Free King of the Corner by Loren D. Estleman Page B

unremarkable. It looked like a display in a discount furniture store. Family pictures crowded the mantel of the gas fireplace, the only personal items in the room.
    “Thanks for coming. I’m Howard Wizotsky.”
    Ance and Doc shook hands in turn with the man who got up from the sofa when they came in. He looked younger than his wife but was probably about the same age, a solid man starting to go soft around the middle in a blue work shirt and slacks with shards of gray in his black crew cut. His hands were heavily calloused, with square, thick nails, and his face was burned reddish brown and grainy as if from long exposure to the sun or some other source of dry heat.
    The men sat down. Mrs. Wizotsky turned off the TV set in the middle of a commercial for a trade school and went to the kitchen for coffee. “I hear you work at McLouth,” Ance told her husband. “I poured steel a couple of summers when I was going to Wayne State.”
    “They laid me off last week. Business went all to hell when GM took the Saturn to Tennessee.”
    “Bastards. They’ll have to do a lot more than dump Roger Smith to turn that board around. Where’s your son?”
    “Oakland County Jail. Bond’s twenty-five thousand dollars. All he did was take a car out for a joy ride. I’m not defending it. I stole a pack of Juicy Fruit from a newsstand when I was eight; my old man broke his hand on my ass and I never took another thing without paying for it in my life. Maybe I should’ve broken mine on Roy a long time ago. But, Jesus, twenty-five grand! It’s not like he took a shot at the mayor.”
    “Collect the bounty, huh?” Ance grinned.
    Wizotsky made an exhausted smile.
    “I called the Pontiac Police this afternoon,” the bail bondsman said. “Your boy shoved a salesman out the passenger’s door during a test drive. The salesman landed on his head. He’s been unconscious for thirty-six hours. The county prosecutor is talking assault with intent to commit great bodily harm less than murder. Your son’s nineteen. That’s a mandatory one to five in this state.”
    “Fucking yuppie made more on his worst day than I did in a week frying in that plant. Roy’s been working for minimum wage since he was sixteen.”
    “The man’s a human being, Howard.” Mrs. Wizotsky set a tray containing three steaming cups and a sugar bowl on the coffee table and took a seat on the edge of an upholstered chair with her hands in her lap.
    “Fuck him. He’s got insurance. I want my son out of that hole before he gets nailed by a bunch of fag bikers.”
    “There’d be a lot more chance of that if he were in the Wayne County lock-up. They get a better class of scroat in Oakland.” Ance tore open three packets of Sweet’n Low and stirred the contents into his coffee. “How much can you raise?”
    “I can scratch up ten percent. That’s customary, right?”
    “Do you have any collateral?”
    “The house is paid for. I’ve got eight more payments to make on the car.”
    “Model and year?”
    “’Eighty-eight Celebrity. It’s got less than forty thousand miles on it,” Wizotsky added hopefully.
    The bail bondsman pulled a face. “I’ll need you to sign the deed to the house over to the M. W. Ance Bail Bond Service. We can do it in your lawyer’s office if you want.”
    The couple exchanged a look. Wizotsky said, “We weren’t planning on signing anything over. If we wanted to put up the house we’d’ve just mortgaged again.”
    “But you came to me instead, because you know a bank or a mortgage company can take up to six weeks processing your application and all that time your boy will be sitting in jail. I’m prepared to go straight to my bank from here, get a cashier’s check in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars, and head right up to Pontiac with it this afternoon, unless you want your lawyer present when the deed changes hands. Roy will be home in time for supper.”
    Another look. Mrs. Wizotsky said, “Would you excuse