American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel (23 page)

“San Francisco’s west,” I said. “We’re heading east, unless that bash in the head and the stuff in Cho’s needle screwed up my internal compass.”

“Sweden,” said the woman. “With a stop to refuel in upstate New York and Scotland.”

“Sweden, is that where the market is?”

She said nothing, profiled against the window with her chin on one knuckle. She looked like an ancient Chinese coin.

“Seeing that liver made me hungry for onions,” I said. “It also answered the question that’s been eating my lunch for days. Hilary Bairn worked in the accounting department of a medical courier service. That’s what made him worth all the fuss. You wanted him to juggle the books to put your hands on transplantable human organs and laboratory paraphernalia. That’s big money on the black market. It could finance an alien-smuggling operation on the grand scale for years. No wonder he ran scared.”

She sat back and turned my way, crossing perfectly lathed legs sheathed in glistening black hose. She was a well-preserved specimen in her own right. I wondered how much time she spent in refrigeration.

“It’s a squeamish subject for many,” she said. “The scientific community deals in it like scrap. I don’t bother with microscopes and serums; equipment is too bulky to transport for what it brings, and chemicals too volatile. You’d be surprised how many respected professionals, Nobel prospects, don’t ask questions they don’t want to know the answers to when it comes to raising money for research. That liver you spilled is worth two million in cash to someone who can afford to have
himself placed at the top of the list of qualified recipients. Your own Mickey Mantle got a boost, in spite of the fact his condition was self-created.”

“He was your Mickey Mantle too,” I said. “You’re a citizen.”

“You wouldn’t know that by the way I used to be treated in stores. Of course, that was before I began making purchases in hundreds of thousands.” She opened a hand as if to let something fly away. “Sweden is beautiful, but it’s dark six months out of the year. Swedes consume more alcohol per capita than all of Europe, including Russia—which is our next stop after Stockholm. Cirrhosis kills more people in both countries than traffic accidents. Then there are corneas in Israel, kidneys in India, bone marrow in South Africa. In Sydney, Australia, a healthy heart would buy you twenty thousand acres of pasture in the Outback.”

“I’m allergic to wool. If it’s a bribe you’re offering.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, you with your gun. You won’t leave this plane alive.”

Watson said, “She’s fly, Walker. We’re just passing the time on account of Elron forgot to bring magazines.”

“Stop talking like Shaft or I’ll put you on ice too. That was a nice fishing expedition at my place. You didn’t want to find out who killed Esmerelda; you gave Madame Sing your okay on that because he tried to set himself up in independent business and you’re a closed-shop kind of guy. When you found out how much I knew you tried to buy me off. That call I made to her was unnecessary. I already had the black spot out on me.”

“She wasn’t pulling your chain about the money. I put the screws to Bairn but good, for my cut. How’d I know he’d wind up offing his bee-yotch?”

I let him have that one. He was a cartoon.

“You’re sure Elron didn’t pay her a visit?” I asked. “Just to make sure the screws held? He likes hitting people on the head. Then comes the madame to offer Bairn a way out of the frame. Is Cho a lawyer, too? Maybe a sushi chef?”

Charlotte Sing said, “That was racist, and ungrateful. He chose merely to sedate you when others suggested a fatal overdose. Victor defected from North Korea, bringing with him a medical breakthrough from the hospital where he was head of research to endear him to your—pardon me,
our
State Department. He was given asylum, and later citizenship, but predictably the government back home was unwilling to release transcriptions of his qualification to practice medicine. He was delivering mail when I offered him a more respectable position.”

“Spinning the wheel in Detroit Beach. I thought you only owned the property the casino stood on.”

“No one can prove otherwise. About anything.”

I scratched my chin with the gun sight. Three hours’ growth of beard scratched back. That gave me a fair idea of the time I’d been in the Phantom Zone. I wondered if anyone was missing me. “On a second pass, Bairn got too notorious too fast because Deirdre Fuller was a secondhand celebrity. It made sense for Violet Pershing to save his butt when she saved it, but when the cops tied him to Esmerelda’s murder and Loudermilk sprang him from me to keep him from talking, he became a two-time fugitive and hotter than a tin skillet. Back to Violet Pershing to mop up.

“So who stocked the refrigerator?” I jerked my thumb toward the locked hatch.

Madame Sing made a sound deep in her throat. “I had a backup. He looked less promising than Bairn, but he came
through in the end. People generally do when there’s so much money to be made.”

“There’s a lot of money in gambling too,” I said. “There’s a lot of a lot more in parting out the human body over two hemispheres; enough to buy up all of Australia, with New Zealand for a winter getaway. Not enough for you, though. The profits from the ready-to-assemble line are just startup to import the finished product into the U.S. What’s next?”

She said, “People respect money. The more you have, the better the respect, and no one cares about the color of your skin or how many brothels you worked in when you were young and didn’t know the language or the culture.

“I’m unique among the
Fortune
Five Hundred,” she went on. “It’s top-heavy with rags-to-riches stories, but mine is the only one that started with the rags on my back belonging to someone else, and me with them. When a slave becomes a queen, it’s more than human interest in
The Wall Street Journal
. It’s biblical.”

After she stopped there was no sound in the cabin but the droning of the engines and the air whistling over and under the wings. We were over a large patch of water now: Lake Erie, if what she’d said about putting down to refuel in New York State wasn’t some kind of blind. I switched the Russian pistol to my other hand, working my fingers as if I had a cramp, but really air-drying my palm. The weapon had grown clammy in my grip.

“Not about making money, then,” I said. “Just keeping score. You’re not the first foreigner who taught herself English reading clichés.”

“Don’t believe my press, Mr. Walker. I’m not made of ice. The numbers are shifting, didn’t you notice? Hispanics are the largest minority in the country, well on their way to becoming
the majority. Dearborn—Henry Ford’s town, the birthplace of history’s most infamous xenophobe after Adolf Hitler—shelters the largest population of Arabs outside the Middle East. They’re streaming into western Europe as well; in London, the wailing from the mosques drowns out the bells from Winchester Abbey. Not so long ago, your own government—
your
government; I don’t vote—became so alarmed at the hordes of Asians crossing its borders it established a quota system designed to reduce immigration of that one specified race to zero. I’m just balancing the scales. When I’m finished, we’ll learn whether a yellow majority treats the dwindling white race any better than when it was the other way around.”

I laughed. “Lady, you’re nuts. I never figured to hear the Yellow Peril speech in my lifetime, let alone from an Asian.”

“Amerasian,” she corrected. “I’ve just enough of the devils’ blood to borrow their methods.”

Wilson Watson said, “Shit. I thought
I
had issues with the Man.”

My stomach sank, but I wasn’t afraid of Charlotte Sing, or even of the water now. The second smallest of the Great Lakes had slipped out from under us and we were over the patchwork quilt of New England, or New Amsterdam, or New Spain, or whatever the long chain of earlier immigrants had chosen to call it, beginning with the Indians, who’d crossed over from Siberia with no thought of conquest or wealth, just mammoths and mountain bison and new material for arrowheads. They were the only true minority left. The engines had changed pitch. We’d begun our descent.

I put the pistol back in my working hand. I was about to lose the biggest part of my advantage. In a little while, if it hadn’t happened already, the temperature would rise dramatically, the pressure would become equal inside and out,
and I’d have to shoot all three of them to maintain status, not just threaten to punch a hole in the plane. They realized it, too; I could feel it as surely as the change in altitude. And I wasn’t alone.

Something heavy struck the cargo hatch from the other side, hard enough to jar the plane from nose to tail; a shoulder, with 280 pounds of steel-tempered body behind it. The pull of gravity had revived Elron, in the hold with all those glands and eyeballs. The gasket held, but it squeaked. He’d back up for another try. I stood and backed across the aisle to widen my field of fire. I could feel the others bracing themselves for the rush.

B
ut Charlotte Sing’s first concern lay elsewhere. “You must let him out,” she told me.

Elron hurled himself against the hatch a second time. Something cracked. She flinched. She was made of something softer than polished granite after all.

I said, “I guess it would take a lot of time to locate another plane with cold storage if he breaks this one. You might wind up with just a load of sweetmeats.”

“What’s the difference?” Cho asked. “You can’t land safely with that going on.”

“Okay, unlock it. Not you,” I told Watson when he got up. “You two are a bad influence on each other. We’ll let the doc do it.”

Cho rose. His expression was tragic. “Please don’t call me that. Without credentials it’s just taunting.”

“Sorry. Sensitivity’s the first thing to go when you’ve been held down and drugged.”

“I had no choice.”

“You could have stayed a mailman.”

“I’m a scientist!”

“You’re a kidnapper and a smuggler. Open the damn door.”

“Victor,” Charlotte Sing said.

That trumped him. He crept down the aisle, took hold of the wheel, turned it, and backed away hastily to avoid being struck when it swung open from inside.

Elron paused with one hand on the hatch while he waited for his pupils to catch up with the light in the cabin. Then he saw me and charged. I fired at his feet. A hole opened in the floor. New York State whistled.

It stopped him, but it was obvious to everyone now that depressurization was no longer an issue. I spoke fast. “Sit down and strap yourself in, all of you. Ladies first when the shooting starts. No boss, no payroll.”

Elron hovered, clearly in the no-man’s-land between complying and drawing my fire. I didn’t know how many the foreign piece held, or how many it would take to stop him.

“Go for it, Elron,” Watson said.

The big man was fast from a standstill, blocking out the woman as a target as he pounced. My finger flexed on the trigger.

Then the floor tilted forty-five degrees and I snapped one off that missed Elron and shattered a window. The glass striated, then caved in to the wind pressure from outside. The engines yawned with the sudden change in course. I grabbed for the back of a seat, missed that too, and fell sprawling across that seat and the one next to it. I didn’t know if the maneuver was prearranged between Madame Sing and the pilot or if he was reacting to the sound of the earlier shot, but he dipped the other wing just as sharply and I tumbled to the floor, hitting my elbow and numbing my arm and hand. The gun sprang free, struck the carpet, and skidded between the seats opposite, thumping against the side of the plane.

There was a general scramble then. Cho and Watson went for the weapon, Charlotte Sing bounded up to secure the hatch before her cargo could jump its traces and spill out of climate control, Elron launched himself at me straight from his heels, his huge glandular mistake of a body eclipsing the light as he fell on me with all his weight and encircled me in his arms. I twisted, catching him under the chin with the point of a shoulder and clapping his mouth shut with a crunch of enamel and a sudden spout of blood from one corner; he’d bitten through his tongue.

But pain is part of a lifter’s everyday life. He grunted but ignored it, and with his chin glistening red he flexed his muscles and brought his hands together under my back. Once he’d laced his fingers there would be no letting go, even in death. He had the primitive physical mechanics of a snapping turtle. With all the life bled from him he’d still manage to squeeze me as empty as he had Fred Loudermilk.

Gasping for air I got a hand on either side of his tree-trunk neck and pulled, trying to slam his head against the steel leg of the seat bolted to the floor next to me. It didn’t budge. The swollen muscles were as hard as tractor tires. I shifted my target to his eyes and gouged at them with my thumbs. I knew it wouldn’t stop him, even if I routed them clear out of their sockets. It was just something to kill time while I waited for him to crush me to death.

His hands met under me, interlocked.

He flexed again. Plates shifted in my chest. Surf pounded in my ears. My vision tattered at the edges and turned black.

He let go. He breathed a chestful of hot air into my face and went as limp as a bag of rocks.

I heard the report then, or rather the echo, ringing like an iron bell in the aluminum can of the fuselage. I opened my
eyes. The blackness faded, the blurring cleared. I saw Victor Cho’s tragic face near the ceiling. I couldn’t see the Takarov, but I knew who’d won the race to get his hands on it.

“No more murders, “he said. “I lost my license, not my oath.”

The plane pitched again, less dramatically this time, and an elbow in a Bulls warm-up jacket struck the Korean on the side of the head. He slid out of my line of sight.

“Chink bastard.” Watson’s voice. “I raised Elron from a pup.”

Charlotte Sing said, “Never mind that. Finish it.”

Then I lost sight of Watson too and knew he was stooping to retrieve the gun Cho had dropped. I shoved hard, but Elron lay on me like fresh cement. I wanted to crawl the rest of the way under him for shelter.