Silent Thunder (4 page)

“I never heard of a secret that had a howitzer in it.”

“Yeah.” He lost interest again. He was one to watch. “This gun control stuff is a hoot. They ought to make everything legal, if you can prove you can clean it without shooting off too many toes.”

“How many are too many?”

“Three.” He was looking down at his feet.

“Where’d Thayer get it all?”

“Tell you when we finish inventorying it and run the serial numbers.”

“When will that be?”

“Hell, I’ll be two years into my pension. This asshole next to me will be Washington bureau chief by then.”

Pardo said nothing.

“Spitball it,” I said. “You don’t look like someone who sleeps with the book.”

“There’s a book?” He grinned his baggy grin. Then he ran a hand over his face. “I don’t find myself agreeing with Vic much. I never agree with Vic. But we’ve been working the local big iron dealers for two years and I’m just close enough to retirement not to want to blow it. Sorry.”

I stepped on what felt like a pine cone and took my foot off it. It was a hand grenade, one of the old pineapples we used to practice with. Livingood noticed it, scooped it up with a grunt, and tossed it and the portable rocket launcher into the trailer.

“Mrs. Thayer told me an old beat-up pickup came to the basement door once,” I said, when the hairs on the back of my neck lay down. “What do you hear from the Shooter?”

“Good old Shooter. I heard he married a rich divorcee and retired.”

“You buy it?”

“He’ll get out when they screw him into the ground. This is way out of his wheelhouse, though. Biggest thing he ever dealt was the MAC-10 he sold me, just before I busted him the last time.”

“He tried to sell me a Thompson once.”

“Did you see it?”

“The wrong end. The guy he was going to buy it from changed his mind and tried shooting up some cops with it.”

“Blew him out from under his hat, I bet. Them old typewriters are too heavy and got a mean pull besides. Plus they jam. Any rookie with a crummy department-issue thirty-eight can plug you while you’re still trying to clear the slide.” His eyes flicked over my shoulder. “Here comes the law in Iroquois Heights.”

I hadn’t heard the big Pontiac coasting to a stop in front of the truck. It was robin’s-egg blue, with the city seal etched in gold on the driver’s door and the department’s motto painted in matching italics on the rear fender.

“ ‘To serve and protect,’ ” Livingood read. “I wonder if the boys in Truth in Advertising know about that?”

A young officer in a uniform he had put on with a roller—it was the same color as the car, with a gold stripe on the pants—got out from behind the wheel and swaggered our way, sliding a walkie-talkie into a holder on his gun belt. Hatless, he wore his sandy hair in a crew with the temples shaved, gold-framed Ray-Bans with violet lenses, and a triangular moustache clipped with nail scissors and a slide rule. His gear, stowed in various loops and pockets of his belt and uniform, included a leather sap, a monkey stick, a pair of black jersey gloves with studded knuckles, two speed-loaders bristling with cartridges, and a Colt .357 Magnum with a fisted grip. His stomach was as flat as an inquisitor’s rack.

“Good afternoon, Officer Pollard,” said the senior agent.

“What can we do for you today and how much is it going to cost?”

Officer Pollard stopped in front of us and pointed a manicured finger at him. “That’s showing disrespect for an officer in the performance of his duties. I could ticket you for that.”

“Who’s going to show you how to write it?”

Pollard made no answer to that. Up close, he wasn’t as young as he appeared from a little distance; his spiky hair was going silver at the tips and the dark glasses couldn’t hide the lines around his eyes. “The chief asked me to look in on you from time to time, find out if you needed anything.”

“I know what he wanted you to find out.”

Pardo spoke up. “Thank you, Officer. If we need anything, we’ll let the chief know.”

“Who’s chief these days?” I asked.

The violet lenses turned my way slightly. “You’re who?”

I showed him my ID. There was no telling if he was reading it. His lips didn’t move, anyway.

“Uncle Sam buying private talent these days?” he asked when I’d put away my wallet.

“Just asking directions.”

“Figured you were new or you’d know the chief’s name is Proust.”

“Deputy chief,” I corrected. “An ex one at that.”

“He’s acting chief till the chief gets well, which he never will. And he ain’t no ex.”

“Impossible. He’s under indictment.”

“That don’t mean he done it. Innocent till proven guilty, mister; that’s how we do things in the U. S. of freaking A.”

“Since when is Iroquois Heights in the U.S.A.?”

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder the way they teach in cop school. “You said you were asking directions, mister. The way out’s that way.”

He went back to his unit, wheeled it around, and lost some rubber going back the way he’d come. Livingood spat at the ground. “I heard they cleaned up this place,” he said.

I said, “They used a dirty broom. You were telling me about Shooter.”

“Was I?” He grinned. “Yeah, I guess I was. Last time I looked, he was doing business at the same old stand. You can try him. As far as the G’s concerned, he’s no bigger’n bait this season.”

“What about Ma Chaney?”

“You do get around.” He was interested again.

This time I grinned. “That’s good, that tired civil servant number. How close are you to retirement really?”

“I don’t expect to live to see it. You know Ma?”

“I did some business with her once out at the barn.”

“She moved it. Not the barn, just what was inside. We don’t know where yet. We can’t get an undercover man past her. If her boys had half her smarts they wouldn’t be in jails from here to Miami.”

“That’s all you can do for me?”

“If it’s Christmas, where’s the snow?”

I left him listening to Pardo, waited for the two men in Windbreakers to pass carrying a Chinese mortar, and got into my car, hoping a spark from the distributor wouldn’t make a park out of that section of town.

It didn’t, and I drove back to the office under a sky as blue as a nuclear warhead. I elbowed my way through the invisible customers lined up six deep in the reception room, got my little green book of dynamite out of the top drawer of the file cabinet, and dialed a number I had listed under a nifty code I had borrowed from a Marvel comic book. Waiting for an answer I watched Custer. It looked to me like he was holding his own.

On the twelfth ring a Mississippi accent answered. “So talk.”

“Amos Walker,” I said. “We’ve done business.”

“Where?”’

“Parking lot on West Lafayette, about a year ago.”

“I didn’t axe when. What’s my name?”

“Sonny boy.”

He didn’t laugh.

“Shooter,” I said.

“Know why they call me that?”

“It sure isn’t because you’re always shooting your mouth off.”

“They call me that ’cause I shoot square. You shoot square?”

“If all your customers shot square I’d be doing business with you over a glass counter in a store with bright lights and a window display.”

“You a customer?”

“I could be, if you’ve got what I want.”

“If you want it, I got it. If I ain’t got it I can get it. If I can’t get it, you don’t want it. What do you want?”

“An interpreter.”

Silence.

“Protection,” I said.

“Buy a dog.”

“I need more protection than that.”

“Buy two dogs. You saying you want a
gun,
man?”

“I got guns. I want a case of C-4 plastic rocket launchers and a fifty-caliber machine gun.”

“Going up after deer?”

I took another look at Custer. He seemed to be losing ground now. “You got what I want, or is what you said before just a stall? Because if it is I can report you to David Horowitz.”

“Tell him take a number. I get back to you.” I had a dead line.

Bright patter. The white noise of the grifter’s world. I hung up on the dial tone and checked the square of sunlight on the wall opposite the window. It looked high enough. I took my birthday bottle out of the deep drawer of the desk and floated some dust in a glass. Then I looked up Ma Chaney’s number in the green book.

“Hello?”

Good old Ma. It was getting so almost nobody answered the telephone the old-fashioned way. I swallowed some antidote and used my name. “We met during that Virgil Boyd thing.”

“I remember.” Her voice was a cigarette wheeze without any inflection.

“I’ve got some questions to ask if you’re not busy.”

“Ma’s never busy. Go ahead and ask.”

“Not over the telephone. Where can we meet?”

“My house is in the same place it always was.”

“When can I come out?”

“Ma’s always home.”

“How about five o’clock?”

“Bring money.”

I barely had my hand off the receiver when the bell rang. It was Shooter.

“You know the warehouse district?” he asked.

“You mean Rivertown?”

“Screw Rivertown. That’s an architect’s drawing. I mean the warehouse district, railroad tracks and big ugly buildings with rats.”

“Where in the warehouse district?”

“It don’t matter, man. It ain’t big enough to piss in since the mayor got his gold shovel. Five o’clock.”

“Can’t make it. How about four?”

“Four’s fine. I be there at five.” He did it to me again.

I called Ma back. “Something came up. Is four o’clock okay?”

“Ma takes her nap at four,” said the owner of the wheezy voice.

“Six, then.”

“At six I visit the hospital.”

“I thought you never left home.”

“Ma’s got a boy in the hospital.”

“How about tonight after seven?”

The wheeze turned into a short laugh that ended in a smoker’s hack. “Ma works nights.”

“I forgot. So when?”

“You come see Ma tomorrow anytime.”

“Okay.”

“Except six,” she added.

I said okay again and wrote the appointment on my crowded social calendar, right between Shooter and the day I stay home and rotate my socks.

E
VERY CASE NEEDS
a place to start, a thread you can pull or an edge of tape you can get your thumbnail under. It was a long haul from your local Saturday Night Special dealer to the people who trafficked in plastic weapons the FAA hadn’t heard about, but Constance Thayer’s short court date didn’t leave enough time to place an ad in
Soldier of Fortune.
I went home at four, shaved for the second time that day, and put on my good blue suit and a solid red tie over a white shirt fresh out of tissue and plastic: that clean-cut look and subliminal American flag that tells the world you’re out to blow Russia right out of the
National Geographic.
I unscrewed the cap from a bottle of Brut and hesitated, wondering if it was a touch too much. Then I slapped it on. Subtlety was lost on the culture I was about to enter.

The old Detroit, the city of growling trumpets, window-tapping hookers, and contraband Canadian whisky served in smoky cellars, is still visible if you care to look for it and the mayor’s contractors haven’t gotten to it yet. At the moment they were busy ripping out the turn-of-the-century brick warehouses along the river and replacing them with hotels and office buildings that looked like Coke bottles, but they weren’t quite finished. A hand-towel-size section along Jefferson still contained blackened box-shaped structures with painted-over windows standing on broken pavement. Disused rails twisted among heaps of rubble and old wooden pallets in one of the last places in the city that didn’t stink of committee planning. Where do all the shattered people go when ugliness has been banished?

I parked next to a loading dock and waited with the windows down. Mine was the only vehicle in the area and I was the only thing breathing in it that I could see. The air smelled of concrete dust and worm-eaten oak and spilled sweat. Gusts off the river skinned the top layer of grit off the scenery and spread a gray mulch over my upholstery. To my right, at the end of a narrow passage two blocks long lined with dirty-faced buildings, the slick blue base of the Renaissance Center was just visible, like a prom queen among the lepers.

At five o’clock on the button a green Dodge club cab as old as unleaded gas came chugging down the alley and stopped a hundred yards away, where it was enveloped momentarily by its own plume of dust and burned oil. Its horn beeped. I got out and strode that way.

The man behind the wheel of the pickup cranked down his window and looked me over with heavy-lidded eyes in a face the color of blue coal. Chill air and loud music came out of the opening.

“You him?” The Mississippi was strong this evening.

“I’m me,” I said.

“I don’t remember faces, just guns. Get in.” He closed the window and unlocked the door on the passenger’s side.

The temperature was at least a dozen degrees cooler inside. The upholstery was maroon plush and the dash was padded leather with more gauges and dials in it than the cockpit of a DC-10. He had a sound system made in heaven and assembled in Tokyo that was belting out Fleetwood Mac loud enough to wake Jimmy Hoffa. I found the power cutoff and punched it. Silence hit me like a skillet.

“You don’t like music?” he said.

“Not enough to sacrifice the fillings in my molars.”

He showed me his own molars. Shooter was a long trickle of water whose bones showed under his skin in a tank top and striped shorts and alligator shoes without socks. He’d told me once he was allergic to leather and canvas. “What you packing?”

I opened my coat to show I was unarmed. He parked the copy of the
Shotgun News
he’d had in his lap over his sun visor and laid the nine-millimeter Beretta it had been hiding on top of the dash.

“You got to cover your ass in this work,” he explained. “They found one of my old partners washing around a pier at the Detroit Yacht Club last week.”

“They let him in?”

“Just his top half. That’s all they found. Say, what you want to mess around with one of them big old water-cooled machine guns, anyway? I can put a Russian assault rifle in your hands for sixteen-fifty; weighs one-tenth as much and it’s a whole hell of a lot more accurate.”