Silent Thunder by Loren D. Estleman Page A

’em off,” he snarled. “The shoes and socks too.”
    “You still don’t know me.”
    “Mister, if I had a nickel for every trailer park I been in and every time I held somebody for Jerry.” His breath smelled of Juicyfruit. “You want me to take ’em off you?”
    “Maybe this’ll help.” I hit him with one hundred and eighty-five pounds.
    He was solid. He rocked back on his heels without going over. But he was too dazed to react right away, and I hit him again just as hard. He backpedaled and lost his balance. I reached past him and plucked the forest fire lamp off its table just before it tipped over. He was out then, but his body didn’t know it. He rolled onto his stomach and tried to push himself up. I hit him on the head with the lamp. Bright yellow-and-orange bits of painted forest fire sprayed all over. He groaned and fell on his face.
    “Hubert?” Ma’s wheezy voice barely reached the ground floor.
    I dropped what was left of the lamp, stepped over Hubert, and pulled the newspaper out of the lacquer wastebasket. I wondered what a day-old copy of the Detroit News was doing lying around an otherwise tidy living room.
    The answer was on the front page, or rather missing from it. Someone with scissors had snipped an L-shaped piece out of the lower right-hand corner. I thought I knew where it had wound up.
    “Hubert?” Footsteps shuffled on the stairs.
    I put the paper back the way I’d found it. I didn’t need it as much as I needed Ma’s goodwill. Around Detroit, old newspapers are as easy to get hold of as hired muscle.

8
    S HE CAME IN wearing boys’ Size Husky overalls over a man’s plaid flannel shirt and sneakers on her big square feet. With her orange hair and the paint and powder on her face the outfit made her look like one of those inflatable clowns that pop back up when you punch them. She looked down at Hubert Darling, then nudged the wreckage of the lamp with a toe. “My Calvin gave me that.”
    “Sorry. His head was harder than it looked.”
    “He dead?”
    “Only from the neck up,” I said. “You won’t notice the difference.”
    “Well, if they had any brains Ma couldn’t afford them.” She booted him in the ribs, hard enough to bruise one. “Wake up, peckerhead.”
    “Let him snooze. He’s going to come to with a headache a yard wide.”
    “One thing’s sure. Nobody that ever wore no wire ever hit anybody that hard.”
    “You’d be surprised.” I’d stopped at my bank on the way there. I took five fifty-dollar bills out of my wallet, righted the table that had been knocked over, and laid them on top. Their edges stirred a little in the wind from the fan. “You’ll have to trust me for the other half. I’ve got a car payment due.”
    “What about your client?”
    “That’s a little complicated.”
    “Complicated how?”
    “What about Thayer?” I asked.
    She booted Hubert again. “Sure he ain’t dead?”
    “I could go out and get my gun and come back and put a bullet in him if you like. It’d be quicker than kicking him to death.”
    “It ain’t that. I just don’t need no bodies rolling around like out at the barn that time. I live here. Well.” She set fire to a cigarette, striking a wooden kitchen match off a thick thumbnail the way I never could, and coughed, hacking a little and swallowing.
    “January it was,” she said. “Maybe February. One of them cold months when I get to thinking about visiting my boy Floyd in Florida. They bum-rapped him down there. He told me himself he was in Arkansas when them boys shot that feller in Fort Lauderdale. My boys steal, but they don’t lie.”
    “January or February,” I prompted.
    “He had a letter with him. I got it here.” She took a fold of coarse paper out of the slash pocket of her overalls and handed it to me.
    The sheet had yellowed in a drawer, been doodled on, and used to add sums of figures in Ma’s crabbed hand. The message had been badly typed on a machine whose o ’s and a ’s