Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (43 page)

“Save it for your next campaign. If my hunch is right I’ll find them both in the same spot.” I put the note in my breast pocket and took myself out.

The navy-blue Chrysler was parked across the street from the newspaper office when I came around the corner from where I’d left my car. There was only one man in it, which meant his partner was
watching the back door. I ducked inside a department store down the block to think.

There was a fire exit in Men’s Wear with a warning sign in red. The clerk, slim and black in a gray three-piece, was helping a customer pick out a necktie by the dressing rooms. I pushed through the door.

The alarm was good and loud. Moustache had gotten out of the car and was hustling through the front door when I rounded the building and trotted across the street to the
Spectator.
The skinny woman in the tailored suit read Strong’s note and pointed out Ed Stillwell’s desk.

Reporters are packrats. While I was sifting through a ton of scrawled-over scrap, Rube Zendt came over and leaned on the desk. “Cops are watching the place,” he said.

“Do tell.”

“The older one with the moustache is Sergeant Gogol. The wrestler’s Officer Joyce. They’re meaner than two vice principals. When you’re ready to go, hide in the toilet and I’ll call in Joyce from the back—tell him Gogol’s got you out front or something—and you can duck out the rear. It worked once.”

“I guess you scribblers look out for each other.”

“Stillwell? Can’t stand the bald son of a bitch. But ink’s thicker than blood.” He strolled back to his desk.

Ten minutes later I found something that looked good, one half of a fifty-dollar bill with a scrap of paper clipped to it and “9 p.m. 8/8 OHS” penciled on the scrap in Stillwell’s crooked hand. Today was the eighth. The torn-bill gag was corny as anything, but that was Iroquois Heights for you. I pocketed it, got Zendt’s attention, and went to the bathroom.

I spent the rest of the day in a Detroit motel in case the cops went to my house or office. From there I called Elda Chase to tell her I was still working and to ask if she’d heard anything. She hadn’t. I watched TV, ordered a pizza for dinner, and left three slices for the maid at 8:30.

The old high school was lit up like Homecoming when I presented myself at the open front door. A security guard in khaki asked me if I was there for the parents’ meeting. I handed him the half-bill.

He looked at it, dug the other half out of a shirt pocket, and matched them. Then he put both halves in the pocket. “You’re Still-well?”

“Yeah.”

“I heard you was in the hospital.”

“I got out.” I passed him ahead of any more questions.

A meeting was going on somewhere in the building; voices droned in the linoleum-and-tile halls. Acting on instinct I headed away from them, stepping around a folding gate beyond which the overhead lights had been turned off. A new noise reached me: louder, not as stylized, less human. It increased as I passed through twin doors and stopped before a steel one marked BOILER ROOM. I opened it and stepped into tropical heat.

I was on a catwalk overlooking the basement, where twenty men in undershirts or no shirts at all crouched around fifteen square feet of bare concrete floor, shouting and shaking their fists at a pair of pit bulls ripping at each other in the center. From the pitch of their snarls it was still early in the fight, but already the floor was patterned with blood.

The door opened behind me while I was leaning over the pipe railing trying to get a look at the men’s faces. I stepped back behind
the door, crowding into a dark corner smelling of cobwebs and crumbling cement. I wished I’d brought my gun with me. I’d thought it would slow me down.

Two men came in and stood with their backs to me, close enough to breathe down their collars. I recognized Henry Revere’s white head and green workclothes. The other man’s hair wasn’t much darker. He was taller and white, wearing a gray summerweight suit cut to disguise an advanced middle-age spread. From the back he looked familiar.

“Which dog’s that?” wheezed the man in the suit. I knew that broken windpipe.

“Lord Baltimore,” said Revere. “Bart. He’s new.”

“He doesn’t have the weight to start out that hard. He’ll fold in five.”

“That’s a bull for you. Shepherds pace theirselves.”

“Shepherds are pansies. I told you not to buy any more.”

“I gots to buy something. We’re running out of dogs.”

“Sell what you got. I’m jumping this racket.”

“Man, I don’t like the other. That’s heat with a big H.”

“
I’m
the heat.”

“What if one of them cons talks to the press?”

The man in the suit coughed. “Why’d he want to? What other chance he got to miss a stretch in Jackson? He should thank us.”

“Not if he gets beat half to death like that reporter.”

“Gogol and Joyce got carried away. They were supposed to just rough him around, maybe break something. Anyway he had his slice. He should’ve stood on his tongue.”

“What I mean,” Revere said. “If he talked, so could a con. And what about that detective?”

“I got men everyplace he goes. His wings are clipped.”

“You say so, Chief. I feel better when he’s grounded.”

A shrill yelp sheared the air. Then silence.

“There, you see?” said the man in the suit. “No distance.”

The door opened again. I squeezed tight to the wall. The pair turned, and I got a good view in profile of Acting Chief of Police Mark Proust’s long slack face. His complexion matched the gray of his suit.

“Chief, that guy Stillwell’s here. Thought I better tell you.” The security man’s voice was muffled a little on the other side of the open door.

“Impossible. What’d he look like?”

“About six feet, 185, brown hair.”

“That’s not—”

I hit the door with my shoulder, occupying the guard while I shoved Proust into the railing.

Revere moved my way, but his short leg slowed him down. I swept past him and threw a right at the guard, missing his jaw but glancing off the muscle on the side of his neck. He lost his balance. I vaulted over him.

“It’s Walker!” Proust shouted. “Use your gun!”

Flying through the twin doors in the hall I sent a late dog rooter sprawling. Behind me a shot flattened the air. The bullet shattered the glass in one of the doors. I reached the folding gate, but the opening was gone; the guard or someone had closed and locked it. The guard was coming through the broken door, behind his gun. I ducked through a square arch in the wall, stumbled on stairs in the darkness, caught my equilibrium on the run, and started taking them two at a time heading up. A bullet skidded off brick next to my right ear.

I ran out of stairs on a dark landing. Feet pounded the steps behind me. I felt for and found a doorknob. It turned.

Cool fresh air slid over me down a shaft of moonlight. I was on the roof with the lights of Iroquois Heights spread at my feet. I let the heavy door slam shut of its own weight, got my bearings, and made
for the fire chute. I had a foot over the edge when the security guard piled out the door and skidded to a halt, bringing his gun up in two hands. Gravity took me.

The inside of the tube smelled of stale metal. My ears roared as I slid a long way, as if falling in a dream. Then I leveled out and my feet hit ground and inertia carried me upright and forward. Officer Joyce, standing at the bottom, pivoted his bulk and brought his right arm down with a grunt. A fuse blew in my head and I went down another chute, this one bottomless.

I awoke with a flash of nausea. My scalp stung and an inflated balloon was rubbing against the inside of my skull. I got my eyelids open despite sand in the works, only to find that I was still in darkness. This darkness stank. As I lay waiting for my pupils to catch up I grew aware of an incessant loud yapping and that it was not in my head. Then I identified the smell. I was in a kennel.

Not quite in it, I thought, as objects around me assumed vague shape. I was lying on moist earth surrounded by wire cages with wet black muzzles pressed against the wire from inside and eyes shining farther back. These were the quiet ones. The others were setting up a racket and hurling themselves against the doors and trying to gnaw through the wire.

My arms had gone to sleep. I tried to move them, and that was when I found out my wrists were cuffed behind me. My ankles were bound too, with something thin and strong that chafed skin; twine or insulated wire. I rolled over onto my face and worked myself up onto my knees. The balloon inside my head creaked.

Something rattled, followed by a current of air that sucked in light. The walls were gray corrugated steel. A pair of shiny black Oxfords appeared in front of me and I looked up at Mark Proust. The battery-powered lantern he was carrying shadowed the pouches in his paper-pulp face.

“Cut his legs loose,” he said. “He isn’t going anywhere.”

Feet scraped earth behind me. A blade sawed fiber and my ankles came apart. I got up awkwardly with my wrists still bound. Circulation needled back into my lower legs.

“When was the last time, snoop? The Broderick kill?”

I said nothing. Officer Joyce joined Proust, folding a jackknife. The crewcut gave his face a planed look, like a wooden carving with the features blocked in for finishing later.

“Shut up those dogs,” Proust said.

I hadn’t realized Henry Revere was present. The old black man came up from behind me and kicked the cage containing the loudest of the dogs. The dog, a sixty-pound pit bull, stopped barking and shrank back snarling. He kicked two more. The third dog hesitated, then lunged, fangs biting wire. Revere kicked again and it yelped and cowered. Its eyes glittered in the shadows at the rear of the cage. The rest of the animals fell into a whimpering silence. Two of the cages contained shepherds.

“Know where we are, snoop?” asked Proust.

“The Iroquois Heights Police Academy,” I said. “Those are some of your new rookies.”

“Funny guy. It’s my little ten-acre retirement nest egg six miles out of the Heights. The old high school’s nice, but it’s too close to everything.”

“Makes a good front, though,” I said. “Like dog fighting, which is illegal but forgivable in case someone starts prying. Maybe he won’t
think to look further and find the real racket.”

“What’s that, snoop?”

I said nothing again.

“Smart.” He smirked at Joyce and Revere. “A smart private nose is what we got here. Only he just thinks he’s smart. Thinks if he acts dumb we’ll let him go on breathing. Which makes him dumb for real.”

I shrugged. “Okay. I heard enough to know you’ve graduated from fighting dogs to fighting inmates, probably from downtown holding. In return for their release or a word to the judge they agree to fight each other, probably in front of a crowd that’s outgrown betting on dogs. Your piece of the gate must be sweet.”

“It pays the bills. Especially when we put a black in the pit with a white. A lot of the residents here left Detroit to get away from the blacks. No offense, Henry.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t put one in with Stillwell.”

“He wouldn’t have lasted two minutes. Gogol and Joyce almost killed him without even trying.” He paused, tasting his next words. “I figure you for a better show.”

“I was wondering when we were coming to that.”

“You might win, who knows?”

“What do I win, a bullet?”

“Warm up if you want. People are still coming. I’ll send someone back for you.” He went out, trailing Joyce and Revere. A padlock rattled.

It was a truss barn with a high roof and some moonlight seeping through cracks between the bolted-on sections. The cage doors were latched with simple sliding bolts. I backed up to them and worked them loose, hoping the agitated dogs inside wouldn’t chew off my fingers. I left them engaged just enough to keep the doors closed. A good lunge would slip any of them. I came to the shepherds last.

In the gloom either of them could have been the dog in the picture Elda Chase had given me.

“Max.”

One of them barked sharply. I called again. It barked again. The other looked at me and gave a rippling snarl. Just to be sure I left both cages locked. They were safer inside.

Some of the cages were empty and I sat on one. I wanted a cigarette but I didn’t fidget. The last thing I wanted to do was startle a dog into breaking loose while I was still present.

After a long time of measured breathing and sweating beyond measure, I heard the lock rattle again and Gogol and Joyce came in. I stood. The detective with the moustache held his revolver on me while his partner led me out. Gogol followed with the gun.

We walked twenty yards through a jumble of cars parked on rutted earth to a steel barn bigger than the one we had just left. Henry Revere passed us coming out the door. He was going back to see to the dogs.

The interior was lit with electric bulbs strung along the tops of the walls. Crude bleachers had been erected on either side of a hole dug five feet deep and eight feet in diameter and lined with rough concrete. The bleachers were jammed with men and some women, all talking in loud voices that grew shrill when we entered. This building smelled as strong as the other, but the stink here was sharper, more foul, distinctly human. Proust sat in the middle of the front row.

We stopped at the edge of the pit and Joyce unlocked my handcuffs. Inside the pit stood a black man wearing only faded blue jeans. His hair was cropped short and his torso was slabbed with glistening muscle. He watched me with yellowish eyes under a ridge of bone.

I was rubbing circulation back into my wrists when Joyce shoved me into the pit. My opponent caught me and hurled me backward. I
struck concrete, emptying my lungs. The crowd shrieked. He charged. I pivoted just in time to avoid being crushed between him and the wall. He caught himself with his hands, pushed off, and whirled. I hit him with everything, flush on the chin. He shook his head. I threw a left. He caught it in a hand the size of my office and hit me on the side of the head with his other fist. I heard a gong.

I backpedaled, buying time for my vision to clear. He followed me. I kicked him in the groin and punched him in the throat; he was no boxer and had left both unprotected. They didn’t need protecting.