Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss (12 page)

A yellow schoolbus snorted to a stop outside the window. The black legend along the side branded it the property of a Baptist Bible study school in Monroe. The door cranked open, spilling out a matron in a fleece-lined coat and the first of half a hundred children in bright-colored snowsuits. The place was about to get noisy.

“What’s their game plan?” I asked. “Flood the economy with phony scrip and bring it to its knees?”

“Some of my superiors think so. The Germans tried it once. You can’t fault their reasoning; they saw what happened between the wars, when you needed a wheelbarrow full of deutschemarks to buy a stick of gum. It didn’t work here. Our economic system’s pretty sound, no matter what you hear during elections. A ton of paper won’t push it over. But it’ll buy enough weapons and sabotage to keep the jihad going for decades.”

T
he church kids trundled in, with the matron shouting above the din for silence. I dumped my debris in a chrome bullet trash can and we left.

Young Deputy Keppler had driven my Cutlass from Old Carriage Lane to the restricted zone in front of the substation. The oyster-colored Chrysler parked behind it was invisible except when the sun pierced the overcast. That would be Clemson’s. We stood waiting in blowing snow for a break in the traffic before crossing.

It would be a while. The community was a church, an extinct movie theater advertising Red Wing shoes on the marquee, and a row of brick two-stories joined by common walls on either side of a state highway. The traffic lights were timed to burn as much fossil fuel and run over as many impatient pedestrians as possible. Bitter little flakes swarmed in the high-beams coming from both directions.

“I can buy Paul Starzek’s little church fronting for terrorists,” I said. “The martyr they chose for their symbol is just the sort of overripe set piece those gibbering types go for. Now tell me why he printed his circulars on Treasury stock.”

Clemson didn’t seem to be in a hurry. His leather-clad fingers squeaked as he worked them deeper into the gloves, a sound that never failed to make my fingernails shrink back into the cuticles. “He must have gotten it mixed up with his everyday stock. Did you find a printer?”

I shook my head.

“Whoever took away the paper probably took that too. No professional shop would ever take credit for that circular.”

“Amateur’s one thing, stupid something else. That’s a whale of a mix-up.”

“The one time I interviewed Paul I didn’t get the impression his ski lift went all the way to the peak. His name didn’t cross with any of the legitimate schools of divinity in the FBI database, by the way.”

“Phony preachers are as common as funny money. The old lady in the convenience store around the corner from Starzek changed a bill for me yesterday with a fake twenty, printed on common stock. It had to be part of the same mistake. But he did okay for a dope. He didn’t buy that marble statue with Camel Cash.”

“Recent purchase, or he’d have dumped the store mannequin by now. We’ll trace it. There can’t be many sculptors in the country doing that kind of work, if it’s as good as you say.”

“Maybe he signed it. I didn’t look that close.”

He didn’t seem to be listening. “Of course Starzek was paid to store the stock until they came for it. He couldn’t resist printing a little on the side. He had the equipment, for his circulars. That’s why they killed him.”

“Why didn’t you haul him in as a material witness when you talked to him?”

“Same reason he screwed up. He was too dumb to trust with covert information, anyone could see that. The professionals may
talk like fanatics, but they don’t mix rhetoric with work. The rest—the five hundred virgins and the rotten poetry—is theater. They just underestimated his greed.”

“That’s kind of encouraging.”

“Not really. They learn from their mistakes.” He flicked a snowflake off an eyelash. “Paul was routine when I interviewed him, a family contact for a man who had no other family. We knew counterfeiting was involved. I wanted Jeff and his cargo. They were probably still on the road then.”

“You better hope. It won’t look good if that stuff was out behind the house the whole time you were grilling him about his brother.”

“I forgot my bolt cutters,” he said. “Also a warrant for probable cause to search the place. We go through channels, no matter what the civil libertarians say.”

It was the first time he’d sounded less than ironic. I wondered if he really thought Jeff had no family apart from Paul. I was starting to feel like a cricket on a fishhook.

I said, “Paul wasn’t so dumb he couldn’t lie to you and make it stick. On the telephone he called Jeff a foul trafficker. He might call him anything else after fifteen years with no contact, but not that. The trafficking came later. Unless you told him.”

“You know I didn’t.”

“Actually I don’t.”

He looked at me with the cold gray lines of the Milan Federal Correctional Facility in his expression. Then the cars thinned out and we started across, Clemson on the trot, me propelling myself with the cane in broken hops. I was getting better at locomotion. Give me six more months and I’d be outracing ice-cream trucks.

“I should’ve put Paul’s place under surveillance,” he said. “We’d have rounded up the whole ring and the Treasury paper when they tried to move it out. We’re still a small agency; you
need more than a hunch to tie up a detail twenty-four-seven indefinitely. Now we have to start pumping our informants all over again.”

“You might also have prevented a murder. As long as we’re dreaming.”

“Speaking personally, I mourn a life lost. Professionally speaking, he can go to the part of hell where they keep the rich evangelists. My agency deals in whole populations.”

A flatbed pickup hauling a pair of snowmobiles shushed between us, stranding me in the center lane with my shoes full of slush. I waited for it to pass, then gunned the cane to catch up. It was like skiing with one pole. “You think Jeff killed him?”

“Someone was bound to, a liability like Paul. Right now I don’t know anyone killed him. Tomorrow I’ll fly in a team of pathologists from Quantico and open him up. I’m sure these local medical examiners are competent, but the best is the best.”

“He ought to be thawed out by then.”

“You should’ve come to Finlander and let him do the digging. What are you, some kind of ghoul?”

“My physical therapist said I needed exercise.” I was panting.

“Well, the crime scene is federal property now. There’s no higher authority to bail you out if you set foot on it.”

“And you feds have such a good track record in court.”

We reached the opposite sidewalk. Little gray jets shot out of his mouth like water rockets. I was leaking steam all over like Old Number Nine. I hobbled over to a parking meter and leaned on it. Up there they put them against the buildings to clear the snow lane. “Which of your informants tipped you Jeff was involved?”

“That was fieldwork. I’ve been tracking that stolen stock all over my territory. That false twenty the old lady slipped you had relatives, all in this area. It might have been a trial batch before
they committed the genuine paper. Who better to spread it around than the local cowboys?”

“Too thin. In my office you came on like you had him dead to rights.”

“What, you never ran a bluff into day money?”

“You’re bluffing now. Who’s your man inside?”

“I couldn’t answer that even if I had one. Why ask?”

“Was it Paul?”

Snow grizzled his dark curls. His expression didn’t change. It was still filled with bars sliding on tracks like theater flats. “If it was, he’d be alive now. We look after our people better than that.”

“I didn’t mean that. Maybe he doubled back on you and your people downsized him.”

“You must buy your fiction off remaindering tables. We retired all the death squads under Gerald Ford.”

“And reinstated them under George W. Bush.”

“You’re just a goddamn lone rider, aren’t you?”

“By default. Most of the time I can’t get anyone to ride with me.”

“Paul wasn’t one of ours,” he said. “Our recruiting pool’s a bit less polluted than the enemy’s.”

“I’ll run with that for now. I’ve only got two shoulders to look over.”

“You don’t have to look over either of them. You can go back to Detroit and work the private sector.” He got out his keys and pressed a button. The Chrysler’s lock opened with a falling note. “If I tell you how we got onto Jeff Starzek, will you do that, or do I have to take two hours away from defending America processing the paperwork on your arrest?”

“No.”

He blinked. “No to what? You won’t give it up, or I won’t have to take you into custody?”

“The first. Two hours or two years. Four weeks ago I didn’t have two minutes.” I tapped my leg with the cane.

I didn’t hear his response. He spoke under his breath and a car was passing behind him ten miles above the limit, spraying fan-tails of snot. But I saw the plume of vapor escape between his teeth and knew it was one syllable. He crossed the sidewalk and leaned in close. For a man who didn’t shave every day he used expensive cologne.

“Jeff’s our informant,” he said. “Tell that to anyone—anyone, and I include your lieutenant lady friend in Detroit—and the FBI will open you up right next to Paul Starzek.”

M
ost physical therapists are built like Bluto. Mine was a scrawny-looking five-eleven, 140, with Barton Fink hair combed straight up from the scalp and glasses with old-fashioned two-tone frames, black over transparent plastic, Buddy Holly-type metal inlays in the upper corners. Sometimes he reported to work in sweats, others in scrubs. Today it was hospital whites, with a blouse that buttoned at one shoulder, and navy deck shoes with thick white soles. He looked like a mad scientist and could bench-press a BMW.

He examined my thigh, first without touching, then pressing the muscles with his wiry fingers and bending and straightening the leg, cocking his head to one side as if listening for hemorrhages beneath the skin. I’d changed into my college boxing trunks and a Detroit Police Department T-shirt for the session. The thigh was bruised eggplant purple with mustard-colored streaks, and the pink new skin that had grown over the wound glistened like spackle. The suture tracks looked like teeth marks.

At length he lowered my foot gently to the floor and sat back on his low stool, resting his hands on his knees. “No session today,”
he said. “I can see you didn’t sit out yesterday’s appointment in a Barcalounger. I advised short walks, not racing city buses.”

“I took a hike in the country.” I was sweating a little from the pain of the manipulation. I was sitting on the end of a padded table that doubled as examination platform and exercise bench. We had the therapy room in Henry Ford Hospital to ourselves at that hour.

“You can’t rush recovery. It takes as long as it takes.”

“Says you. I’m going for the record.”

“You’re a police officer?”

“I’m a sleuth.”

“What’s a slooth?”

“A cop without a badge or authority or a pension plan. I’m a licensed private investigator.”

“Oh. A sleuth. You might try doing your investigating from a sofa for a couple of days. No one knows for sure just how much a ligament can take before it goes out on strike, but I’d say you’re getting close.”

“What’s the worst that can happen?”

“Worst?” He pursed his lips; not a flattering expression when you already look like a carp’s cousin. “A handicapped card on your rearview mirror for the rest of your life.”

“What’s the next worst?”

“A year in a steel brace. This isn’t a sprained ankle. A piece of metal tore a path as big around as a drainpipe through one of God’s most magnificent designs, carrying away flesh and muscle and missing a major artery by a sixteenth of an inch. The human system can’t replace those things, only stuff the hole with scar tissue. You’re not the man you were before you were shot. You never will be. But you can live a normal life if you follow the program.”

“I wouldn’t know what to do with a normal life.”

He drew a weary breath. He thought I was kidding. “You’re in
excellent physical condition otherwise. If you don’t push it, you can throw away the cane in two or three months.”

“Pushing it is my job description. What can I do short of stretching out in my pajamas and finishing
Jane Eyre
?”

“Are you haggling with me?”

“Just measuring my limitations. I’m not talking about paying holiday bills. Someone who never asked for help before is convinced I’m his only hope.”

“That’s one I never heard,” he said. “Usually it’s, ‘I have tickets to Stanley Cup.’ What are you taking, Vicodin?”

“Should I cut back?”

“Definitely not. If anything slows you down short of a rupture, it will be the pain. The addiction you’ll have to deal with later. I didn’t tell you that. My opinions aren’t the hospital’s. They’re not even mine.”

“What else?”

“Elevate the leg when you rest. If it swells, apply cold compresses. If it gives out on you entirely, call nine-one-one. What the paramedics do for you in the EMT will make the difference between a permanent limp and amputation.”

“Thanks.”

“If I hadn’t seen interns push themselves past all human endurance, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Which of course we’re not,” he added. “Is this person you’re helping a relative?”

“No.”

“I never had a friend like that. Not one I’d give my life or my leg for.”

“I don’t know him well enough to call him a friend.”

“Well, remember what I said. And that I didn’t say it.” He got up to see to his towels and things, abruptly enough to set the stool spinning.

So after all those years of carefree piracy, sailing the asphalt seas for treasure, adventure, and the pure joy of sticking his face into the slipstream, Jeff Starzek had become a spook.

Maybe he always had been. Maybe he’d been a mole from the start, not a lone wolf. Maybe the whole sordid chain of moonlit loading docks, flyblown motel rooms, and Benzedrine-fueled hours rocketing along gravel roads, two-lane blacktops, and heartless, hypnotic stretches of superhighway had all been part of the cover.