American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel

by Loren D. Estleman

  I was reclined, not quite flat on my back, on a less cushy surface than the carpet where I’d fallen when I slid off the sofa. I remembered the falling and the dull impact at the end, then nothing as I’d plunged down knockout alley, a place I knew too well. I felt movement and the vibration of a powerful motor, and beneath that contact with a solid surface rolling away under big wheels. At least I wasn’t in a boat. I’d hoped not to find myself on, under, or near the water for a long time.

  Then came a kind of yaw, and a brief feeling of weightlessness as whoever was at the controls made a gentle turn, shifted gears, and fed fuel to the system. Air sucked at weatherseal and whistled around the corners. The surface smoothed out. We’d left asphalt behind and started up the concrete bed of the entrance ramp to an expressway.

  Somewhere on the other end of what I pictured as a large flat craft, something thumped out of time with the beat in my head: a rap CD or a hip-hop radio station. That confused me for a moment, but as my brain cells stuttered on like a series of worn-out fluorescent tubes it started to make sense. It always does when the bad guys come with their own theme music.

  Something, a crane or a robotic arm or a claw machine from an arcade, lifted my left wrist, pressed the vein on the underside, lowered it, and withdrew. I felt a thin sheet of fabric under my palm and beneath that steel decking. I knew what I was in then, apart from trouble.

  “Possum deal’s bogus, Walker. Your head’s harder than the Takarov.”

  I recognized that voice, too high and reedy for the barrel it came from. I didn’t open my eyes. “One more argument in favor of buying American.”

  The syllables didn’t come out in that order. The beat of silence that answered told me Elron had failed to reassemble them into coherence. He raised his voice. “Coming around. Bop him again?”

  “Certainly not. You of all people should know a blow to the head can be fatal.”

  “I told you I didn’t have nothing to do with that.”

  The voice that had answered Wilson Watson’s hyperthyroid general factotum sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. It was mild, masculine, and touched slightly by the musical accents of the Far East. I’d heard it a long time ago, if not on the other side of the world. I opened my eyes then and found my face six inches from the slender features and balding forehead of Victor Cho, the owner of the unlicensed casino standing on property belonging to Charlotte Sing in Detroit Beach. His blue tie and white shirt were the same heavy grade of silk. The eyes under the hooded lids were intense as the tips of a slender thumb and forefinger prised my own lids apart, right, then left. A pencil flash snapped on, throwing purple halos. It went out. He straightened, sitting back on his heels on the deck of the Hummer, and held up a hand. “How many?”

  “How many you got?” This time it came out right.

  “Seriously. There is a risk of coma.”

  “In that case, two.”

  “Two it is. Elron was right about your head. That doesn’t change the fact I disapprove of deliberately causing cranial injury. I saw so many of those in Pyongyang. A criminal invasion of one of God’s greatest miracles.”

  “Speaking of those, where’s Wilson?”

  “Present.” Watson’s voice drifted back a hundred yards, all the way from the rear seat. “A good labor leader gets out in the field.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Shut him up, Doc. This here’s my favorite part. Bump it up.” The volume went up on the radio. I felt the bass in my shoulder blades.

  Cho nodded, then turned out of my field of vision. When he turned back he was holding a syringe.

  I tried to sit up. Elron’s icebreaker head pushed past Cho’s and a manual typewriter struck me full in the chest. I fell back.

  “Just a mild sedative, Mr. Walker.” The Korean squirted a short thin arc of liquid from the end of the needle to bleed air from the barrel. “It won’t hurt as much as the one you got from Elron.” A hand a lot closer to human than Elron’s touched my wrist with something soft and moist. A sting of alcohol pricked my nostrils. I tried to jerk my arm away, but Elron sighed and the claw machine closed on the wrist and jerked it straight.

  “No need to be frightened,” Cho said. “I was a doctor in my country.” That last part sounded bitter.

  It was a sharp needle. I didn’t even feel it go in. The Hummer’s fat tires left the earth and carried me toward Mercury.

  I was back underwater, flailing my legs and doing wingovers and tucking myself into a tight ball to avoid the green phosphorescent tracers slicing past me from the muzzle of Fred Loudermilk’s relentless Ruger. I was a better swimmer than I was when conscious, but something was clutching my ankle, slowing me down and spoiling my maneuvers. I tried to shake it off, but it was holding on as hard as one of Elron’s big paws. I looked down into Ernesto Esmerelda’s dead face, gray and slick as silver paste, bobbing up and down and side to side in the turbulence, the body refusing to let go. Sharp pain lanced up to my knee, and I knew then that with his last breath he’d nailed one of his hands to my ankle, using the hammer from his trademark black toolbox; I was bleeding where the spike had gone in, the blood making a long smear in the water, ideal for attracting sharks. I wondered, not entirely with zoological interest, if sharks lived in fresh water.

  Just as the thought occured to me, something clipped my shoulder, sending me into a spin toward the bottom of the lake, away from the bullets but deeper into the black and in the opposite direction of light and air and life.

  “Slide, Walker! Slide!”

  This was Darius Fuller, the stud in the Tigers’ bullpen. It sounded like good advice, but I didn’t know where the bases were, couldn’t see them through the murk, and all the time that dead man nailed to my ankle was slowing me down worse than the instant replay. I clawed fistfuls out of the black water, moving slower and slower as the bullets streaked faster and faster along their green glowing tracks.

  I wasn’t alone. There were faces in the water: Deirdre Fuller’s, empty-eyed and frozen in anger, as I’d seen it the last time coming away from the pawnshop in Ypsilanti; Hilary Bairn’s, Eurotrash fashionable even in death, with a boil in the forehead where Violet Pershing’s slug had not quite managed to exit; and finally Charlotte Sing’s, painted white like a geisha’s with the jet-track eyebrows of the Dragon Lady’s in a comic strip most of the world had forgotten, mouth open wide in laughter that pounded in my head in a hip-hop bass. Hallucinations only reinforce ethnic stereotypes. If it was a hallucination. Insanity yawns wide beyond a thin line where you can no longer separate fantasy from fact, as in reality programming.

  When I opened my eyes this time, I was alone. It was dark, and for a long moment I thought I was still swimming toward the bottom of Black Squirrel Lake. My nostrils burned as if I’d been breathing nothing but water, but my throat was parched. I was cold. My arms and legs were as heavy as anchors. My left leg—the one Esmerelda had nailed himself to—wouldn’t move at all, and when I gathered all my strength and pushed it in that direction, something dragged with the unmistakeable sound of metal on concrete, stopping with a clunk when it came to the end of its chain. I was shackled.

  I was hyperventilating. I had no access to my lungs, only to a shallow pocket of air just behind my throat that would run out if I didn’t break through to the stores beyond. I caught my breath and held it tight. My pulse hammered in my ears—a welcome sound, not only because it meant my heart was still beating, but because it lacked the hypnotic regularity of rap. I counted to twenty, my eyeballs straining out of their sockets, then let it out in a whoosh that smelled stale even to my own nostrils. I had a terminal case of morning mouth.

  I sucked at the air anyway. It was proof that my lungs still worked, and consequently my heart. I’d given up on both for a while there.

  Now all I had to do was explore the dimensions of the coffin in which I’d been buried alive.

  I sat up. A boom swung down and smacked me in the face, but I ignored it; I’d had Sunday morni
ngs that packed more punch. I explored my immobile leg, starting with my hand on my thigh and working down over the mountain of my knee to my ankle, stopping at the thing that restrained it. It felt slippery, not at all like metal, but heavy when I groped beyond it; a steel cable in a thick plastic sheath. I retraced it to my ankle and explored the dimensions of the bulk that rested there. A turnbuckle, nothing less ordinary than that.

  I found the butterfly-shaped key that held it taut, gripped it in my fist, and turned. The world was locked no tighter in its orbit than that simple device. I wouldn’t have had the strength to budge it even if I hadn’t been seduced, bludgeoned with the butt of a Russian semiautomatic pistol, and had my veins pumped full of morphine, or some less organic substance that was about as mild as a buffalo stampede in a dynamite plant.

  That was as far as my reserves went. I laid back to recharge, and as the thumming in my head receded I felt the more stylized throb of powerful engines, a thousand times more powerful than the one that had propelled Wilson Watson’s Hummer, but without the comforting presence of solid earth rolling under wheels bound by the forces of gravity.

  A boat.

  Jesus.

  No, not a boat.

  A plane.

  The whine of the jets was so incessant I hadn’t heard them until I managed to eliminate every other form of transportation. If there’s anything worse than drowning it’s falling from a great height, aboard a craft that has no more business being in the air than a sperm whale: thousands of tons of sheet metal and wire and oil and fuel under high pressure and the iron smile of flight attendants that can plunge thirty thousand feet on nothing more substantial than a bubble of air in a rubber hose.

  If, for any reason, the cabin should lose pressure…

  What reason?

  Should?

  It was dark, darker than before the birth of the universe. There was no source of light, not one, and the air was colder than Michigan in April. Pitch blackness is not a modern concept. It breeds superstition of the kind that had forced Cro-Magnon man to look up from the mouth of his hollow in the rock and search for meaning in the black slab of cloud that erased the constellations and cry out for a Higher Power to guide him toward the light.

  Where in the sprawl of modern civilization, under the million eyes of light pollution, even in the hold of an airplane, is it possible to find oneself in complete darkness? And why was it so cold?

  Not the cold of depressurization at high altitude; I had a flash of panic before I came to that conclusion. People froze to death under those conditions long before the crash. It was unpleasantly cold, but not severe enough for frostbite. It had a man-made feel. There was a constant hum under the whine of the engines, regular enough to escape notice if you weren’t alone in the dark with nothing to distract you from your sense of hearing: compressors. I was trussed up in a flying refrigerator.

  I sat up, propping my back against icy fiberglass insulation, and patted my pockets. They’d taken away the Chief’s Special, but they’d left me in my suit with my wallet and keys and change where I’d put them. I came to a cardboard fold, took it out, tore loose a match, and tried to strike it, but I was shivering and my hands shook and all I managed to do was demolish it. I let it drop and tore out another. This time I concentrated on steadying my hands. The flame flared white, receding to yellow as the sulphur burned off and the paper caught fire.

  I held it up. The light only reached to the near wall, but I saw rows of odd-shaped boxes held in place on shelves by wire mesh. They had handles and looked like small picnic baskets.

  The flame nipped at my fingers. I shook it out. If I was going to find something I could use to free myself, I would need more than a few seconds of light, but I didn’t want to burn up the matchbook in case it came in handy later. You never know when you might take it in your head to commit arson at thirty thousand feet. I groped out my notebook, fanned it open, struck another match, and held it to a corner of a page. I figured I’d remember this case even if I burned up all my notes on it.

  I passed my makeshift torch along the rows of boxes. They were nothing more exotic than portable ice coolers made of heavy-duty plastic. I figured I could use one to pound loose the screw on the turnbuckle that fastened the cable to my ankle, and as a weapon in case nothing better presented itself.

  The mesh was open on top; it was only there to keep the cargo from shifting in flight. I transferred the burning notebook to my other hand and reached up to grasp the handle of the cooler nearest me. The light shifted and fell on a human face in the darkness.

  It was less than two feet from where I was sitting. Startled, I dropped the torch, burning my hand when I snatched it back up to keep from going out on the floor. I changed hands again, sucked my fingers, and extended the flame toward the spot where I’d seen the face. A pair of eyes glistened through lowered lashes, but the light was only a reflection of the fire. Fred Loudermilk wasn’t looking through them anymore.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The flame burned down while I was looking for a wound. I shook it out before it could burn my fingers. There would be a wound. He wouldn’t do Madame Sing the favor of dying of natural causes, and if he had there wouldn’t have been a reason to remove him from the hospital.

  Why she had wasn’t much of a mystery. Security can be gotten around or they wouldn’t make so much of it, but pumping Loudermilk to find out who he might have told about her connection to the Esmerelda murder would take more time than kidnapping him; after that there would be all the time in the world, for everyone but him.

  Putting the body in with me didn’t guarantee me much more.

  I went to work in the dark. It took me a minute to find the cooler by feel, but I got hold of the handle and lifted it clear of the mesh that held it on its shelf next to the others. It was heavy, and whatever had been put inside to stabilize the temperature—ice, dry or the regular kind—shifted with a sliding sound, displacing the gravity as I was lowering it. Just then the lights came on, dazzling me; someone had opened a door or a hatch, letting in light from outside. I lost my grip. The cooler hit the floor end first, the lid tipped open, and something slithered out and across the floor, leaving a smoking trail of dry ice that seared my throat, choking me. The thing was red and quivering, the size of my hand, and when it came to rest against my thigh I felt the icy gelatinous surface through my pants. I recoiled reflexively.

  A human liver.

  I’d attended a couple of autopsies, and knew one when I saw it, although I hadn’t much time to absorb the information, because Elron charged in, his weight actually tipping the airplane a couple of inches, knocked me flat with one huge palm against my chest, and scooped the organ bare-handed back into the cooler. Dry ice sizzled against bare flesh. He howled and grabbed at his hand. I braced my elbows against the floor and kicked out with my free leg. For a musclebound he had quick reflexes; he turned in time to protect his groin, but my heel caught him hard on the hip and he lost balance. He fell directly onto the smoking white pile that had spilled from the container, sending cooler and liver sliding and grinding particles of frozen carbon dioxide through his clothes. He whimpered and slapped at himself as if he were on fire, and as he twisted to get his feet under him the butt of the Takarov semiautomatic in the holster snapped to the back of his belt came inside my reach. I jerked it loose, found the safety catch with my thumb, and followed him up with the muzzle, yanking back on the action with my other hand and wasting a cartridge when it popped out of the ejector and hit the floor rattling.

  “One in the barrel,” I said. “Whoever taught you firearms safety?”

  “This is a pressurized cabin. You want to kill yourself too?” He stood in mid crouch, breathing hard, his scorched hand tucked under his arm. Smoke drifted off his shirt and pants.

  “Not if you stop the bullet. You’re impossible to miss.”

  “And then what?” asked Charlotte Sing.

  She stood eight feet beyond Elron, framed inside the arch of the open ha
tch. The light was coming in from the passenger cabin behind her and I couldn’t see her features, but the small slender figure in the tailored business suit and low, lightly accented voice identified her like a thumbprint. I glanced at her only a tenth of a second and kept the pistol on the big man. I remembered his reflexes.

  “Elron’s right,” she said. “There are five of us with the pilot, whom I pay. The only way to get us all is to shoot a hole in the fuselage. You don’t strike me as the suicidal sort of hero.”

  “Maybe that crack on the head crossed some wires.”

  “I doubt you’re that delicate.”

  I said, “You missed one.”

  She hesitated. She wasn’t the type of person who liked to ask questions. “One what?”

  “Watson, Cho, and Elron were with me in the Hummer. If they all made the plane, you and the pilot make five. You forgot to count Loudermilk.”

  “He’s cargo.”

  “How’d you get him out of the hospital?”

  “He had an incident. He had to be moved to another floor and there wasn’t room in the elevator for a police escort. It’s so easy to lose track of one patient in a facility that large.”

  That explained his dress, or lack of it. He lay naked in a soiled paper hospital gown.

  “Who furnished the incident, Violet Pershing?”

  “Mrs. Pershing was busy with you,” Charlotte Sing said. “I have an acquaintance on the staff.”

  “Asian or occidental? No, that was unfair. Judging by Elron, your tolerance is spreading.”

  Elron said, “He was pretty far under when he got to me. I squeezed a little hard, but he squealed before he croaked. You’re the only one knew Freddie-boy was working both sides of the street.”