Silent Thunder

by Loren D. Estleman

  “What’s this big mouth’s name?”

  “They never use names except the Colonel’s. Wasn’t this fella.” She nudged the man on the floor with the toe of a brogan several sizes too big for her. Ma liked to kick them when they were down. This one groaned and stirred but didn’t open his eyes.

  “Maybe Sturdy outsmarted them,” I said.

  “Sturdy couldn’t outsmart a sock.”

  “Then he’s got something the Colonel wants.”

  “Like what?”

  Far away a siren separated itself from the chee-ing of the frogs. “Let’s ask him,” I said. “What’s the Colonel’s number?”

  “What are you going to say to him?”

  “I’ll make it up as I go.”

  She gave me the number. After two rings a smooth masculine voice came on the line.

  “Yes.”

  “Colonel Seabrook,” I said.

  “Who’s speaking?”

  “Is this the Colonel?”

  “This is Winston Seabrook.” He sounded more youthful than expected.

  “This is Amos Walker,” I said. “I’m out at the farmhouse. I just shot one of your men. I didn’t like him.”

  There was a very short pause.

  “I think you’re mistaken. I’ve retired from the military. I don’t have men.”

  “Yeah, well, this man you don’t have is bleeding all over my shoes. I’ll need a new pair.”

  “Explain.”

  “Ask Sturdy.”

  “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  “Nobody does. That’s what being in jail will do for you. I’m his new partner. You’ll be doing business with me while he’s indisposed.”

  “And what sort of business will we be doing?” He sounded amused.

  The siren was growing louder. Others had joined it. I stuck a finger in my exposed ear and raised my voice.

  “Not over the telephone. Tomorrow’s Sunday. I’ll be in my office Monday morning at eight. Don’t bother sending your men to my house in the meantime; I won’t be there. Come alone, and bring double what Sturdy was asking.”

  I cradled the receiver. Ma seized it. “I better call for the truck now,” she said. “Them laws’ll truss me up with this shooting till they get the warrant.”

  “Who are you calling, Mason?”

  She hesitated with her finger in the dial. “I don’t know where Mason is. Neither does the FBI.”

  “Ma, they’re going to bury you cagey.”

  “Listen to the skunk telling the muskrat he stinks. What you fixing to do when the Colonel finds out you ain’t got what he wants?”

  “Maybe by Monday I’ll have it. A lot happens on weekends.”

  She snorted and dialed. “Hello, Mason?”

  I put a hand on my throbbing leg and waited for the cavalry.

  20

  IT WENT TO A sheriff’s investigator named Calvin. After the man I’d shot had been whisked away and a paramedic from a second ambulance crew had patched up my leg, a company of sheriff’s deputies took Ma and me in separate squad cars to the county building in Macomb, with two more deputies following in the Mercury and Blazer. I was parked in a ballroom-size conference room to deal with my agoraphobia alone until Calvin came in.

  He was a stumpy Scot with a big head, small delicate hands, and tired brown eyes with a slight cast in the right. I had known other cops with that feature, and it was always an advantage to them; you never knew precisely where they were looking. His suit was a brown sack and the tip of his red tie peeped out of the bottom of his vest like a cat’s tongue when it’s cornered something. He put his hands in his pockets and stood at the opposite end of the long conference table.

  “Anybody read you your rights?”

  “A kid in a uniform mumbled something,” I said. “You ought to check them for baby teeth before you swear them in.”

  He gazed out the window—I think. It was a moonless night and all he had to look at was the lighted parking lot a floor below. “That young man you shot might not live.”

  “That young man was trying to shoot an old lady. You recovered his assault rifle.”

  “It was broken. It could have been a discarded item from the farmhouse.”

  “I broke it when I ran over it. By now you’ve matched the tread marks to my tires.”

  “You overestimate the efficiency of our lab.” He took his hands out of his pockets. “That old lady has been selling guns and explosives illegally since before my father came over from Edinburgh. I can’t tell you how long we’ve wanted her here at County. I suppose we should be grateful to you for that.”

  “You don’t sound grateful.”

  He produced a plastic bag—how cops got along before plastic is one for the Durants—and dumped its contents out on the table. I recognized my wallet and notebook and a familiar crumpled pack of Winstons among the loose change. My gun had been sent to Ballistics. He drew a silver pencil from an inside pocket, poked among the items with the eraser end, and flipped open the wallet, exposing my investigator’s id and honorary star from the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department.

  “What’s a private cop from Detroit doing in my county?”

  “Motoring. I didn’t see your name on the sign when I crossed over.”

  He tipped back the notebook cover with the pencil and looked at the first page. “Shorthand.” He let the cover fall shut. “Who are you working for, or is this one all for yourself?”

  “It’s not shorthand. Just poor penmanship.”

  “There’s more than a thousand dollars in your wallet. You always carry that much cash?”

  “You should’ve seen it a few hours ago.”

  “You never really answer a question, do you?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Why’d you shoot him?”

  I tilted my head. “Until a lawyer walks through that door, I didn’t shoot anyone.”

  “Mm-hm.” He tapped the pencil twice, then flipped it onto the table. “This would be a good place to live if you Detroiters would crap in your own can. We’re booking you for assault with a deadly weapon and if the man dies we’ll make it murder one. Then when the search warrant comes through we’ll tack on possession for sale of explosive materials and conspiracy to violate the Sullivan Act. That ought to be good for life.”

  “That’s seven years in people years.”

  His errant eye fixed on my left ear. “It doesn’t have to be seven months.”

  “Make your pitch.”

  “Give us Emma Chaney.”

  “Make another.”

  “I’ll fix it with the D.A. Probation, maybe, if your record’s clean. Six months if it isn’t, unless of course you’re wanted; then it gets complicated. But we can knock off something.”

  “What if the D.A. won’t play?”

  “You think I’d offer you a deal I hadn’t discussed with him?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  He looked at the ceiling—I think. “Suit yourself. When we shake loose that warrant we’ll have enough evidence to put you both in denim for years.”

  “So why are we talking?”

  Someone knocked on the door. He went to it, opened it far enough to stick his head out, then opened it the rest of the way and stepped outside, closing it behind him. I heard voices raised in the hallway, then silence, a lot of it. He came back in looking as if someone had died owing him money.

  “You had your phone call?” His voice was steady. I hadn’t noticed that before. It meant he was working at it now.

  I said I had.

  He picked up the silver pencil and used it to push my effects farther down the table. “Put this stuff back in your pockets. They’re here.”

  “Both of them?”

  “A fat one and a skinny one, and they don’t answer to Stan and Ollie.” He watched me stand up and stretch and come over to claim the items. Satisfaction glittered in his normal eye at my stiff-legged walk. “I wish to hell you Feds would call someone before you bulled your way into
local jurisdiction.”

  “I’m not a Fed.”

  He said nothing more and we went out into the hall, at the end of which Agent Pardo was standing looking out a window covered with steel mesh—it overlooked the same parking lot—and Horace Livingood leaned against a wall smoking one of his little cigars. He stayed where he was as I approached. “You get in trouble when you’re alone.”

  “Sorry I got you up again,” I said.

  “Sleeping’s for civilians anyway.”

  We stood around not talking until Calvin stumped off. Livingood watched him go.

  “Sociable sort, ain’t he?”

  “Leave him alone. You’d be the same way if the rules changed on you suddenly.”

  He nudged his hat farther back. I figured he started the day with it square over his eyebrows and when it finally fell off he went home. “Feeling sorry for the cops now, are we?”

  “I’m too tired to be a rebel. Where can we talk?”

  “We can see people coming a long way from right here. Victor there can sing out if anybody tries shinnying up the drainpipe.”

  Pardo grunted.

  I said, “The man I shot belongs to Colonel Seabrook. You’ll want to find out what hospital they took him to and have men there in case he wakes up. He and one other were shooting at Ma Chaney when I got to the farmhouse. She doesn’t know why, only that she was supposed to meet the Colonel there. The other one got away in last year’s Chrysler.” I gave him the license plate number. Pardo wrote it down in a notebook with an alligator cover.

  “How’d you know about the farmhouse?” Livingood asked. “We didn’t.”

  “I found the deed when I broke into Ma’s place.”

  “Aren’t we enterprising.”

  I let that one blow. “The sheriff’s men recovered the wounded man’s assault rifle at the scene. One of the victims of the home invasions might identify it, if not its owner. The invaders wore ski masks.”

  “We’ll let the locals put that one together. We want the Colonel for international trafficking in illegal weapons, not penny-ante burglary.”

  “That penny-ante burglary has netted him over a hundred thousand so far. Investment capital for the big thing we were talking about this morning.”

  Pardo was looking at me. “Why are you so cooperative all of a sudden?”

  “I owe you something for the spring.” I kept my eyes on his partner. “I’ve got a client with a short court date and I can’t spare the three days it would take to do this by the numbers. That’s why I called you. I thought if the material witness scam worked in Iroquois Heights it would work here.”

  “It can be overdone,” Livingood said. “What else?”

  I told him about Hubert Darling and the possibility that he’d gone over to the other side. I didn’t mention Sturdy Stoudenmire or the call I’d made to the Colonel. Pardo took down Darling’s name. Livingood finished his Cigarillo and threw the butt in a corner, where it smoldered on the linoleum.

  “Let’s you and me head back to the office, Vic. We’ll set up the checkerboard and wait for Walker to call us when it’s over. I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before.” He sounded bitter.

  I said, “I’m not trying to do your job. It happens my job and yours keep crossing trails. I work my own hours, so sometimes I get there first. No one will be gladder than me when we get rid of each other.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” he said. “Let me tell you something about nets. They’re not real discriminating. There’s always some little fish that get drawn up in them along with the tuna. If they’re spotted early enough they get thrown back, but usually they end up in a big smelly pile on the dock where they rot. It’s too bad, but it’s one of the risks you take when you swim with the big fish. Let’s go, Vic.”

  After they left me I found my way to the property clerk, a blunt-faced lifer in his sixties, who shoved a receipt at me for my valuables and informed me my gun was being held for evidence pending dispensation of the case. I signed the receipt, asked him about my car, and was directed to the ground floor, where I waited in line at another counter and got a voucher from a fat woman in a sergeant’s uniform to show to the attendant at the impound. In the lobby I used a pay telephone to call Detroit Police Headquarters. The party who answered said Inspector Alderdyce had gone home. I tried his home number.

  “Funny you should call,” he said. “I saw your picture on a milk carton in my refrigerator.”

  “Sorry about today, John. Something came up.”

  “You better be calling from headquarters. Otherwise I’m putting your description on the radio.”

  “I can’t make it this weekend.”

  “Try.”

  “I’m staying low. But if you send a couple of men to my office Monday morning at eight-thirty, I’ll hand them the man behind the home invasions.”

  “Be specific.”

  “I just need one favor.”

  “I’m fresh out of favors. I ran out this afternoon.”

  “I need this one before I can hand over the man I’m talking about.”

  He seemed to sigh. You can’t really tell over the telephone. “Feed it to me.”

  “Hang on to Sturdy at least until Monday. If he walks this weekend the whole thing goes to hell.”

  “Too late. We kicked him three hours ago.”

  “What for?”

  “Something called the Bill of Rights. The public defender kept waving it at us, and since we didn’t have anything on Sturdy we thought it might be nice to humor him. Now, what—”

  “Sorry again, John.” I broke the connection.

  I needed a gun. I’d left my Luger in the Chevy and it would take a degree in Civics to pry the Smith & Wesson loose from the Macomb County Sheriff’s Department before Christmas; I hoped their relationship with the police in Iroquois Heights was as bad as all the others’ in the area, and that no effort would be made to match the gun to the bullet in Shooter’s brain. I’d done the cops’ job for them too well, getting one of the only two quickie gun merchants I knew killed and the other arrested. I chewed over it on the way to the garage and while I was standing in another line waiting to take my car out of hock. Then I remembered something.

  I almost ran over a deputy while spiraling the Mercury down to ground level between the rows of sheriff’s cruisers and confiscated automobiles. In the rearview mirror I saw him unholster his sidearm just before I turned the corner into the street.

  It was a slick night, high and moonless, with the stars bright pinholes in the circle of sky and the county roads—those newly blacktopped, anyway—deep black ribbons under the headlamps. From time to time a pair of turquoise-colored eyes would gleam in the light, then vanish into the weeds at the side of the road. It was just past midnight when I crossed the Wayne County line and made tracks for Detroit. There the streets were still wet from the afternoon rain and reflections crawled on their surfaces. The air smelled scrubbed and sweet.

  I drove straight through to Jefferson, encountering only one red light on the way. Some nights are like that. There were no police barricades at the warehouse district, just a smattering of shattered glass that had been swept up against the base of a building to glitter in my headlamps. The Chevy had been towed away. From there I traced the route Shooter and I had taken in his pickup toward the spot where I’d roughed him around. I hoped I could find it. More than that, I hoped no one else had.

  I found the intersection, left the Mercury at the curb, and descended the slight bank on foot holding my pencil flashlight. The grass was shoetop-high and wet, soaking through my socks and plastering my pantscuffs to my ankles.

  After ten minutes of searching I was about to give up when the beam of the flash found something that gave back light. I turned over a soggy square of corrugated cardboard that had been a discarded carton, jumped back when something scurried out from underneath, then stooped and picked up Shooter’s nine-millimeter Beretta from the spot where it had landed when I had tossed it out of the pic
kup. I wiped off the grass and dirt with my handkerchief and kicked out the clip. It was loaded for bear.

  21

  WALDO STOUDENMIRE LIVED, or had lived when last I’d had reason to look him up, in a hotel for permanents and transients in a neighborhood in Iroquois Heights that had started out as carriage trade, deteriorated, come back, and had begun to decline again. There were some elegant old homes in the area that had been kept up through the determination of older residents who remembered better days, next to houses with plywood in the windows, cars up on blocks on the front lawn, and nightly screaming matches inside conducted in murky Middle Eastern tongues. The place could go either way from there.

  The lobby would have been larger and more ornate in other times. Now it was a narrow passage flanked by mustard-colored wallboard with a desk at the end and a sallow middle-aged party in a green plaid jacket snoozing behind it. That kind only wakes up when it hears a suitcase dropping out a window. I helped myself to a pack of matches with the hotel’s name printed on it from a dusty bowl on the desk and took the stairs. The yellow leaf carpet runner was worn a quarter-inch down and a foot across.

  Sturdy’s room was on the third floor next to the elevator, which didn’t have a car anymore and had been used as a garbage chute for years. When nobody answered my knock I slipped the latch with the edge of my investigator’s license.

  The room was small and neat, like its resident. A stack of racing magazines occupied the lamp table next to the single bed, which had been made and turned down with a maid’s meticulous routine, even though the hotel didn’t have one. The rug was a patch of bright color on the noisy floorboards, cheap but clean. Three inexpensive suits hung on wooden hangers in the closet, over a pair of black shoes and a pair of brown shoes with hard rubber heel-and toe-plates on their soles and wooden trees inside. Each of the suits’ inside breast pockets contained a small comb. The dresser yielded nothing of interest. Sturdy lived as if he expected a cop with a search warrant three times a week. Where he kept the goods he fenced depended on which township wasn’t holding an election that year.