Silent Thunder (20 page)

“How many cops does that make?”

“Three, with Alderdyce and Romero, not counting infantry support. They can work out jurisdictions among themselves. Better tell him about the others. The paperwork’s murder when badges shoot badges.”

“You think there’ll be shooting?”

“It was just an expression.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“When there’s shooting, it means somebody made a mistake. If I work it right there won’t be.”

She turned away. “They ought to throw all the guns in the Detroit River. Sporting rifles on up.”

“Throw the knives in after them,” I said. “Don’t forget the garrotes and saps and all the bottles with skulls and cross-bones on the labels. Then they’ll just beat each other to death with rocks. It’s not the guns you have to take out. It’s the shooters.”

“Like me.”

I said, “You never shot anyone.”

It took a moment; or maybe it sank in right away and she used the moment to rearrange her face. When she turned around it looked confused. “What did that mean?”

“Doyle Junior was shot with an automatic. The loading principle is the same as this one.” I patted the .25 in my coat pocket. “You just told me you don’t know the first thing about how to load it.”

“It was loaded already.”

“You said you made him promise never to leave one lying around loaded.”

“He broke it. Do you think a promise meant anything to him when he was in that condition?”

“The level of drugs and alcohol the coroner found in his system would’ve kept him from putting together a coherent sentence, much less loading a gun. If he got that tanked up whenever he beat you he couldn’t have done it, and when he wasn’t he wouldn’t have. You told me yourself what a dear he was when he was straight.”

“Don’t, Amos.”

“Weapons were his hobby. Fathers like to share their interests with their sons. Doyle would’ve shown Jack how to care for a gun. How to use it. How to load it.”

“No. I shot him.”

“It was a big house, but not so big young Jack wouldn’t hear his father beating up on his mother. The last time was one time too many. After it was over, when you were lying somewhere recovering and Doyle had passed out naked on the bed, Jack sneaked downstairs. He probably selected a gun he’d handled before under his father’s supervision. He loaded it and went back upstairs and used it.”

She slapped me. The crack made my ears ring, but I didn’t move. “You’re not doing him any favors by standing the rap,” I said. “A thing like that is a time bomb. He’ll wind up making some psychiatrist rich.”

“It’s a lie.”

“You’re a lie. Constance Thayer, the notorious spouse-killer of Iroquois Heights. That’s the lie. The joke is how many people were willing to help you tell it.”

She raised her hand again. This time I caught it. I said, “One’s all you get for free. After that I slap back.”

“Go ahead. I’m used to it.”

I forced down her hand, kept hold of it, and grasped the other. “Tell Dorrance the truth. He’ll know what to do. If he’s still part man and not all lawyer he’ll introduce the truth, put Jack on the stand, and get this thing out before it starts to fester. Nobody’s going to put him in reform school. He’ll get help.”

“It happened the way I said it happened.”

“A mother protects her child, right?”

“Something like that.”

“Not the other way around.”

She said nothing.

“That’s just a role.” I released her then. She drew back. The look was back, only different; hunted. It was like that scene in
Dracula
where the woman is exposed as a vampire and her expression changes from seductive to feral. I laughed then. It sounded hollow even to me.

“You enjoy playing it, don’t you? You’re not thinking of Jack at all. It’s just another acting job, only this time you get to keep your clothes on.”

“You’re fired. Get out of my sister’s house.”

“Lady, I quit.”

“Amos.”

I paused with my hand on the doorknob. I didn’t feel the least bit like Rhett Butler.

“It isn’t just a role. My son is all I have.”

I left.

It was a high hot day, crisp, without humidity. The sky went straight up for a thousand miles, a long blue tube with the earth at the bottom and scattered clouds stuck at the top. The air was dizzyingly clear. I breathed in a double lungful. Freedom. I owed nothing to anybody. I could go anywhere in the world from that spot, Singapore or Flint. I could play miniature golf around the corner or fish for marlin in the Gulf Stream. There was no fine print on any contract saying I had to go to the office and meet Colonel Winston Seabrook.

I cranked up the Mercury and took off in that direction. I’m a lousy miniature golfer anyway.

Guns.

The history of guns is the history of Detroit, from the day Cadillac’s men dazzled the local Indians with the rattle and flame of their muskets to last Friday, when a sixteen-year-old boy shot down another boy at the downtown Taco Bell for looking at him wrong. Chief Pontiac tried to seize Fort Detroit by smuggling sawed-off muzzle-loaders through the gate under his braves’ blankets, and Harry Bennett mounted Lewis machine guns atop the Ford factory to mow down picketing auto workers. John Brown, while visiting the Detroit end of the Underground Railroad, had bought the guns for his botched raid on Harpers Ferry. Detroit built the gunboats and bombers that did more to win the Second World War than Churchill’s cigar, and it was automatic gunfire in the darkened alleys of Twelfth Street that made a waking nightmare of the 1967 race riots. The battering of Thompsons along the Detroit River had helped to make the twenties roar. Pretty little pearl-handled ladies’ automatics, big black businesslike Frontier Colts, cheap greasy Saturday Night Thumpers as dangerous to their handlers as to their intended targets, nasty plastic-and-sheet-metal burp guns with foreign names stamped on the barrels, stately Lugers, squat-nosed Police Specials, silenced .22’s, amplified .45’s, sawed-off shotguns, sniper rifles with scopes, pocket derringers, two-man bazookas, Mausers, Marlins, Mannlichers, Remingtons and Rugers, Springfields and Smith & Wessons, Winchesters and Webleys, Berettas and Brownings, Hawkens, Henries, Hotchkisses, and howitzers—any one of them held as strong a claim to the city as Ty Cobb and the Model T. Question: What’s Detroit without guns? Answer: Cleveland. Joke.

And now the biggest gun of them all, bigger than all the rest put together, was loaded and cocked and ready to fire. All it needed was someone dumb enough to try to stand in front of it.

AMOS WALKER

The letters, white plastic on the black background of the directory in the foyer of my building, were new, the first improvement that had been made there since plumbing. At the moment mine was the only name on the third floor. The baby photographer next door had been hauled downtown for pederasty, the travel agent had been locked out for nonpayment of rent, one business had failed, another had outgrown the place and moved uptown, and the office at the end of the hall where mail was delivered daily and picked up on Wednesdays by nobody knew who had never had a name. The stairs made melancholy noises when I climbed them.

Half empty as it was, the building felt lonelier than the usual early Monday morning, like a dying cell in a terminal body; but that was the mood I was in. It was just the Lysol in the hallway outside my reception room that made it smell like a mortician’s workshop, only the humming of the building super’s vacuum cleaner in an empty downstairs office that sounded like the incinerator in a crematorium. The tinkle of my keys was ridiculously loud as I shook loose the one to the door.

A shaft of metal, Arctic cold, touched the tender bone behind my right ear, sending a dull thrum of remembered pain throughout my skull. At the same time a hand reached under my jacket and pulled the Beretta out from under my belt.

“Don’t it pay to get up with the birds, though?” twanged Hubert Darling’s voice close behind me. “Let’s go, slugger. The Colonel ain’t got all day.”

H
E FOLLOWED ME
downstairs and out the door, where a dark blue Chrysler sedan was parked illegally in front of the building. I had seen it twice before. His gun prodded my lower back. “Inside, champ.”

I got in. A man was sitting in the back seat on the right side. He was bigger and uglier than Hubert, with a nose-heavy face curdled with acne and a prison haircut that went with his gray pallor. He had on a blue Windbreaker over a mesh T-shirt that needed washing. It had been years, but I recognized him.

“Hello, Jerry,” I said. “Your brother told me you were still in Jackson.”

After a second he showed me a set of long amber teeth like a horse’s. “Work-release program. I missed the last bus.”

“Was that before or after you and Hubert sapped me down at the fairgrounds?”

“I didn’t
think
you was out the whole time.”

Hubert opened the driver’s door and slid under the wheel. Jerry turned the flat blue Darling eyes on him. “You frisk him?”

“Got this here.” He held up the Beretta.

“You
frisk
him?”

“Didn’t have to. It stuck out like—”

Jerry cuffed the back of Hubert’s head. “Shithead. On your knees facing me, Walker. Hube, cover him.”

As I turned around I took the little Browning out of my side pocket and stuffed it down between the seat cushions. My body was between it and Hubert. I knelt on the seat with my back to the windshield and my hands on the headrest. Jerry leaned forward, patted all my pockets, and felt me under the arms and between my thighs. He didn’t overlook my ankles. Finally he sat back. “Okay, Hube.”

When I was facing the other way Hubert stuck a pair of black plastic wraparound sunglasses at me. I put them on. Someone had taped aluminum foil over the inside of the lenses, blocking out all light. Hubert buckled the seat belt across my arms. “For your own good, slugger,” he said. “If you forget and take ’em off, we get to kill you.”

Jerry said, “Shut up and drive.”

The engine started smoothly and we began moving. For a while I tried to keep track of the turns, but Hubert should have made his living flashing baseball signals; after we circled two blocks I stopped counting. Listening was no good either, because he had the radio tuned in hard to a hillbilly station. Well, I knew from the tv set in Sturdy’s room that he liked things loud.

It seemed we drove for hours; at least eighteen killings, twenty-two infidelities, eleven honky-tonks, and nine incarcerations, Grand Ole Opry Time. It was probably closer to forty-five minutes. When the pavement smoothed out under the tires I knew we had left the surface streets for an expressway, which in the immediate area narrowed the options to seven. I knew too when we left asphalt for gravel. That continued for a long time, and then we turned onto something more private, by the neglected feel of loose stones and sharp ruts registered in my stomach and fillings. Shortly after that we rolled to a stop.

Someone opened my door and undid the seat belt. I stumbled getting out, put my hand between the cushions, grasped the little automatic, and returned it to my side pocket, hiding the maneuver with my body. I was walking on grass. A moist smell of fresh manure reached me. I had a pretty good idea then where I was.

We went inside, through some rooms, and down a flight of thickly carpeted stairs. I was fairly sure, although nobody opened his mouth, that others had joined us. The air was more crowded and I smelled a new brand of after-shave. At length we stopped. A door closed behind us.

“Well, take them off.”

This was a different voice, but slightly familiar. Someone removed the sunglasses before I could lift a hand and I blinked in the light. It was indirect, illuminating walls paneled in squares of walnut with the grains set at right angles and a wall-to-wall shag carpet with orange and brown fibers. There were some chairs made of steel tubing and molded plastic and a grandfather clock that had been knocking out the minutes for about eighty years; but however you decorate a basement you’re still underground. I had a Darling on either side and there were three other men in the room. Two were dressed in black trousers and navy turtlenecks, lightweight but still too warm for the season, with the trousers tucked into mirror-finish black combat boots. Their faces were unlined and almost identical, the way they always are when their owners haven’t been around much past twenty years and a military barber has been at them. They wore olive-drab berets at the same precise angle and held M-16 assault rifles across their torsos in sentry position.

The third man stood between them facing me with his feet spread and his hands behind his back. He had been cut from the same bolt, but a lot earlier. He was six feet four in a tan suit tailored military fashion, with patch pockets and shiny black buttons and a knitted black tie on a khaki shirt. His thinning hair was black except for snowy puffs over his ears and combed diagonally across his long skull. He wore glasses with thick black rims whose lenses reflected the light in flat circles, with all the magnifying properties of clear windowpanes; they were just a gimmick to cover the wrinkles around his eyes. He looked fifty.

The door opened behind me. I turned my head and looked at another young man dressed like the others, who closed the door and stood in front of it with his M-16 across his chest.

I turned back. “I’m more dangerous than I thought.”

The man in the tan suit looked at the Darlings. “You searched him for weapons?”

“Yeah.” Hubert stepped forward, took the Beretta out of his waistband, and handed it to him butt-first.

The man in the tan suit kicked out the clip and pocketed it, then ran back the slide. The cartridge in the chamber popped out and landed noiselessly on the carpet. Without pausing he swept the barrel across Hubert’s face. The steel sight split his left cheek like a ripe orange. He yelped and staggered back two steps. His brother started forward, then stopped.

“ ‘Yes, sir’ is the response,” said the man in the tan suit.

Jerry said, “We ain’t in your fucking army.”

The man in the tan suit moved his head slightly. There was a slight rustle from behind, then a sickening thump at my side, and Jerry fell in a crumple. The young man from the door stood over him holding his assault rifle with the butt forward.