Free King of the Corner by Loren D. Estleman

driver, or what a truck driver used to look like before power steering. Between the first two fingers of his right hand resting on the chair arm a cigarette had burned down to the flesh and gone out
    For a second Doc thought he’d found his second dead body in twelve hours. Then something broke loose and a fierce racking snore made him jump. After that the noise became rhythmic. It remained loud.
    A pony glass and a fifth of Ten High two-thirds empty stood on an end table next to the chair. Doc thought he knew something about Taber then, if this was Taber. It was a special kind of drunk that didn’t wake up when a cigarette scorched the tender flesh between his fingers.
    Doc didn’t try to wake him. In a desk with a pullout leaf he found paper and pencils, wrote a note explaining that he was from Maynard Ance and that he was taking the car, signed it, and left it on the leaf, weighting it down with a dirty ashtray. Taber was still snoring when he went out.
    A small paved parking lot for the tenants elled behind the building. Four cars were parked there early on a working afternoon and none of the plates matched the number on the key ring Ance had given him. Walking around the outside of the complex to see if there was more to the lot, he spotted a Coachmen motor home as long as a city block, parked next to the building with two wheels up on the berm that flanked the driveway. The numbers checked out. He hadn’t paid much attention when Ance had referred to it as a bus.
    The inside was a higher climb than Neal’s pickup. Both front seats were mounted on swivels. Behind them was a dining nook, a stove and refrigerator, a couple of fold-down beds, plenty of drawers and cabinets, a closet of a bathroom with a stainless steel basin and a chemical toilet, and something next to it that had a drain in the floor and so might have been a tiny shower before someone had installed bars around it that opened on one side, turning it into a cell.
    The tallest of the cabinets was locked. He unlocked it with a small brass key that didn’t match the others on the ring. Two shotguns, one with a cut-down barrel, a .30–30 Winchester carbine, assorted handguns, and a Thompson submachine gun glistened under a sheen of oil inside foam-lined compartments. Doc had never seen a Thompson outside of old-time gangster movies. The guards on the catwalks at Jackson had carried rifles. He removed the full-length shotgun, a twin of the Ithaca his father had given him on his fourteenth birthday to hunt rabbits, and inspected the breech. It was loaded. He wondered if that was legal in a motor vehicle in Michigan. He wondered if that mattered with the bail bondsman. Feeling suddenly that someone was watching him, Doc put back the weapon and closed and locked the cabinet. Just holding the gun was a violation of parole.
    The motor home’s controls were the same as a car’s. He started the motor and, proceeding slowly—he had never tried to maneuver anything so large—pulled forward into the parking lot and backed and turned the wheel and went forward again and backed again, angling the vehicle’s nose out toward the road. He was straightening it for the last time, using both big side mirrors to avoid hitting parked cars, when a face came to the window on the driver’s side eight feet above the ground. Startled, he stamped on the brake.
    The face’s mouth was moving, distorting it, but he recognized the man he had left snoring in apartment 612. He rolled down the window.
    “—going, you son of a bitch?” The cab filled with the stench of half-digested whiskey.
    Doc said, “Maynard Ance’s office. I left you a note. Want to come along?”
    “Give me them keys.” An arm in a white sleeve flashed past Doc’s face. Instinctively he slapped it up with his left hand. Taber almost fell off the step but caught hold of the mirror post and hauled himself back up. “Fucking prick cocksucking car thief bastard.” Doc rolled up the window quickly.
    An