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

thought you were busy ghosting for fake gangsters.”
    “That’s cold. I thought we were good.”
    “I can’t make promises, Barry. There’s federal interest. You know where that always leads.”
    “Tell me. My FBI file has sequels. Is it them?”
    “Higher.”
    He rotated his chair, an ergonomic item he’d smuggled out of Rockefeller Center when NBC gave him his walking papers. “Attorney general? Don’t tell me you’ve got me in bad cess with the Pentecostals.”
    “Not that high.”
    “Homeland Security. Son of a bitch.”
    “I was impressed myself.”
    “This have anything to do with what happened in Grayling?”
    I wanted to smoke. I didn’t know what it might do to his equipment. “That’s a personal debt. If I can help you out I will. I can count the friends who’d drive six hours to take me home from the hospital on the fingers of a leper. If it turns out I can’t, it’ll have to be a favor to be named later. Right now I’m walking backwards in the dark.”
    “Well, if it’s as bad as what happened to this poor bastard, CNN will get it before I do.” He drummed a tattoo on the keys. The text vanished and his screensaver popped up. He’d traded his montage of classic gangster movies for a still life of Frank Nitti sprawled dead in an alley.
    He had two emotions he shared with the world, flippant and petulant. He was as high maintenance as a prom queen.
    “What do you know about the Church of the Freshwater Sea?”
    “Sounds like a brand of canned tuna.” He went back online. I couldn’t read the response, but no flags went up. “Just a lot of crap on the history of the Great Lakes. Is it a terrorist cell?”
    “I’d hate to think my tax dollars were being spent fighting a pole barn in Port Huron.” I told him what I knew about Paul Starzek.
    He typed in the name, waited. “Nothing. Which means it’s something. It’s much harder to stay off the Net than get on it. It sucks up everything.”
    “Not if you never go near it. This guy’s just a little bit right of Amish. Bill Gates couldn’t find him without a two-dollar map of Michigan counties.”
    “So Jeff Starzek’s the job?”
    “I didn’t say that. But yeah. He’s in a hole of some kind. I maynot be the rope, but since I didn’t bleed to death on a patch of frozen dirt, I can’t not try.”
    “Yeah. If I ever disappear, I know someone will look. It’s a comfort, like knowing where you’ll be buried. The family plot’s in Grand Rapids, by the way. Call my sister. She’s in the book.”
    “You did disappear, and I went looking. Our friendship hasn’t been the same since.”
    “I like to think the patch job held.”
    “November went a long way in that direction. Thanks, Barry. If they don’t slam the lid too tight I’ll let you in.” I levered myself off the stiff chair and tried not to suck in air through my teeth. I’d sat too long. He leaned back in his trick chair, watching me with eyes as clear and untroubled as a boy’s. He’d stopped aging twenty years ago.
    “I can float Paul Starzek and his church among the boys on the street,” he said. “It’s probably not his street.”
    “I wouldn’t risk it. If we all wind up in the same hole, who’ll throw us the rope?”
    “Good point. Back to Port Huron?”
    “I might cut a hole in the ice and drop in a line.”
    “Put an anvil in your lap. The big ones pull back.”
    Clouds sagged a few feet above the Huron channel as if they were filled with lead shot. Out on the white ice, some fishermen were hiding from their families in shanties built of scrapwood and galvanized iron; the smoke sliding out of their stovepipes was no darker than the overcast. The iron-nuts diehards sat exposed to the elements on fish buckets, holding short brightly painted rods above the holes they’d punched in the surface and getting up occasionally to swish away the rapidly re-forming ice with their bare hands. You have to really like the sport, or need the fish, to pursue it