Silent Thunder

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I like it better the way you told it.”

  “Most people do. There has to be a murder in it.”

  “What does that say about people?”

  I moved a shoulder. “We’re still evolving.”

  She went out, leaving behind a faint trace of sandalwood.

  After a while I called for a taxi and went out too. I gave the driver an address in Macomb County.

  18

  THE RAIN HAD cooled things a little after all. A damp breeze stirred the leaves on the trees along Cheyne and the sun shone in a scrubbed blue sky. We detoured around a couple of fallen limbs and cruised slowly through a puddle that stretched from curb to curb and covered the cab’s hubcaps. Somewhere a chainsaw spluttered and soared into a high-pitched snarl.

  The house in the country didn’t look any more lively than it had the day before. It hadn’t rained there; the grass was the same burned-out amber and dust lay thick on the burdocks near the road. I told the driver to wait and went up and rapped on the screen door. No one answered.

  The door was hooked from inside. Placing my body between it and the cab, I took out my pocket knife and ran the blade up the jamb. The hook sprang out of the eye with a little tinkle.

  The living room hadn’t changed, except now a glunky lamp with a fringed shade occupied the table where the forest fire had stood. Ma or someone else had swept up the broken glass and thrown it away. There was a tiny half-bath under the stairs that had been a broom closet, and another door led into a fair-size kitchen with an old-fashioned white gas stove and a refrigerator, newer and avocado colored. No bodies tumbled out when I opened the door. The last person to leave had locked the back door behind him.

  Upstairs I found two bedrooms and a full bath. One of the bedrooms contained a single bed with a painted iron frame and a cracked nightstand with a drawer full of thumb-smeared magazines with girls in black panties on the covers. This would be where Hubert Darling had slept. The closet was empty. The other bedroom had to be Ma’s. The double bed had a flowered coverlet. A lamp with a lace shade stood on a nightstand with claw feet and a brass ram’s head you had to grab by its nostrils to slide out the drawer, which contained a carton of Marlboros and a Bible as old as Gideon. The wallpaper was blue with pink cherubs. The closet was jammed with frilly polyester nightgowns in every color and shade, kimonos like the one she had greeted me in yesterday and worse, and six pairs of bib overalls. A cheap dresser with family pictures on its top—Emma and Calvin and four towheaded boys posed in front of vintage automobiles—held king-size lacy underdrawers and men’s flannel shirts in Ma’s size and a gray metal strongbox under a stack of pillowcases.

  The box was locked. I set it atop the dresser, found two hairpins, and sprang the lid after fifteen seconds. Inside were the title to a brand-new Ford Blazer, four brown and curling birth certificates, letters from various penal institutions bound together with a green ribbon, and two deeds. One belonged to that house and lot. The other contained a description of a sixteen-acre parcel in the northeast corner of the county. The street address was included. I took it down in my notebook, returned the deed to the bottom of the box, locked it, and put it back where I’d found it.

  That was the inventory. The letters from Ma’s sons, laboriously written in soft pencil on lined sheets, read like postcards from summer camp and had been mailed as much as a year apart. Nothing about the house said that she had ever traded in anything more lethal than peach cobblers. Livingood had said she was a good deal smarter than her boys.

  When I climbed back into the cab, the driver set aside his crossword puzzle and rested a thick freckled arm with a kewpie doll tattooed on it across the back of his seat. “Where to now, bub, the big square dance?”

  I said, “Let’s avoid the rural humor and find a town and a place that rents cars.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t rent you a car without a credit card.”

  The rental agent was a short blonde with a flat face and a gray silk scarf around her throat. The tag pinned to her jacket read mitzie. Behind her was an alphabetical rack filled with tan envelopes with lucky renters’ names block-printed on them in black marker. Posters of happy couples gliding along in sleek convertibles plastered the walls.

  “How big a deposit do you need?” I asked. “I brought enough for the down payment on a new Lincoln.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Okay. I sent away my cab. How about a lift to the nearest stand?”

  “Sorry, sir. I can’t leave the counter.”

  I was the only customer in the place. I shared it with her and a mechanic in blue coveralls taking a cigarette break in the corner. I monkeyed around with that for a moment, decided Mitzie wouldn’t appreciate what I had to say, and headed for the door. The mechanic stepped out of the corner. “I think I can help you, Mac.”

  I put my hands in my pockets and faced him. He was a square-shouldered piece of work with no waist and a smudge on his long jaw. His brown hair was cut short with a natural wave in front.

  “You heard me say I had cash on me, right?” I asked.

  He smiled in a way that reminded me of Livingood. “If I was to turn mugger, I wouldn’t start with you.”

  “Okay.”

  The blonde was glaring at us. He blew her a kiss and opened the door for me.

  We walked around the building and through a side door with a carburetor propping it open into the garage, where a concrete floor tilted down to a drain at the back. A new Olds Calais was up on the hoist and three other cars were parked along the sides, two with feet sticking out from under them. The third was a gray Mercury, a square boat with hideaway headlamps and bumpers like construction girders. We stopped in front of it.

  “How old?” I asked.

  “Let’s just say it remembers Vietnam.” He leaned in through the open window on the driver’s side and popped the hood latch. I opened it and whistled.

  “V-8 Continental Mark IV,” he said, using a rag to rub a spot of grease from a gleaming half-acre of engine. “The pollution equipment’s a dummy. Speedometer goes up to a hundred and twenty, but she’ll do twenty over that easy. I bought it off a dope dealer who needed bail money. Get a load of this.” He reached through the window again and heeled the horn ring. Twin blasts flattened the air, one slightly out of pitch with the other. They sounded like air raid sirens.

  “Jesus Christ, Harley.” In the ear-splitting silence that followed, one of the other mechanics sat on his dolly rubbing a fresh lump on his bald head.

  “Sorry, Ed.”

  I asked Harley about the transmission.

  “Put it in brand new when I overhauled the engine. The boss says I got to get rid of the machine. I don’t have a garage.”

  “How much?”

  “Six-fifty.”

  “Why so cheap?”

  He smiled again, drew a screwdriver from one of his coverall pockets, and swiveled the plate bearing the serial number aside from the engine block. There was a different one underneath, stamped into the block itself. “The Dade County Sheriff’s Department is looking for it down in Florida, or they were,” he said. “The insurance company paid off and tacked another penny on its rates. Everybody’s happy.” He screwed the plate back in place.

  “What about a title?”

  “I found the same make and model totaled out in a junkyard up north and bought the title. Then I stamped the plate. The numbers match.”

  “I’ll take it.” I started counting bills out of my wallet.

  “Don’t you want to test-drive it first?”

  “No time. I believed what you said about not starting with me.”

  He stuffed the money into his screwdriver pocket, took the title out of the glove compartment, signed the back, and gave it to me. “What business you in?” he asked.

  “I trace stolen cars for the FBI.”

  He turned white.

  “Just kidding,” I said.

  “You son of a bitch.”

  The big Mercury swoop
ed along the straightaway and sat on the curves like a boulder. When I floored the accelerator, the steering wheel jerked my arms straight and the stench of scorched rubber stung my nostrils. In no time at all the needle buried itself on the right side of the speedometer. The AM radio had a tinny speaker and the cigarette lighter didn’t work, but the big frame rode the bumps and potholes like heavy silk. The engine rumbled, making the soles of my feet tingle. I ran the dial up and down, but there is never a Beach Boys tune playing when you want one.

  Dusk was smoldering when I left the pavement and tore down a gravel road hauling a column of dust behind me. A big doe bounded across in front of me once and I threw two wheels up on the bank to avoid hitting it, nearly losing control when they bit into soft earth. After that I throttled down. Tree limbs met overhead in a tunnel effect, turning the road into a cathedral. Mine was the only car on it.

  The address on Ma Chaney’s deed belonged to a fieldstone farmhouse standing alone in a field that hadn’t been plowed since Hoover. Wild alfalfa had grown over the foundation of a barn forty paces away that had long since burned or been torn down to decorate someone’s recreation room. A navy-blue Chrysler sedan I thought I recognized stood in the rutted driveway behind a dusty green Blazer.

  As I approached along the road, a blossom of gray smoke opened in one of the house’s empty windows and the Chrysler’s sideview mirror exploded. A man hunkered at this end of the car in a camouflage jacket and pants leveled his weapon across the rear fender and returned fire. The report chattered.

  The chattering was repeated on the other side of the house, but it wasn’t an echo. I spotted more smoke and another camouflage jacket just above the barn foundation. Another report from the house, and the window on the driver’s side of the Chrysler disintegrated. At that range a shotgun is as effective as an automatic rifle, but whoever was in the house was hampered by the Blazer parked in between.

  The man by the Chrysler rose into a low crouch. When the firing started up again from the ruins of the barn, he charged the house, cradling his rifle. I punched the accelerator and leaned on the horn.

  Howling like a fleet of squad cars, the Mercury bounded into the field, headed straight toward the charging man. He stopped, whirled, loosed a stream of bullets—one of which squealed off the Mercury’s windshield frame—and leaped out of the way.

  I didn’t try for a second pass. I wheeled wide around the house, bumping over old corn stubble, and fumbled the Smith & Wesson out of its belt holster. The ornament on the hood was shaped like a gunsight and I made use of it, aiming the car straight for the empty foundation and the man crouched behind it. At the last second I yanked the wheel hard right, stretched my right arm across my chest with the gun in my right hand, and fired through the open window. I aimed by instinct rather than sight and squeezed the trigger until the hammer snapped on an empty chamber.

  I threw the revolver down on the seat and used both hands to wrench the wheel as far as it would go to the right. The Mercury plowed the field in a tight circle and lurched into the ruts it had made on its first pass, but I needn’t have bothered. The man was standing in plain sight on this side of the foundation, bent over with both hands clutching his abdomen. His rifle, snout-shaped with a black plastic banana clip and a collapsible skeleton stock, lay on the ground at his feet. I drove over it deliberately.

  Now for his partner.

  No luck there. He had recovered himself and scrambled back into the Chrysler, and as I swung around the house he backed into the road and took off with a roar and a hail of flying gravel. I gave chase for a country block, but I had lost momentum on the turn, and when a lumber truck trundled into the road in front of me out of a narrow logging trail, taking up both sides, I turned around and went back to the house.

  Just as I stepped out behind the Blazer, a wind buffeted my left side and something stung my hip like a cluster of yellowjackets. Then I heard the roar of the shotgun.

  “Stand right there or the next one takes your head off, you Yankee trash,” called Ma Chaney from the house.

  19

  BOY, YOU GOT to learn to sing out,” Ma said. “I could of blowed you out of your shoes.”

  It had taken some talking to convince her I was friendly, and then some more before she would come out and help me drag the man I’d shot into the house. She was wearing a man’s corduroy jacket on top of her overalls with the sleeves turned back and a man’s felt hat jammed down over her orange hair. The shotgun, an aging Ithaca pump with a scarred and dented stock, never left her hand.

  The farmhouse wasn’t as neglected as it appeared from the road. The roof was new, and although the north wall had collapsed into rubble, someone had erected a substitute out of cement blocks. The ground floor was stacked to the ceiling with kegs of gunpowder and boxes of ammunition and C-4 explosives. It wasn’t as impressive as the Colonel’s store in Iroquois Heights, but it was enough to turn the house into a crater if a spark were struck.

  I said, “You picked a swell place to hole up during a firefight.”

  “Ma didn’t pick it; they did. I was supposed to meet the Colonel here, but when them two boys piled out packing auto-rifles …”

  There was no furniture in the house. We laid the wounded man, panting and semi-conscious, on the floor in the front room and I tore open his blood-slicked shirt.

  Ma tsk-tsked. “Gutshot?”

  “Not quite. There’s a rib or two shattered, though.” I pulled off his olive-drab beret and stuffed it into the hole to staunch the flow of blood. He was not more than twenty-five, with clean features and dark hair with an Oliver North cut. I didn’t know him from the President’s podiatrist. He had no identification in his pockets.

  “Right good shooting,” Ma said, “from a moving car.”

  “I was just throwing lead.”

  “How’d you know who to throw it at?”

  “I figured that Blazer out front belonged to the title I found in your strongbox. That put you inside. And I was pretty sure I saw that Chrysler last night when my car got shot up. Besides, I don’t like automatic weapons.” I sat back on my heels. “He needs a hospital.”

  “Use the phone.”

  It was standing on top of an open crate of shotgun shells.

  “Why didn’t you call for help?” I asked.

  “Anytime Ma can’t handle two pups with squirt guns, she’ll learn needlepoint.”

  I lifted the receiver and dialed 911, grunting with the effort. She pointed at the bloodstain on my slacks. “You’re hit.”

  “I picked up a few shotgun pellets. I wonder whose.” When the operator came on I told her a man had been shot and where to send the ambulance.

  “Get them pants down,” Ma said when I hung up. “You got a pocket knife?”

  “Those are two sentences I hoped never to hear in that order.”

  “You want to get infected?”

  “Every time we meet you try to get me to strip.” I fished out the knife, undid the slacks, and dragged them down my hips. She left the room. I heard water running. She returned with a damp towel, a wad of clean rags, and a bottle of Aqua-Velva. She put the rags and the bottle on the crate I was sitting on and used the towel to sponge away the dried blood from my leg. The three pellets were blue-black under the skin.

  Ma opened the knife and poured Aqua-Velva over the blade. “My boy Mason’s after-shave,” she said. “It’s the only thing here with alcohol in it. Hang on to something.”

  I gripped the crate with both hands while she probed and pried. I sweated a little.

  “Okay.” She cleaned off the fresh blood, splashed stinging liquid into the holes, and wound one of the clean rags around the leg. “You better see a doc later. Ma ain’t no nurse.”

  I pulled up the slacks and fastened them. “Sorry about the inventory. The cops will seize it.”

  “Can’t without no warrant, and it’ll be long gone by the time they get one. Ma knows some folks.”

  I knelt by the wounded man and pried up both
his eyelids. There was no talking to him that day. I sat back, looking at Ma. She had turned on a light finally. Outside the frogs were singing. “What happened?”

  “What I said. I had an appointment with the Colonel. I got this.”

  “What was your business with Seabrook?”

  She got a sly look on her face. She had sweated in streaks through the thick powder and it wasn’t pretty. “So you know him now. Who’s asking, you or the po-lice?”

  “I shot a man today and I want to know why. Maybe you owe me.”

  “Well, like I said, Ma didn’t need you.” She shrugged.

  “He wanted to buy some guns. Said he’d meet me here.”

  “Any idea why he sent in the troops?”

  “If I did I wouldn’t of agreed to meet him here.”

  “Where’s Hubert Darling?”

  “The little sneak cleared out yesterday while I was visiting my boy Wilbur in the hospital in Ypsi.”

  “I think he’s with the Colonel now.”

  “What makes you think it?”

  “Just a nightmare I had. What about Sturdy Stoudenmire?”

  “What about him?”

  “Yesterday you said he was dead. Today the Detroit police have him in custody.”

  She shrugged again. “I heard a bad rumor.”

  “Who told it to you?”

  She got the sly look again.

  I said, “I know you sold Seabrook the guns his men have been using in the home invasions. What do you think they were shooting at you with? Now that he doesn’t need you he’s mopping up, knocking over anybody who might tell the law what he’s up to. You don’t owe him anything.”

  “That never was Ma’s long suit anyway.” She heaved a porcine sigh. “It was one of the Colonel’s boys. He come to make a pickup, never mind what. I knew he was from the Heights so I asked him what he heard from Sturdy. ‘Sturdy’s dead,’ he said. Ma said, ‘When?’ ‘Tomorrow night at the latest,’ he said. That was Tuesday.”