Lady Yesterday by Loren D. Estleman Read Free Book Online

off Fenkell, beige tile over concrete block with the standard garage extension on the end with the usual basketball hoop mounted over the open door and the obligatory bicycles and garden tools and pop bottles wedged in on both sides of a Japanese car. I could hear the television pulsing inside when I used the bell. After a long time the door opened and the man stood there in an unbuttoned brown cardigan and jeans and stocking feet with a bottle of Miller in one hand. He was thick through the chest and shoulders and big in the head with a shelf of bone over his eyes and a jaw you could build a small house on. His skin was black with a purplish tint, and looking at him you knew he would always be the bad cop in the interrogation room. Behind him the television was still droning.
    “Walker.”
    He had always called me that, going back to when we were kids; never Amos. I said, “They told me at thirteen hundred you were on personal time. Who’s on the telephone?”
    “I took the fucking thing off the hook. The department shrink can’t stop playing with that dial and every time he plays with it he uses my number. Take it in out of the cold.”
    The house was warm. He hung my hat and coat on the hall tree and offered me a beer. I said no thanks and he tipped his up, emptying it, and set it down at the end of a row of empties on the kitchen counter and opened the refrigerator and twisted the top off a fresh one. I followed him into the carpeted living room, where on the 21-inch screen a pile of gray hair in a suit with wide lapels was working his way with a microphone through an audience of women, asking them what they thought of lesbian postal clerks.
    “Fucking faggot.” John turned off the set and flung himself into a scoop chair upholstered in green vinyl. I sat on the edge of a green plaid sofa in the only spot that wasn’t piled with magazines and record albums. The floor was a litter of crumpled socks and sports sections and stray lint. The butt of another empty stuck out from under John’s chair.
    “So what’s doing in rental heat these days?” he asked.
    “Same old same old. A keyhole here, a kidnapped heiress there. The rest of the time I’m shaking blondes and hand grenades out of my bed. Where’s Marian?”
    “Visiting her parents in Flint. She took the kids with her.”
    “I guess you couldn’t get away.”
    “Her old man’s in construction. City employees are people he pays to tie their shoelaces while his people dump sand into the cement. We get on like salt and iron. Her mother plays bingo.”
    “You’ve been alone here how long?”
    “Let’s see, I had ten cases when I started. A week.”
    I didn’t see his department piece anywhere. The only weapon visible, not counting the alcohol, was a deer rifle with mounted scope leaning in one corner. “You under hack downtown?”
    “No.” He tilted the bottle and set it down. Foam climbed to the neck, then collapsed. “I’m sick to puking of paperwork up the wazoo and cops who are starting to look and sound like the mayor and TV pricks asking why did you chase that boy who raped and strangled the little old lady and stole her car, put all those other motorists in jeopardy? I’m sick of civil liability and toy coffee in the office pot. I want caffeine. We’ve got more contract killers in uniform than we’ve got in the mugs and I’m sick of that. I’m on vacation.”
    “For how long?”
    He lifted the bottle again and studied the contents, three quarters gone. “I’ve got six cases left on the back porch. When I’ve killed them I’ll decide.”
    “That’ll be Friday at the rate you’re going.”
    He looked at me, eye-whites glittering in his dark brutal face. “Run your errand or give me a pamphlet and go. I want a lecture I’ll put the phone back on the hook.”
    I thought of leaving. My welcome with friends wasn’t going too far lately. I stayed where I was. I took out my handkerchief and unwrapped the bullet and held it out.
    He