The Hours of the Virgin (30 page)

Well, hell.

I must have caught some fumes of my own.

I tugged the .45 out from under my belt, kicked out the clip, and pocketed it. The clip was fully loaded. I hadn't bothered to pump one into the barrel when I dropped the hammer on North. I undid the bundle, put the pistol in the cigar box with the clippings, and did it back up again. Now it was heavy enough to anchor a small boat.

I cruised through the house one last time, but it was just for fun. I was satisfied I'd removed all physical traces of Dale Leopold from it and the office. I shut the bedroom window.

The drive to Jefferson Avenue was not without interest. The wet snow of the morning had frozen on the pavement, creating a hard slick base beneath the fresh powder, like glass under talcum. The Cutlass turned into a hydrofoil whenever I went around a curve or changed lanes. I snuck along at twelve miles per hour with the river on my right, gray as galvanized iron. The Windsor skyline looked like a matte painting in an old movie about King Arthur. The stuff was coming down in starched sheets.

The Belle Isle bridge was all mine. Farther down the river an ore carrier squatted low on the water, but it was something that didn't have anything to do with me or the century I was living in. The snow muffled my tires and the flakes coming down closed in around the car, flowing with it like a communion robe. They landed on the water without making a ripple, bobbed once, and dissolved. The temperature there was just above freezing. By nightfall it would drop and ice would form like candle wax along the banks.

I parked in the nearest lot, or what I assumed was one; the entire island was covered and I couldn't tell grass from asphalt, or for that matter the Scott Fountain from the Dossin Museum. Mine was the only car in sight. I felt like a French explorer.

Like a lot of Detroiters I almost never visit that oblong oasis on the watery border between the United States and the Dominion of Canada. When I do, it always seems to be winter. A few years back I had stood ankle-deep in snow on the softball field and watched three men die, their blood staining the white like that of a sacrificed lamb. It occurred to me that I had witnessed more than my share of that kind of thing, although probably not as much as Dale. No wonder he liked the comics.

I walked down to the beach. The cold was getting to me now through my thin shoes and saturated trousers. The fabric was frozen stiff as armor below the knees. The wind blew in gusts, kicking up pale clouds that settled into stationary waves in the intervals. The place didn't look anything like it had in summer, the one time Dale and I came to the island together.

People fish this river, kid. The sewers empty into it and so do the coke ovens at the plants. If you dip a toe in it the nail turns black and falls off in three days, but they eat the fish and somehow they live to come back and fish it again. I used to think they were too hungry to care. But it ain't the fish. The French paddled up that channel, the Indians too. Soldiers crossed it in bateaux and bootleggers in their big-ass black sedans when it froze solid. The whole history of the city's here, and will be long after they finish tearing down the best buildings and burning the rest. You can lay me down here too if you ever get a minute. Let the fish nibble my ears and swim up to the hooks and get themselves caught and bring back part of me with 'em. A hole in the ground's okay for some people. Not me. Nobody ever comes back from a hole in the ground
.

Well, he wasn't in a hole in the ground. His ashes were in an overpriced urn in his sister's living room in Toledo and she and I weren't on speaking terms because she thought I was the reason he didn't throw over detective work and join her husband in the cement business. She may have been partly right, although Dale had told me the only thing that kept him from going into partnership with his brother-in-law was that he was the kind of twerp who would marry a woman like Dale's sister. Anyway he wasn't coming back from that urn either. I had all of his mortal baggage under my arm.

“Heads up, Dale.”

I gave the bundle a football toss. I put teeth in it. It made a long loop, splashed, pitched twice, rolled over like a ship in a Viking funeral, and slid under the surface, as gone as virtue.

A Biography of Loren D. Estleman

Loren D. Estleman (b. 1952) is the award-winning author of over sixty-five novels, including mysteries and westerns.

Raised in a Michigan farmhouse constructed in 1867, Estleman submitted his first story for publication at the age of fifteen and accumulated 160 rejection letters over the next eight years. Once
The Oklahoma Punk
was published in 1976, success came quickly, allowing him to quit his day job in 1980 and become a fulltime writer.

Estleman's most enduring character, Amos Walker, made his first appearance in 1980's
Motor City Blue
, and the hardboiled Detroit private eye has been featured in twenty novels since. The fifth Amos Walker novel,
Sugartown
, won the Private Eye Writers of America's Shamus Award for best hardcover novel of 1985. Estleman's most recent Walker novel is
Infernal Angels
.

Estleman has also won praise for his adventure novels set in the Old West. In 1980,
The High Rocks
was nominated for a National Book Award, and since then Estleman has featured its hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, in seven more novels, most recently 2010's
The Book of Murdock
. Estleman has received awards for many of his standalone westerns, receiving recognition for both his attention to historical detail and the elements of suspense that follow from his background as a mystery author.
Journey of the Dead
, a story of the man who murdered Billy the Kid, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

In 1993 Estleman married Deborah Morgan, a fellow mystery author. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Loren D. Estleman in a Davy Crockett ensemble at age three aboard the Straits of Mackinac ferry with his brother, Charles, and father, Leauvett.

Estleman at age five in his kindergarten photograph. He grew up in Dexter, Michigan.

Estleman in his study in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, in the 1980s. The author wrote more than forty books on the manual typewriter he is working on in this image.

Estleman and his family. From left to right: older brother, Charles; mother, Louise; father, Leauvett; and Loren.

Estleman and Deborah Morgan at their wedding in Springdale, Arkansas, on June 19, 1993.

Estleman with actor Barry Corbin at the Western Heritage Awards in Oklahoma City in 1998. The author won Outstanding Western Novel for his book
Journey of the Dead
.

Loren signing books at Eyecon in St. Louis in 1999. He was the guest of honor.