Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss Read Free Page A

Korean job. I was still thinking about it when Barry called and said his would-be collaborator had turned out to be a Hyundai dealer from Phoenix who’d made up the story to impress a girlfriend and hadn’t known when to bail out. The confession had come under pressure from Barry; the man knew too much about the details of zero-percent financing for an ordinary thief.
    By then I had an employee-fraud job, nothing too strenuous, just a couple of hours in the evening parked behind the Troy K-Mart, videotaping stockroom clerks stashing new DVD players in a Dumpster. My leg interrupted my concentration when I’d been sitting too long, but changing positions took care of that. By the time I’d gathered enough evidence to prosecute, I’d found new uses for the cane, such as flipping the telephone receiver out of its cradle into my hand when I didn’t feel like tipping my office chair forward. I was getting to be as good with it as Charlie Chaplin.
    The nightmares took longer to get used to. You hear a lot about wound trauma in the physical sense, but no matter where you get shot it always ends up in your head. I woke up plenty of times with my sheets soaked through with sweat, sure it was blood. Iwished the Hyundai dealer hadn’t let Barry down. I needed the work more than my bank account did.
    Christmas came and went, as it will despite Marshall Field’s best efforts to keep it alive through Super Sunday. The all-purpose, no-offense holiday display in front of the City-County Building came down, spruces and Scotch pines turned orange in the gutters. Most of the toys were broken and the kittens had all outgrown their red ribbons and started in on the furniture. I made a host of calls, but I couldn’t even land a security job until I could outrun an old-lady shoplifter in a slick parking lot.
    Dick Clark doddered in the new year, and I reminded myself to use it when I postdated my checks. I stayed home on the holiday to look in on the multimillionaires in pads and helmets, woke up the next dawn lying in a pool of blood behind Spike’s Keg o’ Nails, and instead of going back to sleep got dressed and made coffee. Twenty minutes later I let myself into the office from a street swept bare of life. Behind the desk I dozed until the first spasm of the day sent me into the water closet for Vicodin.
    While I was washing it down with water from the tap, I heard the door from the hall open and close. The buzzer had been out of service since September. I hadn’t bothered to have it fixed because there is little off-the-street trade in the investigation business, and none at all on my street. I stumped to the connecting door and opened it on the first knock.
    “Are you Walker?”
    I confessed to that condition and hooked the cane over my left wrist to shake the man’s hand. He gave mine a brief squeeze that would have bunched my fingers like copper wire if I hadn’t shoved them deep into his fist from instinct. He was my height, with the sloped shoulders of a tired grizzly and a head the size of a soup kettle and just about as easy to dent. He was completely bald—not even a fringe—wore no hat on the coldest January dayin recent memory, and burned cranberry red from his crown to the coarse black hairs twisting out of his open collar. I placed him at forty; he could have been fifty-five and cured in the barrel. He had on a blue Detroit Edison uniform and tractor-tread boots with the toes worn down to the steel caps.
    “I’m Oral Canon,” he said. “It’s pronounced like the artillery piece, only you spell it with two n’s, not three.”
    “Like the camera. Any relation?”
    “Not the money side.”
    He had a deep, burring voice, like a circular saw on idle. I said I had the same arrangement with my cousin Hiram and pointed the cane at the customer’s chair. He used two inches of the seat, bracing his hands on his thighs. They were big-veined hands, the kind that were comfortable in work gloves, and wore a class ring