Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde Read Online Free PDF Page A

missed December and January. Next week is three months.” She made a hoarse little noise of amusement. “I ought to write a song about the situation; it’s ironic enough to go platinum. As long as she went on bleeding me, I knew I was safe. Now she’s stopped, and I can only wait for the other shoe to drop. That is the expression, isn’t it? The other shoe.”
    “Uh-huh. She might be in jail or the hospital. Or she might be sacked out at home in front of Days of Our Lives , letting you work up a lather while she gets ready to raise her rates. Her kind is very good at psychology. It’s their only weapon and they spend a lot of time polishing it.”
    “Or she might be dead.”
    “She might be dead,” I agreed. “Even a blackmailer can get run over by an innocent bus.”
    “The flaw in the system. Except I don’t suppose she cared about acts of God when she set it up. Can you find her? If she is dead and I know it, I can at least be prepared for what’s about to happen. I can always run.”
    She hadn’t convinced even herself of that. Her upper lip alone stood two stories high on billboards throughout the lower forty-eight, promoting her national tour, and you couldn’t tune in MTV without seeing her stamp holes in Standards and Practices on one of her videos. She’d need more than Groucho glasses and a fright wig to go underground anywhere in the free world.
    “Anyone can be found,” I said. “The catch is the deadline. The FBI has been looking for a couple of mad bombers since the sixties, and I’ve got exactly one-tenth of one-thousandth of
a percent of their manpower. The only promise I can make is it won’t be next week. That would probably hold even if I knew where you’ve been meeting her to make the drop, but it would be a place to set up base camp. You haven’t told me.”
    “It hasn’t always been the same place. Anyway, I’m not the one who’s been making the drop.” She tasted the phrase “making the drop,” not without pleasure. Everyone likes to talk like Joe Friday if he doesn’t have to do it to eat. “You’ll need to ask my business manager about the more current details. I put it in his hands.”
    “Nice to have a business manager you can trust with a toy like your life. They have such a good track record with life savings. Did you sic him on Caterina first?”
    “I apologized for that.”
    She very specifically had not; but I let it flap. Unnecessary dead ends go with the work, like mad dogs and mailmen. Also I liked her. I liked the lift of her jaw and the way she looked at you closely when you talked, listening hard, and the snap of light in her eye when she heard something she didn’t like, which in another latitude might have been followed by a stiletto from a garter belt.
    Or a needle filled with Stelazine. Her Mata Hari defense had more holes in it than Mata Hari.
    “So what’s the name of this manager, and where do I find him? One missing person per case is my limit.”
    “Hector Matador.”
    This was a new voice, or rather an old voice in a new venue. I could have placed that guttural Hispanic accent, heavy on the H and dentilinguals, given the time and the circumstances, but as it was all I had to do was turn around. He’d let himself in the door from the sitting room, making no more noise than he’d made listening from the other side. Of course he’d have a key card to the suite.
    He’d put on a little weight on the block, but you could still thread a needle with his narrow hips and shoulders and narrower head, if you had the right size needle and resisted the temptation to turn it around and shove it through his heart. He still wore
his hair in little-boy bangs, although these days the black was probably aged in the bottle, and he hadn’t lost his fondness for fawn-colored suits, pink silk neckties, and bench-made loafers. It would be the great-grandson of the outfit he’d had on the last time I saw him, when my testimony before a Wayne County jury had