Silent Thunder Read Online Free PDF Page B

looked high enough. I took my birthday bottle out of the deep drawer of the desk and floated some dust in a glass. Then I looked up Ma Chaney’s number in the green book.
    “Hello?”
    Good old Ma. It was getting so almost nobody answered the telephone the old-fashioned way. I swallowed some antidote and used my name. “We met during that Virgil Boyd thing.”
    “I remember.” Her voice was a cigarette wheeze without any inflection.
    “I’ve got some questions to ask if you’re not busy.”
    “Ma’s never busy. Go ahead and ask.”
    “Not over the telephone. Where can we meet?”
    “My house is in the same place it always was.”
    “When can I come out?”
    “Ma’s always home.”
    “How about five o’clock?”
    “Bring money.”
    I barely had my hand off the receiver when the bell rang. It was Shooter.
    “You know the warehouse district?” he asked.
    “You mean Rivertown?”
    “Screw Rivertown. That’s an architect’s drawing. I mean the warehouse district, railroad tracks and big ugly buildings with rats.”
    “Where in the warehouse district?”
    “It don’t matter, man. It ain’t big enough to piss in since the mayor got his gold shovel. Five o’clock.”
    “Can’t make it. How about four?”
    “Four’s fine. I be there at five.” He did it to me again.
    I called Ma back. “Something came up. Is four o’clock okay?”
    “Ma takes her nap at four,” said the owner of the wheezy voice.
    “Six, then.”
    “At six I visit the hospital.”
    “I thought you never left home.”
    “Ma’s got a boy in the hospital.”
    “How about tonight after seven?”
    The wheeze turned into a short laugh that ended in a smoker’s hack. “Ma works nights.”
    “I forgot. So when?”
    “You come see Ma tomorrow anytime.”
    “Okay.”
    “Except six,” she added.
    I said okay again and wrote the appointment on my crowded social calendar, right between Shooter and the day I stay home and rotate my socks.

5
    E VERY CASE NEEDS a place to start, a thread you can pull or an edge of tape you can get your thumbnail under. It was a long haul from your local Saturday Night Special dealer to the people who trafficked in plastic weapons the FAA hadn’t heard about, but Constance Thayer’s short court date didn’t leave enough time to place an ad in Soldier of Fortune. I went home at four, shaved for the second time that day, and put on my good blue suit and a solid red tie over a white shirt fresh out of tissue and plastic: that clean-cut look and subliminal American flag that tells the world you’re out to blow Russia right out of the National Geographic. I unscrewed the cap from a bottle of Brut and hesitated, wondering if it was a touch too much. Then I slapped it on. Subtlety was lost on the culture I was about to enter.
    The old Detroit, the city of growling trumpets, window-tapping hookers, and contraband Canadian whisky served in smoky cellars, is still visible if you care to look for it and the mayor’s contractors haven’t gotten to it yet. At the moment they were busy ripping out the turn-of-the-century brick warehouses along the river and replacing them with hotels and office buildings that looked like Coke bottles, but they weren’t quite finished. A hand-towel-size section along Jefferson still contained blackened box-shaped structures with painted-over windows standing on broken pavement. Disused rails twisted among heaps of rubble and old wooden pallets in one of the last places in the city that didn’t stink of committee planning. Where do all the shattered people go when ugliness has been banished?
    I parked next to a loading dock and waited with the windows down. Mine was the only vehicle in the area and I was the only thing breathing in it that I could see. The air smelled of concrete dust and worm-eaten oak and spilled sweat. Gusts off the river skinned the top layer of grit off the scenery and spread a gray mulch over my upholstery. To my right, at the end of a narrow passage