Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss

by Loren D. Estleman

  “How long will it take you to get there?”

  I felt him back away. I’d sounded too eager. I sipped coffee to flatten my nerves.

  “Is it about Starzek?” he asked.

  “Only indirectly. I owe you twenty bucks.”

  “Keep it. Be direct.”

  I hesitated, then set the hook. “Operation Sebastian.”

  Far away a bell rang. The humming slowed. I heard him pull over and coast to a stop. “Where’d you hear that name?”

  “I want to give you back your arrow.” I hung up.

  Oak Park had enjoyed a brief thaw while I was north, just long enough to melt the snow on the Canons’ hip roof before winter turned back and flash froze it into tyrannosaur fangs of icicle. A broad section broke loose when I slammed the taxi door and smashed the sleeping rosebushes flat. The only other vehicle on the street belonged to a plumber. Frozen and broken pipes are as much a part of the Michigan winter as hockey fights.

  Rose was ready, dressed for the street in slacks, ankle boots, and a blue sweater that electrified her eyes and showed her collarbone, a feature I’ve always approved of in women’s clothing. She was holding a tiny tomato-red snowsuit in one hand.

  “You look terrible,” she said.

  “I put on a tie.” I hung up my overcoat and pointed my cane toward one of the platform rockers in the living room. “That seat taken?”

  “Take Oral’s. It’s the most comfortable in the house.”

  I hadn’t come there to get comfortable. Aloud I said, “I don’t want to jinx you with Oral.” I wobbled over to the rocker and lowered myself into it. “I’ll talk while you finish getting ready. We don’t have much time.”

  Jeffie lay in a convertible stroller near the door to the kitchen, red-faced from crying but asleep. He barely stirred as his mother got him into the snowsuit, a complicated operation performed with efficiency. I told her what had happened with Jeff. I left out Herbert Clemson’s connection with it all and Jeff’s nonreaction in the kitchen when I’d said what I’d said about Rose still being in danger. I didn’t know how she’d take it and I wanted her gone in time to make certain arrangements.

  “How did he look? Has he been eating?” Her hands flew over snaps and zippers.

  “You don’t have to worry about that. He’s the type that gets fat in the saddle, like Napoleon. He’s leaving the country. You won’t see him for a long time.”

  “Well, I’m used to that. What’s going on, Mr. Walker? What kind of trouble is he in?”

  “The murder kind. He’s set to take the fall for what happened to his brother.”

  “He’s no murderer. You must know that by now.”

  “I do. I know who killed Paul.”

  She pulled a knit cap over the baby’s head and tucked him into his blue blanket. She straightened and faced me. “Not Oral.” Her husky voice fell to a whisper.

  “Not Oral. No one you’ve met.”

  “Who?”

  “That’s what the meeting with Clemson’s about. I’ll tell you when you get back from shopping.”

  “Why can’t you tell me now?”

  “No time.”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it with a will. She got a silver all-weather coat off the hall tree, put it on, took gloves and a matching wool scarf from a pocket. Then she steered the stroller into the kitchen. I heard a door slam, a garage door opening on a lifter. I got up, moved the chair closer to the brushed-black console telephone on its little stand, sat, made a quick call, and rested the receiver on its cradle. I took the .38 out of its belt clip and tucked it out of sight between the seat cushion and the arm of the chair on the right side. Then I straightened out my aching leg and rested the cane across it with the crook in my lap.

  It wasn’t until I focused my attention on the front door that I realized I hadn’t heard the garage door closing.

  A door opened, not the one I was watching. Rose Canon came in from the kitchen, pushing the stroller with Jeffie in it still asleep. Herbert Clemson followed two paces behind.

  I slid my hand down to my side and closed it on the revolver.

  “If you come up with anything more than a handful of lint, I’ll blow a hole square through mother and child.” He showed me the slim Beretta pointed at Rose’s lower back.

  I brought my hand up empty and laid it in my lap. Rose had stopped. Her gloved hands made tight fists on the stroller’s padded handle. “He was waiting for me in front of the garage. He said he was with Homeland Security.”

  “He was.”

  The former agent looked as if he hadn’t been out of his clothes since Port Sanilac. He had on the same turtleneck, felt-lined boots, and the parka he’d lent me to replace the overcoat I’d ruined crawling around under Cabin Twelve. His cultivated five o’clock shadow had begun to look like noon of the next day. Rose and I seemed to have come at the end of a long string of loose ends.

  “Where’d you get Operation Sebastian?” he said. “That’s a level-one secret.”

  “I started at level ten. I kept winning free games.”

  “What was that you said on the phone about an arrow?”

  “I left in such a hurry I forgot it. I’ll send it to you in the Milan pen, just the way you sent it to me. You got a little gaudy there. That story you made up about someone sending a golden arrow to Paul Starzek should have been enough. The Order of St. Sebastian. What a ham.”

  “It was sent. I sent it. Without Jeff Starzek, it had to look like terrorists. Where is he?”

  “Flew the coop. You should take his example. Even if you kill us, he’s a witness against you. You’ll never run him down, even if you manage to talk yourself back into harness.”

  “I’ll run him down. I did it once. What if I don’t? He’s a fugitive and a known felon. They’re calling me in over irregularities in my operational budget, a bookkeeping snafu. Who do you think they’ll believe at the finish?”

  The baby woke with a shriek. Rose put a hand on him. “Jeffie.”

  “Jeffie.” Clemson whispered. “I never thought he stopped anywhere long enough for that.”

  I drummed my fingers on my cane. “You didn’t kill Paul just to frame Jeff. You can’t always crook a man of God so he’ll stay crooked.”

  He struck at the bait a second time. “That man of God blackmailed one of his own parishioners into giving him the stolen paper. He was a retired Treasury clerk with a sore conscience. I kept Paul out of jail and paid him as an informant. I knew he was a bad risk, but I needed the storage space until I set up shop. If I knew he was printing off twenties for himself, I’d have stopped him before he mixed up the stock.”

  “Meanwhile you made other storage arrangements with Miss Maebelle. Her price was a truck.”

  “Not just any truck. That’s the item that got me in hot water. Sooner or later I’d have had to kill her, too. You saved me that chore. Don’t move!” He dug the gun hard into Rose’s back.

  “I want to pick up my son.”

  “Let the bastard bawl.”

  I said, “I took Maebelle off your hands, but it cost you your operation. Burning it up was pure panic on your part.”

  He smiled his disarming, nongovernment-issue smile. “I’ve got a big territory. I split the stuff up after Port Huron. There were only a few sheets of the genuine on top of the pile. The rest was newsprint.” He took a step back. “I got what I came for: You’re an army of one. The buck stops here.” The gun came up.

  I raised my voice. “Did you get that?”

  “Got it.” Barry Stackpole’s voice had an aluminum edge coming out of the telephone speaker. “Should I play it back?”

  I looked at Clemson. “Your call.”

  The smile stayed on his face. The rest of him seemed to fade away from it like the Cheshire cat. He hesitated with his gun pointed at neither Rose nor me.

  She shifted to shield the baby with her body. The movement drew the gun her way.

  I threw the cane like a javelin. He ducked to the side, knoc
king it away with his free arm. The gun fired. Under the report, glass tinkled like bells far away. I scooped up the .38 and shot him in the chest.

  The impact of the bullet hurled him into the wall. Baby pictures showered down. There was no blood on his sweater. I’d forgotten about his Kevlar vest.

  He spun my way and snapped off another shot, but I was no longer in the rocking chair. I rolled onto my bad leg with all my weight and landed on my chest with the revolver extended in both hands. Barry was shouting all the way from his condo downtown. All he heard was gunshots and breaking glass.

  Clemson flung his forearm across Rose’s throat and back-pedaled toward the front door. His gun was out of sight behind her. She hung onto the stroller with both hands; it rolled with them, the baby screaming to bring down the ceiling. Clemson got the door open and tried to drag Rose through it, but the stroller jammed tight between the door and the frame. He gave up and ran.

  I grabbed at the seat of Oral’s big Naugahyde chair and pulled myself to my feet. I still owed Clemson twenty bucks.

  A motor roared and climbed to a wail. Asphalt shredded tires in a long, tearing shriek. The shriek ended in a wet thud.

  I manhandled Rose out of the way, stroller and all, and lunged out onto the porch holding the gun. Ten yards down the block, Jeff Starzek was stepping down from the driver’s seat of the grimy plumber’s van. The front end was caved in. The thing that had caved it in lay behind the van, a heap of rags in the street. I went over there.

  “Put away the gun,” Jeff said. “I hit where I aim.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  The feds wanted to talk to Jeff Starzek, but the crafty little rats they pay to serve their subpoenas got no closer to him than the van he’d left in the middle of the street, which traced back to a small fleet belonging to a plumbing contractor who hadn’t noticed it missing. Jeff’s name is still on an FBI pickup list, but regional authorities scattered along the Huron shoreline stopped looking months ago. They’ve got their hands full with a new crop of smugglers since the tax on cigarettes went up again in March.

  Rose and Oral Canon sent me a wallet-size studio shot of little Jeffie, a real porker at six months, with his father’s big head. My physical therapist tells me I should be walking without the cane in time to attend his first birthday party. I bet him his fee, double or nothing, I’ll be rid of the limp by next spring. He didn’t take me up on it, but that was just a matter of ethics. I don’t expect to get a birthday invitation either, because by then the Canons should have forgotten about me. That’s my hope.

  Jeff had two minutes with Rose before he fled the sirens on foot. I didn’t ask her what they’d talked about.

  I logged a lot of time in the Federal Building in Detroit. The investigators were convinced I knew where Herbert Clemson had hidden the rest of the missing Treasury paper, despite the evidence on the tape, and I’m pretty sure they know my current bank balance better than I do, in case I decide to make a large deposit in uncirculated twenties. Clemson’s mole in the system, if he had one, never surfaced. A lot of press conferences in front of a lot of flags spent a lot of words talking about terrorist links, but all they really cared about was all that fake money floating around. They pretty much confirmed that when they let the terror alert fall back to yellow.

  Barry Stackpole’s story broke big in the Detroit News. The New York Times bid higher, but he went with his loyalties. Anyway the fee bought him a new hard drive to replace the one he’d destroyed to stay out of federal custody.

  Not long ago an envelope came in the mail with the owner’s title on the Hurst Olds, endorsed over to me. No note, and no return address, just a Charlottesville, Virginia, postmark, which was probably a blind, since Jeff has contacts in all the major tobacco-growing states. I’ll miss the car when it sells, but the hospital’s threatening to go to a collection agency, and I’ll be glad to get the Cutlass back in the garage. The trunk was empty except for a single carton of Winston’s—my brand—and a bottle of Scotch—Old Smuggler, if you want to know. I disposed of the evidence in a week.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Loren D. Estleman has written more than fifty novels, this being the eighteenth one featuring Amos Walker. In his illustrious career in fiction he has already netted four Shamus Awards, four Golden Spur Awards, and three Western Heritage Awards. He lives with his wife, author Deborah Morgan, in Michigan.