Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 21 - Infernal Angels (9 page)

“Crossgrain told me he ordered from an eight hundred number,” I said. “You must’ve been able to trace that.”

“It led to a boiler room where the operators process the incoming through an Internet address. When we tried tracking it, we got so much spam it shut the District down for four hours.”

Hornet and I stood silent while she collected her thoughts, appreciating her ordeal. The lieutenant belched.

She went on. “Some of the companies we connected with MacArthur are legitimate corporations trading on the New York Stock Exchange and in Tokyo. Their CEOs say they never heard of MacArthur, and we’re not so sure they’re all lying. It’s the supernumeraries who look after the nuts and bolts; nailing the right clerk or secretary or junior exec is like trying to tail one bee in a swarm. We don’t have the people, and when I say
we
I’m including the FBI and the CIA and Homeland Security and the intelligence divisions of all the branches of the U.S. military.”

“Wow,” Hornet said, when she ran down finally. “It almost makes me sorry I don’t give a rat’s ass.”

She let him have her cool brown gaze. “Maybe you will when someone drives a car bomb through Thirteen Hundred.”

“It already looks like someone did. You been away a while, so you forgot what police do. Walker’s right, for once: When somebody’s careless enough to drop a corpse in our streets like a turd, it’s our job to scrape it up. If we can find out who dropped it, we flush it and go home, just like a guy walking his dog with a plastic bag.

“I ain’t spy material. For one thing I’m too fat to jump on roofs and hook up with shady characters in rug shops, and for another I don’t have that kind of time. I just had a file dumped on my desk that went cold two years ago. It’s still cold. No new evidence, no witnesses we didn’t talk to ten, twelve times, just a family member that hit it off with the attorney general over a plate of spaghetti in Lansing last month, but it’s open again and that’s that, we make room for it next to all these heroin overdoses and now Crossgrain. If you can tell me why he had to die just because he took delivery on a shipment of legal merchandise, then I’ll give a rat’s ass.” He waited, watching her with his mean little pig eyes folded in suet.

It was a barn-burner from start to finish. I wouldn’t have thought he had the wind to get through it.

“I can’t tell you until I have a chance to examine the merchandise,” she said. “So far, Walker’s the only person with a pulse who’s gotten close enough to touch it.” She looked at me, expectation dripping all over.

“I hefted it is all. I’ve held heavier Manhattans.”

To Hornet she said, “I don’t give a rat’s ass why Crossgrain was killed if finding out doesn’t lead me to who sent the shipment.”

“I’m just after the shipment,” I said. “If anyone’s asking.”

“You’re a lame duck,” said Thaler. “Your client’s in the shop with a cracked block.”

“Where I can’t give him a refund. I still owe two days on the retainer.”

“It won’t do his ghost any good if you spend ’em sitting in a cell at County,” Hornet said.

“I’m confused. Am I a lame duck or a rat’s ass?”

The deputy marshal moved in close to Hornet and said something in a low voice. He pushed out his paunch and flattened his hands against his kidneys, like a pregnant woman with a bad back, and turned away from me, burying his response in two and a half feet of blubber and polyester. I felt like a customer in a butcher shop getting ready to buy two pounds of thumb.

When they were facing me again Thaler said, “How about staked goat?”

I asked what it paid.

“Two days on the street,” Hornet said, “no interference from us. All you got to do to thank us is come running back with whatever you get.”

“If it’s all the same to you I’ll take the jail time. I can use the R and R.”

He said, “That’s a bluff we can call. Me and the marshal.”

“Deputy,” she said.

“International terrorism amps up the volume. The city can’t house you without a charge, but Deputy Marshal Thaler can dock you in the Milan Federal Correctional Institution for reasons of national security, same old specialty of the house. The Bill of Rights don’t exist when the republic’s at stake.”

“Why not Guantanamo? I can top up my tan.”

“There’s a three-month waiting list for admission to Gitmo,” Thaler said. “Can’t think why. The food’s better in Milan. Justice likes to keep its prisoners fat and sluggish.”

I stuck a hand in my pocket and turned the cigarette pack over and over. “Who would I report to?”

“Me.” Once again they spoke at the same time.

Another brief conference with Hornet’s back turned my way. You could have projected
Lawrence of Arabia
on it.

Thaler moved out of his shadow. “Me, if you get a line on those converters. The lieutenant if you turn a suspect. Copy us both, of course.”

Hornet said, “If you lose our numbers, I’ll book you on obstruction and interfering with the police in the performance of their duties.”

“Same old specialty of the house,” I said.

“Except by then we’ll have everything we need to shake loose a warrant. That’s the part that sold me: If you don’t follow through, the deal never happened. Can’t recommend the diet at County,” he said. “Beanie-wienies and sauerkraut from the can.”

“Two days without fuzz steaming up my collar,” I said. “That’s like two weeks in real time.”

Mary Ann Thaler took me home and I chased sleep for an hour. When it finished outrunning me I got up and made coffee. An unfamiliar car was parked on the street a few doors down. Someone with foresight had driven it through a mud puddle, but it was the latest model for three blocks. I didn’t know if it belonged to Detroit or Washington, but either way it violated the terms of our deal. I drank from my cup and watched it though the window with mixed emotions. I’d traded a counterfeit bill for a blind horse. It was an honorable arrangement that no one intended to honor.

TEN

I sat down in the living room with my coffee and dialed a number I knew by heart. On the other end, the bell was hooked up to an air horn to be heard above the whine of power wrenches.

“
Ja.
” Ernst Dierdorf picked up just ahead of AT&T.

“A little heavy on the Teutonic this morning.”

“Oh. It’s you.” He racheted back the accent. He had a thousand customers and knew each one by voice. His ears were tuned to tell which belt was loose by its whistle and whether a rattle belonged to a stuck lifter or a broken engine mount.

I said I needed a loaner.

“You bang up that Cutlass again?”

“That was just once, and years ago. It’s fine. Just too easy to spot.”

I told him what I needed. The arrangements were involved, but he listened without interrupting and didn’t ask me to repeat anything. He said to sit tight and broke the connection.

OK Towing & Repair was an outlaw garage, operating in open violation of federal law. Neither he nor any of his employees was a certified mechanic, and no framed proof of certification hung on any of his walls. Overnight, the legislation, which was intended to discourage incompetence and price-gouging, had destroyed the old American custom of a garage on every corner and quadrupled the cost of even the most basic repairs. Ernst, who had left Germany with his father to avoid just that kind of tampering with private enterprise, kept a mean little rat terrier of an attorney on a leash to stay in business.

When I finished the pot and put on another, the unfamiliar car was still in the same place, all alone now that my neighbors had all left for work. I couldn’t tell if anyone was inside. There would be two: one to drive, the other to get out and tail me on foot in case I took the last parking space.

A knuckle banged on the back door. I let Ernst in while the coffee was brewing and shook his hand. “I expected you to send a flunky.”

“I have a vested interest in that car. I raised it from a wing nut. You’re lucky I let
you
drive it.”

It was the first time I’d seen him without coveralls. He wore a plaid sport coat over a blue denim shirt, narrow necktie, and jeans. Nothing fit him properly; his hunched, shriveled frame would challenge a master tailor. A jack or something had slipped early in his working life, crushing parts of him that had been replaced with titanium and plastic. The thought of him dragging himself over fences to get to my house unobserved made me cringe.

I let him peer around the edge of the curtain at the unfamiliar car outside. He made a disgusted noise with his tongue against his teeth. “Designed in Canada, assembled in Mexico with parts made in China. Like feeding yourself with a fork, a corn tortilla, and chopsticks.”

“Coffee?”

“Strong?”

“Brutal.”

He took plenty of sugar. I was pretty sure he was on his third set of teeth. His head with its thickness of blonde hair—graying now—and aging but clean lines needed a Heidelburg dueling scar on one cheek to complete the effect, but apart from his looks he was thoroughly Americanized. The accent only came out when he didn’t want to disappoint a customer who preferred the stereotype.

“Sixty-five-and-a-half Skylark Gran Sport.” He pushed a plain ring with two keys on it across the table in the breakfast nook. “White with patches of rust-red primer. It was scheduled for painting Friday. Four-oh-one Wildcat engine.”

“I thought the Wildcat was four-forty-five.”

“That’s the number of pounds of torque it delivers at twenty-eight hundred RPM. Four-oh-one refers to cubic inches.”

“I’m used to four-fifty-five in the Cutlass.”

“You won’t notice much difference. Buick called it ‘a Howitzer with windshield wipers’ in its advertising.”

“Suspension?”

“Four control-arm in back, roll bar in front for stability. Boxed frame. Those were standard. I made some improvements.” He looked smug.

I gave him the keys to the Cutlass.

“How fancy do you want it?” he asked. “I can keep ’em busy for twenty minutes, then I’ve got a brake job that can’t wait.”

“Ten should do it. Stick to the limit and don’t let ’em get a good look at who’s behind the wheel.”

He finished his coffee. “I parked two streets over like you said, straight shot from your back door.”

“Thanks, Ernst. What’s the damage?”

“Don’t scare me with such talk. Top off the tank—you’ve got additive?”

“I’ve got a case in the garage.” Classic muscle cars won’t run on modern unleaded gas without help.

“I put some in the trunk just in case. Fill it up when you’re finished and get it back to me in one piece. I’ve got a customer on the hook with homes in Grosse Pointe and London. He wants to ship it back and forth across the Atlantic by air.”

“The economy must not be so bad after all.”

“Oh, he’s hurting. He couldn’t swing the asking on the forty-nine Merc he had his eyes on originally. You take the cure?”

I caught his meaning after a second. “Nope. Still smoking.”

“Not in the car. I reupholstered it in red leather.”

“At least let me pay your hourly rate.”

“That’s work. This cloak-and-dagger business beats the grease pit.” An idea took some of the chill out of blue eyes. “What you can do, as long as you’re not using the Cutlass, is let me bang out the dings and give it a spray job. I’ll do it for cost. It’s a sin to hide that engine inside a brown paper bag.”

“I need the protective coloration. They’ll shoot me if they think they can’t catch me.”

We stood and shook hands again. I reminded him to obey the traffic laws. Although he could dismantle a ’55 Thunderbird convertible and reassemble it as a station wagon, he was an unreliable driver. They say Stradivari couldn’t play a note.

*   *   *

As the garage door trundled shut, I watched the unfamiliar vehicle separate itself from the curb and fall in a block and a half behind my car. The distance made it a closed tail; I wasn’t supposed to know it existed. This team must have been using a coloring book for a manual. If it was Washington, I hoped that meant they were saving their best people for actual terrorists. If it was Detroit, it was business as usual.

I was feeling athletic; my morning pills had kicked in. I let myself out the back door, hopped a fence and a drainage ditch, and found the Buick where Ernst had said I would, a two-door hardtop built wide and low to the ground. I’d been afraid it would attract too much attention, but the chalky white paint worn down to dull reddish-brown primer in big swatches on the hood and fenders blended in with most of the beaters on the street. A connoisseur would spot it for what it was, but I didn’t plan to be driving it long enough to build an entourage.

The instruments in the dash were pleasantly simple, just a speedometer, odometer, and fuel and oil gauges and an AM radio, like in the Cutlass. Whoever had ordered it from the factory hadn’t popped for air-conditioning or a tachometer, but Ernst had installed seat belts, also optional under LBJ. The interior smelled of good leather and the bucket seat embraced my back and hips with warmth from the sun.