Stress

by Loren D. Estleman

  Someone who thought the place was worth finding had hand-painted the address Joe Piper was looking for on a door with a tarnished brass handle. When he pushed it open, a metallic crackle answered from the gray darkness inside. He obeyed the command to enter with his hands away from his body.

  Although he had been around guns most of his life, he never carried one. The man inside frisked him, uncocked and belted his revolver, a short nickel-plated .357, and pulled a six-foot steel cabinet away from the door to a staircase leading to the upper stories. He was short, but he was as strong as a horse. His shoulder-length black hair, beaded headband, and the sweatshirt he wore with tribal designs painted on it under a quilted vest gave Joe Piper the impression he was an American Indian. It seemed an odd association, but then nothing had made much sense downtown since July 1967.

  The Indian motioned up the stairs. He walked that way, accidentally kicking a piece of debris across the floor. The place appeared to have been a laundromat. Twisted and broken-off pipes stuck out like tentacles from the walls and there was a smell of detergent and mildew beneath the smoky stench.

  At one time the second floor had been divided into apartments, but the walls had been torn out to make room for a single enterprise. Joe Piper knew where he was then. Before the riots he had come there on occasion to shoot pool and seal bargains over an unlicensed drink. A room without character at the best of times, now that the tables and fixtures were gone and the windows blocked it felt empty even of ghosts. The only light came from a Coleman lantern hissing on a square Formica-topped table and a kerosene heater on the floor. The flames cast more shadows than light and warmed little besides themselves.

  Having delivered the visitor, the Indian made for the far wall facing the door and leaned against it. No introductions were made. They were unnecessary. Joe Piper assumed the man seated behind the table knew who he was, and even in the hollow illumination of the lantern he recognized the man’s features from his FBI circular.

  Wilson McCoy. The narrow dusky face, black beret, Fu Manchu moustache, and straggly chin-whiskers reminded Joe Piper of the young Dizzy Gillespie, but he was implicated in the daylight ambush of mob boss Patsy Orr and three associates in an elevator of the Penobscot Building in 1966. That had been at the time of the Kercheval Street Incident; although that dress rehearsal for the full-scale rebellion that took place the following summer had pushed the assault off the front pages, McCoy’s connection with the Black Panthers brought him to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, who had been searching for thirty years for another John Dillinger to touch up the Bureau’s image. McCoy now occupied a spot on the list just below Jane Alpert, the woman sought for the 1969 New York bombings.

  Unimpressive in person, with eyes set too close together and a sickly, hollow-chested look that Joe Piper suspected was congenital, McCoy had one habit that fascinated him: He chain-smoked marijuana. There was no mistaking that scorched-grain smell or the noisy way he sucked in air along with the smoke, but Joe Piper, a sometime indulger, had never before seen anyone round over an ashtray with hand-rolled butts, or light a fresh reefer off the stub of the last. The procedure was expensive and should have turned his brains to cornmeal, but there was nothing mushy about the way he opened the conversation.

  “I know a smoke shop on Michigan where I can score all the pieces I need for half what you charge. How come everyone says call you?”

  That was when he told McCoy what was wrong with the gun business.

  Teeth shone on the other side of the table. Whether it was a smile or a grimace was anyone’s guess. “I’m off the tit a long time. I guess I know a good gun from one that’s going to blow off my own dick.”

  “You’d be surprised. I’ve seen some pretty guns, museum quality, that I wouldn’t fire without a long string and a brick wall to squat behind. Automatics are the worst. They’re the knock-off Rolexes of the gun trade. They gut them, part out the actions, and stick in any old Mickey Mouse works. You think you bought a Beretta, but what you’ve really got came from a boiler factory in Seoul. A real melting-pot piece. And there’s something else to consider besides quality of merchandise.” He started forward, intending to lean across the table. The Indian straightened and rested a palm on his .357. Joe Piper put his hands in his pockets.

  “A gun can kill you without ever going off,” he said. “Last month three guys got stopped for busting a light on Woodward. The cop turned out the car and came up with three unregistered S-and-Ws. Okay, that’s a Class A felony, but any kid with a degree could plead that down to a fine and time served. Only come to find out one of the pieces killed a clerk in a Seven-Eleven in Dearborn last Thanksgiving. None of these guys was even close to Dearborn that day, but they’re nailed for felony homicide. Now they’re singing, taking everybody down with them, including the guy that put them on to the guy that sold them the guns. Not the guy that sold them the guns, though. Cops in Wyandotte snagged him out of the river three days after Christmas. See, that’s another reason you can trust a Joe Piper piece. My balls are on the block. No fuck-ups. No history. Better than General Motors.”

  “There’s another way.” McCoy chain-lit a joint. “Don’t bust no red lights.”

  He ignored the remark as irrelevant. “Someone told me you were asking about grease guns. That’s a wide field: Uzis, AK-47s, BARs, M-16s. The whole alphabet. Maybe you better nail it down.”

  “I heard shitty things about M-16s.”

  “They’re shit, all right, but they get the job done. Plastic stock, banana clip. Low velocity. Fucking bullets tumble end over end. Sometimes they go in sideways. Make a hell of a hole. I can cut you a deal now that the war’s winding down. In six months they’re going to be a drug on the market.”

  “What else you got?”

  He hesitated. It occurred to him that he was dealing with a man who faced serious time. Joe Piper had a nose for such things as informants and wires. He wondered if the FBI’s priorities had shifted to the supply side. He had contacts in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and none of them had reported a thaw in the cold war between ATF and the Justice Department; still, Hoover was dead. “I’m not saying what I’ve got,” he said. “We’re just talking. Why don’t you tell me what you have in mind and we’ll figure out what’s best for the job.”

  Again he saw teeth. “Last time I told whitey what I was thinking, I got six years at Whitmore Lake.”

  “Maybe you should tell me what you have to spend. If you were buying anything and I had anything to sell;” he added.

  “I might go fifty large for twenty pieces. Depending on the pieces.”

  Joe Piper never showed surprise. He had learned the art of dissembling early, when he had continued in the weapons trade on his own after his father had gotten over the hump and returned to the cement business, without the father ever suspecting what the son was up to until he was out of the house for good. Yet the amount quoted by McCoy rocked him. He did some fast mental arithmetic, and in his professional interest forgot to be cautious about terminology.

  “For twenty-five hundred apiece, I can put you behind twenty Ingrams.”

  “What the fuck’s Ingrams?”

  “Machine pistol, folding stock. U.S. made, if you’re patriotic, only I guess you’re not. Comes in two calibers. Thirty-eight’s easier to handle, but the forty-five pokes holes big as a champagne cork.”

  “I like big holes. What’s the ROF?”

  He measured out a small smile. “Eleven hundred and forty-five rounds per minute. I’m telling you, you can’t flutter your lips fast enough to duplicate the sound.”

  There was an impressed silence. Joe Piper broke it.

  “For hard cash I’ll throw in the suppressors and fifty thousand rounds of ammo.”

  “What the fuck’s suppressors?”

  “Well, silencers.”

  “Don’t want no silencers. I like to make noise. Keep the silencers and make it a hundred thousand rounds. When’s delivery?”

  “I got the
guns if you got the cash.”

  McCoy dragged in a lungful of smoke. When he spoke his vocal cords were constricted. “I ain’t. I expected to, but something went bad. I call you when I got it. You box up the guns meanwhile.”

  The son of a bitch. Drag him clear down here just to listen to the Rotarians speech. It was lesson time.

  “Thing is, this is perishable goods. If you don’t have the pony, I know three other guys who do.”

  He didn’t believe any living organism could move that fast, much less one with so much marijuana in its system. The Coleman lantern tipped off the table, the Indian lunged forward to catch it, and McCoy caught Joe Piper’s unruly hair in one fist and drew a thin edge of fire across his Adam’s apple with the other. Released suddenly, Joe Piper started back, and only then saw he was bleeding, bleeding bright strawberry all down the front of his coat. He felt himself turning to water below the waist.

  “It ain’t cut.” McCoy wiped the edge of the straight razor clean on the heel of his hand. “Not through. Not this time. Box up them guns like I said. You’ll get paid.”

  Downstairs, the Indian, who seemed prepared for everything, dressed the five-inch slice with peroxide and a bandage that looked like a clerical collar and sponged the worst of the mess from his coat with a towel soaked in distilled water. Minutes later Joe Piper wobbled out into the bright sharp air of a January afternoon on Twelfth Street.

  Chapter Three

  CHARLIE BATTLE WONDERED AT WHAT POINT A SQUAD lieutenant decided to transfer his forensic skills from unraveling the riddle of urban crime to solving the mysteries of nautical rigging.

  Sweating a little in his winter uniform—the steam heating system at 1300 Beaubien had been designed for a building much taller than seven stories—Battle stood without fidgeting while Max Zagreb threaded thirty-pound-test fishing line through the tiny loops on the plastic main yard of Old Ironsides. The green blotter on the big gray steel desk was a litter of polystyrene masts, hatch covers, and able-bodied seamen frozen in mid-duty, from which the historic battlewagon was rising in l/24th scale like a ghost ship from a miniature scrap yard. In time, Battle supposed, it would take its place among the Mayflower, the Santa Maria, the Bonhomme Richard, and the rest of the toy fleet that sailed atop every file cabinet and shelf in the corner office. Throughout the twelve precincts Zagreb, who spent most of his lunch hour driving to and from Rider’s Hobby Shop in Ypsilanti, was referred to as Cap’n Crunch, but never to his face. As skipper of Special Investigations he drew deep water in every bureau.

  He was a slight man with a balding head and enormous sideburns like the ones on the deceased city leaders whose pictures walled the corridors of the City-County Building where Battle worked. With the Bicentennial still three years away, a number of local notables were already cultivating such exotic adornments in the spirit of the shaggy greats of the past. It was the young officer’s observation that most of them lacked training in the care and nourishment of facial hair; Henry Ford II and Senator Philip Hart especially looked as if they had hooked on false whiskers for a school play.

  Zagreb tied the line to a halyard on the deck, snipped off the extra inch with a pair of pinking shears, and peeled aside his gold-rimmed reading glasses. “Know anything about ships, Officer?”

  “I know they float. Sir.”

  “Under ideal conditions, yes. The only time I was ever on one—a real ship, I mean, not a rowboat or the ferry to Mackinac—I got sick as a dog. Haven’t been on the water since. So why do I build model ships? I could say it’s good for manual dexterity, but there are other kinds of models I could put together, cars and movie monsters, and they don’t interest me. I guess I’m fascinated by sailing craft because they’re entirely self-contained. Maybe that’s why I joined the police force. It’s the only government body that cruises along independent of the rest.”

  “I guess us cops are all sort of in the same crew.”

  “Horseshit. I didn’t call you in here to give you the don’t-rock-the-boat speech. How are things at City Hall, by the way? Is Gribbs figuring to re-up?”

  “I don’t know, sir. The mayor doesn’t confide in me. I only see him in the lobby and he’s usually surrounded by TV crews.”

  “Well, if you do talk to him tell him I don’t recommend it. The Democrats are grooming Young. That son of a bitch does his electioneering with a pipe wrench.”

  Battle, who thought it was high time the city had a black chief executive regardless of what tools he employed, said nothing. He wished Zagreb would invite him to crack a window. But the lieutenant didn’t seem uncomfortable at all in a double-knit suit that might have been painted aluminum for all it wrinkled or draped or gave any indication that there was a body underneath.

  He sat back, Old Ironsides forgotten. “We know now why I became a cop. Why did you?”

  “To serve and protect.”

  “That’s what it says on the cruisers, and it’s horseshit. This isn’t the academy finals. What made you decide to become a cop?”

  “It isn’t wrestling.”

  “Explain.”

  “There’s a story involved.”

  “I don’t have anything to do until this cement dries but listen.”

  “I was raised by my Uncle Anthony. He was born in Biloxi. Down in Mississippi a black man picked cotton or nothing. When his father had enough of that he came up here to make Model Ts and brought Anthony with him. Anthony didn’t want to work for Ford, so he boxed. Only when he got to the Golden Gloves he found out he wasn’t Joe Louis and went to work carrying a hod. When he got tired of that he became a professional wrestler.”

  Zagreb snapped his fingers. “Anthony Battle. I should have guessed. He took the U.S. championship away from Percival E. Pringle, two falls out of three.”

  “World, U.S., it was all the same thing. The same outfit held all the wrestlers’ contracts and decided who won what. I didn’t see any future in that. Hod-carrying doesn’t pay much better than it did in 1953, so here I am.”

  “By default.”

  “Not really. I like the job.”

  “You like getting coffee for the deputy mayor?”

  “Tea, usually. And it beats sticking my face in Dick daBruiser’s crotch at Cobo Hall every Friday night.”

  “I’ve got something better than either of those,” Zagreb said. “You know Paul Kubicek?”

  “Not personally. I see his picture.” It was pretty hard not to, unless the TV was broken, the subscription to the paper ran out, and something blew into his eyes every time he passed a newsstand. The scowl and crooked necktie Sergeant Kubicek had worn for his ID photo had appeared in every edition and on all the noon and six P.M. broadcasts since New Year’s Day. The eleven P.M. too, probably, although Battle was usually in bed by then, resting for the six A.M. turnout.

  “Yeah, the pricks in the press are really busting Division’s balls over this one, as if one dead black ex-con more or less made any difference in this town.”

  “I don’t guess it matters what color you are once you’re dead,” Battle pointed out. But the lieutenant went on as if he hadn’t spoken. In his twenty-two years the officer had encountered both extremes, raw uncut racism and white liberal bend-over-backward sympathy, and knew how to respond to both, but the unthinking impersonal bigotry that ran throughout the Detroit Police Department was something he didn’t think he’d ever get used to.

  Zagreb said, “It’s a good shoot any way you stand it up. This Harrison character that went down on the terrace had a record and a gun in his hand. So did the others, Nampula and Potts, but their bullet holes were in front so nobody’s raising any stink over them. This ain’t the fucking Old West. When one of the perps in a robbery makes a break for it with apiece, it’s a cop’s job to put him down.”

  “No one at the party heard him identify himself as a police officer.”

  “He claims he did. There was a lot of screaming and yelling, so who knows what they heard or didn’t? Only this citizen’s group, this Afr
o-American Congress—”

  “American Ethiopian Congress.”

  “As if any of them could find Ethiopia on a map at gun-point. Anyway, this Junius Harrison turns out to be an office boy or something at the firm where one of the lawyers at Caryn Crownover’s party works and he’s got a message for the lawyer in his pocket, so the Congress says he was there on legitimate business. To me, that makes him the inside man, but they’ve filed a complaint and it looks like the N.A.A.C.P. is backing it up, so we’ve got to run it out. How’d you like a spot on the shooting team?”

  Battle wasn’t expecting anything like the question. Before he could frame a response, Zagreb held up a hand.

  “It’s not a promotion. You’re still assigned to the City Hall Bureau and there’s no raise and no guarantee when it’s over you won’t be right back asking the fire marshal if he likes one lump or two in his orange pekoe. It’s a chance to work with Special Investigations and get out of the blue bag for a while.”

  “Why me? Sir.”

  “You can lay off that ‘sir’ horseshit. Whatever you may think of me and my toy boats, I’m a lieutenant, not an admiral.” He leaned back in his chair, peering at Battle through the rigging. What he saw, or what Battle imagined he saw, was a tall young black man in a crisp uniform with the crudely blocked-out facial features of an ebony carving. His afro was modest even by department standards, an almost grudging acknowledgement of brotherhood with the types who decked themselves out in dashikis and named themselves after rivers in Nairobi. He had inherited his uncle’s musculature but not his bulk; were Zagreb to enter the locker room while the officer was changing into his civvies, he might have been surprised by the hard-planed shapes that combined to form his slender build.