Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (68 page)

“Skillet.”

Roger was standing by the pots and pans. When he turned his head to take one down, I took the pistol cartridge out of my pocket and tucked it back between my fingers.

“No butter.” He passed me the skillet by way of the woman. “I’m fat enough.”

I put it on the burner. “I hear they pile on the starch in Mar-quette. Makes it hard to squeeze your gut through a tunnel.”

“You and Benny both talk too much,” he said.

“Give me some credit. Prison’s the only circle the two of you would ever travel in together.”

“He’s got his good points. Up there you need a friend in the White Power gang if you want to live till parole.”

“The joint’s a great leveler. Where else would a couple of bums hook up with a rich kid like Emmet Mitchell Junior?”

“He drops names, Benny does. I told him it wasn’t cool.”

“I didn’t need the hint. I keep current. Emmett Senior spent millions trying to acquit his boy. Looks like he had a few left over. Junior’s a serial killer. Benny’s got an excuse; he’s a psychopath. What’s yours?”

“Mister, you don’t get no more unemployable than an Indian ex-con. Even the casinos won’t touch me. What’s it to me how many night-call nurses got themselves raped and killed so long as the old man pays cash?”

“Emmett Mitchell,” Pearl said. “I heard that name.”

I said, “They moved him to maximum security in Marquette State Prison after he tried to escape from Jackson. That was before DNA linked him to Victim Number Six. Not even the press knows when they’re taking him downstate for the hearing. But Roger and Benny know. It’s tonight. You need a bankroll like Emmett Senior’s
to buy that kind of information.”

The eggs were starting to sizzle, but just then Benny came back in. I could tell by his face he’d overheard plenty, but he wasn’t upset. He looked like a man who had won a bet with himself. He leveled the pistol at me.

“Private cop walking in just when he did,” he said. “He was laughing at us the whole time, us talking all around what he knew already.”

“You’re wrong, Benny. Why would he have his ID in his wallet if he was undercover?”

“Cops are dumb, that’s why. They keep talking about the world’s dumbest criminals, but they’re the ones make all the mistakes. Our boy Amos made two: The day he was born and the day he died.”

I concentrated on the eggs. It was an argument I couldn’t win. The trick was to keep him close without pushing him over the edge.

“You’re smarter than you look,” I said. “If Old Man Mitchell is paying the officers transporting Emmett Junior to stop here, and he’s paying you to tie them up and maybe knock them out to make it play like an old-fashioned escape set up by a couple of Junior’s former inmates, you can be sure he’s paid someone else to make sure you don’t turn state’s evidence against him when you get caught.” I chose that moment to let the cartridge drop into the middle of a yolk to avoid making noise.

“So we don’t
get
caught.” The skinhead placed the muzzle against the bone behind my right ear.

That was too close. Any sudden disturbance would startle him into jerking the trigger.

“Pearl, they’re fixing to kill all of us.”

This was a new voice, hoarse from lack of use. Luke had recovered from his choking fit. He sat in his corner perfectly alert, his
good eye glistening. Benny didn’t move. “Roger, I told you what to do the minute he opened his mouth.”

“I don’t flag people. They only got me because I wouldn’t shoot.”

“Luke’s right,” I told him, watching the skillet. The brass shell was almost submerged in yellow goo. “Mitchell Senior can’t afford to leave anyone behind, Benny knows that. Not even the cops he bought. That’s the way the two of them worked it out. You won’t need any more duct tape.”

“Benny?” Roger’s tone was less guttural, almost shallow.

“Don’t be a dumb digger injun. If you wasn’t so skittish we’d’ve done this at the start and saved all this jabber.”

I knew then I couldn’t wait for a diversion. If I moved fast enough... but no one was that fast.

No one except Luke. He shoved himself away from the wall, rolling, and caught Roger behind the knees with a bulky shoulder. The Indian folded like a cardboard cutout, the gun flying from his hand when his elbow struck the floor, but for a man running to fat he wasn’t clumsy. He dove to retrieve it.

Benny pivoted that way, taking the pistol away from my head. I swung the skillet with all I had, catching him square on the corner of the jaw with the edge, spraying hot egg over both of us, grabbed his gun arm in both hands, and broke it over my knee. He shrieked and his fingers lost their grip. I caught the pistol as it fell, but by then I didn’t need it.

Pearl was faster than all of us put together. She’d beaten Roger to the Magnum and stood in a feral crouch, covering him with the weapon in both hands. He remained motionless on all fours.

A loud report made us all jump. The pistol cartridge from the skillet had continued to heat up for a second after it hit the floor, and
went off like a kernel of popcorn. The slug dug a hole in a baseboard. I’d worried about what direction it would take.

“You work for Mitchell?” Pearl seemed ready to include me in her firing trajectory. Her pumpkin-colored hair hung in her face.

“Don’t make me lose respect for you. I’m only here because of a rumble strip.”

“What?”

“You know. Those things they put on the edge of the highway to warn you you’re drifting off the road.”

“We can use those other places,” she said.

I found the roll of duct tape and trussed up Benny, clucking over his screams when I jerked his shattered arm behind his back. I remembered to take my money out of his pocket. Then I saw to Roger. There was enough tape to go around after all. Finally I helped Pearl cut Luke loose.

“Good tackle,” I said.

He grinned lopsidedly; his bruised eye was a kaleidoscope of color. “You should’ve seen me on the field.”

“NFL?”

“St. Helens High. They overlooked me in the draft.”

“Too bad I’m not a scout.”

“Now what?” Pearl repaired her hair, a pin in her teeth. “They cut the phone wire.”

“Now we stop a prison van and reunite father and son.” I went out to the car to get my cell.

Why I told the joke at all
I can’t say. It wasn’t that good, but then neither was the bar I told it in nor the bartender I told it to. I was drenched through with the sweat of a long day, with nothing else to show for it but the thought of an unpleasant telephone conversation with the client the next morning. Sometimes you stick with the subject like his own bad taste in aftershave, sometimes he drops you like a weak signal; but the guy paying your freight is never a philosopher.

I’d driven past the place a hundred times without noticing. I hadn’t been thirsty the first hundred times. A long way back it had been someone’s idea of home, a square frame eight-hundred-square-foot house with a shingle roof and tile siding that reminded you you’d missed three appointments to have your teeth cleaned. It didn’t identify itself: The owner had just bought an orange LED sign that said OPEN and stuck it in the front window. But in that neighborhood a bar was all it could be. I still think of it, when I think of it at all, as the Open.

Inside was permanent dusk, two piles of protoplasm dumped on stools at the end of the bar, and a tabletop shuffleboard game whose pine boards had been slapped with a varnish that went tacky in high humidity so that one of the shuttles had stopped halfway down its
length one day and decided that was where it would stay. A paint can opener would be needed to pry it loose.

I don’t remember what the bartender looked like. He would be a middle-aged guy running to flab who had seen Cocktail once, pictured himself in some swanky joint juggling shakers and stem glasses, and like the shuttle had come to everlasting rest in that spot. Normally I wouldn’t have spoken to him beyond ordering a double scotch, but while he was siphoning it out my gaze lit upon a sepia picture in a frame on the wall above the beer taps. Someone had cut a photo of zebras grazing in the veldt from National Geographic and put it behind glass to make the place seem exotic.

“Guy walks into a bar,” I said.

“Guys do, pleased to say.” He slapped a paper napkin in front of me and set my drink on it. “This is a joke?”

“That’s the punchline from another ‘Guy walks into a bar’ joke; but you tell me. There’s a kangaroo mixing the drinks. Kangaroo looks at the guy and says, ‘I see you’re surprised to find a kangaroo behind the bar.’ Guy says, ‘I’ll say. Did the zebra sell the place?’”

He grunted, which told me all I needed to know about how he’d wound up in a dump like the Open. A really first-class barman laughs when the joke isn’t funny and shakes his head when the story isn’t that sad. Now that I think of it, his face belonged on the other side of the bar, tie-dyed with red gin blossoms and yellowed lost opportunities. But then that might just have been my face in the peel-and-stick mirrors in back of the bottles with recycled premium labels. An unexpected glimpse of one’s reflection on that sort of day is no treat.

I’d thought of leaving him change from my ten, but I put it away. His kid could scrub pots and pans for his tuition, just like all the other self-made millionaires. I was in what the poets call a dark humor. I looked around for someone to kick sand in my face.

“Fucking cops,” the bartender said.

He’d flicked on the TV on the corner shelf under the ceiling, in case my opening routine might lead to a set.

I wasn’t the least bit curious. That state of mind is the first off-duty casualty in the life of a detective. I couldn’t care less about what the cops were up to that put him out of his sunny mood. So of course I looked up at the screen.

A female reporter stood on a street cross-hatched with yellow caution tape, pretending to read from a notepad while red and blue strobes pulsed in the background. An Early Response Team—downtown Detroit jargon for SWAT—had charged a house on the northwest side where an armed man was said to be barricaded with his wife. The husband was in custody, but the wife was dead with a slug in her heart. An unidentified source swore that no firearms were found in the house. An investigation was under way to determine whether a stray police round had killed the woman.

The bartender backhanded his remote at the TV and the screen went black. “They’ll sweep that one under the rug toot-sweet. State should make them buy a hunting license.”

“I guess you’ve never been in on a bust.”

“I been on the receiving end. Cops think they own the town.”

“Anything can happen when the adrenaline kicks in and the guns come out. A little girl got killed the same way last spring. That time they were looking for an armed robber.”

“I remember it. Seems to me a cop got an unpaid vacation. He’s back on the job and the girl’s still dead. You a cop?”

“If I said I was, would you spit in my drink?”

He grinned sourly. “For starters.”

• • •

The story metastasized over the next few days. A DPD spokesman confirmed the report that no gun was recovered from the house and the bullet, which had shattered when it penetrated the woman’s sternum, was a soft-nose .38, a common police weapon. The lab rats in Ballistics were working to reassemble the fragments in order to match them to the gun. So far none of the officers on the scene had admitted to discharging a sidearm. The spokesman refused to say whether their guns were being examined, but that would be SOP.

Another press conference was called by Philip Justice, who announced he’d been retained by the husband to sue the police department for excessive use of deadly force and false arrest. Justice—it was his real name, and maybe the inspiration for his choice of occupations—was a pit viper who specialized in representing ordinary citizens against authority. His strategy never changed. He went in fast and hard, shrill with outrage, blindsiding the opposition before it could get a toehold and wresting pricey settlements with his teeth.

I admired his performance over my morning coffee. He removed his hand from his recently released client’s shoulder only to stab a finger at the camera and paraphrase the First Book of Samuel; he’d know the passages on David and Goliath by heart, but he needed the sympathy of atheists too.

It was live coverage. I’d just turned off the set when my telephone rang. It was Justice.

I’d worked for him a couple of times, so I wasn’t shocked that’d he tag me to investigate, but the timing was a surprise. I thought he’d be on the line with a judge or the New York Times, or anyway someone higher up on the food chain so quickly after going public. I said I wasn’t working hard and agreed to meet him in his office in twenty minutes.

• • •

He operated high up in the American Building in Southfield, a glassand-steel arrangement that towered over the horizontal suburb like a birthday candle on a cupcake. The suite was medium gray and pale yellow, and his desk was a glass wafer on composition legs. He got up from behind it, and as usual his six feet six was a shock to the system; sitting down he looked built to ordinary scale. His hair grew straight back and close to the scalp like an otter’s and he blinked a lot—I guess from all those TV lights and flash attachments he lived among. He took my hand in a swift, firm grip and gave it back. “Amos Walker, Claud Vale.”

I remembered his client spelled his first name without an E. He rose from a yellow leather chair, shrinking in on himself unlike Justice as he did so, and lowered and raised his chin in greeting while letting his hands hang at his sides. He was fifty but looked older, with once-red hair like rusted iron and muddy eyes wallowing in bags behind bifocals. A blue blazer hung from thin shoulders, showing four white stitches on one cuff where the manufacturer’s label had been removed, a nice lawyerly touch that said the man was unaccustomed to dressing up but had made the purchase to appear presentable in court. The black silk armband was unobtrusive but impossible not to notice.

When we were all seated, me in gray leather, Justice in the er-gonomic item behind the desk, he said, “Mr. Vale neither said nor hinted that he was armed. When he refused to open the door to police answer a domestic disturbance complaint by neighbors, the officers assumed the worst and the situation escalated from there.”