Sinister Heights

by Loren D. Estleman

  Iris twisted in her seat. “Listen. That’s not David. It’s a two-ton bullet, and it’s already been fired. You don’t stop to talk things over with a bullet. Do what the man says and we’ll be out of this in a minute.”

  A sign flashed in my headlamps: TRENTON ONE MILE EXIT 28. The diamond-shaped state highway emblem showed and vanished. I eased up on the accelerator. I remembered it was a short exit ramp.

  Glendowning read my mind. The black pavement between us shrank. The front of the heavy truck, with its curving lines and open grille, looked medieval, like a battering-piece with a crude face carved into it.

  “Don’t slow down! Speed up!” Iris was shouting.

  “I won’t make the exit.”

  “Screw the exit! Pour it on!”

  I pushed the pedal the rest of the way. The needle climbed past 105, 108, 110. I’d never had it up that high. A thirty-year-old engine was prone to overheating at unaccustomed tachs.

  In the back seat, Constance was making soothing shooshing noises, as much for herself as for Matthew. Hell, for me, too; I nearly lost it when a billowing plastic bag bounded across the lane and I thought it was a small deer. My tires screeched on the swerve and I only kept the rear end from fishtailing by main might on the steering wheel.

  112, 115, 118, 120. And the Ram was gaining. The curly-horned emblem on the front of the hood was square in the middle of the rearview mirror.

  “Amos!”

  The second syllable was a scream. Iris’s nails tore through the fabric covering my thigh. The benign front end of a Geo Prizm came up level with the windshield, with another stacked atop it. I hadn’t seen the Christmas-tree lights of the haulaway trailer until I was almost aboard it.

  I couldn’t see if there was anything in the left lane. I tore the wheel right. I think my left front fender clipped one of the trailer’s taillights, perched on a stalk on the corner of its bumper. Iris screamed again. Constance and Matthew screamed too. I joined them. I read the sign in a flash just before the post buckled the hood of the Cutlass and fissured the windshield:

  TRENTON EXIT

  MICHIGAN STATE POLICE POST 51

  I didn’t have time to appreciate the irony. Wrestling with a locked wheel, I heard gravel crunching, then grass swishing. Then the world stopped with a crush and blackness fell across me like a telephone pole.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  During the next few minutes—or hours, or days—my car entertained more visitors than it had anytime since it was in the showroom. David Glendowning showed up and poked around; so did Rayellen Stutch and Connor Thorpe and Ralph Nader, clucking about how unsafe my machine was. Some of the drop-ins had animals’ heads on human bodies, and there was an assortment of griffins, sphinxes, and pesky fairies flitting about to vary the mix, along with the Taco Bell Chihuahua and Mr. Auerbach, my high school shop teacher, smelling as always of linseed oil and peppermint Schnapps.

  “Walker,” he said, “you’re never going to make a first-class mechanic as long as you keep trying to put on a timing belt any old way. You want to be a grease monkey your whole life?”

  Of course, I might have dreamt some of it.

  The last time I woke up I got sore. Alternating strobes of red and blue light refracted through the fissures in the windshield, and a collision of distorted voices racketing out of someone’s two-way radio stuck an icepick through my ear and stirred it around inside my skull.

  I said, “I can’t hear you with the bandsaw going, Mr. Auerbach. Anyway, you’re dead. You passed out smoking a cigarette in 1969 and they buried you in a closed coffin.”

  “Don’t move, fella. Wait for EMS. We don’t know what’s busted inside.”

  This wasn’t Auerbach’s voice; the German accent was missing, as well as the Schnapps. I blinked at a deep black face with regular features and kind tired eyes, movie-star handsome, under a flat felt brim and a shield bearing the Michigan State seal. He was leaning through the open door on the driver’s side with his flashlight beam slanting away from my eyes.

  I remembered the exit sign. The icepick in my skull poked out through the back of my neck when I turned my head. Iris was sitting calmly in the passenger’s seat, still strapped in, a reassuring sight. A shaft of white, thrown by a search beam, lay across her left shoulder. Only it wasn’t made entirely of light. The light shone flatly off a slab of dull steel with a pitted surface. The end of a guardrail had punched through the windshield and across the top of the seat, impaling the car like a giant harpoon. And I knew then why I hadn’t noticed the pattern on Iris’s shirt when she’d put it on for the trip. It looked purple when the blue light took its turn.

  I lurched in my seat. My belt was still fastened, and when it resisted, the icepick stabbed my neck again and I fell back with blackness filling my head.

  “Easy, I said. We don’t want no more fatalities on this run.”

  The state cop kept his hand on me until I settled down, then withdrew his flash. Heavy feet slithered through tall grass going away. I let a minute go by—it might have been longer, I might have blacked out again—then groped for the release button on the belt. I made a careful inspection: arms, legs, ribs, collarbone, head. I had a knot on my forehead. I felt along the rim of the steering wheel and found the place where I’d caved it in. I’d been right not to trust the tension in my old seatbelts. Little cartoon lightning bolts shot out of my neck when I turned my head or tipped it back. Common whiplash. There was a whole chapter about it in Sam Spade’s manual of home remedies for private eyes, right after the one on concussions.

  There was nothing in it about decapitation.

  I touched the back of Iris’s hand where it rested between the seats. It felt cold. That was just shock, my shock. It takes hours for the body heat to drain, and I was pretty sure it hadn’t been hours. I could still feel the pressure of her nails on my thigh. I squeezed the hand and withdrew mine. I had a hole through me as big as the Windsor Tunnel.

  She’d accused me of being a Republican. Matthew had asked his mother if we were married.

  Matthew.

  Constance.

  Pieces of memory were coming back, like lights clicking on in separate rooms. I’d had other passengers.

  I couldn’t twist my head around without pain, and behind it the lights clicking off; every time I lost consciousness, someone died. Moving slowly—I felt as if I’d gone over the falls in a barrel full of rocks—I drew up one leg, then the other, grasped the back of my seat, and pulled myself up onto my knees to peer into the back. Constance lay sprawled across the seat, her body covering Matthew’s booster. I reached out and touched her arm. It felt warm through the open weave of her thin sweater. I grasped her upper arm and shook her gently. A noise came from her throat. She stirred and rolled half over. A claw-mark pattern of blood had dried down the right side of her face from a gash in the temple. The end of the guardrail that had killed Iris had grazed her.

  The booster seat was empty. The two ends of the seatbelt lay loose inside. They weren’t torn. The buckle had come open, or someone had opened it. I looked at the floor between the seats. It was in deep shadow. I groped through the darkness to the carpet. I didn’t want to search too thoroughly. The guardrail had not gone through the back window. That meant the rest of Iris was still in the car.

  I forced myself. On the floor my hand brushed something that was not Matthew. Blackness welled up. I hit the door handle hard and threw myself out.

  My ankle turned. Pain swept up me like a sheet of flame. I raised the leg, crane fashion, and grasping the roof of the car worked my way toward the trunk. I was searching the ground to see if the boy had fallen out.

  A hand grasped my shoulder. “I told you don’t move. I seen folks walk around after a crash and laying dead an hour later.”

  It was the state cop. “There’s a child,” I said. “That’s his mother in the back seat.”

  “She’s unconscious, is all. Well, it may not be all. She took a hit in the head and I don’t
know what else. Let’s go and sit down.”

  He laced an arm across my back and I leaned against him. His cruiser was parked broadside to the Cutlass with its doors open. He half-carried me there—me at one eighty-five stripped and one leg not doing anything to help—and lowered me onto the edge of the seat. The left side of the Cutlass was visible in his headlamps and spotlight. The frame was unbent and the engine probably hadn’t been touched. Its lights were still on. It was skewered on the guardrail like a hog on a spit.

  “I ain’t seen one of these in years,” the cop said. “These days they bury the ends of them rails in the ground, or bend them back so the cars just kind of scrape along the edge. They moved the ramp about fifteen years ago. I guess they just didn’t get around to taking out the rail. I’m real sorry about your lady.” He sounded real sorry. “It don’t help much now, but it will later, so I’ll say it: She never felt a thing.”

  I looked up at him. “How would you know?”

  He nudged his hat back with a knuckle. He was six and a half feet and close to three hundred in a neatly pressed uniform and starting to get a paunch. It would be as hard as the rest of him. “Well, that’s a point. I guess all the people who could tell you for sure couldn’t tell you. But, mister, I seen more of these things than a human man should be able to stomach. I heard folks yelling, you know to look at them they ought to be dead and will be soon. Yelling and cussing so you want to draw down and put them out of it right there. I can’t help but think this is better.

  “I didn’t see no boy. I saw the car seat, so I went looking. The doors weren’t open when I got here and the windows was up, so he wasn’t thrown out. He might of let himself out and went wandering. I called it in. I ain’t been here but five minutes. You want to tell me what happened while we wait?”

  I heard a siren far off, and then the insistent airhorn, activated for the benefit of the slow-to-react.

  “I was run off the road. Late-model Dodge Ram pickup, white. One of those cute retro jobs. I had it up to a hundred and twenty, trying to shake him, when I lost it.”

  “I don’t guess you got the license number.”

  “You guess right.”

  True so far; I hadn’t looked at the plate when I was in Glendowning’s garage.

  “Get a look at the driver?”

  I saw Glendowning’s face, but it had been tangled up with others, including a number of mythical beasts and one advertising gimmick. “Too dark.”

  “The white pickup squares with the call we got. That’s the upside of all these cell phones. Makes up a little for all the soccer moms we mop up with the things stuck in their fists.” He seemed to realize what he was saying. “I’m real sorry about that. I’m spending too much time alone these days, been pulling double shifts ever since my wife died.”

  “Sorry.” I didn’t give a damn about his wife. I fished the pack out of my shirt pocket. It was full of crushed paper and loose tobacco. I’d been wondering why my chest hurt. I must have hit the steering column at the same time I struck my head.

  “That your wife in the front seat?” he asked.

  “A friend.”

  “Good friend?”

  “They’re all good when you don’t have many.” I rattled the pack between my hands. “You’re the second person tonight to ask if we were married.”

  “Yeah? Well, race differences don’t mean nothing these days. There’s some say they do, but I didn’t see none of them in the crowd when I heard Dr. King speak in Cobo Hall. It’s all in how people look at you.” He inspected his big flashlight, flicked the switch on and off. “You a police officer? I ask on account of the gun.”

  I’d forgotten I had it, as uncomfortable a thing as it was to wear. That was a sign I’d been wearing it too often lately. It hadn’t meant anything against two tons of Detroit steel. “Private. I’ve got a carry in my wallet, if you want to look at it.”

  “We can do that later. I figured it was something like that. You got too big a plant in that car for a civilian, and if you was a cop, the taxpayers’d be standing the bills. You need body work.”

  “You think?”

  “That’s just sheet-metal damage and glass. Anyway, it’s not what I’m talking about. That right front fender’s been banged up since Nixon.”

  “Private cop doesn’t mean I went to private school. I get five hundred a day and bottle deposits. I worked sixty days last year.”

  “It ain’t the expense. It’s some kind of a cover. You look to me like a man that likes an edge.”

  “It’s gotten me where I am.” It came out nastier than intended; or maybe not so much more.

  “You working tonight?”

  He wasn’t playing with the flashlight now. He wasn’t a man to use the same piece of business twice. But he overdid the casual tone.

  I read the surgeon general’s warning on the pack. Smoking was endangering my fetus. “No. Just giving some friends a ride.”

  “Okay.” The light show from the ambulance reflected off the shining black planes of his face. He raised his voice above the siren. “In a couple of minutes it won’t be my business. When the first team gets it, they’ll be all coffeed up and fresh as milk. You’ll need a better story. I hope you ain’t forgetting that little boy.”

  “A boy’s best friend is his father.”

  “What?” He leaned in and cupped his ear. He had a hearing problem the way he needed a ladder to change a lightbulb in an eight-foot ceiling.

  I shook my head. It hadn’t been meant for him to hear.

  He strode off to talk to the paramedics, who had parked on the apron and got out to unfold the stretcher from the back. An unmarked Plymouth, white as justice, cut its engine and coasted to a stop behind the big square van. The first team was checking in.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  “How’s that? Too tight?”

  I waggled my foot around. It was wound with ten yards of athletic tape and didn’t waggle much. “A little.”

  “Good. You said you wanted to be able to move around; that will keep the circulation going. If you’re going to take your weight off it for any length of time, you’ll want to remove the tape. Gangrene’s not nearly as much fun as it sounds.” The paramedic, a kid with freckles and an impressive red handlebar moustache that made him look like an actor in a school play, returned the roll of tape and stainless steel scissors to his metal case, arranging them just right in their proper niches. He and his partner had strapped Constance Glendowning to a board, placed the board on a stretcher, and slid it into the ambulance. He didn’t think she was in any danger, but you never knew with a concussion. I asked him when he thought she’d come around.

  “Five minutes or five days. The human brain’s got more heart than the heart; it knows when its owner’s in for a world of pain, and shuts down until the timing’s better. I understand her boy’s missing. That’s a biggie.”

  “I hope to get him back before she wakes up.” I lowered my foot to the ground and tested it, supporting most of my weight with my hand on the door of the cruiser. The pain was there but muffled, like a toothache under a wad of cotton. It was just a sprain after all. I’d been afraid the foot was hanging by a thread. I pulled my sock on over it and stuck my shoe in a slash pocket of the Windbreaker. I knew without trying it wouldn’t go on over an ankle the size of a bucket.

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about it. There’s a little white pill that’ll make her think he’s in Mother Goose’s daycare. It’s no bigger than a Tic Tac. Street price of a bottle of sixty would put you in retirement. If you didn’t mind spending it in Cell Block A,” he added, when he realized the two plainclothes cops were approaching.

  “What about—the other woman?” I asked. It was time to stop thinking of her as Iris.

  He shook his head. “Nothing we could do. I’m sorry. If it helps—”

  “She didn’t feel a thing. I know. I was talking about the remains.”

  “Wayne County Morgue, until someone claims her. You
next of kin?”

  It was my turn to shake my head. I was getting tired of the question. “Both her parents are dead, and she was divorced. I never heard her mention any brothers or sisters. There’s a woman in Monroe, but she was just an employee.”

  “Well, I hope she had a friend close enough to go to her funeral. Otherwise she might wind up on a dissecting table.”

  “Somehow I don’t think she’d care.”

  The look I got surprised me. I hadn’t thought it was possible to shock someone who paid his rent scooping up human entrails. “I can see you’re not the friend I was referring to,” he said.

  I looked at the boy’s face behind the man’s moustache. I’d grown one once to look older, but that was someone else, like the woman in the car. I was too tired to deal with any of them. “Thanks for the bandage. It’s the best job I’ve seen, and I’ve seen more than my share, most of them on me. You know your work. What kind of friend I am to the lady without a head is something you don’t know a goddamn thing about.”

  He looked down and got busy latching shut his case. His face went as red as his handlebars.

  “Hello, Eddie. Through with this boy?”

  “All yours, Sergeant.” He stood, opened his mouth, then used it to tell me I ought to get a brace for my neck. “I don’t think there are any fractures, but a whiplash injury can take months to heal without support.” He nodded at the other plainclothes detective and carried his case up the slope.

  “I heard some of what you said. I think you hurt Eddie’s feelings.” The detective with the words was a woman about fifty, and fifty pounds overweight. She wore a dark gray jacket with bolero lapels buttoned too tight over a light gray skirt. The arrangement pyramided her figure unflatteringly. Her hair was dyed beige and bobbed just above her big shoulders. Her lipstick was too red, but it matched the satchel she had slung over one shoulder and her shoes, low-heeled pumps size 10EEEEE. Her companion was male and younger, possibly as young as Eddie; the prematurely bald head added ten years. He had on a black three-button sharkskin and a necktie he’d found floating in a bowl of soup.