Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 01 by Motor City Blue

Author:Motor City Blue [Blue, Motor City]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective
ISBN: 9781453220481
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1980-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

14

THE TEMPERATURE HAD CLIMBED twelve degrees since noon, according to the radio, and now big fat drops of freezing rain were starring the windshield after the wipers had made peanut brittle out of the wafer-thin ice that had already formed. My tires swished on the slick wet pavement. All around me cars were hydroplaning on the sheen of water atop the glassy surface, and here and there curbs, gutters, and hydrants had begun to blossom with fender-benders and six-hundred-dollar suspension replacement jobs. Some people have to learn how to drive all over again each winter.

The overcast had reduced the complexion of the city from its usual smog blue to a smeary gray, through which swollen headlamps gleamed resignedly like candles beneath a filthy wet undershirt and were reflected even more dimly in the puddles ahead. I reached over and tugged mine on just for appearances. The car smelled of warm, wet wool. Tires swished and wipers thrummed and rain pattered on the vinyl roof and the heater fan pushed warm air at my feet, drying my socks, soaked from slogging through puddles. I felt cozy and relaxed and protected from the cold, wet, noisy world by a palpitating wall of warmth. Then I swung left onto Woodward and an icy stream of water that had been trapped beneath the dash drooled over my right ankle and the feeling was gone.

Just for the hell of it I cruised past George Gibson’s building at Woodward and Watson, but this time my attention was fixed on the place across the street, where Francis Kramer had knocked a match out of my hand while he was hurrying out the door. No soap. A guy with a back like a marine drill instructor’s—straight as a rifle shot—in a necktie and brown, knee-length trenchcoat was standing in that very doorway looking miserable and sticking out, in that neighborhood, like a pair of black formal shoes at a love-in. Only he wasn’t marines, he was army. Which when I thought about it wasn’t such a tough break after all, since if there had been anything worth looking for in the GM foreman’s apartment they’d have found it by now, and there wouldn’t be any need to post a guard. I rolled on past and lit a shuck east to Erskine.

I parked in a lot a couple of blocks down from Story’s After Midnight and walked back in that direction with my hat brim down to my eyes and my collar turned up around my ears, leaning into the driving rain. The drops crackled when they pelted my face, burning the skin on contact like showering sparks. The wind picked up my coattails and flapped them noisily about my legs. Along this block the street rose at a thirty-degree angle, and the run-off made rivers out of the gutters and gurgled greedily past naked branches and gobs of wet newspaper in the sewer grates. The world was very much with me here.

There were no toughs waiting for me

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