Free Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss by Loren D. Estleman

doors. You never know when someone might need enlightenment.

NINE
    T he Web site was called Martyrs R Us. You can’t make this stuff up.
    It belonged to a small Catholic press in some inexplicable place like Bayonne or Newport News. Its feature that month was a life of St. Thomas More, available in either trade paper or a deluxe limited edition bound in cardinal-red calfskin with a CD laid in of Gregorian chants, recorded by the brothers of Our Lady of Perpetual Dolour in Kirkwall, Scotland. You could also buy silver-and-enamel cuff links fashioned in the shape of John the Baptist’s severed head.
    Barry Stackpole had found it by typing in “St. Sebastian” and patiently nursing the entry through sites on cities of that name, church-sponsored pie-eating contests, the late actor Sebastian Cabot, and—mysteriously—Benito Mussolini. There appeared to be no Christian sects registered online that paid any more than lip service to the arrow-riddled martyr of Paul Starzek’s Church of the Freshwater Sea. I hadn’t really expected there to be: Starzek hadn’t appeared to own a television, much less a computer.
    At the last minute I’d postponed my return junket to Port Huronto find out what I could about the pole-barn parish. Barry had moved again, from the suburbs into the belly of the beast. With the kill fee a satellite network had paid him not to air a six-part series on the history of organized crime in America, he’d bought a condo on the fourth floor of a former steam radiator factory in the shrinking warehouse district off East Jefferson, within pistol range of the Renaissance Center. Bullet-resistant windows provided a view of Windsor, Ontario, across the river and also of cranes picking apart what remained of industrial-age Detroit.
    He’d paid enough for it to build a small mansion of six thousand or so square feet but, typically, had furnished it out of someone’s garage. The scattered sticks preserved the integrity of the loft’s bulk-storage origins, with steel utility shelves packed with commercial books on the mob arranged by geographical location and rows of transcripts of wiretapped conversations bound in paper covers stamped FBI PROPERTY—DO NOT REMOVE FROM LIBRARY . The only decoration was a battered eight-by-ten photograph in a brass document frame of Al Capone shaking hands with Babe Ruth, putatively signed by Scarface and the Bambino themselves. I don’t know how he came by it, but it was the only thing he’d taken with him through all his midnight moves. If I knew Barry at all—and I’d known him for thirty years and ten thousand miles—there was a working fire escape out back and a speedboat tied up to a dock for a fast exit. He wasn’t paranoid, just practical.
    I sat on a plywood potato-chip chair salvaged from some failed high school next to the sheet-metal kitchen table Barry used for a workstation and watched him riffle the keys on the most expensive fixture in the house. He was dexterous for a man with only eight fingers. Joe Zerilli’s street soldiers had blown off the rest, along with a leg and a piece of his cranium, but you wouldn’t know it by the way he got around on his prosthesis and combed his fair hair across the steel patch.
    The audio sample that came up with the Gregorians sounded like an overworked compressor in a refrigerator car. He turned down the volume on the speakers, tapped his mouse. His eyes never wandered from the seventeen-inch screen.
    “What’s that you’re whistling?” I asked.
    He stopped, then whistled the last couple of bars again. He hadn’t been paying attention. “ ‘The Thieving Magpie.’ Rossini.”
    “Oh.”
    “Theme from
Prizzi’s Honor.”
    “Oh.” Different emphasis.
    “Fun flick. Inaccurate as hell. The Mafia doesn’t employ lady hitmen. Never has, never will. Even if they look like Kathleen Turner.”
    “Nicholson was good, though.”
    “Nicholson’s good even when he’s bad. Ah!”
    “What?” I never know where to