Free Motor City Blue by Loren D. Estleman Page B

stale meat. Its growl was a dynamo rumbling deep in its powerful chest.
    “Ulysses! Down!”
    The weight lifted suddenly from my shoulders, leaving only its ghost behind as the blood rushed in to fill the dents. The great beast turned a bobbed tail on me and went over to its mistress, its head lowered for petting. It planted its feet carefully this time, like an elephant testing the ground before trusting its weight to it.
    “You bad dog,” she said, but it didn’t sound as if she meant it. She scratched behind its ears. It closed its eyes and gave vent to a long, groaning sigh, like a record winding down. I hadn’t seen anything like it since the last time I fell off the wagon. From snout to truncated tail it stretched four feet and stood a yard high at the shoulder, with almost two feet of that gobbled up by its chest. From there its underside swept back up in a graceful scoop to taut flanks and narrow hips and muscular haunches, between which its nub of tail moved from side to side with a measured beat as its mistress’ pudgy fingers stroked the sensitive hollows behind its skull. Even when it wasn’t moving, its muscles seemed to throb and ripple with restless power beneath a thin coat of flesh and short hair the color of gun bluing.
    “You mustn’t let Uli frighten you, Mr. Walker,” she said, staring into the dog’s nut-brown eyes as with both hands she smoothed back the seams that ran down both sides of its neck. “He’s really very gentle. He wouldn’t hurt anything larger than a rabbit. Would you, dear?” Ulysses craned forward to lick her ear with a tongue like a wet facecloth.
    “Does that go for the guy that looks like Kong and talks like Willie Best out front?”
    That took a moment to seep through. Then she laughed that tinkly little laugh again. “You mean Felix. Yes, he’s harmless. If you believe what he says, he’d have been the world heavyweight champion in 1936 if they hadn’t forced him to throw his biggest fight. If they did, it was the only time he was ever paid for something he did all the time unintentionally and for free.”
    While she was talking, a slender black girl with very closely cropped hair drifted down the stairs, smiled at me dazzlingly, helped herself to a cigarette from the box on the table, and retreated back to the second story. I watched her openly. Anything else would have been ludicrous, as she was wearing a pair of rubber shower clogs and nothing else. Her skin was deep brown with a purplish tint. She had conical breasts and round, firm buttocks and a pubic patch that grew wild over her small mound, untouched by any razor. As she walked, the loose clogs came up and slapped the soles of her feet, but aside from that she made no sound at all. The dog watched her movements with a bored expression. Naked females were nothing new to him.
    I won’t say I wasn’t stirred. I’ve slept with women who didn’t move like that when they were fully clothed. But drinking’s the only vice I indulge in before noon. I reached over and stubbed out what was left of my cigarette and hoped to hell my hand wasn’t shaking as noticeably as it seemed.
    Beryl Garnet looked amused. She was still scratching Ulysses, who was sitting beside her chair now and, it appeared, studying my throat closely. “Don’t let Iris embarrass you,” she said. “She’s new. They’re like children at that stage, always trying to shock the grownups. I’ve found that if you ignore them when they do something outrageous, they soon become embarrassed themselves and stop.” She let her hand drop back into her lap. The Dane swung its mammoth head in her direction, looking for more attention; when none came it got up, stretched, its bones cracking, and trotted out the doorway through which it had entered.
    “You’re dying to know what a sweet little old lady like me is doing running a whorehouse.” She brushed fussily at the dog hairs adhering to her pink skirt. “When you’re my age you’ll