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Overview
Calling upon his considerable novelistic skills, Loren D. Estleman exposes the black heart of a seemingly stable, well-run city suddenly pitched into violence and chaos. A delicate balance of forces—greed and corruption, ambition and desire—run out of control in the wake of a serial killer's grisly rampage.
A power struggle—between a police chief who has looked the other way for too long, a Mafia boss who holds the city's vices in his powerful grasp, and media reporters looking for a big story—turns what has been a minor dispute into a desperate struggle for survival.
Setting this drama, Gas City, in a blue-collar metropolis dominated by an oil company, Estleman, with an unerring eye for telling detail and an ear for dialogue that reveals the secret desires of his characters, crafts a fascinating, deadly tapestry of love, ambition, revenge, and redemption, a stunning portrait of the human condition.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429925938 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/03/2009 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 399 KB |
About the Author
Loren D. Estleman is the author of more than eighty novels, including the Amos Walker, Page Murdock, and Peter Macklin series. The winner of four Shamus Awards, five Spur Awards, and three Western Heritage Awards, he lives in Central Michigan with his wife, author Deborah Morgan.
Read an Excerpt
Gas City
By Loren D. Estleman, James Frenkel
Tom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 2007 Loren D. EstlemanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-2593-8
CHAPTER 1
He was on the telephone with Marty's sister when the nun came up and touched his arm. He pegged the receiver and went with her, moving fast.
Afterward, the nun said it often happened that way. It was as if they waited until they were alone. He'd been in the room with Marty all evening, listening to her labored but steady breathing, and had only stepped out to stretch his legs and report to his sister-in-law, who was stuck in Mexico, some little shit village whose switchboard shut down for two hours at siesta time. He'd just got back in time to hold Marty's hand while her blood pressure dropped into the basement.
The nurses asked him to wait outside for a few minutes. They called him "Mr. Russell." No one had called him mister in more than thirty years. He wondered if they knew who he was, apart from Marty's husband. It didn't seem possible that they wouldn't, but then the hospital seemed to exist entirely within its own boundaries, like the Vatican. Even the parking lot attendant peered down at you from his booth as if he were about to ask to see your passport.
He thought they'd spend the time tidying her up, but when he was allowed back into the room, all they'd done was draw the respirator from her throat and unhook the wires and tubes. She lay with her eyes and mouth gaping, damp hair smeared at her temples. Rage shot through him like an electrical charge. He hadn't reached that level of fury since he'd stopped wearing the uniform. It filled the space Marty had occupied. He wanted to break things, push in faces. People were meat. It didn't matter that this one had kept her fifth-grade perfect attendance certificate in a frame on the wall, miscarried twice, given birth finally after seven months on her back to a daughter who turned whore at fifteen and ran off with carnival scum, and then a son, dead at twenty in a minefield; that she hadn't cursed God even then, as he had. Instead she'd added Saturday Mass to her schedule from then until she couldn't get up the cathedral steps without being carried, a thing she was too Sligo-proud to permit. The nurses and the young squirt doctor had addressed her as Martha Rose because that was the name on the admissions sheet, but he knew that among themselves she was Twelve, and not even Room Twelve. He hated them with a heat that was almost pleasant.
And then the rage and heat were gone, and there was a hole through him and he had to turn so the wind wouldn't whistle through it. He'd been preparing for this moment for weeks — years, he corrected, from the time the results of the first tests had come back and he'd stopped arguing with them — and he'd hoped the dread of the waiting would give way to a sense of release. He'd felt it for a moment, with the last exhalation, when she took her leave of her body, a lacy apparition in a cheap religious print. But this was a new level of emptiness. What he'd thought was the bottom collapsed beneath his weight, the thinnest of crusts, and he went plummeting yet again. It was like falling in a dream. They said if you woke up before you hit, you were okay, but if you didn't, well, that was when people died in their sleep. It seemed better than this eternal falling.
He closed her eyes, a kneading sort of operation, not at all like turning down the slats in Venetian blinds, and tipped up her chin gently. It would be the last thing he did for her, after months of helping her dress and undress, trimming her nails and hair, and he wondered how he would fill the time from then on. There would be arrangements to make, calls to place, beginning with Marty's sister; after that, what? Wake, vigil, services. Friends and family and near strangers eating his food and telling him stories about his wife, half of which he'd never heard and would only remind him of the time they hadn't spent together, all those nights he'd slept at headquarters because it hadn't seemed worth going home just to turn around and come back for the morning turnout. Then they would all shake his hand and leave.
And after that, what?
When he turned from the bed, Hugh Dungannon was standing in the doorway. His suit was virgin wool, black with a sheen like polished walnut, and as always he wore a fresh clerical collar, but he managed to look rumpled just the same. He was a big man, at war with his size. He partially succeeded in shrinking in upon himself, but his clothes were not so flexible, gathering and wrinkling in the spaces he left. His hair was white and splendidly thick, but he chopped it close to his scalp, calling attention to his cauliflower ear and making his face with its prognathous lower half stick out like a shorn lion's. He had the golden-brown, unblinking eyes, and a deep dimple in his upper lip that suggested the leonine cleft. He'd been at Our Lady of Perpetual Misery for so many years even Russell had to remind himself they'd sat at adjoining desks in Sister Catherine Eustatius' English Composition class. It was the sister's powerful right hand that had given Hugh that ear.
"I'm sorry, Francis," he said. "She was in a state of grace."
"I know. One of the nuns told me you were here with your stick."
"Six hours ago, it was. I thought you might be here as well."
"I couldn't sit any longer. I went out for a quick one."
"Just one?" Dungannon smiled.
"Practically. It goes a lot farther than it used to."
"Not much else does. Remember when we tore your da's sofa apart looking for a quarter to buy beer?"
"Anyway, the time came and I knew you were here, but I didn't get off the stool. I figured if a bishop couldn't pray her across without my help, what good's the whole business?"
"Now you sound like an atheist."
"I know He exists. We had a falling out."
Dungannon changed the subject. They had had this discussion before. "I'll stand you to a cup of coffee. The cafeteria's closed, but they keep a pot on for me. I don't sleep but four hours either way."
Russell hesitated. The habit of staying with Marty had gotten its hooks in deep. His desertion that afternoon had had no precedent.
The bishop read his thoughts. "She's in good hands. You can make the arrangements tomorrow."
The hallway was quiet, as if the building itself were whispering. Dungannon's patent-leather pumps, hand-lasted to his disproportionately small feet, made soft squishing sounds on the linoleum. Russell's rubber heels squeaked. The noise mortified him. A clock suspended from the ceiling read two minutes past eleven. In an hour it would be the first morning in fifty-five years without Martha Rose Noonan.
Only one row of fluorescents glowed in the cafeteria. Russell preferred the muted effect, but hadn't the energy to protest when Dungannon palmed up the rest of the switches. He regretted agreeing to coffee, wished he'd pled exhaustion and gone home. Steel and Formica gleamed in the bright light. The floor had been waxed within the hour. It smelled like High Mass.
"Me own mug." Dungannon plocked down an oversize white vessel in front of Russell and filled it from the carafe. He socketed two cardboard cups together and poured for himself. No light showed through the stream.
Russell sipped the bitter stuff and set down the mug. "Mother of God."
"Some days I just chew the grounds." The bishop sat down and raised his container in both hands, ignoring the fold-out handles. "Who are you using?"
"Stillwell brothers."
"Good men. I baptized Dennis. They use the modern method. No formaldehyde. Does this talk upset you?"
Russell shook his head. He was only half listening. "Marty had a poem she liked. By Rossetti."
"I'll use it. Christina?"
"Dante Gabriel. From The House of Life. 'As when two men have loved a woman well,' is how it starts."
The leonine face smoothed out. "I didn't think she'd remember."
"She never mentioned it. Not once in thirty-seven years."
"You married a saint."
"She was a blowtop. She threw a skillet at me once."
"I'd have thought she'd be more original."
"It seemed inspired enough at the time. I earned it, I guess. I never was much in the husband department."
"She knew when you married she'd have to share you with the city."
"The city didn't get any bargain, either."
"She died, Francis. You didn't kill her."
"It ain't that. She always said a mackinaw was as warm as mink. I took it another way."
"You were a good provider. House on West Riverside, new car every two years, box at the Corinthian. I know how you feel about opera, so that counts double."
"She said she'd have been as happy with one bedroom and a bleacher at Granite Park."
"They're supposed to say that."
"I took it as criticism. She was saying I should've stayed a cop."
"What do you mean, kick in doors and shout at felons to put their hands on their head? She'd never know if you were coming home."
"She never knew as it was."
The bishop took a slug of coffee. "There's a misconception about priests, that we're not of the world and don't know its ways. But I've heard more confessions than you. Some men keep mistresses, beat their wives, perform unspeakable crimes upon their sons and daughters. You're no transgressor."
"You need good works to pass through the eye of the needle."
"Even so, it's a little late for this conversation, unless you want to put the uniform back on. Who'd run the place when you got yourself killed?"
"Who's running it now?"
Someone was operating a floor buffer in the hall, a low-grade hum. Dungannon glanced that way. This time Russell read his thoughts. You're never more than twenty feet from another pair of ears.
"You're the best chief this town ever had," Dungannon said. "There's voting citizens lived here their whole lives never knew another."
"Citizens in jail, too. Sneak thieves and dopers. I can't remember when was the last time we arrested a man wearing a necktie."
"Maybe we should start a program in the Circle. Hand them out at Christmas along with the secondhand overcoats."
"Maybe we should knock on some doors on West Riverside."
The golden-brown gaze rested on him. "You're worn out, Francis. You ought to go home and sleep."
Russell smiled. "Don't worry, Hugh. I'm talking through my hat is all."
"I know that. Not everyone does. And not everyone has had my practice at keeping secrets."
"I'll get you that book of poems. It's the ninety-first stanza. 'Lost on Both Sides.'"
"I might have it at the rectory. Father Gillespie taught poetry, remember."
"I'd rather you didn't read from a book belonging to him."
"I never knew you didn't like him."
"He committed suicide."
"He fell under the interurban."
"Threw himself."
"The cardinal investigated. He ruled it an accident."
"I investigated, too. Gillespie had cancer of the spine. Morphine wasn't enough and he started going to the Circle for heroin."
"He was in pain."
"He was a priest."
"You expect too much of people, Francis. Starting with yourself."
"That's what Marty said."
"She was a smart woman."
"She was no smarter than she wanted to be."
He left Dungannon sitting there, turning his cup between his palms. On the way out of the hospital he passed an ox-faced orderly buffing the floor. The orderly didn't look up.
CHAPTER 2Before the wells and the refinery — before Gas City, when brochures invited a restless population to settle in Garden Grove — the city fathers had commissioned the construction of a variety theater on the north end of Commercial Street adjoining the arboretum. The arboretum was gone, replaced by a housing project funded by the Defense Department to shelter refinery workers during wartime, but the Corinthian remained, a homely gray box stunted by the Deco and neoclassical high-rises that had sprung up around it.
The interior was more impressive. Gutted during a shabby period of reincarnation as a movie house, then restored for Grand Opera at double the cost of original construction, the lobby presented Greek pilasters, Egyptian friezes, and a soaring staircase, beyond which an auditorium done in gilded plaster and burgundy velvet seated twenty-five hundred, with an orchestra pit built to accommodate one hundred pieces. The somewhat narrow proscenium had during its history showcased talented tenors on their way east to New York and superannuated coloraturas on their way west to dinner theaters and cruise ships. Ernestine Schumann-Heink was generally conceded to have expired there in the middle of a production of The Bohemian Girl.
First in line when season boxes went on sale was Anthony Zeno, proprietor of Volcanic Wholesale Plumbing Supplies, who also presided over the theater's board of directors and sat on the Gas City Cultural and Civic Improvement Commission. Slender and white-haired, with patrician eyebrows and the nose of a Sioux chief, he managed to appear as comfortable in full dress as he did in denims when he tended his herb patch Sundays. He attended openings with a copy of the score and libretto, and followed each line and lyric with a finger, checking places where the performance departed from the text and writing a polite letter of correction to the director the next morning. He adored opera with the attention of a U.S.-born Genoese, and liked to remark that lack of talent was all that had prevented him from selecting the stage as his career. "That, and Joe Gallante wiring six sticks of dynamite to the battery of Fat Paulie Buffo's Cadillac." More and more he liked to joke about those unlamented days.
Almost before Fat Paulie came down, Zeno was put on a train to Gas City to take his place. He hadn't expected to remain long. He'd had his eye on the Manhattan Dry Cleaners Guild, which to his thinking was not being run efficiently, and he intended to have arranged a number of advantageous contracts with the McGrath refinery by the time the New York slot opened so that he would be considered favorably to fill it. Two things happened to alter that plan. First, the plumbing supply business, purchased at a bankruptcy sale merely to give him something to declare to the Internal Revenue Service, proved surprisingly successful in the hands of the directors with whom he'd placed it. The profits for the first year exceeded the custodial fee his outside investors paid him to manage their brothel and horse parlor interests in The Circle, and caused him to consult a tax attorney to set up shelters for his legitimate income. Second, his wife Trina died at age twenty-eight — of a congenital heart defect, as reported in The Derrick. She had dissolved thirty-four phenobarbitol capsules in a glass of vodka and drunk it while listening to the radio. In the course of his mourning, he discovered he'd made friends, first among them Francis X. Russell, the local chief of police, who called him every night and attended the races with him afternoons at Granite Park. In time their visits became less frequent, but they had lunch on occasion at Rinaldi's and played cards at each other's house, and almost before he knew it, Anthony Zeno had put in twenty-five years in Gas City.
He reminded himself to call Francis after the opera. Marty had never approved of their association, he knew, but neither had she objected to their spending time together. The chief had few friends — people respected him but thought him aloof, not the sort to share a pitcher with and argue about who hit harder, Sailor Bantry or the Macroom Mauler — and when her sister visited she worried about him sitting in the parlor smoking his pipe while they caught up on the sister's travels over Irish coffee in the kitchen. In her world, even the company of a hooligan was preferable to one's own. And now she was gone, and it was Francis who needed to be taken to the races.
Zeno should have called before this. They hadn't had much contact since the wedding. Three years ago, that was; he supposed he should start referring to it as his marriage. Deanne was not Trina. She was half his age, to start, and she only came with him to the Corinthian because everyone in the place knew what a season box cost and she shone whenever a pair of opera glasses were trained on her from the orchestra. People saw her that way, heard her clear, upward-canting laugh, and wondered among themselves (he'd heard them, whispers carrying as they did, farther than normal speech) what kind of pills he took to keep her interested in bed. It never occurred to them the flame had no heat. He and Deanne went out as often as they did because the silence at home was like a throbbing ache. Her ash-blonde, blue-eyed, firm-breasted energy in public, clinging to his arm and hinting broadly at the lewd goings-on under the Zeno roof, almost convinced even him they were a normal couple.
And now he'd been thinking too much and had missed most of the second act of Fra Diavolo. He paged through the script, drawing an arched eyebrow and a smirk from Deanne, who had adopted the attitude that his interest in anything more challenging than Greco-Roman wrestling was an affectation: Scarface Al telling the boys in the press that with him, "Grand Opera's the berries." The last time she'd said that, he'd had to restrain himself from slapping her. At that moment, her eyes had lit with a malicious glint, her point proven. And he knew she'd go on, stockpiling her ammunition and refining her tactics, until her theory became fact for everyone to see. It was women who made gangsters, with their suicides and derision.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Gas City by Loren D. Estleman, James Frenkel. Copyright © 2007 Loren D. Estleman. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Break of Day,I: The Crisis,
II: The Crackdown,
III: The Crusade,
IV: The Crime,
Close of Day,
About the Author,