked. Only the faces change. The patter stays the same.

My car was parked in the deserted service station across the street. Once behind the wheel I shook the silver-dollar-size object out of the envelope and clipped it to the sun visor. The messenger
had come from Lee Killinger, not Mrs. Subject.

I don’t keep a safe deposit box In Iroquois Heights. Mostly what I keep there is away. But the road that leads there is one of the few empty stretches in the metropolitan area and crosses Square Lake Road, where Albert Donato got cooked to death and near where Francisco LoPolo had lived in dope-financed splendor until somebody shot him in the head and tipped him into the river. I made a face at the doohickey on the visor. For a man who didn’t own a computer or even a digital watch I was counting an awful lot on modern technology not letting me down.

I picked up the truck at Thirteen Mile Road. A big yellow tanker labeled CAUTION TOXIC CHEMICALS, wheeled into my lane from the right without stopping for the light, forcing me to use the brake to slow down. The Chevy, which had been hanging back a block and a half since I left downtown, closed in then. This would require timing.

Although it was cool September, my window was open to allow maximum oxygen into the car and my brain. Now I poked my cigarette butt into the slipstream and rolled up the window. I wanted as little resistance as possible when the time came to maneuver.

It came sooner than expected. The traffic had thinned out to just us three, but we were a mile south of the Square Lake crossing and the straight stretch that afforded an unobstructed view in both directions. The tanker accelerated with a black jet of diesel smoke from its stack and went into a hard turn. Its rear tires skated sideways, laying down molten rubber. The truck filled my windshield.

My instincts screamed brake. I didn’t listen. I wrenched the wheel left and leaned with the inertia. My tires yelped. Thanking God and Goodyear for steel-belted radials, I stood on the brake then, and while my insides were still straining toward the firewall I straightened the wheel and banged the lever into Reverse. The tires spoke
again. My rear wheels struck the curb with a vibration I felt in my teeth. I spun the wheel and hit the accelerator. The blue Chevy slid into view square in the middle of the windshield. I saw the driver’s narrow dark face, his eyes and mouth forming a triangular rack of O’s, one hand diving inside his coat.

I hit him hard.

The Mercury was fifteen years older than his little outsourced GM and outweighed it by fifteen hundred pounds. His front end crumpled like foil, throwing belts, bursting hoses, and spraying steam. After killing the ignition I unbuckled myself and piled out behind the .38.

I didn’t need it. He hadn’t worn a seat belt and was sprawled over the console, out cold and bleeding from the piece of scalp that was caught in the jagged star on his windshield. I found his pulse, unburdened him of the 9-millimeter Beretta he carried in a shoulder rig under his coat, and used it to cover the driver of the tanker. That was unnecessary too. He was sitting hunched over the wheel of his stalled truck with that poled-ox look that says the round is over.

That’s how things looked when the state police radio car arrived carrying Commander Killinger, its roof-mounted halo homing in on the little electronic gizmo attached to my visor.

• • •

The matron held the door for my client more in the manner of a maidservant than a turnkey, which meant all her bills were being paid. Prisonwear today was a pink cashmere sweater and pleated skirt split as if for riding. Mrs. Donato nodded to Sporthaven and sat down opposite me with the table in between.

“You’ve been busy,” she said, when I’d delivered my report. “Do you think this Hidalgo will testify against Milton Thorpe?”

Feliz Hidalgo was the name on the green card the state police found on the driver of the blue Chevy. I moved a shoulder. “If the cops match that Beretta I took off him to the slugs they dug out of LoPolo’s brain, he might trade his boss for a sentence less than life. If he’s the pro I think he is, they won’t. The tanker driver is another story. I hear he’s talking already. That ties Thorpe to the attempt on me.”

“I don’t want that. I want him to answer for Albert.”

“That’s up to Hidalgo. Or Subject, if he surfaces. The judge put out a warrant on him when he didn’t show at his preliminary this morning. No body yet, so it’s possible he just ran.”

“So Albert wasn’t the target after all. The wanted LoPolo that night.”

“It makes sense,” I said. “LoPolo lived on Square Lake and always took the same route home from his headquarters in Detroit. He drove a gray Cadillac, Albert drove a gray Chrysler. They look alike to the owner of a Chevy. Your stepson just got sucked up in the slipstream. Later, when they found out their mistake, they took LoPolo out more quietly.”

“Poor Albert. I really was fond of him.”

“You’ll get over it. In time,” I added sympathetically. She was as easy to feel sorry for as a battlewagon.

Sporthaven shifted his briefcase. “You’ve earned the five thousand, Walker. Send us the bill when you buy a new car to replace the one you wrecked.”

“Thanks, I’ll get it fixed. I’ve seen what the new ones are worth.” I rose. Rita Donato’s eyes followed me up.

“I won’t forget you when I’m paroled. That may not sound like much now, but I won’t be your average ex-convict any more than I was your average rich widow.”

“Just don’t put your first hundred million into electronics,” I said.

Outside, it was eighty-nine degrees
at ten PM., with percentage of humidity to match, and I was experiencing the early stages of frostbite.

I was sitting on a bench otherwise occupied by semi-professional hockey players, each of whose pads, jerseys, and weapons-grade adrenaline were more effective insulation against the proximity of the ice than my street clothes. The arena had been conjured up out of an old Michigan Company stove warehouse on the Detroit River, with the Renaissance Center undergoing a public-friendly renovation on the one side and twenty toxic acres being parceled out to gullible buyers wanting riverfront condos on the other. Veteran Detroiters were aware that asbestos and car batteries had been leaking poisons into the earth there since Henry Ford, and so the athletes on the ice outnumbered the fans in the bleachers.

I wasn’t playing, and I was only half paying attention to the game. When I want to see apes brawl, I can always tune in to the Discovery Channel. I was providing security for a Detroit Lifters guard named Grigori Ivanov who, at the moment I realized I could no longer feel my face, was busy pummeling a French-Canadian center skating for the Philadelphia North Churches. Ivanov didn’t seem to need my help with that.

The team owner, a Fordson High School dropout who’d made a couple of hundred million selling pet grooming products over the Internet, had gambled most of his capital on the notion that a summer hockey league would go over as big as Sergeant Spaniel’s Tick-buster Spray. Now he was finishing out the team’s second season under a court order forcing him to play his team or pay off the remaining time on the players’ contracts.

In the midst of all this, Ivanov had started receiving letters from an anonymous party threatening to throw acid in his face if he didn’t remand his salary over to a fund to save the Michigan massas-sauga rattlesnake from extinction. Since most people, particularly those with small children, aged relatives, and beloved pets, would just as soon see the region’s only venomous viper go the way of the passenger pigeon, and since hockey stars in general looked as if someone had already thrown acid in their faces, no one was taking the threats seriously.

No one, that is, except the owner’s attorneys, who warned him of the legal consequences on the off chance Mr. Anonymous wasn’t just blowing smoke. But Ivanov was a reclusive type, with relatives in the Ukraine awaiting money from him to make the journey to America and no wish for any undesirable publicity that might move the State Department to deny them entry visas. That ruled out the police. I’d come recommended on the basis of an old personal-security assignment that had wound up with no one dead or injured (three cracked ribs didn’t count, since they were mine), and since I was on my sixth week without a cent and considering trading a kidney for the office rent here I was on the night of the hottest day of summer rubbing circulation into my face while visions of hot toddies danced in my head.

The score was lopsided in Philadelphia’s favor. By the final buzzer, the only audience left was either too drunk on watered-down
beer to move or sweeping up Bazooka Joe wrappers in the aisles. I pried my stiff muscles off the bench and moved in close to Ivanov as the Lifters started down the tunnel toward the showers.

The kid had on a bright green T-shirt, or I might not have spotted him bobbing upriver through the red-and-yellow jerseys. The concrete walls were less than ten feet apart, and the players averaged six feet wide. It was a tight crowd, and I had to wedge myself in sideways to keep from being squeezed to the back, which is no place for a bodyguard. As it was, I couldn’t get to my gun and had to bodycheck Ivanov out of the way when the kid’s arm swept up and yellow liquid sprayed out of the open vial in his hand.

I hadn’t time to see where the liquid went. I hurled myself between two padded shoulders, grabbed a fistful of green cotton, and pulled hard. A seam tore, but the kid’s forward momentum started him toward the floor, and I came down on top of him and grasped the wrist of his throwing arm and twisted it up behind his back. The empty vial rolled out of his hand and broke into bits on the concrete floor.

I placed a knee in the small of his back and ran a hand over him for weapons. He hadn’t any. By this time, the players had backed off to give us room. I got to my feet, pulling the kid up with me by his twisted arm, and slammed him into the wall, pinning him there while I looked at Ivanov.

“He get you?” I asked.

He’d put a hand against the wall to catch himself when I’d shoved him aside. He pushed himself away from it and touched his face, a reflexive gesture; the lawyers weren’t the only ones who’d suspected something was behind the letters besides a crank. “No. I am OK.”

The kid was shouting something. I took hold of his hair and pulled his face away from the wall to hear it.

“I didn’t want to hurt anybody!” he was saying. “I just wanted to scare him. It was just colored water.”

I looked at the wall farther up the tunnel. It had been painted green until a moment before. Now there was a large runny patch with smoke tearing away from its bubbling surface. A patch about the size of a man’s face.

“Your name’s Amos Walker?”

I’d seen the speaker once or twice at police headquarters, but we’d never exchanged a word except maybe to ask for a button to be pushed on the elevator. He was a big Mexican in his forties who bought his sport coats a size too large to leave room for his underarm rig and wore matching shirt-and-tie sets to save himself time dressing. His graying hair was thick enough to be a rug but wasn’t, and he had a red, raw face that looked as if he exfoliated with emory paper. The name on the ID clipped to his lapel was Testaverde. He was a detective sergeant with Special Investigations.

I said my name was Amos Walker. He was holding my ID folder, so there didn’t seem any point in denying it. We were standing in a hall at headquarters by the two-way glass looking into the interview room where the kid with the stretched-out T-shirt was answering a detective’s questions in front of a camcorder. The air conditioner wasn’t working any better than it did in any other government building, which was all right with me. My nose was still running from the chill in the arena.

Testaverde returned the folder. “That was quick thinking. Babysitting your specialty?”

“I almost never do it. Hours of sitting around on your hip pockets, seasoned by ten seconds of pure terror. But a job’s a job.”

“One might say
our
job. Why do people pay taxes if they’re going to hire the competition?”

“If they refused, you’d arrest them. Anyway, this one had a muffler on it. It’s the only edge I’ve got. You’ve got all the people and whirlygigs.”

“Well, the rabbit’s out of the hutch now. Let’s have a listen.” He flipped the switch on an intercom panel next to the window. The kid’s shallow voice wobbled out of the speaker.

“... vegetable dye, I don’t remember what kind. All I know is there wasn’t any kind of acid.”

The detective, a well-dressed black man named Clary, read from his notebook. “‘High concentration of sulphuric and hydrochloric acid.’ That’s what Forensics scraped off the wall. It scarred the concrete, Michael. Think what it would have done to Ivanov’s face.”

“I filled the tube from the tap and put in the coloring. I wouldn’t even know where to lay hands on that other stuff. “

“Hydrochloric you can get in any hardware store. People soak their faucet filters in it to remove rust. Sulphuric you can drain out of an ordinary car battery. I want to believe your story, Michael, but you’re not helping much. Who could have switched the tubes?

“I don’t know.” His mouth clamped shut on the end.

Clary scratched his chin with a corner of the notebook. “Let’s go back to those letters you wrote. You said you were jealous of Ivanov’s success.”