There was a general scramble then. Cho and Watson went for the weapon, Charlotte Sing bounded up to secure the hatch before her cargo could jump its traces and spill out of climate control, Elron launched himself at me straight from his heels, his huge glandular mistake of a body eclipsing the light as he fell on me with all his weight and encircled me in his arms. I twisted, catching him under the chin with the point of a shoulder and clapping his mouth shut with a crunch of enamel and a sudden spout of blood from one corner; he’d bitten through his tongue.
But pain is part of a lifter’s everyday life. He grunted but ignored it, and with his chin glistening red he flexed his muscles and brought his hands together under my back. Once he’d laced his fingers there would be no letting go, even in death. He had the primitive physical mechanics of a snapping turtle. With all the life bled from him he’d still manage to squeeze me as empty as he had Fred Loudermilk.
Gasping for air I got a hand on either side of his tree-trunk neck and pulled, trying to slam his head against the steel leg of the seat bolted to the floor next to me. It didn’t budge. The swollen muscles were as hard as tractor tires. I shifted my target to his eyes and gouged at them with my thumbs. I knew it wouldn’t stop him, even if I routed them clear out of their sockets. It was just something to kill time while I waited for him to crush me to death.
His hands met under me, interlocked.
He flexed again. Plates shifted in my chest. Surf pounded in my ears. My vision tattered at the edges and turned black.
He let go. He breathed a chestful of hot air into my face and went as limp as a bag of rocks.
I heard the report then, or rather the echo, ringing like an iron bell in the aluminum can of the fuselage. I opened my eyes. The blackness faded, the blurring cleared. I saw Victor Cho’s tragic face near the ceiling. I couldn’t see the Takarov, but I knew who’d won the race to get his hands on it.
“No more murders, “he said. “I lost my license, not my oath.”
The plane pitched again, less dramatically this time, and an elbow in a Bulls warm-up jacket struck the Korean on the side of the head. He slid out of my line of sight.
“Chink bastard.” Watson’s voice. “I raised Elron from a pup.”
Charlotte Sing said, “Never mind that. Finish it.”
Then I lost sight of Watson too and knew he was stooping to retrieve the gun Cho had dropped. I shoved hard, but Elron lay on me like fresh cement. I wanted to crawl the rest of the way under him for shelter.
Instead something a lot harder than Elron plowed into me from behind and beneath, flattening my lungs between it and him. Other blows followed, rattling my organs and chattering my teeth, and from instinct I let go of the big man and shoved my palms against the floor to hold on. The world tilted, then reversed itself, tilting more steeply the other way, seemed to hang there like a drop on the end of a stalactite, trying to decide whether to fall or stay put and calcify. Finally it made up its mind and heeled on over, groaning and grinding and crunching, steel and glass and plastic all alike. Elron broke gravity and floated up and away from me, toward the ceiling. Then the floor came away from my hands and I reached up to grasp him again and ride him like a raft. We weren’t defying the pull of the earth, just obeying it. He spat a stream of blood from his torn tongue when he struck, stinging my eyes, but he broke my fall. The plane had turned a somersault and finished on its back.
I’d blacked out again, I didn’t know for how long.
That was getting old, and so was I. When everything else slows down, your brain is all you have left, and mine had been abused by the butt of a pistol and Dr. Cho’s Magic Elixir. I’d voided the warranty.
I did a systems check, starting with my toes. Everything seemed to be working until I realized I was lying on top of a dead man, tried to roll off him, and stuck myself with a cracked rib. The sharp pain made me gasp, but the fog cleared and I levered myself to my feet, holding onto my side with one hand and grasping the edge of what used to be an overhead luggage compartment with the other. I was standing on the ceiling. I felt like a fly.
Elron lay on his back, arms and legs spread like a Dutch windmill, eyes and mouth wide with blood caked between his teeth. It was an obscene a thing as I’d ever laid eyes on. He’d disappointed me at the finish: almost three hundred pounds and six and a half feet from the floor to the crown of his head, and all it had taken to stop him was a bit of metal no bigger than a cashew, fired by a man half his size who’d sworn an oath not to cause harm. Aside from the part about trying to crush me to death, I still sort of liked him.
I went exploring, still holding my side and stepping over the dumped-open doors of the luggage compartment and the bags that had spilled out, including a matched set of Louis Vuitton that probably belonged to Charlotte Sing. I made a long leg to clear a bulky duffel and realized when I was straddling it that it was Victor Cho, with his head tucked under one arm like a sleeping seagull’s. I didn’t bother to stoop and check for a pulse. There wouldn’t be one in a neck that obviously broken. He must have landed on his head when the plane tipped over.
There was no sign of the pistol he’d used to shoot Elron. I remembered then that he’d lost possession of it to Wilson Watson. I kept my eyes open after that, cast them up and down and from one end of the passenger cabin to the other. The hatch to the refrigerated storage room was still shut. I bent down, stabbing myself in the side again, and went through bags looking for a weapon. I found a portable hair dryer in one of the Louis Vuittons, wound the cord around one wrist, and let the weight of it dangle from my right hand. I figured I could swing it like a mace if I had to. I felt a little less pathetic, but not much.
Making my way through the fuselage, the passenger seats above my head, I found myself growing dizzy from vertigo. I couldn’t tell for sure if it was me or the world that was upside down. Chalk up shock under the lingering effects of concussion and drugs. I leaned against the wall until the sensation passed, then pressed on. I wasn’t going to turn my back on that plane until I was sure I was the only thing moving around in it.
I gripped the cord tight as I stepped over the crumple of blue curtains into the cockpit. My face nearly collided with someone else’s and I jumped back, lacerating my side with fresh pain and bumping my already aching head against the edge of the opening.
The face was upside down, the eyes rolled back so that they seemed to be staring at the ceiling. The owner was a blonde, crew-cut Marine type, about thirty, in a white uniform with striped epaulets. He was still strapped in the pilot’s seat, twisted half around from the shattered windshield to face the back of the cockpit. The hub of the steering mechanism had crushed his chest when the nose of the plane struck earth, pivoted, and slammed the craft down on its back.
I was alone with a cargo of dead men.
The hair dryer seemed more foolish than ever. I unwound the cord and let it drop. Neither Wilson Watson nor Madame Sing would bother to wait around once they got free of the wreckage. Police would be on their way with the fire department and ambulances soon or sooner, depending on where we’d crash-landed, and all the crooked millions in the world couldn’t stop the ripples from spreading once the corpses were discovered and the cargo hold opened.
I wasn’t through shopping, however. Breathing shallowly to keep my broken rib from pinching my lung, I reached up and worked a rectangular metal case free of the control panel that had caved in on impact and pinned it against the console between the pilot’s seat and the one reserved for a copilot, found the latches, and tipped up the lid. It was a map case, containing navigation charts and a month-old copy of Playboy.
I cast it aside, groped among the smashed dials and useless switches, opened a compartment, and took out a short length of pipe attached to a handle with a trigger in a guard, painted fire-bucket red.
The flare pistol went with me when I left the cockpit. I was still on the case, even if it no longer held any resemblance to the one I’d signed on for. I didn’t know what kind of head
start Sing and Watson had, but a signal fired in the air would bring out reinforcements a lot faster than if I went looking for them.
The emergency exit door was missing. It operated on an explosive cartridge that blasted it free when it was unlocked from inside. That was the path they’d taken. I tucked the flare gun under my belt, stuck a leg out into open air, and twisted to grasp the edge of the opening and lower myself to the ground, grinding my teeth against the pain that shot cartoonish red lightning bolts from my side. They struck again harder when I dropped to my feet. I nearly turned an ankle on a hard fibrous clump sticking up out of plowed caked earth: the stub of an old cornstalk. We’d landed in a disused field, where the wheels had caught on stalks or in a furrow and pitched the plane forward at high speed and into a cartwheel.
I tripped on the stalk, but I caught myself with a palm against the fuselage. It burned my hand on contact. It was the weekend of the hottest Fourth of July in years and the white-painted metal had been baking in the sun for some time. I fanned my palm to cool it and looked for bearings. The sky was scraped clean of clouds and there was nothing between it and the earth but a line of trees three hundred yards away on the edge of the field. If the farm still existed, the house and outbuildings would be on the other side of the plane. I hobbled alongside it toward the front.
“Too hot for a hike, Walker,” Wilson Watson said. “Come sit with me in the shade.”
I turned, grasping the handle of the flare pistol. I’d missed him in the pool of shadow under the wing. His back was propped against the fuselage and his legs, his pathetic stunted legs, were spread out on the ground in front of him. The left leg of his baggy jeans was torn, stained dark, and a shard of polished bone stuck out of it. Blood smeared the lower half of his face, congealed in his Fu Manchu moustache. His nose was smashed and both eyes blackened. He had to support the Russian semiautomatic in his right hand with his left wrapped around his wrist.
It was pointed at me. But then guns generally are.
He gestured with it toward the flare pistol. “You don’t need that. Don’t rush the Fourth.”
I took it out of my belt and tossed it aside.
TWENTY-NINE
I regretted the loss, but not for long. In the next second I smelled fumes. The plane’s tank had sprung a leak and dumped out what smelled like fifty gallons of high octane. It would take a lot less than a flare to set it off.
“That must have stung.” I pointed to his shattered leg.
“I didn’t know it was that long of a drop.” He snuffled up snot. “Busted my nose too, when we hit. You took a bang too, looks like.”
I was holding my side. “Just a rib. I’ve had so many of those I don’t even let them tape them up anymore. They take just as long to heal either way.”
“You don’t count ribs. Know who said that?”
“The Cajun Chef?”
“Dick Francis. He was a steeplechase jockey in England. They take a lot of spills, over hedges and such. One time or another he busted every bone in his body. Horse stepped on his face once. That smarted, I bet.”
“I heard of him. He got tired of the violence and retired to write murder mysteries.”
“Fucking good ones. I started reading him inside. You could tell he knew what it was like to bang up.” His face spasmed, smoothed out. The shock was wearing off. “This my second time for this leg. Ku Kluxers kicked the shit out of me in Jackson. I fractured the other on a switch handle chasing scabs acrosst the Michigan Central tracks. STRESS cop cracked open my head in seventy-three. You ever been shot?”
“Twice.”
“Once for me. I got a twenty-two slug working its way up my spine from the night we took the Series in eighty-four. Some mornings when I slept on it wrong I can’t get out of bed. You get anything down on that game?”
I shook my head. “Odds sucked. Padres should’ve sent their starters to the showers after throwing out the ceremonial ball.”
He wasn’t listening. He’d begun to sweat, stroking his thigh with one hand while the pistol swayed in the other. I swayed the opposite direction. The next spasm might reach his trigger finger. “You and me got that much on old Dick at least,” he said. “Getting shot. Just a couple of wounded vets.”
“Tell that lie up your sleeve. Where’s Tokyo Rose?”
“Went looking for transportation. She’s a pit bull, won’t give up on that cargo.”
“She just said that so you wouldn’t shoot her in the back. The plane crashed, Einstein. This field will be swarming soon. She’s cutting her losses just like she did when she had Bairn killed to keep him quiet. I envy you a little,” I said. “You got to see her run.”
“She walked. Took off her shoes and crossed that field like she was strolling down Woodward. It was almost worth the leg just to see it.”
“You’ve been out of prison too long to get a crush on a lunatic.”
“She’s spooky, a’ight. But she pisses money. I like that in a woman.” He scowled, turning his face into more of a fright mask than it already was. “Sit the fuck down, I said. You make me hot just watching you wobble around.”
I didn’t want to sit down. The air swam with fumes just waiting for a spark. It occurred to me then he couldn’t smell them through his smashed nose. I thought about telling him. Instead I sat down. Clumps of hard earth shifted underneath my tailbone.
“Hell,” he said, “I know she ain’t coming back. I knowed it when she said she was, but I don’t know how many shells this commie piece holds. I got to save at least one.”
“I wouldn’t have typed you for a suicide round.”
“Well, you be right. I figure to take one with me when they come. The rest’ll take care of the rest.” He grinned then, and it wasn’t much better than when he scowled. His nose had started up again and the blood was dripping off his chin. “Hell, might be you I take. We won’t neither of us know till the sirens start.”
“You could throw down the piece when they tell you. They’ve got some pretty good therapists in the Jackson infirmary. You’ll be playing basketball in the exercise yard by Christmas Eve.”
“You ever been in?”
“Short time.”
“Then stop talking about shit you don’t know the first fucking thing about. It ain’t what they tell you it is. It’s a hell of a hell of a lot worse.”
I thought I heard sirens. The wind had come up; it might have been whooshing through the trees.
“You should’ve stuck with that ATM scam, Wilson. You change your lay, you change your luck.”
“I been running on bad luck my whole life. Be surprised what kind of mileage you get.”
“Why don’t you give me the gun?” I said. “You can unload it first. No one has to know you killed Cho. It’s Elron’s gun.”
“That was uncool. I liked Elron but it wouldn’t bring him back. What about Loudermilk?”
“That’s a little different. He was bent, but he used to be a cop. Cops have this brotherhood, like the Masons. But that was Elron too. He might’ve gone off on a bender like Esmerelda. You could turn state’s evidence on the smuggling charge and duck prison entirely.”
“Sure, and you’d back me up.”
“All I care about is who killed Deirdre Fuller. I know it wasn’t you or Elron.”
He wasn’t listening again. “You hear sirens?”
“They’re a long way off. I think we’re pretty far out in the country.”
“Where you think, Canada?”
“Not if my high school geography took. Buffalo, maybe. That area.”
“Buffalo ain’t country. I left school at fourteen but I remember that much.” He stroked his leg. Then he seemed to remember something and dove into a jacket pocket. He came up with a Blue Diamond box, slid it open, and plucked out a joint, as brown and wrinkled as a justice of the Supreme Court. “I’d offer you a toke, but a busted rib don’t rate.”
I thought about the fumes again. I lifted a hand and let it drop. “I don’t use it. You wouldn�
��t have a flask in there someplace.”
“Don’t use it.” He groped in the box and tossed it away. “Wish I’d left a match in it.” He slid the joint along his bottom lip, tasting it. “No shit, you stuck on account of Fuller’s daughter?”
“There was a little more to it.”
He hawked long and loud, turned his head, and spat out a glutinous red mass that held its shape when it struck the ground. “Man, that’s nasty. I don’t guess letting a horse step on your face is a hell of a lot worse than smacking it into the side of a plane.”
“A thing like that could put you off flying.”
“Them sirens sure sound close.” He tightened his grip on the pistol.
“We’ve got ten minutes.”
“How come you know so much?”
“I grew up in a country town. Sounds carry out in the open.”
“I hate the country. I never seen a cow till they took me out I-Ninety-Four in the van. Ugly motherfuckers. I ain’t drunk a drop of milk since.”
“You could ask for Milwaukee, it’s a lot like Detroit. The feds really want Charlotte Sing. They’ll set you up there with a new name and a job in a brewery. You’ll have the place organized in no time.”
“They got casinos there? My kind, I mean. The legit operations are too tame. Old people in sweats.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. Everywhere people breathe they gamble.”
He sucked on the joint, caught his throat just as if it were lit, made an unsatisfied face. “Christ, I’d kill for a light.”
I made a decision. “I’ve got one.”
“Shit, why’n’t you say that before? Give.”
I started to get up. The pistol jerked. I subsided, reached into my pocket, and brought out the book of matches. I hesitated, then flipped it toward him. It fell short of the knee of his broken leg. He grunted, reaching for it, then fell back, sweating. I stood, scooped it up, and held it out. He snatched it from my hand, gestured with the gun. I went back to where I was sitting and sank onto my haunches.
He opened the flap and laid the pistol in his lap to grope at a match. I did the calculus and came up short. He was a lot closer to the weapon than I was.
American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel Page 19
