Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss (6 page)

F
or a window jockey, the kid in Warren had had a good eye; or rather sense of touch. The old-style twenty, which is still in circulation, looked genuine as to color and engraving, and was convincingly stained and crumpled by what appeared to be passage through many hands. It was printed on very good paper. But it had been printed on paper.

I popped it a couple of times, stroked it between thumb and forefinger, held it up to the light, and gave it back to the trooper. I’d milked things a little, but then I’m a born ham.

“I’m poor,” I said. “I don’t handle the stuff often enough to know the difference.”

“Not good. Not even funny. What else you got?”

We were sitting in the front seat of his cruiser with a console separating us, bumped out all over with equipment and coiled black cords and wee colored lights. He had a two-way radio, an onboard computer with a printer, GPS, and something that looked too much like a professional doughnut maker for comfort; if I didn’t stop looking at it I was going to say something unfortunate and lose whatever chance I had at freedom. Every now and then a call came gurgling over the radio that had nothing to do with us,
and from the lack of tone in the dispatcher’s voice, not much more to do with her. They recruit them from Thorazine-testing laboratories.

“Okay.” I got a cigarette out, to keep my fingers busy; nothing more than an electrical fire had ever been lit in that car. “So long as it’s understood knowing a bit about counterfeit money doesn’t make me a counterfeiter.”

“No free passes,” he said, flat as a paddle. “I tore the last one off the pad. Go.”

“Paper money isn’t paper, really. Mostly it’s cloth. That’s why it doesn’t fall apart when it goes through the wash in your jeans pocket. That bill’s mostly paper with some threads running through it. Bed-and-breakfast stationery is good as a rule, but it isn’t Treasury stock. The kid who called in my license plate must’ve kept his fingers off the griddle.”

“The new bills are harder to fake, and the old ones are starting to thin out. Some business owners train their people to give the discontinued series more attention. These others are fine.” He put back the bills he’d taken from my wallet and held it out.

I took it and returned it to my hip pocket without counting. He looked too spit-shined to palm anything less than a hundred, and maybe not even that. Anyway he hadn’t the palms for it.

“This kid ought to get a raise,” I said. “As it is, his boss will probably take the twenty out of his time.”

“It’s always the little guy gets it in the neck. But not on my beat. Go home.”

“You’re kicking me loose?”

“If I were passing bad bills, I’d drive a better car. Someone slipped it to you, I’m pretty sure. Whether you didn’t notice or decided to slip it to someone else is between you and Andy Jackson. I’m not your spiritual counselor.”

“The car’s a classic,” I said. “Punks kept choosing me at stoplights so I went over it with a baseball bat.”

“You wouldn’t remember who gave you the bill.” I didn’t see any faith in his expression. They leave it in the locker with their civvies at the start of the shift.

I made my face thoughtful. I’d driven straight to Port Huron from Detroit with nothing in my wallet but a few of the C-notes Oral Canon had paid me to find Jeff Starzek. The only place I’d broken one was at Vic’s Super Senter, around the corner from Paul Starzek’s house and church. The old lady making change behind the counter had even made a crack about the economy looking up.

I said, “I could give you a list of possibles, but you’d have to shake loose every police station in this part of the state. I’ve been on the road all day.”

“That’s the trouble with money. Everybody squawks about it, but nobody looks at it when he’s getting it or spending it. Chances are whoever slipped it to you had it slipped to him and he passed it on all unawares.”

“All unawares,” I said. “Landagoshen.”

The cop’s face got as hard as quartz. It hadn’t been puff pastry to begin with. “Go home. Pay more attention to your cash from now on. It’s only what drives the whole system.”

I limped back to my car. The cruiser kicked gravel and pieces of broken pavement U-turning back the way it had come. I threw away the cigarette I’d been playing with, tapped out a fresh one, and fired it up from the dash lighter. I felt a little bad about ragging the cop, but it had taken my mind off my leg. I figured he’d pass it on to the driver of the next sports car he saw topping seventy, just like a counterfeit bill.

It was cold in the car, but I didn’t start it. I smoked and thought
and rode the Shockwaves from the traffic slapping past, trying to beat the rush.

Funny money’s like food poisoning. Everyone’s had it at one time or another without really knowing it. Since laser printing had eliminated the need for bulky photo-engraving plates and big cumbersome printing presses, fake twenties had become as common as northern black squirrels; worth looking at when you noticed them, but not worth getting excited over. Washington disagreed, and in response had redesigned its bills for the first time since the Depression to make counterfeiting more of a challenge. That would hold until the last of the old bills went to the furnace and the paperhangers returned to the drawing board. The only sure way to stop a crime is to make it legal.

That was someone else’s problem. Just because a scrap of false currency had found its way into my hands while I was looking for Jeff Starzek didn’t mean it had anything to do with the job. It was just curious that he’d spent most of his adult life ducking the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and that ATF is a division of the Department of the Treasury. Same old enemy he knew by type if not always by name. Agent Clemson of Homeland Security had said Starzek had branched out in a whole new direction, and Starzek had hinted he’d thrown over cigarettes for another kind of cargo, just before he’d driven off the edge of the map.

If there was anything to it, God help him. You can murder a federal agent and Uncle Sam will track you down with no more than his usual resources and prosecute you according to the book. You might even get off with life, or nothing at all if the lawyers and investigators blundered the way they so often do where national security is involved. But print and pass one dirty dollar and he’ll come down on you like frogs on Egypt. They’ll bury you inside.

It might have been the Vicodin talking. Anyway I didn’t know what to do with it. It was too big a subject—IMAX times ten—
and I was sitting too close to the screen, where I couldn’t see around the wings of the eagle. I got better results in a neighborhood theater, with a simpler script and a smaller cast of characters. Someone who’d said his name was Oral Canon had paid me in cash to find his wife’s kid brother. Except Jeff Starzek never had a sister and so far all the client’s contact numbers had given me was a sleigh ride through the chilly winter wonderland of fiber optics.

I’d sat too long. Cold lay on my ears and nose and pierced my femur like an ice pick. I twisted the key and pumped the pedal, grinding at the starter until it caught. A glacial gust blew from the heater. I switched off the blower. A bank thermometer changed from eight to seven as I passed it.

The four and five o’clock rush hours had melded into one lump of slow-moving steel downtown. Windows lighted against the early dusk and hung like the last leaves of autumn among the abandoned offices and apartments next door and on the floors above and below. The city had emptied into the suburbs when I got back to the office and climbed back aboard the sleigh.

A voice with plenty of bottom welcomed me to Verizon Wireless and told me the cell number Oral Canon had given me was unavailable. I broke the connection and tried his home once again. Three stories down in the street, someone’s car alarm started hooting. It sounded like one of those goofy birds in a Tarzan movie with no room in the budget for elephants. On the fifth ring I took the receiver away from my ear.

“Hello?” A woman’s voice, sounding farther away than the alarm-bird. I put her back to my ear.

“I’m trying to reach the Canon residence.” I’d probably dialed wrong. No one had picked up all day.

“This is Mrs. Canon. Who’s calling, please?”

R
ose Canon,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Oral Canon.” I couldn’t think of any other conjugations. The woman on the other end of the line prevented me from going back and starting over.

“Is this Amos Walker?”

Her voice had dropped like the temperature outside. She sounded as if she were talking through a paper tube. You can usually tell when someone’s cupping the mouthpiece with her hand. In spite of that I heard a male voice in the background, the hand-rubbed baritone of a TV anchorman reading the results of a presidential poll.

“Oral’s there, isn’t he?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“You don’t want him to know you’re talking to me.”

“No.”

“Stop saying yes and no. When’s he leave for work in the morning?”

“Eight.”

“I’ll call back then. Tell him you just lost a radio quiz.”

“Thank you, anyway.” Something plopped in my ear.

I’d poured a finger of Scotch and let it come up to room temperature. The bottom drawer where I kept it caught the draft from the floor. I swirled it like brandy and threw it back like a movie cowboy. It hit my stomach like a bass drum and crawled through my limbs, driving out the chill. Alcohol thins the blood, they say, making you more vulnerable to hypothermia, not less. Five generations of alpine St. Bernards had labored under an illusion.

Her voice was a little husky in the low registers, the way I like trombone music and women’s voices. Maybe she had a cold. I got out the snapshot Canon had given me, of the woman he’d said was his wife and Jeff Starzek, the man he’d said was her brother. The face went with the voice: pretty, lightly seasoned. I had a hunch cameras didn’t do her justice.

I wondered what was this fascination for other men’s wives.

The card Oral Canon had given me had come out with the picture by accident. I looked at my name and the old telephone number, then turned it over and read the handwriting Canon had said was Starzek’s:
Rose
—
If you don’t hear from me by the first of the year, hire this man
. No signature or initial.

No vibes either, but that was okay. Preternatural communication exists, all right, but it’s wrong just as often as the regular kind. I put the card and picture back in my pocket, stuck the bottle out of temptation’s path, and took a pill instead. Then I drove home through empty polar streets with houses on both sides still wearing Christmas lights and opened a can of soup.

My leg woke me the next morning ten minutes ahead of the alarm, but I was lying in my own bed and not a frozen parking lot, which was progress of a kind. I had coffee and painkillers for breakfast. At eight o’clock I called the Canons’ home. A baby with steel lungs wailed in the background. That was another suspected
lie laid to rest, and I resolved to give Oral the benefit of some doubt until I could question Rose in detail. She couldn’t talk right then, so I got the address and said I’d be there at nine.

The house was a two-story frame in Oak Park with a hip roof, one of several built on a tree-lined street in the second generation after VJ Day and something of an improvement over the G.I. Bill ranches that had preceded them. A pair of mature cedars towered in the front yard, their upper branches hollowed out in a U by Detroit Edison crews to keep them from taking down wires during windstorms. Oral Canon might have done the job himself, if he was with DTE as he said and splicing technicians weren’t above that sort of work. I still had some reservations about him.

A hand-lettered three-by-five card inserted in one of the small panes in the front door asked visitors not to use the bell. I rapped gently and waited. My breath smoked and the iron air frosted the hairs inside my nostrils. It was like breathing through fiberglass.

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Walker. Come in and take off your coat. It must be zero.” Her husky voice was almost a whisper.

She had blue eyes and the blackest hair I’d ever seen on an Occidental, a color combination that always puts blondes in the second rank. A crumpled red face and a full head of coarse black hair showed above a blue blanket wound into a coccoon in the crook of her left arm. The kid seemed to have his father’s complexion; but I had one more point to clear up before I stepped inside.

“It was two below when I left the house.” I kept my voice low. “Could you describe your husband for me, Mrs. Canon?”

Her face showed no surprise. It was oval, pale as milk, with a strong straight nose and a dimpled upper lip with edges as delicate as a ski track in fresh powder. It looked as if it would collapse if you touched it with a finger.

“He’s a big man, like you, only heavier. Bald and sunburned. I can’t get him to wear block. My father died of melanoma.”

“I heard he drank.”

Her eyebrows went up, black contrails against her fair skin. “Oral? Not—”

“Your father. Oral said he drank and your mother walked out on you.”

“You get personal right on the doorstep, don’t you?” The whisper was harsh. The bundle in her arm stirred and opened its eyes a crack. They were blue like the mother’s, but they say that’s true of all babies. I’d never paid them that much attention. They can’t answer questions and don’t hit very hard.

“The answers could save us both time and you money. Your husband hired me to look for a brother it turns out you don’t have.”

“He didn’t lie.” She jiggled the baby, pulled the edge of the blanket up around its ears. “Please come inside. The doctor said a little cold air isn’t really bad, but Jeffie doesn’t know that.”

I stepped in past her. It was the
Jeffie
that did it. She closed and locked the door.

A heavy oaken hall tree stood to one side with a variety of outerwear hanging from it. I shrugged out of my overcoat and used a vacant hook. “You named him after Jeff Starzek?”

“I’ve always liked the name. It has strength and tradition. You’d never believe how many babies in the maternity ward were named Joshua and Jason.”