Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss (16 page)

“A wise man.”

The smile went behind a cloud. “Not so wise he didn’t take his car out on the ice during the thaw.” She picked up her beer.

Something caught my eye on the way out, a wall rack with display pockets containing pamphlets and flyers advertising area attractions. I pulled out one. “What’s the Church of the Freshwater Sea?”

“You got me. People are always sticking things in there without asking. I ought to charge for the space.”

“Can I keep it?”

“Knock yourself out. You don’t look the born-again type.”

“You never know. I almost died last November.”

Outside I lit a cigarette and let the smoke warm my ears as I stumped around the grounds. The ache in my leg eased a little after being in one position so long, and I’d put together a happy meal of painkillers and a fish sandwich near Lexington. Far out on the ice, the angry spitting sound of one of the promised snowmobiles rose and fell above the constant whirring of wheels on the state highway. I stood in watered-down sunshine and watched a full-scale blizzard slap up against the sides of the fishermen’s shanties, flexing them like animated Disney houses. It was over in seconds, leaving behind a crystal carpet that sparkled like shattered windshields in a sudden break through the overcast. The Great Lakes is a region like no other, brutal and beautiful.

The paper in my pocket didn’t have to mean anything. It was printed on regular stock, and such things do circulate, hence the name. Still, I was forty miles north of Port Huron, and if what the old woman there had told me was true, most of Paul Starzek’s congregation could barely make it to morning services from down the street. It seemed a long way to go to proselytize.

The wind reached me in a delayed effect, stiffening my cheeks and striking matches off the tips of my ears. I stood my collar on end, stuck my free hand in my coat pocket, and got my circulation moving. The snow squeaked underfoot, a sure sign the thermometer was brushing bottom.

The cabins and bungalows, identified by curlicue brass numerals tacked to the doors, were heated independently, but fueled by a common propane tank as big as a whale, beached on a concrete
slab down from the caboose-office. The thermostats would be cranked down in the unoccupied buildings to conserve energy, which explained the heavier than usual frost on the windows. I went down to Twelve, one of the modulars brought in on flatbeds, next to which the leviathan CXT was parked. You needed to carry a lot of cargo or push a lot of snow to justify the payments.

This was the building Miss Maebelle said she couldn’t rent because it was without heat. In that lake climate, the hoarfrost on the windows should have been as thick as plaster of paris inside and out. It wasn’t. I looked up at the chimney vent that pierced the roof just below the center ridge and stared at it a long time before I decided I could see a shimmer of escaping heat.

I turned my back on it and gazed out across the lake, dragging smoke deep into my lungs to slow down frostbite. I wanted to look through a window, but I didn’t want to be seen paying the place too much attention.

My instincts were sound. When I snapped away the butt and turned back toward my car, a broad shadow that could only be Miss Maebelle’s face slid away from the window in the caboose.

Y
ou never know what kind of music will greet you when you enter a bar up north. The closer you get to the Arctic Circle, the evener the mix of bluegrass, reggae, heavy metal, and polka. It all depends on whose quarter is in the slot.

Chet Baker sobbed at me as I opened the door of the Air Horn on a puff of overheated atmosphere and rubber galoshes. The place was an island built on the truss principle in a sea of diesels, clearing their throats in puffs of blue smoke that hesitated from time to time but never quite stopped; in that latitude, you burn less fuel letting the engine run than trying to start it back up. A row of refrigerated cases separated the bar and grill from a convenience store stacked high with canned soup, windshield-washer fluid, prepackaged sandwiches, pinetree-shaped air fresheners, cases of Bud Lite, and blunt instruments designed to test tire pressure and stave in skulls. There were showers and lockers in back. “My Funny Valentine” followed me to a booth made of molded plastic, where an exposed port in the wall had accommodated a telephone until recently, for the convenience of homesick truckers; the cellular revolution had made it redundant. I was either going to have to break down and get one of my own or brush up on my semaphore.

The place took the long-haul theme as far as it would go. Antiqued tin signs advertising Mack Bulldogs and heroic watercolors of Freightliners climbing icy mountain passes decorated the walls under a continuous shelf of oilcans, toy trucks, and wooden battery crates, and the juke was shaped like the front end of a 1930 International; an engine revved quaintly between selections. A bullet-headed bruiser and a lean coyote with a cigarette stuck to his lower lip clacked balls around a green felt table to no apparent purpose and the owners of a row of exposed butt cracks seated at the bar were watching
Duel
on video and rooting for the truck. There were still six hours of daylight and the place was more than half full.

Ambience seemed to be the chief sell. I waited five minutes for service, then got up and took a stool at the bar, far enough away from the truckers to spare me most of the cheering when the demon tanker obliterated Dennis Weaver’s telephone booth.

The bartender was a fresh-faced kid with freckles and an ancient soul peering out through windows as blue as dime-store sapphires. I ordered a beer and asked him if the owner was present.

“Present.” He stood a bottle on a paper mat with a square grille bearing down on the viewer.

“What’d you do, run the trifecta?” I drank ice-cold beer and waited for the heat. The British had the opposite theory about hot tea in India.

“Pluck and luck—and a trust fund that’d choke an elephant. Go ahead, call me a rich little snot. I’m used to it.”

“Everything’s relative. You probably had to fight your way out of dance class. This whole part of the country seems to be run by one-man shops. You know the Sportsmen’s Rest?”

“Miss Maebelle.” He grinned a flinty little grin. Whoever straightened his teeth had used a plumb line. “I went to her husband’s funeral, not that there was anything to put in the ground.
Everyone’s related here, or friends, or enemies of long standing. How is the old tub?”

“Healthy as a hippo. Drinks her weight in fresh lime every day.”

“I guess that makes you a friend.” He swept a drop off the bar with his thumb and sucked it clean. “What’s the beef? You with Triple-A, checking up on her star-and-a-half?” He looked as suspicious as Opie Taylor.

I gave him a card. Proprietors of saloons don’t like it when you flash a folder in front of the clientele. “A guy came into money. I’m trying to find him for the family. She hasn’t seen him, she says.”

He read the card. A lot of people just make a show of it, but he seemed to be looking for a watermark. “I get you guys from time to time,” he said. “It’s always a guy came into money. What’d he do, duck out on child support?”

“I do that kind of work too. This is legit. The family wants to find him.”

“No inheritance, though.” He slid the card back my way with a fingertip.

“I’ve got an expense sheet.” I showed him the picture.

“Hey, Buzz! This a business or a hobby?”

“Excuse it, please.” He snapped a finger at the photo and went over to the bunch watching
Duel
. He hadn’t given it more than a glance. He filled two fresh glasses from the same bottle of Old Setter, parked it under the bar, and came back my way, mopping the top with a cheesecloth as he came. “How big’s your sheet?”

I smoothed out a five on the bar. “That’s to start. I haven’t paid for the beer.”

He left it there. No contempt on his face. I was starting to like him, but my judgment was suspect since the shooting. “He play piano?”

“He’s pretty good. I like tin tack myself, so don’t go by me.” I
left it there, the way he had the bill. It wasn’t easy. I was starting to feel warm all over, and it wasn’t the alcohol. I got out a ten and laid it on top, squaring the edges even.

“Me neither. I got a bum ear. First Gulf War.”

I nodded. He was older than he looked.

“Ordered Old Milwaukee,” he said. “Clydesdale piss, with a water chaser. I’ve got a policy. I sell alcohol, not bench space. He drank maybe a quarter of the bottle, never touched the water. What do you make of that?”

“What do you?”

“He set the glass on the piano and never moved it. A glass of water makes a pretty good mirror.”

I rotated a quarter turn. A spinet, fairly new and inexpensive, with a plastic veneer, stood near the short hall leading to the rest-rooms and lockers. It was just something to take up space instead of a potted fern. I nodded again and turned back. “When?”

“Christmas Eve.”

I drank from the bottle and pinned the two bills under it. “If you don’t know, say so. I don’t pay by the word. Next time, hesitate a little. You might put it over.”

He straightened his spine.

“The beer’s a buck six bits. Thanks for coming and don’t call again.” He turned his back and started wiping his taps.

I drank up. I was still sitting there two minutes later when he turned back. I pushed the bills his way. “That was a test. The job’s a little like surfing the Net. You have to sort out the genuine screed from stories about alligators in the sewer.”

He leaned on his hands with the bar rag still in one. He didn’t touch the money or look at it. “You don’t forget Christmas Eve in the saloon business. Half the place is celebrating and the other half is drinking to drown out the jingle bells. Either way they drink just as much and they don’t go home before two o’clock.
Sometimes not even then, and ten minutes later the cops come around and threaten to call liquor control. You can set your watch by them.

“Meanwhile you got a wife at home who’s three months along and she won’t see you for another hour because you’ve got to balance out the register and put the cash in the safe and see out the help and swamp the sick out of the stalls in the bathrooms and look under all the tables for stowaways. You can’t rush home because you might hit a deer, and all the time you’re opening your presents next day you’re listening for the telephone and the call that tells you you’re being sued by the survivors of some smashed-up drunk because you sold him a perfectly legal beverage without giving him a Breathalyzer test first. I don’t need a calendar to re-member what happened last Christmas Eve, or the one before that, going back to when I bought the place.”

I lit a cigarette. “Work’s tough. I got shot outside a bar a lot like this one a few weeks ago.”

“I thought maybe you were Bat Masterson.”

I laughed. He laughed. It wasn’t that funny. We were letting out the bad air.

“Buzz. That your name?”

“Also Mac, Ace, and Slim. At home I’m Ronald. My folks were Reagan Democrats in California.”

“Mine named me after half a radio show.” I shook his hand.

“I don’t know what that means.”

I showed him the picture. He nodded and made a circular motion with the rag. The bills vanished.

“Yeah,” he said. “Solid little guy. I broke my hand on one of those in high school. They’re as easy to knock down as a fireplug.”

“Talk to him?”

“I asked him if that was his Hurst Olds parked outside, a cherry heap. He said yeah and I said I was all set to make a guy an offer
on a Shelby Mustang when my wife peed on a stick. He said he’d trade places with me anyway.”

“What’d he mean?”

“I guessed he meant he’d rather have a head on the next pillow than a car in the garage. You hear a lot of maudlin shit that time of year, but the way he said it was like saying he had to stop for gas before he left town. I liked him saying it. Most of the guys think it’s a tragedy of our time I had to settle for a minivan. I offered him another beer on the house. He said no thanks.”

“What else?”

“Nothing. The next wave came in and I got busy. I didn’t know he’d left until Hap Hansen started playing and singing ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.’ The little guy was pretty good. Next to Hap he was Chopin.”

“I think it’s
show-pan
,” I said.

He grinned tightly. “I know. That was a test.”

I thumbed out another five-spot. He took it and opened the register to make change. I didn’t take it. “How well you know Miss Maebelle?”

“Better than some, not as well as others. I wasn’t one of her students. I’m not as young as I look. She buys her beer to take out.” He jiggled the bills and coins in his hand, waiting.

“The owner of a truck stop must have noticed that CXT she’s got parked out at her place. International doesn’t sell more than a hundred of those a year.”

“It’s a lot of truck, even for a woman her size. Tip-up Town won’t pay it off in ten years.”

“She says she’s holding it for a friend.”

He found a place for the cash and put the rag to use. A fly would starve to death in that bar. “I hope for her sake she’s charging storage. It’s been parked in that spot for a month.”

“It hasn’t moved? Maybe in the last couple of days?”

“I couldn’t swear to it. I don’t look that way every day.”

“She says she’s got heating problems in one of the buildings.”

“No shit?” He looked unimpressed. “I had to shut down for a week last February on account of burst pipes.”

I showed him Paul Starzek’s church flyer. “See anyone passing these out?”

“Not that one. I get Witnesses, Adventists, Church of Christ, Scientists. One raggedy-ass Buddhist with a bad case of the shakes; I don’t think he’s committed. No Freshwater Sea.”

I put it away and got my wallet out one more time. He held up a palm.

“It’s not a good idea to flash too much cash here. Truckers are as honest as anybody, but the pilot fish that swim around them are as bad as bad gets. The hookers bang on cab doors before they come to a stop. What’s the racket, hijacking?”