Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss

by Loren D. Estleman

  Outside, the moon stood on edge, pouring light onto the snow and splashing it through the window. The furniture in the bedroom made hand shadows on the walls. Even my cane looked sinister leaning against the chair where I’d Hung my clothes. Wind whimpered around the edges of panes, the proverbial wolf at the door.

  I was thinking more clearly asleep than awake. I got up, clambered into my robe and slippers, and hobbled out into the living room and the only comfortable chair I owned, next to a lamp and the metropolitan telephone directory on their little table. I hauled the big book onto my lap and lit a cigarette one-handed while I paged through Automobile Maintenance in the yellow section.

  OK Towing & Auto Repair was the oldest continually operating professional garage in a city that had spent the last generation eradicating every link to its historical past. I brought my Cutlass there for tune-ups and repairs: had bought it there, in fact, after the owner of the shop had found it abandoned in a field in rural Washtenaw County and dropped in a new engine and transmission. He hated collectors for babying their machines instead of driving them as God and Henry Ford intended, but he did all their work for triple what he charged his other customers, and they shut their mouths and paid up, because as mechanics went he was a Picasso in a world of Sunday painters. He was German, of course; and of course he was working at three o’clock in the morning. For all I knew he lived there, against all the zoning ordinances in his neighborhood. But then the only laws that meant anything to him were the laws of bodies in motion. He refused to report cash expenditures in excess of ten thousand dollars, as required by Washington to discourage the cash-and-carry trade in illegal narcotics, which was another reason why his operation was popular. When a fugitive like Jeff Starzek needed work done on his classic transportation, OK was the only place he could go in the state of Michigan,

  “OK.” Ernst Dierdorf’s High German accent cut through the animal wail of air wrenches in the background.

  “Amos Walker, Ernst. Nineteen-seventy Cutlass? I’ve got a question.”

  “Lay off premium. It’s a car, not a racehorse.”

  “It’s not about the Cutlass. It’s about someone else’s car.”

  “We open at eight. Come in then.”

  I blew smoke at the dial tone. He was just old enough to have served with the Hitler Youth, and his bedside manner was in keeping. I started to call him back, then hung up. He changed his mind as often as the Vatican changed popes, and if you annoyed him sufficiently, you were dead to him for months. Half the races in the old Detroit Grand Prix had been lost by drivers who’d found that out firsthand.

  I put out the cigarette, stumped back into the bedroom, checked the load in the .38 for the eighth time that night, and tucked it back under my pillow. In spite of the package I’d received, I had an idea that when they came for me it wouldn’t be with a bow and arrow.

  At six o’clock I was up again, microwaving last night’s coffee while I got dressed. It tasted like boiled socks, but the caffeine chased the pixies out of my head. I swallowed two Vicodins and pounded the second half of the cup down on top of them. Then I went out into the granite cold of predawn.

  Barry Stackpole was awake when I got to his condo. He slept about two hours in the afternoon, hanging upside down. He heard me out, woke up a couple of people on the telephone, hacked into a top-level database on the computer, and gave me a printout. In return I drank his coffee and told him everything that had happened since we’d seen each other last. He took no notes—he never did—and said he’d sit on it until I gave him the sign. The only way you could tell he was excited was his eyelids looked sleepier than usual.

  It was a white glazed-brick building on the east side, with a Standard gasoline pump rusting out front and an electric fence in back to protect the rolling stock. Dead birds littered the ground around the fence, but that was just staging. Dierdorf had barely ducked a conviction for reckless endangerment after a prowler tried to climb the wire and lost the use of one kidney. The owner cut back on the current on the advice of his attorney, but he’d made his point. There had been no attempts since.

  I passed a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Detroit muscle up on hydraulic lifts and what looked like a bathtub-gin Duesenberg rendered down to its basic molecules on the concrete floor on the way to the office. A half-dozen overgrown Oompa Loompas in greasy coveralls splattered sparks off cracked frames, balanced wheels, and puzzled over parts older than their grandfathers to the accompaniment of a raunchy roadhouse beat galloping out of loudspeakers mounted near the roof. Dierdorf, a German national who’d been registering as a resident alien for sixty years, held a deep fascination for homegrown American culture that didn’t include Americans themselves, whom he’d never forgiven for Hogan’s Heroes. A professionally painted mural of Larry, Moe, and Curly Joe trying to crank-start a Model T covered the back wall of the garage.

  A three-by-five card with a black thumbprint in one corner commanded me to KNOCK, THEN ENTER. I rattled my knuckles against the opaque windowpane, purely out of courtesy, and opened the door. A gasoline-tank explosion couldn’t have penetrated the din.

  Dierdorf, seated at his Edwardian rolltop heaped with insurance forms, bills of lading, a two-year run of J.C. Whitney catalogues, and empty Beck’s bottles, recognized me and threw the switch on a power strip, cutting off the stereo on its shelf. Now only the silken whisper of pneumatic hammers drifted into the cramped space.

  “You’re at least a thousand miles past due for an oil change,” he said by way of greeting. He knew me by sight, and could dredge up my name with a little effort, but the calendar in his head was always turning, on every vehicle he maintained on a regular basis. He could detect a faulty timing gear by the sound and a loose piston ring by the smell, but he’d never mastered English subjunctive. “I sold you that four-fifty-five, and I can sell it out from under you if you don’t treat it properly.”

  He had a dashboard clock of some Art Nouveau design in pieces on a cleared section of desk and was poking at the cogs and wheels with a precision screwdriver. It might have belonged to the Duesenberg, or he might have found it rooting around in a pile of scrap iron. His hands, blue-black with grease, were coarse and misshapen, like his body, with knuckles flattened and scarred, but tapered into fingers with spatulated tips like a concert pianist’s. His head, although white-haired now and sagging under the chin, belonged to a Nazi sculptor’s idea of a Roman god. His coveralls were Homerically filthy. Contact with them alone would soil whatever he wore underneath. My theory was it was his own naked skin. For all I knew he lived in the garage like the Phantom of the Opera and never went out, except on midnight raids of all the salvage yards in the area. I knew he never bothered to test-drive the results of his skill. Once they left the floor he stopped thinking about them until their next service period.

  “I’ll make an appointment next week,” I said. “It’s a Hurst Olds I’m interested in. Sixty-nine, powder blue. Stripped for speed.”

  “If one comes in here painted blue I take it away on principle. I told them fockers in the Woodward Dream Cruise I shit on their mutant spawn.” He blew metal shavings off a tiny part and began reassembling the clock. His fingers seemed to work independently, each with its own brain. The muscles of his face were locked in concentration.

  “Well, it’s blue. This is the owner. Maybe you’ve done business with him in the past.” I got out the picture of Jeff Starzek with Rose Canon and laid it on top of a 1939 Chevrolet owner’s manual. I didn’t hold out much hope he’d make the connection. I think when he looked at his customers he saw headlights, grilles, and manufacturers’ insignia instead of faces. Just to tilt the odds I included a folded fifty I’d broken out of the safe in my office on the way there.

  His gray eyes flicked toward the photo, then back to his work. His hands never seemed to leave the project, but when I looked again the fifty was gone. He’d snatched it away without disturbing the picture on top.

  The clock was mechanical. He opened a t
iny drawer next to the pigeonholes in the rolltop, rummaged among a pile of Dumbo-shaped brass keys, selected one apparently by feel, fitted it in place, and wound it three or four times. The clock ticked and the sweep hand went into orbit. He set the time against the MobilGas advertising clock on the wall and stood it on its pedestal on the desk. Then he pulled out a deep file drawer and handed me a rounded paper cup with an elastic band from an assortment inside. “Put it on.”

  I stuck my head through the band and adjusted the cup over my nose and mouth. “Bank or party store? I left my gun in the car.”

  He said nothing, which after abandoning German was the only language he spoke fluently. He got up and led the way out of the office, walking stooped over with his arms bent in the permanent crook they’d acquired lifting engines without benefit of a chain fall. I figured he’d gotten the rest of his physical complaints during the sorting-out process at Nuremberg.

  In the garage he stopped to fit together two deformed-looking parts of the Duesenberg for a mechanic seated on the floor amidst the carnage, then continued to the airtight metal door of the paint room.

  “Where’s your mask?” I said.

  He tugged open the door and went on through, no response.

  This room, a former bay no longer used for maintenance, was windowless and displayed all the colors of the spectrum on walls, floor, and ceiling, along with a few others invented by the design departments of all the major automakers past and present. Notwithstanding an elaborate ventilation system, it reeked of ozone and acetate. Steel shelves encircling the room held spray guns, portable drying lamps, and cans and cans of paint labeled in every language. The air swam with fumes. I sucked what oxygen I could through the paper mesh in my mask and still felt woozy. Dierdorf must have had his lungs removed and gills installed.

  “Is it ready?” he asked.

  “I was just about to rip off the tape.”

  The reply came muffled through a Neoprene gas mask covering the features of the man who occupied the room. It covered his head as well. The shape of his body was invisible under a loose smock that hung to the tops of his shoes. He stripped off a pair of rubber gauntlets.

  The car parked in the middle of the room was a 1966 Hurst/Oldsmobile, still futuristic in line after all those years. Silver vinyl draped all four tires and miles of masking tape secured scraps and patches of brown paper to windshield, windows, headlights, taillights, and chrome. The exposed sections gleamed warm white with twin gold stripes bisecting trunk and hood and limning the sides, the original factory color scheme. The paint man tore loose the tape alongside a stripe with a shrill zipping sound.

  I heard thumping. I thought at first it was a worker in the garage pounding out a ding with a rubber mallet. It was my heart.

  “Let me. For this I live.” Dierdorf snatched the vinyl off the tire nearest him, threw it aside, and walked around the vehicle, stripping off tape and crumpling paper as he went. He almost whistled.

  Jeff Starzek tore off his gas mask and ran his stubby fingers through his chestnut hair. He grinned at me. “How about a spin?”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Jeff gave Dierdorf a tight roll of bills as big around as a soup can and we strapped ourselves in and took off through the bay door before they had it all the way up. I confirmed there was no backseat. “Speed or cargo space?”

  “Speed. Since the last tax hike you can carry a couple hundred grand in the trunk easy.”

  “Are we?”

  He smiled at the windshield. He wore wraparound shades that made his round face look like a well-fed Steve McQueen’s. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

  “Where we going?”

  “Around. I like to drive.”

  “You’d think you’d be sick of it.”

  “Didn’t Seabiscuit like to run?” He swung right and let out the clutch. The big plant under the hood gulped air through its scoops and we lifted away from the pavement. Neither of us worried about cops. One thing they let you do in Detroit is drive.

  “I guess you got tired of blue.”

  “I never liked it. It was my cloak of invisibility.”

  “Are you looking to get pinched?”

  “They have to catch me first.”

  We rocketed through the East Side, scattering Sunday supplements and one cock pheasant, which took off with a white blur and turned into the sun, glistening russet and turquoise with an arrogant cackle that drowned out the rumble of the 455. Jeff’s engine was the same size as mine, but he’d science-fictioned it into a barely earthbound Concorde. Squat brick titty bars and patches of weedy vacant real estate shot past in a smear.

  “Oral moved out on Rose,” I said. “He found out you’re not related by blood.”

  “It had to happen sometime. There’s a brain in that big bald head. You tell him?”

  “He figured it out for himself. She told him the rest.”

  “Well, I’m sorry about that. I never saw her as anything but a sister. Mother, too. She raised me from a stray pup.”

  “She told me that. I found out the rest for myself. My head’s smaller than Oral’s, but I flush it out with alcohol now and then.”

  “How’s the leg?”

  “Follows me around like an old dog. I’m told I have to get used to that.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “That was my reaction. Where’ve you been keeping yourself?”

  “I been everywhere, man. Hotels, motels, YMCAs, the long open road. Did you know the Michigan coastline’s the longest in the United States, not excluding Hawaii and California?”

  “I heard. And there’s a hundred public telephones to every mile.”

  “An exaggeration. For every working instrument there’s five bird’s nests and one honking big nest of seriously pissed hornets.”

  “You don’t look stung.”

  “I’m a fugitive, son. I don’t own a cell, for damn good reasons, and every time I stop long enough to make a call, five branches of law enforcement are waiting with nets. You’d think I was Ted Kaczynski. All I ever did was feed the good old American craving for nicotine.”

  “True. Well, there was that counterfeiting thing.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with that. I never take delivery on cargo I can’t carry in one trip. And I never took a flyer on a rap I couldn’t beat. Uncle’s one unforgiving son of a bitch.”

  “Your brother did. He’s dead.”

  “I heard. We weren’t close.”

  We climbed the ramp onto 1-94, the Edsel Ford Expressway, downshifting behind a Saturn trying to enter at thirty. At the last second he gunned it, shifted again, and we slipped into the passing lane through a space no wider than a pantry door. A Greyhound bus let him know what it thought about that. I took my foot out of the floorboards. “What brought you into contact with him after all those years?”

  “Herbert Clemson. I’m betting you’ve met.”

  “Why’d he turn you?”

  “You mean how.”

  “Start there.”

  “Saginaw cops pulled me over in November, ran my sheet, and frisked the car. I was hauling three hundred cartons of Tareytons, a real dog of a brand, but I had a buyer lined up in Toledo. Turns out my source had kicked in a big-box store in Midland Halloween night. He told me he’d bought the cigs wholesale in Tennessee. I was looking at three felony counts, including an ADW on a security guard he’d bopped on the head. Clemson came in and just took me away from them.”

  “Him and his John Does. He tried the same thing with me. How far back do you figure he set you up?”

  “Midland. Maybe as far back as Tennessee. He’s one bad hat. I was supposed to be his mule. You can pass a lot of phony paper when all the people you work with deal strictly in cash.”

  “That’s his signature. It’s the same with small churches and roadside motels. You were part of his fleet. He has a territory the size of Brazil.”

  “He said it was an inside sting to crack a terrorist counterfeiting ring. I was to pick up my fir
st shipment from Paul.”

  “Clemson was rigging you to take the fall for Paul’s murder. He’d already decided he had to go.”

  “Something of the sort occurred to me. I went to Paul and warned him he was in over his head. He was a crackpot and a crank, but he was the only family I ever had except for Rose. He called me a foul trafficker and sent me on my way. I’ve been burning rubber ever since. I guess you got my note.”

  “You know I did.” I moved my leg into a position that didn’t make me want to scream. “Clemson isn’t the type to let a good frame go to waste. After you dropped off his screen, he used your brother’s corpse to set me up the way he did you. What was the something else you told me in Grayling you were carrying down the coast?”

  “A big load of government bullshit.”

  I waited, but nothing else came. His concentration was fixed on a street with plenty of visibility and no other traffic.

  “Normally I don’t even have to pump you for the brands you’re smuggling,” I said.

  “That was before I got on this lifesaving jag. This is secondhand smoke you don’t want.”

  “Life meaning mine.”

  “Mine too, if I can work it.” He exited at Grand and we cruised past the Fisher Building and the former corporate headquarters of General Motors, already losing some of its Art Deco shine to an indifferent city government now in residence.

  I waited until we stopped for a light, then took out the computer printout Barry had given me and snapped it open in front of his face. He took it and read it.

  “ ‘Operation suspended pending review.’ What’s it mean?”

  “It means Clemson’s freelancing. No help from Washington. He’s been recalled, and he’s taking his own sweet time about answering.”

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “A friend. He’s busting up his hard drive as we speak. It’s evidence to prosecute if the FBI traces the hack.”

  “Hell of a friend.”

  “We saved each other’s life a couple of times.”