Stress by Loren D. Estleman Read Free Book Online

downtown, took two in the chest, and still managed to put down the perp when he was holding a gun to the head of the kid behind the counter. Eight weeks in the hospital, and he’s still carrying around a forty-grain slug an inch from his spinal cord. How much lead you carrying around, rook? How many certificates of valor you got taped inside your locker next to Miss April’s tits?”
    Battle looked from one detective to the other. “That’s the line, is it?”
    “You’re goddamn right it is. Question is, which side of it are you standing on?”
    “Let the kid breathe, Wally.” Bookfinger squashed out his cigarette in a tin Salem tray. “He doesn’t know Kubicek. What say we fix that?”
    Battle said, “He’s in the building? I thought he was suspended with pay.”
    “Limited duty. He’s keeping the dust off a chair in the Media Room.”
    “What’s that?”
    Stilwell stood, checked the magazine in the Smith &Wesson, and returned it to its clip. “File room back of STRESS. It’s got a TV. Let’s go ask him what’s going on with Days of Our Lives .”

Chapter Six
    F OR A MAN WHO LOATHED BOREDOM AND COLD weather more or less equally, Joe Piper reflected that he spent a good deal of time freezing his ass off on some windswept spot waiting for someone.
    On this particular flinty Sunday morning in January, that spot happened to be the old interior parade ground at historic Fort Wayne, where the wind from Canada blasted between the buildings containing the barracks and the powder magazine, flinging bushels of grainy snow and ice splinters from the river against his coat and into his face, where they stung like sparks. Around him, a denser shade of gray than the low sky and the bare earth and the jagged water, stood a number of humpbacked tanks and big guns mounted on swivels: products of the Arsenal of Democracy, borne there on flatbed trailers from the converted weapons plants of Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler and never used, rendered obsolete by the Japanese surrender while still warm from the foundries. They belonged emphatically to a redoubt constructed one hundred twenty-five years ago for the defense of a city that had never been threatened. He wondered what compelled people to visit vestal arms in a spinster fort.
    He looked at his watch, tapped it, wound the stem, and held it to his ear on the leeward side. It was ticking. It seemed incredible he’d been there only five minutes. In that time his nose had begun to drip, his feet in their thin leather shoes had turned to flatirons. The only place on his body where he still had feeling was the tender flesh beneath his chin. He had given up shaving that area to avoid breaking open the scab, and the stubble kept the bandage so loose it chafed him whenever he moved.
    He couldn’t believe he’d stood there and let Wilson McCoy slice him open like a brisket. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t known the business had changed since he’d come into it. None of the old rules applied since the Sicilians had pulled out of Detroit. New to the rackets, the blacks had learned nothing from the last fifty years and duplicated all the dumb, violent mistakes their predecessors had made during Prohibition. They slaughtered one another in the street, shot it out with cops, and even butchered their own suppliers, obliging themselves to find replacements, often without checking their references. The undercover presence of STRESS made every white face a threat to be eliminated on the slightest suspicion. What for Joe Piper had been a relatively safe area of criminal enterprise had in a field of excitable amateurs become dangerous in the extreme. He’d known all that, and still had managed to place himself in hazard.
    What was worse, here he was again.
    At last a drumroll of pistons drew his attention to the Jefferson side, where a Jeep Cherokee was rolling through the main gate. It was painted a dull green and as it entered the parade ground he saw that it had been stripped of