Free Silent Thunder by Loren D. Estleman Page B

“That’s Officer Pollard. He’ll drive our car back while I ride with you. Unless you’d rather leave yours here.”
    Somehow I knew before I looked that Pollard would have a crew cut and Ray-Bans. “We met yesterday,” I said. “What’s the charge?”
    “No charge. This isn’t an arrest. It would just be a lot more convenient all around if you’d come with us.”
    “If that’s a threat you did it nicely.”
    “When I make a threat, people don’t ask me if I made one.” He was waiting for an answer.
    “I’ll drive.”
    He shrugged; eloquently, of course. Where he came from shrugging is an art form.
    Pollard got into an unmarked Pontiac parked in the next aisle and I started the Chevy. Romero wound up the window on his side.
    “No air conditioning, sorry,” I said.
    “Don’t need it. Take I-75.”
    We tooled along Grand River with the Pontiac behind. “Puerto Rico, right?”
    “We’re all Puerto Ricans to you Anglos. I came with the boatlift.”
    “It’s a long way from Mariel to a gold shield in Iroquois Heights.”
    “We aren’t all convicts. Some of us are baseball players.”
    “I thought you looked like a shortstop.”
    “Catcher. I was scouted for the Tigers.” There was pride in his voice. “Ah, but you can’t feed your children on a boy’s dreams.”
    “Lousy batting average, huh.”
    “Worst in Toledo.”
    We didn’t say much once we entered the expressway. It was Friday afternoon and all the lanes were clogged with RV’s and boats on trailers pointed north. I lost sight of the Pontiac.
    “Take the next exit,” Romero said.
    “That’s the wrong way for downtown.”
    “I know it.”
    With him directing we followed a narrow paved road west of Iroquois Heights past a couple of shopping centers and then some houses. After a while the houses thinned out and we ran out of pavement. From there on, our way led between deep woods on both sides, with here and there a farm hacked out of the foliage. Crawling waves of heat flooded the hills ahead with imaginary pools of water. The Pontiac was visible now in the dust clouds behind us.
    “Turn in here.”
    We had been traveling for three quarters of an hour. I swung around a dusty unmarked mailbox and followed two ruts through a stand of virgin pines with trunks nearly as big around as the car, over a hill, and into a clearing where a long white house with bottle-green shutters stood on ten acres of fresh sod. A large red barn loomed behind it and horses grazed inside whitewashed fences between the buildings.
    We stopped in front of the house. Pollard braked behind us and our combined dust drifted forward and disappeared into the grass. As we were getting out, a rider who had been cantering a big chestnut around one of the corrals leaned down, unlatched the gate, and trotted up to the Chevy. It was Mark Proust, the Iroquois Heights deputy chief of police.
    “Any trouble?” he asked Romero.
    “No.”
    “I’ll see you inside.”
    Gathering the reins, Proust looked down at me for the first time. He looked much older than he had the last time we’d met, his white hair thinner, his face grayer and more pouchy; but then I was used to seeing him in a business suit. He appeared thicker but strangely fit in an open-necked shirt, whipcord breeches, and knee-length boots. He turned the horse and cantered back toward the corral without a word in my direction. Lieutenant Romero and I watched.
    “How long you figure he sat in that saddle waiting for us?” I asked.
    “Horas.” The lieutenant made a hoarse noise in his throat. “Hours.”
    Inside, a Hispanic maid in a white starched blouse and an orange skirt led us into a sun-drenched living room full of rustic furniture, exchanged pleasantries with Romero in Spanish, and left us.
    “When did he get the ranch bug?” I asked.
    “About the time his first granddaughter graduated high school.”
    Pollard said nothing. His uniform creaked when he shifted his weight. I looked at a recent