Don't Look for Me: An Amos Walker Novel (Amos Walker Novels)

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Lady, I couldn’t afford to hire me for a day, let alone you for a week.”

  “Well, you can at least kiss me before you go.”

  I did that, and she turned that long back on me. She was breathing evenly before I got to the door.

  *

  The sun had made its first appearance in days, dropping through the overcast. The butternut light spreading under that low ceiling made a phony effect, all filters and reflectors: I was too smart for that. I was a smart character all around. At that point I could outwit a Chevy short block. The gutters were going like sixty with melted slush. A cat with one eye, one ear, three legs, and a tail like a used pipe cleaner crouched on the sidewalk with its haunches tight, watching for rats swimming against the current.

  Waiting for the traffic to clear so I could turn onto Woodward, I looked up in the rearview mirror and grinned. My Town Car was back, with what looked like the same pair of heads behind the windshield. Lately the shift changes were working in my favor.

  No use boring them with another trip to the office. After I made my turn I swung left onto Michigan and led them out past downtown to the Aurora Car Wash. They hung back a little after I bumped up over the cut-down curb. For a moment I was afraid they’d circle the building and wait for me when I came out the other side, but they were wary; there might be a trapdoor inside and a ramp leading to the Bat Cave. They turned in too, giving me twenty feet.

  The attendant, a lanky thirty-five or so with prematurely white hair, beamed when he recognized my car. I always gave him a ridiculous tip to make sure the undercarriage was good and clean. I don’t care about the finish, but you don’t want a stray pebble clawing at a brake rotor when you’re trying to keep up with someone doing ninety. He stopped beaming when I told him what I wanted.

  “What are they, cops?” He was wise enough not to look their way. I’d pegged him for an ex-con. You start out working in a car wash or you end up there, but you don’t spend your middle years in one unless nobody will hire you for anything else. And he hadn’t gotten that white hair scraping chewing gum off chrome.

  “What I want to find out. Don’t worry, I don’t intend to shoot first.” I handed him a ten-spot on top of the usual. That put him back on his feed.

  He stuck the bill in his shirt pocket and picked up a hose wand. “Gonna get wet.”

  “I was born wet.” I guided my tires into the tracks and shifted into neutral.

  After he got the surface dirt off with the wand and a push broom, the conveyors pulled the car forward, and the power washers came on, pounding the sheet metal with spray and swaying the chassis on its springs. Multicolored soap made a gay pattern on the windshield. The car passed through it in lockstep. Just before the thick lather blanked out my rear window I saw the Lincoln in the mirror, pulling in behind.

  I tensed up at the sight. A large part of me was hoping I wouldn’t have to spring the trap: It had one chance of working and ten of putting me in the hospital, and I was spending more time in recovery than I used to.

  The rotating scrubbers started in. Then came the swishing fabric strips, licking the hood and then up the windshield and over the roof. I reached into the backseat for the slicker I keep there for sudden downpours on tail jobs. By the time I’d shrugged into it and pulled the hood over my head, the strips were between me and the Town Car, cutting off the occupants’ view. I had to shove the door hard to open it against the water pressure during the rinse cycle, and then the handle was torn from my hand and the door slammed shut. Turning, I braced myself against the side of the car and readied myself for the next move. It was like standing on the deck of a ship during a gale, only the water was a lot hotter, almost scalding. I hadn’t considered that.

  I took the plunge, literally: Two feet of slick concrete separated me from the catwalk that ran alongside the conveyors. If I lost my footing I lost everything; I could see the nose of the Town Car sliding out from under the strips. I leaped, and slapped my palms against the wall to avoid smashing my face into it. They stung. It all took only a half-second. Meanwhile I was drenched from the knees down. I missed the hot water then: Once out from under it I chilled quickly in the early spring air. When I turned to face my retreating rear fender, my feet squelched in their shoes. It hardly seemed worth the time lost putting on the raincoat, but I hadn’t rehearsed the maneuver, so the surprises were bound to be unpleasant.

  I unholstered the .38, pulled my oilcloth sleeve down over it, and stood with my back against the wall. It was pale unpainted concrete and I wore dark clothes, but I was counting on the pair in the Lincoln looking straight ahead at the Cutlass.

  I held my breath anyway and made myself as flat as possible as the gray car crept past. The conveyors seemed to move slower than when I was in my heap; I was sure one of them would turn his head my way, and wished I were a frog. I didn’t need the submersive ability so much as that trick they have of flattening themselves when they’re about to be stepped on.

  Time slows when you’re in that kind of situation, and things were moving slow enough as it was. The longer away from the spray the colder I got. My clothes were plastered to my skin like wet leaves. My breath smoked—I was afraid it would be noticed, but it quickly mingled with the steam from the sprayers. My feet had punched out for the day and gone home. I wanted to stamp them to revive the circulation, but I didn’t dare move and risk calling attention to myself.

  The front half of the Lincoln passed me, and between it and a glacier there was no contest. The driver, who was the only one I could see, was a blurry profile behind a sheet of soap and water, both hands gripping the wheel. The hand clenching the Chief’s Special was numb. I realized I was holding it tight, preparing myself to raise it in case the head turned my way. I relaxed my grip and felt the tingling warm my fingers.

  The rear door drew abreast. I tilted my torso ever so slightly forward on the axis of the pelvis, shifting my center of gravity for the big move.

  I couldn’t count on the door being unlocked. If it wasn’t, I’d lose the element of surprise tugging at it. Wrapping my hand around the cylinder of the short-barreled .38, I backhanded it hard against the window butt-first. The glass exploded into a million kernels. I reached in with my free hand, jerked the door open by the handle inside, threw myself into the backseat, and border-rolled the revolver so that the butt was in my palm and the barrel pointed toward the front seat.

  The driver was surprised. So was I. There was no one in the passenger’s seat in front.

  I was sluggish in anticipating the next move. I was just turning my attention from the wide-open eyes in the rearview mirror when the rear door on the passenger’s side flew open and the missing party bent down from the catwalk and stuck the barrel of a massive semiautomatic pistol inside.

  That’s the problem with most tricks. The mark can work them just as easily.

  “Your ride wasn’t all that dirty, Walker.” The voice was shallow, sexless, and sounded dryer than it should have; the owner wasn’t wearing a raincoat. It had a foreign accent I couldn’t place just then. “Throw your weapon into the front seat.”

  I shifted the muzzle toward the driver’s head. “You first. I just got it back.”

  The conveyors were still pulling the car along. Keeping the pistol steady on me, the newcomer slid into the seat beside me, twisted my way. The suit was cut mannishly, but it had been soaked through, and clung to its wearer in a way no man’s ever would. The face was smooth as polished silk, with the features arranged as an afterthought to the eyes, gray-blue and canted slightly, with large pupils. Black hair cut short and shaped to a long skull with plenty of room for gray matter.

  She looked twenty. The gun made her older.

  With two fingers of her left hand she reached inside her coat, slid out a folder bound in blue leather, and flipped it open. The card in the window looked official, with a gold seal, her picture looking as grim and eager as her cocked pistol, and lettering that belonged on a box of kosher salt.

  “
Lazara Dorn. I’m a major with Israeli Intelligence.” She snapped it shut with the turn of a slender wrist and dropped it back into its pocket. “My partner, Captain Asa Leibowitz. Both of us are trained to take a bullet in the head rather than fail the mission. Are you?”

  All the adrenaline went out of me then. I reached across the back of the passenger’s seat in front and let the revolver drop onto the cushion.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Mossad?” I asked.

  Lazara Dorn shook her short-cropped head. “GOLEM. Do you understand Hebrew?”

  “No. Reading from right to left gives me a headache.”

  “Then I won’t bother with the words behind the acronym. Do you know what a Golem is?”

  “A walking statue with a mission.”

  “That mission being to protect the Jews at all costs. We’re an arm of Israeli military intelligence.”

  “Right or left?”

  She smiled, without warmth. “That depends on the mission.”

  We were in a room at the Book-Cadillac, one of the grand old buildings that have escaped a city charge of dynamite for the time being. It had been redone in figured wallpaper, furnished in maple and brown Ultrasuede, and a flat-screen television dozed inside a cabinet with louvered doors. Asa Leibowitz stood beside the window in case I got any ideas about rappelling down twelve stories. He was a pudgy forty with Dumbo ears and a five o’clock shadow that looked as if it had gotten its start last night. His suit, tan to match his partner’s, had been a good fit before he’d stuffed ten more pounds into it, mostly around the middle; the skinny tie had come from Hughes & Hatcher by way of a time machine. So far he might have left his power of speech back in Tel Aviv.

  The woman had just come in from the shower. Her small slender body was buried in a fluffy white robe and her feet wore a pair of plain mules. Sitting opposite me in the ergonomic chair that belonged to the desk, she crossed a pair of ankles that looked delicate for someone who presumably spent a fair amount of time chasing reluctant detainees on foot; but then so did Secretariat’s. Her hair was already dry. She’d probably given it a vigorous shake after toweling off the rest of her. She had an athletic look and moved like a cat. Gymnastics was my guess.

  We’d come there in the Town Car. Leibowitz had parked my Cutlass outside the car wash. Maybe I’d see it again.

  I was sitting in an armchair barefoot with my soaked pants rolled up to midcalf while my shoes and socks baked on the radiator. I felt like Huck Finn in the mitts of Injun Joe.

  “You’ll get a bill for that shattered window,” Dorn said. “My suit, too, if it shrinks. They don’t pay all our expenses.”

  “Way to overcome the stereotype,” I said.

  Her strong dark brows went up a sixteenth of an inch. They contrasted sharply with her eyes, gray-blue satellites stopped in midorbit as if by a force of will. “Are we a bigot?”

  “We are not guilty. We have a Jewish great-great grandmother on our mother’s side and Italians, Serbs, Croats, Germans, Alsatians, and English on our father’s. We’re bulletproof.”

  “Serbs and Croats?”

  “Family reunions were always lively.”

  “Why’d you do what you did?”

  “I wouldn’t have, if I’d known you’d left the doors unlocked.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  That androgynous voice, throaty and with her accent, was intoxicating. I took a strong dose of mental caffeine. “You’ve been tailing me for days. It was the best way to get a look at you. It’s okay, now I know you’re fuzz. I’m used to attracting cops. I must have some pretty strong pheromones. But I like to keep track of whose list I’m on this week and why.”

  She lifted my revolver off a lamp table, swung out the cylinder, snapped it back. My wallet was on the table, contents spread, so she knew I was legal. Not that she’d care. Military intelligence agents regardless of nationality have a marked lack of interest in civilian law. She handled the weapon as easily as a compact; easier, maybe. No cosmetics had done any streaking in the car wash, and she hadn’t put any on after showering. For my money she didn’t need them—her face was a classic oval, with a high forehead, a straight nose, and thin but delicately turned lips, not to mention those eyes—but these days an undecorated young woman is something you notice.

  “You can tell a lot about a person by the way he takes care of his sidearm,” she said. “So far you get a passing grade. I prefer my Desert Eagle.” She returned the .38 to the table.

  The big Israeli pistol lay snug in its speed holster on the nightstand, separated from me by one of the double beds. I said, “When you stuck it in my face I thought it was a refrigerator. Forty-four?”

  “Three fifty-seven. Forty-four loads are too heavy. They pull my skirts out of line.”

  It was the first I knew she owned a skirt. I guessed even foreign spooks went out dancing from time to time. Maybe that was when the war paint came out. “When did you folks start working with the Mafia? Golda Meir wouldn’t let Meyer Lansky within a hundred miles of Israel.”

  “I don’t know who Meyer Lansky is, but I’m guessing he’s one of your American gangsters.”

  “Was. I thought your schools were better than ours at teaching history.”

  She let that one coast. “What makes you think we work with the Mafia?” With her accent the word had only two syllables, like the way some people say “piano.”

  “Okay, be cute. My shoes need another ten minutes anyway.”

  “Stop trying to change the subject.”

  “Lady—”

  “Major.”

  “Major lady, you started it, turning my head with sweet talk about how I scrub and powder my gun.”

  “Revolver.” An automatic reaction from someone with recent army training. She was big on correcting people. “You’re lucky your trick didn’t work. We act on reflex.”

  “I didn’t jump into your car with a chrysanthemum in my hand.”

  “You might have had time for one shot. Your schools should concentrate more on mathematics. There are two of us, and we’re equally expendable. When you grow up dodging bombs you don’t have time to become sentimental about the people you work with.” She seemed to consider something, then shook her head briefly. “I doubt you’d have had time.”

  “Maybe not. I didn’t know I was at war. Who’s the enemy?”

  “Iran. Iraq. Libya. Syria. Hamas. Now perhaps Egypt again. You’re a spoiled people. We’ve been at war for sixty years. We’ve lost more citizens during cease-fires than you have in your last three wars. Men, women, children. Babies. Hospitals and schools are primary targets. Our school bus drivers are required to carry Uzis.”

  “Ours carry Glocks.” I fished for a cigarette, but my pack was damp. There’s no such thing as a perfect raincoat. “The Arabs in Dearborn are too busy earning a living to tinker with SCUD missiles. Pick a subject. No? Okay, I’ll go. You set a tinhorn Capone we affectionately know as Yummy Mondadori on me in my office building, probably as a spotter. He knew me from somewhere, maybe one of those times I got my picture in the paper or hanging around Detroit Police headquarters. He gave you the high sign as I was following him out; I didn’t see it, but the minute I hit the road I grew two more heads.” I put a cigarette in my mouth anyway. Wet as it was, it kept my chin from shaking. For all I knew Mr. and Ms. GOLEM had diplomatic immunity and could fix murder like a parking ticket. “Why a Lincoln, by the way? You could’ve rented a Fiesta and gotten a room upgrade for the difference.”

  “We needed the space. We might have picked up some passengers.”

  “What are you using on them these days, bamboo splinters or something you plug in?”

  Captain Leibowitz heaved a sigh they heard in Windsor. I thought he was getting ready to break stride, but he turned back toward the window without saying anything.

  Lazara Dorn looked as upset as the Wailing Wall at midnight. “You’re stalling, Mr. Walker. Why?”

  “I don’t know. I expected the cavalry
before this.”

  “What cavalry?”

  “I guess they don’t get American television in the Middle East.”

  “We do. I don’t own a set. I share an apartment with two families and I go there only to sleep.”

  “I’m not stalling. I’m tired. It’s hard work holding up both ends of the same conversation.”

  She uncrossed her ankles and recrossed them the other way. She was getting ready for something. When she twitched at the robe to make sure it was shut, I spotted golden stains on her first two fingers. That explained the hungry little gleam in her eye when I’d stuck the wet nail between my lips. I wondered how much longer she’d hold out against the no-smoking law.

  Years, if she had to, I decided. I’d faced tougher opponents, but not without air support.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I put away the cigarette. There wasn’t much more of her goat to get, and anyway it was like chewing kelp.

  “I don’t know who this man Mondadori is,” she said. “Captain Leibowitz and I were sent here to investigate an international ring of narcotics smugglers. Our sources led us eventually to Elysian Fields. Apparently there are many such establishments in this country. In Israel, we’re under the impression Americans are not interested in health and fitness. In Las Vegas, Nevada, I’m told, there is even a restaurant called the Heart Attack Station, where a customer can order a hamburger sandwich containing sufficient calories to feed a neighborhood in the Golan Heights. Of course I do not believe this.”

  “Believe it. In my neighborhood, there’s a Tubby’s next door to Weight Watchers. We’re a nation of contradictions.”

  “So Asa tells me. He grew up in Chicago.” She pronounced it with a hard ch. “Where I was raised, you would never hear a person say, ‘I hope you’re hungry.’ In many places it would be a cruel jest.”