Read Online Downriver by Loren D. Estleman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Loren D. Estleman
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“How tall is Mrs. Jackson?”
Heat was rising in thick greasy sheets from the pavement in front of the Jacksons’ house when I curbed the Renault between a gypsy van missing its left front fender and an Opel station wagon with Saran Wrap taped over an empty window. Mine was the only car on the street with all its equipment. As I was getting out with the aluminum crutches I’d bought at a hospital supply house on Michigan, a reedy lad of fifteen or sixteen separated himself from a gang brawling over a soccer ball in a burned-out lot on the corner and slithered over. Some of the shine went out of his eyes when I stood up and tucked the crutches under one arm.
“Watch your car for five bucks,” he said. “They been shooting out headlights in this neighborhood.”
I onced him over. He was almost my height but forty pounds lighter, in khaki pants and a stained nylon mesh football jersey with the hem hanging to his thighs. He was wearing the skinhead cut that had replaced the Afro while I was looking in some other direction. I turned to slam the car door and grasped his belt through the jersey and pulled him in close, shoving the padded armpieces of the crutches under his nose and bending his head back. He struggled, but his neck creaked and he stopped. There was pink fog in the whites of his eyes.
“Give it over,” I said.
It took a little more pressure from the crutches, but after a second he reached behind his back and came out with an air pistol with a heavy plastic stock rigged to look like an auto mag. I leaned the crutches against the car and accepted the pistol. Then I let go of his belt.
“That cost fourteen bucks and change.”
“You talk like you bought it.” I stuck it under my waistband, giving him a hinge at the butt of the Smith just before I refastened my coat. “If I’ve still got headlamps when I come out you get it back. Don’t bother blowing off steam anyplace else. The car’s rented.”
He left me. Halfway back to the empty lot he unbuckled his belt and pulled down his pants and bent over. I fingered the grip of the air pistol, then decided against it. I was mellowing.
10
T HE NEIGHBORHOOD HAD been decent before the city started turning streets with bad reputations into parks and expressways, which was like cutting into a malignant but dormant mole and releasing carcinogens throughout the system. The slide would have begun with occasional B-and-E’s and ended with old people crossing the street to avoid knots of cigarette-sucking youths blocking the sidewalk. In a year or so the place would be a park or an expressway and it would be another neighborhood’s turn in the box.
For all that, the Jacksons’ house showed efforts to slowdown the skid. The crabgrass was cut, the old boards repainted recently, and some streetwise flowers grew in boxes under the windows looking like tough kids in bright knit caps. Somebody had painted the house number on the curb, but somebody else had sprayed it over with a word that belonged there. I followed a row of sunken flagstones to the stoop and rapped on the screen door.
I could make out some furniture inside, but the room wasn’t lighted and the double-ply screen was set a little off, obscuring details. I didn’t figure that was an accident. Floorboards shifted and then a short thick black man came to the screen holding something that looked like a gun.
“Mr. Jackson? I’m Amos Walker, the man who called.” I opened my ID folder and flattened it out against the screen.
He reached up and flipped an invisible hook out of an unseen eye. “Come ahead in.”
I opened the door against the pull of an ailing spring and caught it behind me before it slammed. He had stepped back to give me room. He had on a white shirt with an open collar stuffed into colorless slacks and his feet were shod in imitation moccasins with simulated leather stitching. The thing that had looked like a gun was a bar of tarnished lead like they used in Linotype machines,
Heat was rising in thick greasy sheets from the pavement in front of the Jacksons’ house when I curbed the Renault between a gypsy van missing its left front fender and an Opel station wagon with Saran Wrap taped over an empty window. Mine was the only car on the street with all its equipment. As I was getting out with the aluminum crutches I’d bought at a hospital supply house on Michigan, a reedy lad of fifteen or sixteen separated himself from a gang brawling over a soccer ball in a burned-out lot on the corner and slithered over. Some of the shine went out of his eyes when I stood up and tucked the crutches under one arm.
“Watch your car for five bucks,” he said. “They been shooting out headlights in this neighborhood.”
I onced him over. He was almost my height but forty pounds lighter, in khaki pants and a stained nylon mesh football jersey with the hem hanging to his thighs. He was wearing the skinhead cut that had replaced the Afro while I was looking in some other direction. I turned to slam the car door and grasped his belt through the jersey and pulled him in close, shoving the padded armpieces of the crutches under his nose and bending his head back. He struggled, but his neck creaked and he stopped. There was pink fog in the whites of his eyes.
“Give it over,” I said.
It took a little more pressure from the crutches, but after a second he reached behind his back and came out with an air pistol with a heavy plastic stock rigged to look like an auto mag. I leaned the crutches against the car and accepted the pistol. Then I let go of his belt.
“That cost fourteen bucks and change.”
“You talk like you bought it.” I stuck it under my waistband, giving him a hinge at the butt of the Smith just before I refastened my coat. “If I’ve still got headlamps when I come out you get it back. Don’t bother blowing off steam anyplace else. The car’s rented.”
He left me. Halfway back to the empty lot he unbuckled his belt and pulled down his pants and bent over. I fingered the grip of the air pistol, then decided against it. I was mellowing.
10
T HE NEIGHBORHOOD HAD been decent before the city started turning streets with bad reputations into parks and expressways, which was like cutting into a malignant but dormant mole and releasing carcinogens throughout the system. The slide would have begun with occasional B-and-E’s and ended with old people crossing the street to avoid knots of cigarette-sucking youths blocking the sidewalk. In a year or so the place would be a park or an expressway and it would be another neighborhood’s turn in the box.
For all that, the Jacksons’ house showed efforts to slowdown the skid. The crabgrass was cut, the old boards repainted recently, and some streetwise flowers grew in boxes under the windows looking like tough kids in bright knit caps. Somebody had painted the house number on the curb, but somebody else had sprayed it over with a word that belonged there. I followed a row of sunken flagstones to the stoop and rapped on the screen door.
I could make out some furniture inside, but the room wasn’t lighted and the double-ply screen was set a little off, obscuring details. I didn’t figure that was an accident. Floorboards shifted and then a short thick black man came to the screen holding something that looked like a gun.
“Mr. Jackson? I’m Amos Walker, the man who called.” I opened my ID folder and flattened it out against the screen.
He reached up and flipped an invisible hook out of an unseen eye. “Come ahead in.”
I opened the door against the pull of an ailing spring and caught it behind me before it slammed. He had stepped back to give me room. He had on a white shirt with an open collar stuffed into colorless slacks and his feet were shod in imitation moccasins with simulated leather stitching. The thing that had looked like a gun was a bar of tarnished lead like they used in Linotype machines,
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