Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss (20 page)

After that she continued to close. The surface wasn’t built for tires.

I had other things to worry about. Drowning was number one. The Great Lakes freeze over only once in generations. A current runs through their centers, too swift most years for a good frost to take hold. Every winter the Coast Guard rescues a party of hapless fishermen or hikers from a broken floe. I didn’t figure to make Canada without getting my feet wet.

Just as the thought occurred to me, the truck went into a dip on
a perfectly flat section of ice. It was growing rotten, and would get rottener still the closer I came to open water.

Then, of course, there was the open water. I wondered if any of this had dawned on dead Jim before he and his Subaru went under. I throttled down.

His widow was still behind me, as inexhaustible as her supply of shotgun shells. She let fly with another in an orange starburst, missing but letting me know she wasn’t turning back.

I looked at the speedometer for the first time. I was doing thirty-five; it felt like eighty. I set the cruise control at the going speed, adjusted the wheel right to block Miss Maebelle’s view of the driver’s side, opened the door, and bailed out.

Subzero air burned my face and whistled past my ears. I tucked myself into a tight ball and hit the hardest surface I’d hit since the Grayling parking lot, emptying my lungs in a series of gusts as I rolled. I seemed to be picking up speed. I might have kept rolling until I ran out of ice, where the water would seize my heavy clothes and drag me down among the broken French barques and bootleggers’ Cadillacs and lovestruck Indians like in the song.

I stopped abruptly, spread-eagled on my back with my heart trying to punch a hole through my chest. I couldn’t blame it; I’d violated its trust. I couldn’t get my breath. I may have been unconscious for a few seconds. Anyway I didn’t hear a thing when the ice collapsed beneath fifteen thousand pounds of truck and eight hundred pounds of Arctic Cat and Miss Maebelle.

I
flagged down a fresh-fish delivery truck with my last twenty-dollar bill and gave it to the driver to go four miles out of his way and drop me at my car, which was where I’d left it in the little cleared spot past the Sportsmen’s Rest. The driver, a weathered-looking old salt with scales in his beard, watched me engineering the climb down from the seat.

“I don’t get why a guy with a bum leg’d ankle it all the way to the highway just for a ride back to where he started,” he said. “There’s a motel just down the road.”

“Nobody home.” I shut the door on his next question.

For a few minutes after he left I just sat behind the wheel. My leg burned, my cheek was sore where a shotgun pellet had torn out a divot on its way past, the eye on that side swollen. I had my keys in my hand but they were too heavy to lift. I ached in more places than Paul Starzek’s St. Sebastian and my ears still rang from shotguns and snowmobiles. I was shivering and sweating at the same time. I felt under the seat, found the pint I kept there for emergencies, and took a long pull. Not surprisingly, it was lighter than my keys. It had no taste and left no traces. I wondered if liquor could
go stale. I’d never had a bottle around long enough to find out. I capped it and put it back.

I missed the ignition twice, speared it on the third try. It took two hands to turn it. The motor started eventually and I backed the Cutlass around in the tracks left by the fish truck and followed them back to the state highway. Nothing seemed to be happening at the Rest. Lights burned on the sign and in the caboose and bungalow, where the officers who came to investigate could draw whatever conclusions they liked from the counterfeiting setup and a floor full of holes. I wasn’t in any condition to help out. I had a case of shock and walking pneumonia, to start.

On the highway, blue and red lights strobed where the yellow hatchback had turned to avoid hitting Miss Maebelle and smacked into a minivan, bending sheet metal and locking bumpers. There was a big hammered-steel box of an ambulance along with two or three police cruisers, but I couldn’t see if there were any injuries. I hoped there weren’t. I had a retired schoolteacher heavy on my conscience, and she’d tried her best to kill me. A state trooper in a fur hat directed traffic around the guttering flares with a flashlight. Out on the ice, more flashlights probed at the spot where the truck had fallen through with the snowmobile hard behind it. It was a pretty story, if you liked them that way: husband and wife reunited.

I don’t remember most of the drive back into Port Sanilac. I found myself sitting in the car with the motor running in the parking lot of the motel where I’d booked a room to rest and wait for the sun to go down. I switched off and put the keys in my pocket, but I couldn’t find the key to my room; my pockets were full of gun and gloves and burglar tools and four hundred dollars printed on one sheet, hastily folded. I hadn’t the energy to dig deeper.

I picked up my cane, but when I bent over the backseat to grab my overnight bag, I began to black out. I drew my head out into
the fresh air to clear, then swung the door shut. There was nothing in the bag I’d need soon. I thought about the bottle then, but that required more bending over. Anyway I prefer to get drunk when I’m alert enough to enjoy it.

The redhead was still on duty at the desk. I thought at first she must be on a twenty-hour shift, but the clock behind her read just past nine. I couldn’t fathom it. But then three hours had made all the difference between the World Trade Center and Ground Zero.

She was on the telephone. Her mouth parted a little when she saw me. She brought an end to the conversation and hung up. “May I help you?”

I hadn’t looked at myself in a mirror. I probably had dried blood on my cheek, and in my watch cap and skulking clothes, streaked with dirt, trousers torn and soaked through, I must have looked like America’s Most Wanted.

“Amos Walker. I registered this afternoon. I lost my key.”

She recognized me then. Some of the color returned under the heavy cosmetics. “Were you in an accident?”

“A little one. I went snowmobiling with a friend.”

“Do you need a doctor?” She handed me a key.

“Just a good night’s sleep.” I coughed, a lung rattler that alarmed even me. “Could I trouble you for an envelope and a piece of paper?”

The telephone rang. She handed me an envelope with the motel’s return address printed on it and a sheet of stationery and answered. While she was busy talking, I turned my back, refolded the sheet of twenties to fit into the envelope, folded the paper around it, dropped in one of my cards, and sealed it. I got Agent Clemson’s card from my wallet and scribbled his name and office address on the outside with a pen reserved for check-ins. When she hung up, I asked for a stamp, and when she tore one off a sheet I opened an empty wallet. Irony.

“I’ll put it on your bill,” she said.

I gave her the envelope to send out with the morning mail and turned away. Turned too soon; but then I hadn’t thought I’d make it up the stairs without passing out.

T
he lake was a living thing made of ice and fire, with a broad cherubic face under an Elmer Fudd cap whose flaps curled up at the ends to form devil’s horns. It opened its mouth to laugh and sucked me in like a moth. I spiraled downward as if someone had pulled the plug out of a drain, debris swirling around me in the form of faces: Oral Canon’s, huge and red and hairless; Rose Canon’s, a pale oval with a delicate upper lip and jet-stream eyebrows like Kim Novak’s; Herbert Clemson’s, chilly-eyed, fashionably stubbled; Jeff Starzek’s, round and calm and watching. I think I saw the Michelin tire man, too. Even delirium has to pause now and then for a word from the sponsor.

The deeper I plunged, the hotter it got, until I was swimming through flaming oil. I smelled alcohol and iodine, which as everyone knows are the principal ingredients of brimstone. From the black depths a monstrous truck came toward me, turning and rising on a collision course; I paddled like mad to get around it and almost made it, but a fender clipped me and sent me cartwheeling toward the surface and back into the cold. Up there, someone was blasting big holes through the murk from above. Fragments of shrapnel skidded past me like tiny torpedoes, plucking at my
clothes and slicing peels of skin off my cheeks. I tried to reverse directions, but my limbs were getting stiff. I was freezing to the bone, and all the time I was drifting up, straight toward the source of the blasts.

I had four days of that, they told me, and when I finally broke through to the surface, my bedsheets were soaked. It was like one of those “Was it a dream?” episodes of
The Twilight Zone
. Rod Serling came in a number of shapes, all of them female, including the doctor, a traffic-stopping blonde with ambitions beyond residency in a small hospital in a port town. Her name was Immelman, like the old flying maneuver, and for a couple of minutes I was in love; but then I’d have fallen in love with the bed rail after being rescued from the lake.

She was more concerned with the condition of my leg than the fever, which had broken, and with the three shotgun pellets that had fallen out of my trousers when I was undressed, pressed between the layers of clothing like flowers in a book. I remembered feeling the heat from the blast against my hip as I dived out of the crawl space beneath the bungalow at the Sportsmen’s Rest. I’d never make a joke about long underwear again.

“Jealous husband?” she asked.

“Hunting accident,” I said. “I got a little ahead of my party.”

“It was buckshot. Firearms deer season is over. And you weren’t wearing hunting clothes. You were dressed like a gas-station bandit.”

“Who are you, Mr. Black?” I resisted the impulse to touch the gauze taped to my right cheek.

She scowled at my chart in her hands. She wasn’t reading. “The details are none of my business, except we have to report this kind of thing to the police. I’d brush up on my answers before they come back.”

“Back?”

“They’ve been here every day, state
and
county, waiting for you to come around. They think you may know something about an incident on the lake.”

“What incident?”

“Some fools went joyriding on the ice the night we checked you in. There were two vehicles involved, and someone reported shooting. One body’s been recovered, a woman’s. They’re looking for others. We get that a lot, and there’s always alcohol involved.” She flipped a page. “Your blood-alcohol was three-point-oh when you came in.”

“What about my leg?”

She flipped the page back, pursed her lips. “GSW, several weeks healed. I guess you left your thermals behind that time, not that it would have stopped the bullet that made that wound. Can I assume the authorities were notified?”

“They were all over it. What about the leg?” It wasn’t hurting, but I was hooked up to an IV and whatever was dripping into it wasn’t apple juice. First thing I’d done when I woke up was to check and see if the leg was there.

“You strained a ligament. At first we thought it was ruptured. Half the staff wanted to amputate. Another couple of hours stumping around on it and the vote would have been unanimous. I never saw anyone abuse a major injury so completely.”

“Can I get a second opinion?”

“Not in this facility. You can’t afford it. I just found out this morning you don’t have insurance.”

“Were you surprised?”

“No. Just from what I’ve seen, you couldn’t get a group rate with the bullfighters’ union. What are you, a crash dummy for Smith and Wesson?”

“Only on the side. The rest of the time I’m a detective.”

“I thought detectives were stealthy.”

“I didn’t say I was any good at it. Are you kicking me out?”

“Not right this minute, but you might want to make arrangements for a change of clothes before the end of the day. We had to cut you out of what you came in with.”

“What about my wallet and gun?”

“You’ll get your personal effects when you sign the release.”

“Only dead people have personal effects.”

She pointed to an aluminum walker standing at the foot of the bed. “There’s your ride for the next couple of weeks. It’ll appear on your bill.”

I was alone with my thoughts for two minutes before the cops came. The first one wore a county uniform, trimmed like a Christmas tree in Baghdad, with weapons of small destruction and electronic equipment that muttered and peeped throughout his visit. He was a large black man with a round jolly face and eyes as hard as hammers. When he started asking questions I pretended to be asleep. I actually did fall asleep before he gave up; I hadn’t felt so tired since basic training, or so weak since I forgot and drank the water in Cambodia. Getting shot was easy compared to a night of blind fear followed by four days of fever.

I found out from his questions that Miss Maebelle’s body hadn’t been identified, or maybe I didn’t. It might have been a snare, but I was too full of morphine to step into it. He left.

For a while between visits I lay in the twilight between boredom and sleep I didn’t need, listening to the sounds of a hospital at work. It was a pretty noisy place, all things considered: Rubber casters squeaked on waxed linoleum, monitors bleeped, the nurses at the station down the hall spoke into telephones and among themselves, a maintenance worker strode past my door jingling his keys and humming. Outside the double-paned windows a
turboprop took off from the harbor airport, whooshing its after-burners and fluttering its pistons in what sounded too much like a death rattle for comfort, but then I don’t fly well. The flutes and ricochets of a spaghetti western drifted out of one of those rooms where the TV was never turned off. I’d seen the four walls of my room only but knew what the rest of the place would look like, the way a microbiologist reconstructs a lake from a single drop of water. I was becoming a reluctant expert on hospitals.

I elevated the head of the bed, took a lidded cup off the rolling bed tray, and sucked water through an old-fashioned glass straw. The jointed plastic kind hadn’t yet made its way up the two-lane blacktop on that side of the state. The water seemed colder and wetter that way, and it gave me an idea.