The Lioness Is the Hunter

by Loren D. Estleman

  Either Detroit’s plague of scrap rats hadn’t made it up that far or the current owners had begun restoring the hardware. A series of fixtures shaped like women’s breasts and paneled with mica shed orange light from the ceiling. A tarnished brass rectangle from the building’s hotel incarnation directed me with arrows to Suites 600–620. I stood there with the .38, still in both hands, at my waist, for a minute. It was getting old, this business of waiting for my brain to catch up with my respiration.

  Six-oh-four was near the end facing cross-town. It wasn’t a corner suite. There was some comfort in that, until I reminded myself that Sing almost never repeated herself.

  I knocked and struck the same pose, hugging the wall with my arm stretched along it, muzzle pointing at the middle of the door.

  “Mr. Walker?”

  That same male voice, a mix of Industrial North and Deep South.

  “Uh-uh,” I said. “Fooled me once. This time you open the door.”

  There was a silence while a drop of sweat crawled down my back, disguised as a fire ant. Then a latch grated in its socket. I pushed away from the wall, placed my right foot close to the threshold, and leaned my shoulder against the door. When it cracked open I shoved it with everything I had. The man with his hand on the knob stumbled backward, and was fighting for balance when I spun on the ball of my foot and swept my gun arm backhand, all the way from my left shoulder. I was Miguel Cabrera, swinging for the suburbs. The loaded cylinder—the heaviest part—caught him square on the right temple. He slung a thread of saliva across my shirt and went down hard enough to shake the building.

  Standing in a crouch I eyeballed the room. We lacked two of a quorum, if that was where Sing was holding Gwendolyn, and all the doors were closed except the one I’d come in through. I slammed it with my heel, twisted the latch, and knelt to check the heap on the floor for a pulse. His eyes were all white as I pried back the lids. He was alive, and out like the cat.

  He was a biggish black man, even-featured, with a shaved head that shone like a polished walnut bowl, a haze of gray lurking in the shadow under the skin. His right temple was bleeding blood, not brains, for all my effort. He wore a nylon jogging suit, blue with a broad white band that went diagonally from his left shoulder to his right hip and a narrower stripe down the outside seams of the pants. Air Jordans on his feet: white, new, and expensive. I patted him down, but I didn’t expect to find a firearm. His weapon of choice was more sinister.

  The right hand was partially closed. I pried open the fingers and looked at a slim glass hypodermic syringe. The naked needle glittered.

  I’d sooner handle a live cobra in that condition. I looked around, found something shiny in the deep nap of the carpet, and carefully slid the glass cap over the point. I took the instrument out of his hand then, got up, carried it to a glass-topped table, and stashed it behind a bowl of cut flowers. If he came to while I was frisking the place, I’d have time to put him down again before he found it.

  Neither the table nor the flowers nor the carpet made sense in a suite in a deserted skyscraper. The floor was cloaked wall-to-wall in snow-white lamb’s-wool, giving off a chemical smell of fresh adhesive. Slim black-enamel floor lamps with umbrella-shaped metal shades made soft pools on its surface and the furniture was upholstered in pliant blue leather that lay back and begged you to make a running dive into it. What at first glance looked like pictures on the blue-and-silver-striped wallpaper shimmered and changed images: I blinked at Monet’s water lilies, van Gogh’s blazing haystacks, a Caravaggio, a Rembrandt, a couple of minor Picassos, and something that might have been a Klee; beyond ten feet, my eye for fine art needs a foghorn. It was some kind of trick holographic display on monitors in picture frames, wired to all the great art museums on six continents.

  I didn’t spend time admiring brushstrokes. I opened doors and stuck the gun into empty rooms: a mother-of-pearl bathroom with a sunken tub and rose-colored mirrors reflecting an aging and badly scared man, a master bedroom with a headboard six feet high with holes chewed in it by worms dead three hundred years, a closet I could park my car in, stocked with shoes too skimpy to be anything but Italian and clothing for every occasion and climate; all women’s.

  Small and slight as she is, Charlotte Sing couldn’t have crawled into the toe of a Jimmy Choo. She’d given me the slip again; but why should I be any more special than the FBI, the CIA, Interpol, the French Sûreté, Scotland Yard, and the North Korean death squads?

  And where was Gwendolyn Haas?

  The last door was locked. It would connect to the room next door. Just to be sure I wouldn’t be interrupted, I dragged up a Louis-the-Somethingth chair, tilted it, and jammed the back under the knob. The syringe was where I’d left it, the man in the jogging suit too. I picked up the syringe.

  He stirred a little, winced, rolled his head to the side opposite the injured temple, and then his face went flat. His eyes flickered, but didn’t open.

  The revolver was superfluous now. I stuck it in its clip and thumbed the cap off the needle. I grinned at the shiny lethal point and squirted a thin arc of fast-acting poison to clear the barrel of air.

  It was the first thing the man on the floor saw when he opened his eyes.

  He got his elbows under him. I made a gesture with the needle and he stopped. He fixated on it. I could be any one of the heads on Mt. Rushmore for all he cared. The needle was the thing to watch.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  His lips moved, but nothing came out. He licked them, cleared his throat, and said, “Who?”

  “Mrs. Bigfoot, who else? Look at that.” My hands were shaking. It wasn’t an act. “I’m getting old. Time was when you could blow me up, kill my client, a homeless innocent, and a lawyer, and I wouldn’t twitch an eyelash. Tell me where she is—the hostage, too—or I’ll find out just how quick this stuff works.”

  He said nothing; but his eyes slid toward the connecting door. They weren’t standing out any farther than cue balls on brown felt.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I wiggled the needle again. He lowered himself onto his back. I got up, scooted the chair away from the door, and rapped on the panel. After a week a metallic snap came from the other side. Considering whose fingers were on the latch, I changed hands on the needle and drew the .38; however fast the poison acted, a bullet was certain. I stood back from the door with it aimed at waist level.

  The door opened. I let my breath out. I hadn’t known I was holding it.

  “How do you like my little pied-à-terre, Mr. Walker?”

  Every time we met I was surprised by how tiny she was, barely five feet and built to scale. She could have bought her shoes in the toddler’s department, if Nieman Marcus has one. The ones she wore were in keeping with those in the closet, black crocodile with red soles that showed when she lifted her feet from the carpet. She had on a black suit with slightly flared legs over a red heavy silk blouse with the collar spread over the lapels, showing a garnet the size of a wren’s egg on a gold chain as fine as a spider’s web; most appropriate.

  She was hard on sixty, but could pass for forty—or thirty-six, if it was Last Call and you’d bombed out all around the cocktail lounge. A woman who could buy her way off the gallows could afford a troop of cosmetic surgeons as large as the North Korean Army. She had doll’s features, and in her case “Asian” didn’t quite apply. She was Oriental in the nineteenth-century use of the term, meaning enigmatic and devious.

  The only unfashionable thing about her getup was the cast she wore on her right wrist, covering the hand almost to the fingertips, highly polished in red. The cast, aged dingy yellow, was the first I’d ever seen that had been in place that long without acquiring a single autograph. I couldn’t think of anyone in the world who’d dare to come that close.

  Apart from me. I’d smashed it with a wine bottle—the only weapon handy—badly enough to require years of micro-surgery.

  At the time, she’d told me she was down to her last hundred millio
n dollars. Those procedures, bribing a powerful Communist government, finding and preparing a ringer to take her place in the noose, explained her extensive investments in area real estate. Once she’d flipped it at a profit of several hundred percent, she’d be as rich as any oil emirate. With money like that she could buy a fleet of nuclear missiles large enough to turn the world into a half-moon, with her standing on the other side.

  Not that she’d try anything so unsubtle. Her style ran more toward flooding the illegal narcotics market with lethal-grade heroin, financed by smuggling stolen human organs.

  It all sounded loony enough for a Saturday morning superhero cartoon, and it seemed even less real that she was asking me if I approved of her flat downtown.

  “Not bad,” I said. “A little fancy for me. What becomes of all this when they knock the place down?”

  “They meaning me. I intend to continue pumping cash into your broken city. Finding someone to take Carl Fannon’s place is inconvenient, but he became a liability when he was clumsy enough to tip his hand to his partner.”

  “Speaking of Haas.” I flicked my gaze over her head into the adjacent room. It was bare of furniture, fixtures, and imprisoned heiresses.

  “Mr. Walker, this is Gwen—”

  I almost dropped the gun and the needle. She’d turned her voice, a rich contralto with no regional inflections, into a Midwestern mezzo, an exact duplicate of Gwendolyn Haas’s, right down to the breathless note on the phone.

  She laughed that silvery tinkle that always reminded me of something scurrying inside a wall. “My voice coaches taught Hollywood how to sound like Londoners and cockneys to speak Alabama cornpone. One in particular had quit show business for a job in the White House, answering telephone calls in the voice of a busy president. I outbid his client. With what I paid those people to help me pronounce my r’s, don’t you think I’d ask for something on the side?”

  “Where is she?”

  “I have no idea. Possibly celebrating her reunion with her father over dinner at the Blue Heron. I won’t insult you with a windy story of how I managed to obtain a check with her name and address on it; anyone can get them from the bank, with no questions asked. Forging her signature was more challenging. She’s right-handed.” She held up the one with the cast on it. Just for an instant I saw a red flash in her eyes, which were so black they appeared to have no pupils; it was like the strobe of the coroner’s wagon reflecting off the wall of a homicide scene. Along with being the sole person on the planet who’d gotten within striking distance of her, I’d scored another first: discovering she was capable of human emotion. Her hatred for me had grown like a cancer.

  But then her every action was driven by hate. She was an Amerasian, ostensibly rescued from South Korea by her father, a veteran of the Police Conflict, only to be sold by him into slavery in a massage parlor back home, where a man with cash could get just about anything, even a massage. A thing like that can make a person practically un-American. Some people like to drown puppies; Charlotte Sing got her giggles chopping holes in the population of the United States.

  “Even so,” I said, “you went to a lot of bother just to take a swipe at me.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself; it doesn’t become that air of self-deprecation you cultivate so carefully. I employ people to run such mundane errands as a trip to the bank. I could have put any one of a number of skilled artists to duplicate Miss Haas’s hand, but in this case it amused me to take a direct role. Which as it turned out was justified by that misstep in the casino. Had my current business taken me to New York or L.A. or Mexico City, I wouldn’t have given you a thought. As long as I was here, making an example of you for the benefit of my more important adversaries seemed a good use of time.”

  “But not of money. A bullet would have done as well, without adding the Arson Squad to your list of adversaries.”

  “It was killing two birds with one stone. The prospect of the fire spreading throughout the building and causing the maximum number of casualties was appealing.” She moved a fragile shoulder. “A juvenile mistake. I should have taken into account how much experience your fire department has had in extinguishing flames started by locals.”

  “You’re slipping, Charlotte. Okay if I call you that? We’ve known each other so long.”

  “I prefer Madam. Translated in my native language, it’s a sign of respect, but it has a western connotation I consider quite appropriate, given my past. I’d prefer it if you didn’t smoke.”

  I’d juggled the needle into the hand holding the revolver—keeping enough distance between us to reverse positions—and plucked the pack from my shirt pocket. I tapped a cigarette out partway, speared it between my lips, struck a match from the book, and set it afire. I wasn’t crass enough to blow smoke her way; I directed it toward the man who so far hadn’t moved from the floor. I’d kept him nailed in the corner of my eye.

  “I’d prefer it if you didn’t slaughter people in case lots; but we’ve got the stars, we don’t need the sun and the moon.” I grinned. “I got that from Now, Voyager. You should watch it, take a break from Dr. No. What’s the score now? Somewhere between Hurricane Katrina and Sadaam Hussein? Or am I being naïve? No one would miss Philip Justice except the lowlifes he represented, and the world can do with one less Fannon, but you could have bought off Frank Nelson for the price of a year’s supply of Oscar Mayer.”

  “Frank Nelson?” A smooth ivory brow furrowed, against all odds: Industrial-grade concrete is pie dough compared to Botox. “Yes, the wastrel. Collateral damage. As loose ends go he was what your military calls an acceptable loss. The space he left has probably already been filled.”

  “How did you ever get anyone to stand in for you at your execution?”

  “Conditioning, Mr. Walker. You’d call it brainwashing. Lord knows I’m a past master, having spent time at the other end. Promising funds enough to support her family for the rest of their natural lives is more of an incentive in her country than in most. I owe a great deal to tyrannical societies; they make any alternative an improvement, however horrific it may seem to yours.”

  “My God. You’re worse than the people who made you what you are.”

  The shoulder lifted and fell again. Attempting to reason with insanity can crack your own hinges.

  She stepped into the room, as casually as if two lethal weapons weren’t trained on her. “What do you think of my artwork? All the great masters at my command, down to the last detail. Bill Gates, the master of our computer-driven society, commissioned it for his home, and I stole it out from under him, using much the same methods as he; in his case at the risk of a slap on the wrist from the Federal Trade Commission. At the touch of a button I can admire the genius of five centuries close up, right down to da Vinci’s thumbprint on the Mona Lisa. He had a cut across it, by the way, possibly caused by careless use of a palette knife. Given ten more years, my scientists may be able to produce another da Vinci from the DNA in the blood he shed; a man who worked out the principle of flight by man, and who could draw a perfect circle freehand and perform exquisite calligraphy from right to left, so that his notebooks can be read only in a mirror? Am I so evil as to imagine such a thing?”

  She was crazy, all right; but she managed to make perfect sense when she laid out her megalomania. That was the most dangerous thing about her.

  She touched something under the edge of a table, and turned her face—that plastic, perfect face—toward a monitor in a picture frame mounted above a wet sink stocked with premium liquors. The Renaissance noblewoman pictured there, plastered to the throat in precious stones, flickered and vanished. The screen went blue, then burst into a stormy scene of a white horse twisting back upon itself in defense against a pile of brown sinew gnawing at its throat.

  “Lion Attacking a Horse,” she said. “George Stubbs, an overlooked master. It’s one of my favorites. The head of the lion, you see, is hidden behind the neck of its prey; it could sport the male’s ruff or the lack of it, which
would indicate the female. In the wild, the male of the species bides its time, licking itself and preening its mane, while his mate provides the feast. The lioness is the hunter. The primitive world has understood that since the dawn of time. I owe my success to the failure of the modern world to do the same.”

  “Nice picture,” I said. “I like Johnny Cash on black velvet.”

  Black eyes slid sideways. “I see you’ve deprived Mr. Bledsoe of his favorite toy. I warned him you wouldn’t be as easy as Philip Justice.”

  “What’s Mr. Bledsoe’s story? He’s imported, or I’d have heard of him. We’re strictly blue-collar here, shot-and-a-beer. No trendy stuff like wine coolers and ricin.”

  Her red-painted lips warped at the corners. She never showed teeth. It’s an Asian thing. Park Avenue dress and good labials couldn’t trump the conditioning of centuries.

  “Ricin is a toy. In its standard form it takes days to work, and is traceable. My chemists genetically re-engineered the castor plants, crossing them with African frog venom, which conventional science claims is an incompatible combination, vegetable and animal, and bombarded the young beans with lasers. It took six growing seasons and many failures, like Edison’s incandescent bulb, arriving at last at the colorless, odorless liquid you’ll find in the barrel of that syringe. Be careful with it. A pint in a city reservoir would paralyze the population. One cc was enough to bring Mr. Justice’s gaudy career to an abrupt end. Few will mourn. Every lawyer joke you’ve ever heard is based on fact, as far back as Shakespeare.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question. Who’s Bledsoe?”

  Black eyes slid toward the man in the jogging suit, then back to me. “He’s useful. The Detroit Lions offered him a contract, but he decided instead to have non-consensual sex with a concierge in the Hilton Garden Inn.”