The Lioness Is the Hunter

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Non-consensual my ass.” Compared to our first conversation, this was a filibuster on Bledsoe’s part.

  “Enough.” How she did it, without raising her voice, was no mystery considering her résumé; the one word cut him off like a razor across his throat. To me: “As I’m sure you’re aware, today’s professional athletes are no strangers to the needle. When I offered Mr. Bledsoe something better than minimum wage as a fitness trainer, he took less than twenty-four hours to accept. It’s no nine-figure, three-year contract, but I consider it generous under the circumstances. Yes?” Again she looked at him.

  “Yes, Madam Sing.”

  “Did Bledsoe kill Fannon and the man in the shelter?”

  “Fannon. He was disappointed not to use his little toy, but it was important that Emil Haas be blamed for his partner’s death. His word had to be discounted.”

  “And Frank?”

  “The vagrant? That was mine. I wanted to test my street disguise and the portable wiping device I had developed in one of my laboratories; the same place that enabled me to penetrate Bill Gates’s personal firewall.”

  “Like hell. Frank lived on a steady diet of protein, and you’re just Tinker Bell’s evil twin. He’d have broken you in half the second you picked up that pillow.”

  “I anticipated that, and borrowed Bledsoe’s needle. I was loath to use it for the curiosity it would arouse at the autopsy. But it wasn’t necessary. He stank of raw whiskey and was too far under to struggle.” The doll’s face creased. “If he was a friend, it might bring you comfort to assume he thought he was dreaming.

  “I like to keep my hand in,” she went on, “lest I get lazy and too dependent on my subordinates. I choose them for their ability, not necessarily for their intelligence.”

  That pricked Bledsoe’s pride. He sprang up with the speed of a trained athlete and charged me, his bullet head aimed for my chest. I swung the .38 his way, stopping him in his tracks in the snow-white carpet. When I returned my attention to the worse threat, it leveled a shiny semi-automatic pistol at me and jerked the trigger.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The slug would be no bigger than a pencil eraser, but it was enough to drive me back two steps. I felt the wetness to the right just above my belt; the pain would come later.

  She’d had the pistol hidden inside the cast on her arm. I hadn’t thought about that.

  I had a choice to make. Bledsoe was within striking distance and Sing had more cartridges in the magazine. The Chief’s Special was in my right hand, Bledsoe’s side. That made up my mind. I shot him and in the same instant swept my left arm in a sidearm pitch, letting the needle slip from between my fingers. It turned end-over-end twice and stuck deep in Sing’s midsection an inch above where her suitcoat buttoned. It was good, and there was luck behind it, but I hadn’t hit a vein. However fast the stuff worked she had time to shoot again. I shot from the hip. The little automatic fell from her hand and her knees gave out.

  Another thud shook the floor: Bledsoe falling on his face, stiff as a cut tree. That’s how little time had passed between shooting him and dealing his boss a lethal one-two. She made a lot less noise going down, folding almost gracefully onto her shoulder. Then, less picturesquely, she curled into a fetal position like a dying spider, her lips foaming at the corners.

  Just in case all that madness and hatred still controlled her muscles, I stepped her way, kicked the pistol across the room, and put a foot on the cast on her arm.

  The plaster cracked, showing a crevice of ivory skin. I didn’t know at first just what was wrong about that.

  I squatted and put my fingers against her throat. I’d sooner have touched an exposed wire; but there was nothing going on in the carotid. Then I took hold of the cast on both sides of the break and spread it, flaking plaster and tearing old gauze. I saw then what was missing. Human skin is always replacing itself, one layer peeling away to make room for the next. When any part of it has been confined only a fraction of the time as Sing’s, the dead cells accumulate so that when the cast is removed the flesh looks like a laddered stocking. Hers was smooth, and nowhere near pale enough to have been veiled from the sun more than a few days.

  A siren swooped a few blocks over. It had probably been going on for some time, but I’d been too preoccupied to notice. Someone had heard the shots and made the call; even in Detroit, people sometimes thought the noise unusual. I finished stripping off the cast, took the wrist between thumb and forefinger, and turned it this way and that, looking for the scars left by the jagged bones when they pierced the skin and the lacerations made by scalpels and lasers during numerous operations. It was unmarked. Charlotte Sing had the hands of a China doll, and this one had never been broken.

  I felt dizzy. Blood seeped between the fingers of the hand holding my belly; but it wasn’t entirely the loss of blood that had me reeling.

  She’d done it again.

  * * *

  It wasn’t the first time I’d been wheeled out of Detroit Receiving Hospital, but I still couldn’t make any sense out of why all the bother, just to let me stand on my own two feet at the curb. I thanked the chatterbox of a nurse and hesitated before stepping up into the black SUV idling at the curb, an Escalade; a Cadillac in everything but style, comfort, and performance. You can slap a French label on a bottle of Thunderbird, but you can’t make it champagne.

  The door opened on the passenger’s side and a youngish man in a black Polyester suit put a friendly expression on his pie-dough face. “Mr. Walker? Agent Craddock; NSA.” He tipped open a leather folder containing something laminated with a gold seal.

  “Thanks. I’ll walk.”

  “It’s four miles to your house. A man who’s been shot—”

  “My doctor told me I should take exercise. Who’s your friend?”

  The man behind the wheel, of similar vintage to his passenger, leaned his face across the other’s chest. “Agent Winterhill, Homeland Security.” Came out another set of credentials stamped in gold. “We’ve met.”

  “I remember.” It had been on the other side of an anaesthetic fog in the recovery room, where they know how to deal with gunshot wounds from long experience.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Educated. I’ve been suckered, shot, shackled, and set on fire. That last is new. I’ll call for a cab, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “You’re entitled to counsel, of course; but you shouldn’t need it. You’re a witness, not a suspect.”

  “Either way I usually wind up in stir.”

  The cypher in the driver’s seat made a quarter-turn. The sliding door behind the front seat whooshed open and Barry Stackpole gave me his barn-door grin. “You know they’re hurting when they ring in the press for assurance. I’m going to give the introductions all over again: This gentleman is An Anonymous Source, and next to him A Source Who Asked Not to be Identified. Sorry if I’ve mixed you up,” he told the two. “They turn all you guys on a lathe.”

  The young men’s faces were as flat as playing cards. I shrugged and climbed in beside Barry.

  I felt more comfortable then, not because of GM’s attempt to stuff the seat of a glorified mud-dogger to feel like an Eldorado’s. What he had on the spooks in front of us was between them and taxpayers. I hadn’t made enough to file a return in three years.

  “Okay if we drive around for a while?” Craddock asked. “Let us know if it gets to be too much. I can’t imagine what it must be like to suffer a gunshot wound.”

  “I hope you never find out; and I don’t even know you. Drive, Jeeves. Anything’s better than four walls in ICU.”

  We rolled away from the curb. It felt like flying over Mount Kilimanjaro.

  Barry shook out a Winston and held it across his chest. I leaned over, nailed it, and let him fire it up from a throwaway lighter. My lungs took in smoke with a happy hello. “Et tu, Brute?” I said, blowing out a plume with the words.

  “Relax, shamus. These boys are okay so far as spooks go. This whorehous
e on wheels is a confessional. Nothing that takes place in it passes as far as the curb.”

  “That’s what scares me.”

  “Amos.” He leaned close, with as earnest an expression as I’d ever seen on that eternally youthful face. “It’s you they’re protecting. The more gaps you can fill between you and them, the sooner this thing goes into the file.”

  Winterhill, the driver, had fine hair, straw-colored and stirred by the slightest current of air in the car; he’d be bald in five years. He drove carefully, observing the speed limit and all the lights. I didn’t trust him as far as the dashboard. “We know the woman you killed was an imposter,” he said, “created by the late Madam Sing’s organization in order to dupe the world into thinking she’s still alive. These fanatics need a symbol, to put the fear of God into their enemies. We’re still running the file on this one, the one you killed, but whether she took an active part in three murders is irrelevant. She was almost certainly an accomplice, either before or after the fact, which would make her death justifiable homicide. Same with the late unlamented Bledsoe, whose fingerprints you didn’t quite manage to eradicate from the syringe he used to kill Philip Justice. Give us the benefit of what you’ve learned, and we’ll wipe your slate clean. Do we have an understanding?”

  I blew smoke. Current snatched it out the open window at my side. “Refresh my memory, please. We’ve got the FBI, the CIA, military intelligence, and the Cub Scouts. Why do we need you guys? It’s like Ford and General Motors turning out the same model.”

  Craddock belched delicately into a fist. “Nine-eleven changed everything, Walker. Everyone knows that.”

  “Do I? I’ve never been able to walk three blocks in any direction without tripping over a cop.”

  Something rustled. A thick manila envelope poked over the back of the front passenger’s seat and landed on my lap.

  I examined it from both sides, which were blank, ran my thumbnail under the flap, and pulled out a sheath of paper; paged to the end and looked at my signature in blue ballpoint. It was my official statement to the Detroit Police Department. I’d signed it in the hospital.

  “Stand by it still?” Craddock asked. “Nothing more came back to you after your head cleared?”

  “No.”

  “Then consider it a souvenir. This case is closed, as far as local authorities are concerned. We’ve got it now.”

  “Slow down,” I said. “What brought Carl Fannon to the basement in the Sentinel, when he was expected in Beijing?”

  “We’ll talk to Brita Palmerston, the office manager at Velocity Financing; when we locate her. You and Haas both told us he relied on her. He denies it, but we think he let something slip about wanting to meet you in the Sentinel, and she got word to Fannon. Maybe she was a double-agent, working both ends against the middle.”

  “I told Haas something like that,” I said, “only I didn’t say ‘double agent.’ Sounds like Spy Kids.”

  “Or she was a Peaceable Shore plant,” said Winterhill.

  Craddock said, “Anyway, we like her, and since she hasn’t shown up for work or at her house in days, we’re checking the airports, bus terminals, train stations, and car rental agencies. She’ll fill in the blanks. For sure Fannon let his flight go and went straight to the Sentinel to ball up the meeting. We’ll ask her who paid the freight.

  “Charlotte Sing’s dead,” he said. “She’s been dead since the North Koreans dropped her at the end of a rope. All this talk about a perfect double went to rest when you shot her in the Sentinel. We know now she worked in the Kyoto Spa near Metro Airport as a ‘masseuse.’” He actually made air-quotes with his fingers. Trust a thirty-year-old virgin to do worldly. “The DNA checked.”

  “So did Sing’s in Pyongyang.” The cigarette had gone bitter. I powered down my window and snapped it into the slipstream. “You guys must use a corkscrew for a ruler. I can’t wait to hear who killed Fannon, Frank, and Justice.”

  Winterhill said, “Bledsoe, of course. He had the build to manhandle Fannon into that vault and force a pillow onto Frank’s face, and you caught him with a needle full of lethal dope. Your fake Sing took credit for Frank, on orders from the late Madam Sing’s organization. As long as they can pretend she’s alive, her reputation will continue to provide power. We know from recent history that you can’t kill the terrorist octopus merely by cutting off its head. These people will travel on the gas left by their dead predecessors for as long as is necessary until they find another Madam Sing.”

  “That’ll happen,” I said. “About the time Christ comes back for His dry cleaning.”

  Winterhill stopped for a light. “Any one of those girls could win an acting Oscar. The better they are, the bigger the tip. She was as young as she looked, unlike her model—not that either of them will get any older. And she was well-coached; by whom, we may never know, since you managed to eliminate the only two witnesses we might have asked.”

  “So sorry. Next time I’ll bring along a choreographer.”

  The light changed and Winterhill pressed the accelerator. “Where to, Walker, home or office?”

  “Office.”

  “All work and no play, eh?” Craddock looked smug.

  “Screw that. I left the bottle at the office.”

  * * *

  Barry got the story. He reported it on his streaming broadcast, copyrighting it first so the wire services had to credit him. Everything fit, the way he laid it out.

  Which stank, and we both knew it. We had a theory about conspiracy theories: Life isn’t a jigsaw puzzle. There are always pieces missing.

  Over the smeared office glass on my desk, I got out the check the fake Charlotte Sing had signed with Gwendolyn Haas’s name, tore it both ways, and dusted the pieces off my hands into the wastebasket. It was only the second time I’d destroyed a check made out to me, both on the same case. Knowing Sing, I thought it would clear, but the money would fester in my pocket. I had the satisfaction anyway of preventing her account from balancing.

  Brita Palmerston cinched it for me. The feds never found her. Neither did her mother in Maryland, whom she’d called every day until the day I spoke with Brita at Velocity Financing. Missing Persons departments there and in Detroit—Deborah Stonesmith’s detail—are still looking, along with every agency in Washington. They won’t even find the body. Of all the brilliant psychopaths with means, Sing’s the only one so obsessed with detail.

  She’d arranged for one double; why not two? Any street grifter can pocket the pea while he’s switching the shells around under your nose. It takes a Madam Sing to put a pea under each shell and let you guess which one was the real deal. She’s still out there, waiting, like a lioness in tall grass.

  Books by Loren D. Estleman

  AMOS WALKER MYSTERIES

  Motor City Blue

  Angel Eyes

  The Midnight Man

  The Glass Highway

  Sugartown

  Every Brilliant Eye

  Lady Yesterday

  Downriver

  Silent Thunder

  Sweet Women Lie

  Never Street

  The Witchfinder

  The Hours of the Virgin

  A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

  Sinister Heights

  Poison Blonde*

  Retro*

  Nicotine Kiss*

  American Detective*

  The Left-Handed Dollar*

  Infernal Angels*

  Burning Midnight*

  Don’t Look for Me*

  You Know Who Killed Me*

  The Sundown Speech*

  The Lioness Is the Hunter*

  VALENTINO, FILM DETECTIVE

  Frames*

  Alone*

  Alive!*

  Shoot

  DETROIT CRIME

  Whiskey River

  Motown

  King of the Corner

  Edsel

  Stress

  Jitterbug*

  Thunder City*

  PE
TER MACKLIN

  Kill Zone

  Roses Are Dead

  Any Man’s Death

  Something Borrowed, Something Black*

  Little Black Dress*

  OTHER FICTION

  The Oklahoma Punk

  Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula

  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes

  Peeper

  Gas City*

  Journey of the Dead*

  The Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association*

  Roy & Lillie: A Love Story*

  The Confessions of Al Capone*

  PAGE MURDOCK SERIES

  The High Rocks*

  Stamping Ground*

  Murdock’s Law*

  The Stranglers

  City of Widows*

  White Desert*

  Port Hazard*

  The Book of Murdock*

  WESTERNS

  The Hider

  Aces & Eights*

  The Wolfer

  Mister St. John

  This Old Bill

  Gun Man

  Bloody Season

  Sudden Country

  Billy Gashade*

  The Master Executioner*

  Black Powder, White Smoke*

  The Undertaker’s Wife*

  The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion*

  The Branch and the Scaffold*

  Ragtime Cowboys*

  The Long High Noon*

  NONFICTION

  The Wister Trace

  Writing the Popular Novel

  * Published by Tom Doherty Associates

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LORAN D. ESTLEMAN is author of more than seventy novels, including twenty-six featuring Amos Walker. Winner of four Shamus Awards, five Spur Awards, and three Western Heritage Awards, he lives in Michigan with his wife, author Deborah Morgan. You can sign up for email updates here.

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