Read Online A Smile on the Face of the Tiger by Loren D. Estleman - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Loren D. Estleman
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three and five minutes respectively, typed up my report along with a bill, pounded a stamp on the envelope, and slid it into the OUT basket. There were no messages from Louise Starr, so Eugene Booth hadn’t resurfaced while I was in Marshall. By then the pork chops were making me sleepy, so I switched on the electric fan and stuck my face into it and when I was alert enough to ask questions and listen to the answers I dialed one of the numbers on Lowell Birdsall’s business card. I got a dreamy kind of a male voice that I had to separate from the Sinatra ballad playing in the background. He awoke from his dream when I mentioned Eugene Booth and told me he’d be out between four and five but expected to be home the rest of the evening—Room 610 at the Alamo Motel—and looked forward to showing me his collection. He sounded like an only child with his own room.
I had a couple of hours to kill, so I settled a heel into the hollow I’d worn in the drawleaf of the desk, crossed my ankles, and opened
Deadtime Story
to the spot I’d marked with a spent match.
Following a number of adventures on the road, some of them in the company of a beautiful female hitch-hiker who happened to put her thumb out at just the right time, the accountant on the run from the mob stopped at a rustic motel in the northwoods. There by the pulsing light of a cheap lamp running off a sputtering generator he wrote a note of explanation to the special prosecutor and wrapped it and the incriminating ledgers in butcher paper. The beautiful hitchhiker, who was staying in the next cabin, had to be persuaded to agree to deliver the package, knowing that they might never see each other again. She didn’t get ten miles before she fell into the hands of the Mafia boss’s henchmen, from whom the accountant was forced to rescue her. At the end, torn and bloodied, he and the woman marched into the special prosecutor’s office, placed the package in his hands, and went out without waiting to be thanked, eager to get to a justice of the peace who would marry them.
It was a tight, suspenseful story, and if the love angle was predictable there was something about the villains, their flat vernacular and working habits, that suggested the author had borrowed them from life rather than the movies or the pages of his competitors’ books. I wondered where in his herky-jerk resumÉ Booth had come into close enough contact with the breed to collect their idiosyncrasies like blood samples. It left me thirsting for more Booth. I saved
Tough Town
and
Bullets Are My Business
for later and poked another tape into the cassette player.
“ ‘He was too tired to think,’” he dictated in his scratchy monotone, “ ‘or maybe he just didn’t want to. He drank from the flat pint and sat outside the wobbly circle of gasoline-generated light and watched the moths hurl themselves against the glass as mindlessly as waves smacking the shore. And he didn’t think, didn’t think.’” A bottle gurgled, lips pulled away from it with a kissing sound. “Okay, Tolstoy, you’ve got your beginning and your end. Now all you have to do is write twenty chapters to stick in between.”
I’d been half-dozing, the raspy sentences grinding the edges of my subconscious with no meaning. The drinking noises and the slight lift in his tone when he’d stopped dictating snatched me awake. One phrase had come through, but I’d needed the hand up to realize its importance. I rewound the tape and played back the passage. At “gasoline-generated light” I hit the stop button. I picked up
Deadtime
Story and paged backward from the end, past the touching scene in the adjoining cabin when the woman clutched the bundle of evidence to her breasts in lieu of the man she loved, to the one in the accountant’s cabin. Once again he grimly wrapped the ledgers and scribbled the prosecutor’s name on the slick white paper in the throbbing light of a lamp hooked up to a generator. There were moths
I had a couple of hours to kill, so I settled a heel into the hollow I’d worn in the drawleaf of the desk, crossed my ankles, and opened
Deadtime Story
to the spot I’d marked with a spent match.
Following a number of adventures on the road, some of them in the company of a beautiful female hitch-hiker who happened to put her thumb out at just the right time, the accountant on the run from the mob stopped at a rustic motel in the northwoods. There by the pulsing light of a cheap lamp running off a sputtering generator he wrote a note of explanation to the special prosecutor and wrapped it and the incriminating ledgers in butcher paper. The beautiful hitchhiker, who was staying in the next cabin, had to be persuaded to agree to deliver the package, knowing that they might never see each other again. She didn’t get ten miles before she fell into the hands of the Mafia boss’s henchmen, from whom the accountant was forced to rescue her. At the end, torn and bloodied, he and the woman marched into the special prosecutor’s office, placed the package in his hands, and went out without waiting to be thanked, eager to get to a justice of the peace who would marry them.
It was a tight, suspenseful story, and if the love angle was predictable there was something about the villains, their flat vernacular and working habits, that suggested the author had borrowed them from life rather than the movies or the pages of his competitors’ books. I wondered where in his herky-jerk resumÉ Booth had come into close enough contact with the breed to collect their idiosyncrasies like blood samples. It left me thirsting for more Booth. I saved
Tough Town
and
Bullets Are My Business
for later and poked another tape into the cassette player.
“ ‘He was too tired to think,’” he dictated in his scratchy monotone, “ ‘or maybe he just didn’t want to. He drank from the flat pint and sat outside the wobbly circle of gasoline-generated light and watched the moths hurl themselves against the glass as mindlessly as waves smacking the shore. And he didn’t think, didn’t think.’” A bottle gurgled, lips pulled away from it with a kissing sound. “Okay, Tolstoy, you’ve got your beginning and your end. Now all you have to do is write twenty chapters to stick in between.”
I’d been half-dozing, the raspy sentences grinding the edges of my subconscious with no meaning. The drinking noises and the slight lift in his tone when he’d stopped dictating snatched me awake. One phrase had come through, but I’d needed the hand up to realize its importance. I rewound the tape and played back the passage. At “gasoline-generated light” I hit the stop button. I picked up
Deadtime
Story and paged backward from the end, past the touching scene in the adjoining cabin when the woman clutched the bundle of evidence to her breasts in lieu of the man she loved, to the one in the accountant’s cabin. Once again he grimly wrapped the ledgers and scribbled the prosecutor’s name on the slick white paper in the throbbing light of a lamp hooked up to a generator. There were moths
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