Free Angel Eyes by Loren D. Estleman Page B

that room standing over a murdered corpse when someone came to the front door.
    I heard the handle rattling and vaulted back into the storeroom, where I pushed the door almost shut, leaving a crack just wide enough to observe the newcomer. It was the thickset black I had seen pushing a broom on my last visit. Wearing a greasy jacket over his green work suit, his glowering features all but obscured beneath the bill of a soiled cloth cap, he entered in mid-grumble, muttering about the weather and the condition of the streets and the mayor and life in general with the singsong litany of a man who begins bellyaching in the morning and doesn’t stop until he’s turned out the light to go back to sleep or had his first drink. He was still at it as he drew near the storeroom. I noticed too late that I was sharing quarters with his broom. Releasing the knob gently, I flattened against the wall and pulled out the Luger.
    His footsteps stopped suddenly. I waited for them to resume. They didn’t. I remembered then that I’d left the gate open at the other end of the bar and that the body was in plain sight of anyone who happened to glance in that direction. He didn’t scream or gasp. They don’t, in that neighborhood. He stood still for a space, the way I had, and then his crepe soles kissed the floor swiftly going away, toward where his boss lay. I put away the gun and then, easing open the door to keep the hinges from complaining, crept up behind him on the balls of my feet. He was standing with his back to me and his head bowed, ogling the corpse and breathing like an asthmatic. At the last instant he sensed something and began to turn.
    I clamped my left arm across his throat and slammed him hard against me while gripping his right wrist with my right hand, wrenching it back and up. He made a single, guttural noise of raw animal fear, a chilling sound. I choked it off.
    “I can crush your windpipe or I can splinter your arm like a bamboo pole,” I whispered in his ear. I managed to keep from slipping into the North Vietnamese dialect, but just barely. “Do you believe I can do that? Nod if the answer’s yes.”
    He nodded. His neck was sweating and I could smell the corruption of panic. Something solid in his hip pocket was pressing against my pelvis. I asked him if that was what I thought it was. He nodded again.
    “Handy. Or do you always carry it?”
    He nodded a third time. He gave good hostage, I’ll say that for him.
    “Man, scratch anyone over twelve this side of Woodward, you’ll find a piece.” The words tumbled out shallow and breathless, forced out by the pressure of my forearm against his throat. “Ain’t you heard? This here’s Dodge City.”
    “Shame on you,” I said. “Renaissance and all.” In the advertising mirror behind the bar I glimpsed a face I would cross the street to avoid, strained, tight, and leering. I released him, stepped back, and took the Luger from my pocket. “The iron. Slide it along the bar.”
    It was nothing, an Italian automatic of no particular make stamped out of sheet metal and exported in a hurry before it blew up in someone’s face. I picked it up off the polished counter top and sniffed the muzzle. It hadn’t been fired recently. The butt was clear of blood and hair. I dropped it into my coat pocket. Between it and the Luger and the diamond ring I was hauling enough metal to sink an ore carrier.
    Turning, the janitor recognized me. I read his thoughts: He was calculating the life expectancy of a man who had seen his boss’s murderer. Others followed it, thoughts I liked even less.
    “I didn’t kill him.”
    He wasn’t convinced. I couldn’t imagine why not. I broke the magazine out of the Luger and showed it to him.
    “See? Loaded. Why skull him when a bullet is so much neater and more certain?” I shoved the clip back in, just in case he forgot about the one in the chamber. His gaze roamed toward the corpse and back to my eyes, or rather to the bridge of my