Silent Thunder (12 page)

“Who would they report it to, the cops?”

Livingood was watching me. “I’m not so sure Vic isn’t right—about questioning you, I mean, not the other. You wouldn’t still be breathing if somebody with a lot more imagination than brains didn’t get cute and try to set you up for the Shooter. Thing is, we’ve been on this a year and couldn’t get any farther than the front door, and here you are sitting in the middle of it after only two days.”

“Lucky me.” I stood up, caught my balance, and swallowed bile. To avoid bending down, I used my foot to nudge a section of canvas over the dead man’s upper half. The flies buzzed around angrily and lit on the canvas.

“Being a little guy has certain advantages,” I said. “Nobody thinks I’m worth a court order.”

“Better stretch it some. You’re running short.”

“It felt short.” I patted my pockets, found the crushed pack of Winstons, and shook one out. I still didn’t have a match, and Livingood wasn’t volunteering. I held the cigarette by its ends with my thumbs and forefingers and looked at it. At least I was still seeing single. “Shooter brought me here to meet someone named the Colonel.”

“Colonel what?”

“Seabrook, he said. Ever hear of him?”

“Maybe.”

“We found the place unlocked with nobody in it. I was just starting to look around when the lights went out. Mine.”

“Still short.” He was admiring the Smith & Wesson in the clear plastic.

“That’s as much as I know. The rest is pure guesswork.”

“Guess.”

“This Seabrook party thought I was getting close to I don’t know what. He had Shooter bring me here, sapped me down, did him, and tipped the cops so I’d roll over for the kill.”

“Kind of hard on the Shooter.”

“Maybe he’d outlived his usefulness.”

Pardo said, “Why do it here, if it meant giving up safe storage and clearing out the inventory?”

“It wasn’t safe storage,” I said. “You knew about it. A federal judge might overturn the local court order anytime, and even if he didn’t, the city would pull its support once the elections were over. Now was as good a time to move out as any. Odds are they’ve had another warehouse lined up for some time.”

“What makes you so dangerous?” asked Livingood.

“If I knew that I wouldn’t be standing here nursing a headache.”

“It doesn’t scan.” He rubbed his face for a moment, then reached behind his back and tossed a pair of handcuffs at my feet. “You better put those on.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Mister, I’m holding the murder weapon with your prints on it and those are my bracelets on the floor. When Washington hears about the one they’re going to ask why I didn’t use the other. I don’t hear anyone laughing.”

“About time,” Pardo said.

I crushed the cigarette into a ball and threw it away. “Okay.”

Livingood said, “Okay?”

“Okay, you win. This one wasn’t planned, at least not by someone with the brains and cash to arrange this whole setup. It was jury-rigged on the spot by a grunt who thought he’d make points with the boss. The real job was supposed to take place last night in the warehouse district in Detroit, where four men with machine guns did some body work on my car. I was supposed to be in it at the time.”

The senior agent rested his hands on his knees. “You kind of forgot that part.”

“No law says I have to report an attempted murder on private property to federal authorities. Having fingered me, it was the least Shooter could do to offer me a ride here. The rest you know.”

“Four men with machine guns.”

I nodded. “I made the same connection.”

Pardo said, “What?”

Livingood ignored him. “Too cheesy. What’s Seabrook doing messing in armed home invasions?”

“You tell me. I never heard of him before last night.”

“If you’re lucky you won’t hear of him again. But I doubt it.”

“Who is he?”

“Classified,” Pardo snapped.

“Shut up and listen, Victor. You might learn a thing or two about police work.” Livingood dropped his Cigarillo and squashed it underfoot. He never had lit it. “He’s an honest-to-Christ lieutenant colonel, or was until the marines washed him out after that thing in Grenada. Seems he shot a second lieutenant in the leg when the looey didn’t hit the beach fast enough to suit him. There’d have been a court-martial, only Washington was taking enough heat over the invasion without it, so they let him resign his commission. It was either that or a Section Eight.

“He turned mercenary after that, which I guess is what you do when you’re born an army brat, graduate West Point, work your way up from first lieutenant, and they take away the uniform. Seems he’d been dealing military ordnance to the private sector for some time before he shot that second looey—the marines unwound that one a little late—and he used the profits to set himself up in business: buy guns here, sell them there, and finance armed expeditions to Africa, Iran, Central America, all those hot places where people got nothing better to do on a Saturday night than put on camouflage and knock over the government. Bureau wants him bad. We were hoping to turn something on him in Doyle Thayer Junior’s basement after the rich little bastard got dead, but the man covers his tracks. Munitions are hard to come by in these numbers. I don’t think he’d be dumb enough to waste any of them on a string of glorified B-and-E’s in his own backyard. What if a gun got left behind and the cops traced it to whatever armory it was stolen from?”

“Maybe he didn’t use his own guns,” I said.

He jumped on it. “Is that another guess, or you got something to share?”

“Just a guess.” I shoved Ma Chaney’s clipping out of my thoughts. Cops like Livingood have been known to read minds. “Say he had something big in the hopper and needed a lot of money in a hurry. He couldn’t sell off some of his weapons without drawing attention to himself, and anyway maybe he needed them for the big thing. He could rob a bank—he’s got the men for it—but that’s daylight work, someone might get caught and blab. Instead he knocks over some well-to-do homes when the residents are in and there’s no chance he’ll trip a silent alarm. It means going in heavy. Any way you read those invasions they sound like a commando raid.”

“He’d need a fence.”

“Around here he’d have his choice.” I got rid of Sturdy Stoudenmire as quickly as Ma’s newspaper clipping.

“So what’s the big thing?”

“Ask Shooter.”

He looked at the corpse. “Poor old Shooter. How do you suppose he got tangled up with the big kids?”

“Sometimes the small fry get large ideas. Sometimes it works out. More often they wind up floating in formaldehyde down at County.”

“Words to live by.” He was looking at me now. He took my gun out of the plastic bag and held it out. “In case you can’t swim.”

I took it. “What’s it going to cost me?”

“The usual. You turn something, you don’t run to the locals with it. Here’s my card.” He produced it from a leather folder. I holstered the .38 and put the card in my wallet.

“He’s a smoking gun!” complained Pardo.

Livingood stood up with a grunt. “The work’s hard enough without doing the city cops’ job for them, Victor. Especially in this city. Even if murder was our lookout, nobody ever shot anybody and then cold-cocked himself repeatedly.”

“Maybe he’s got friends.”

“If they were any friendlier he’d be feeding the flies just like Shooter.” He looked at me again. “You need doctoring?”

“What I need is a drink.”

“We’ll give you a lift as far as Detroit. You can walk from there and join the crowd waiting for the bars to open.”

“What about the cops outside?” I asked.

He flicked aside the canvas covering Shooter with his foot. “Must leave things as we found them. No telling how much time they’d waste looking for a hitter polite enough to throw a wrap over the mark.”

“Is there a Lieutenant Romero out there?”

“Which one’s he?”

“The one who looks like a young Gilbert Roland. He’s hard to bluff.”

“He’s not there. They all look like Sydney Greenstreet, just like every other bent dick I ever met.” He picked up his handcuffs and put them away. “Let’s go, Ironskull. I’m expecting my wake-up call any minute.”

T
HE WEEDY LOT
was awash in the glare of police cruiser spotlights and the inevitable rotating red and blue beacons. Garbled voices came over two-way radios cranked up to full volume. Once outside, Livingood put on his Fed face, flashing his shield around the group of uniforms and plainclothesmen—they smelled of cigars and cheap after-shave, like cops everywhere—and making material witness noises in my direction. Pardo said nothing, a vote in his favor. Livingood kept us moving as he spoke and before the cops could work up the impetus to stop us we were in his unmarked Ford rolling toward the opening in the fence.

“Bolt cutters,” he said, when I asked him how there came to be an opening. “Field agents and second-story men shop at the same stores.”

I had him exit the expressway at a Ramada Inn north of Detroit.

“Taking the day off?” He stopped under the canopy and switched off the ignition. The sun was breaking red over the scattered cars in the lot.

“It’s Saturday,” I said. “I don’t feel like spending it talking to the Detroit cops about my broken car.”

“You’re lucky. Washington doesn’t recognize Saturdays.” He rested his elbow on the back of the seat. I was sitting next to him with Pardo in back. “What about that drink?”

“I was just kidding. I’d rather sleep.”

He popped open the glove compartment and handed me a pint of Southern Comfort.

“I did deep cover in ’sixty-nine with the White Panthers in Ann Arbor,” he said. “I got the shit kicked out of me once and there wasn’t anybody to offer me a bottle. I’ve carried one ever since.” He started the car. “You’ve got my card.”

I waved at him from under the canopy.

The clerk at the desk, a Japanese girl in a gold blazer and ruffled blue blouse, looked at my rumpled clothes as I was filling out the registration card. “Sir, do you have luggage?”

I patted the pint in my pocket and smiled. She shoved the key at me.

There was an ice machine at the end of my corridor. I filled the plastic container from the room, skinned cellophane off a glass, and poured Southern Comfort over the cubes. It tinted them pale orange, like the sun as it cleared the window. The room was large, with twin beds, a big bath, and a terrace overlooking the parking lot. All the rooms in the motel were the same size. I was in the mood for a flyblown little cell with a dusty bulb and a bed with springs that sounded like a Vincent Price movie, but the nationwide chains have just about made them extinct. They’ve eliminated the worst along with the best and left us with the middle ground.

I felt greasy under my clothes. I took off my shirt and shoes and worked my toes in their damp socks into the carpet. It felt cool from the air conditioner. In the bathroom I ran cold water onto a washcloth, gingerly scrubbed the blood from the lump behind my ear, held the cloth to the back of my neck for a moment, then to each of my wrists. Then I washed my face and looked at it in the mirror. Finally I went back out for my drink. It tasted sweet, the way Southerners liked their liquor and their women, or so I was told. I’d never been there. The world was full of places I’d never been. Vietnam didn’t count. Working in Detroit most of my adult life, I felt like a spinster who’d wasted her youth taking care of an invalid parent. Except spinsters hardly ever woke up on their backs in empty buildings on deserted fairgrounds with their heads pounding and dead men at their feet.

Stop complaining, Walker. You made your choice the day you stepped off the plane carrying your duffel and turned right toward the office of Apollo Investigations and not left toward the post office, where they give the civil service exams.

Things were starting to fall into some kind of order. Colonel Seabrook had pulled off the home invasions for case dough to finance some operation or other. Ma Chaney had sold him the weapons so he wouldn’t have to dig into his own stores. Shooter’s part was still smoky, but selling guns he would cross the Colonel’s path from time to time; maybe he had smelled something and cut himself in. Sturdy had been fencing the items taken in the home invasions, and was killed for one of two reasons: Either the Colonel had all the money he needed and was covering his tracks or, more likely, Sturdy had gotten hungry and tried to arrange a partnership. My poking around put me on the clean-up list. It was the easiest case I’d ever solved. Now all I had to worry about was the one I’d been hired for.

I finished my drink, stretched out in my clothes on one of the beds, and slept without dreaming.

I woke up at three, hungry and not sure where I was. When I remembered, I called the desk and asked for room service. The clerk, a man this time, said there wasn’t any but recommended the motel coffee shop.

A copy of the
Free Press
lay outside my door. I took it with me to the coffee shop and went through it over a steak sandwich and a glass of water. The fairgrounds killing was on an inside page in a column of late-breaking stories from the greater metropolitan area. There were no names, just a paragraph saying a body had been found. There was nothing in the paper about Sturdy. I finished eating, paid, and had the clerk call for a taxi from the desk.

It was another steamy day, but there was a dark fringe of clouds in the west and by the time the cabbie let me off at my house it had cast its shadow over the entire west side. Thunder trundled in the distance.

The house smelled like a freshly opened Egyptian tomb. I left the door open, flung up all the windows that weren’t painted shut, and stood under the shower for fifteen minutes. When I came out I wrapped a towel around myself and plugged in the telephone. I caught it in mid-ring.

“Where the hell were you all night last night and all day today?”

“John?”

“Answer the question,” Alderdyce said.

“As good as can be expected, John. And how are
you?”
I sat down in my towel and crossed my legs. It was growing dark out now, although it was barely four-thirty. The wind was coming up.