Free Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde by Loren D. Estleman Page B

United States, too small for a house and not quaint enough for a cottage. I acquired it from a foreman at Dodge Main who’d bought it for a starter home in 1940 and moved out thirty years later into his daughter’s house after she caught him trying to replace a spent fuse with a shotgun shell. After twenty-five years I don’t guess it’s a starter for me either. It’s a place to smoke a cigarette without alerting Detroit Vice, and maybe the only place in the solar system where a man can tell a visitor to go screw himself and make it stick. It needs a new roof, a coat of paint, and while we’re at it a cellar stocked with vintage Amontillado, excellent before dinner and when entombing enemies. I’d settle for the paint.
    The open tail I’d been touring with most of the day had evaporated sometime while I was parked in the warehouse district, replaced by a pale blue Bonneville with tinted windows; it had taken forty-five minutes of aimless driving to pick the car out of rush-hour traffic. After that I’d torn the wrapper off some tricks I’d learned in my varied and ultimately pointless career, but this one didn’t shake. Unlimited drug money and then the Gilia Fund for Unemployed Parasites had taught Hector Matador the value of hiring quality. I returned to conventional driving. I’d only been amusing myself. If the threat I’d passed through
Gilia was worth the breath it took, the second team would go away on its own. There was no sign of the Bonneville when I’d pulled into my garage; which whether it meant something or nothing I was too tired to decide. Nothing is more draining than a day of asking questions without answers.
    I heated a bowl of chili for supper, cooled it down with two beers, and took stock of my panoramic view of the neighborhood. In the dying light I saw no vehicles I couldn’t assign to a regular, but that was similarly inconclusive, so I stopped thinking about it. I read part of a mystery that had more holes in it than Augusta. I watched two figure skaters stumble out of Olympic gold on TV and went to bed. I had as much on my mind as Big Top Pee-Wee and I dreamed I was asleep in bed dreaming of nothing at all.
    When the telephone rang I switched on the light to read the alarm clock.
    “It’s three-fifteen,” I answered. “Do your kids know where you are?”
    “I don’t even know if I have any. I always give a phony name.”
    It was Barry Stackpole, sounding as bright as the moon. “It’s chipper,” I said. “Its news must be good.”
    “There is no bad news, only bad reporters. Where can we meet?”
    “I’d offer my office, but since you didn’t say after breakfast I’d say give it to me over the telephone, but since you won’t do that I’ll say the Atheneum. They’re open all night and you need a baseball bat to stir the coffee.” Barry wouldn’t order a pizza over a land line and he never touched cordless. He’d been tapped, bugged, and black-bagged under Nixon and Clinton, and under the present conditions all the cops needed to listen in was a thumbs-up from an Eagle Scout or better.
    “Thirty minutes.” He clicked off.
    It was snowing finally; bitter, streetwise flakes that rolled off the hood of the Cutlass like buckshot. I found a space near the six-story slot machine that used to be Trappers Alley and hung up my coat inside the Atheneum: a counter, six booths, and a
scatter of tables on gray linoleum as old as the wine-dark sea. The restaurant was one of the few left in Greektown that hadn’t gone to ferns and stainless steel.
    There were only three customers on-site. A couple with overcoats still on over their party clothes dined in chilly silence in the far booth. Barry was nursing a mug of coffee at the end of the counter. He wore no coat as before and the same clothes he’d had on earlier that day.
    I slid onto the stool next to his. “What happened to guarding your back?”
    He pointed to a convex mirror mounted above the blackboard menu. The Today