American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel by Loren D. Estleman

dragon.” When I stood up, a hollow gong struck inside my head. The liquor was kicking in. I needed to float something in it before I bearded someone like Wilson Watson. “Thanks very much for your time.”
    She remained seated. “I was curious to see what kind of snare they were setting for me this time. I’m happy I was mistaken. I’ll hold on to your card. Mai told me you sometimes do security work. Would you consider a temporary position on my staff next time I travel?”
    “I thought you only employed Asians.”
    “I prefer to, when their abilities match or excel those ofthe occidentals who apply. As a businesswoman I can’t afford to dismiss anyone out of hand on the basis of race alone. I’m not a university.”
    “Would the job include carrying your bags?”
    “No. I have people for that, as well as for the bags belonging to the security personnel. A bodyguard with his hands full is useless.”
    “How do they get their guns aboard the planes?”
    “The planes are chartered. I stopped taking commercial flights after nine-eleven. I’m not concerned about fanatics, but I dislike being ordered about by cocktail waitresses.”
    “I get five hundred a day.”
    “I think I can do a little better. Of course, travel, meals, and accommodations are included.”
    “When’s your next trip?”
    “Sometimes I have to leave on two hours’ notice.”
    “Heat?”
    “Fluctuations in the market.”
    “I’ll start carrying a toothbrush in my pocket.” I hung back at the door connecting to the sitting room. “I know why you have to register under a pseudonym. But why MacArthur?”
    Her smile belonged on a silk print with ponds and pagodas.
    “Sentiment. He was the first American to leave Korea.”
    Wilson Watson was one of those names, like Twelfth and Clairmount, that brought back memories most Detroiters who lived through the period would rather burn, bury, and cover with salt. He was seventeen in 1967, hauling around a string of juvenile offenses already, when a police raid on a blind pig on that corner touched off the granddaddy of allrace riots, with pistols and Molotov cocktails on one side and M-60 tanks on the other. Forty-three people died, 1,383 buildings burned, and the phrase “soul brother” entered the national lexicon, having been spray painted on black-owned businesses in hopes of sparing them from the torch—in vain, by and large. Once a city of a million starts rolling downhill, racial ties alone won’t slow it down.
    Of the nearly four thousand people arrested that week, Wilson Watson was among the first. He’d organized a band of looters who made their way systematically across the smoldering city, across the wounded, wailing city, targeting savings and loan offices, electronics outlets, and liquor stores and removing cash and merchandise that could be liquidated easily. A number of witnesses summoned to testify against him at his trial vanished or lost their memories on the stand, but those who cooperated with the prosecution gave evidence that Watson had set out to raise money to import highgrade heroin from Asia and the Middle East and squeeze out the independents. He’d gotten the Call, which was to become the biggest drug czar in the Great Lakes. The authorities, shell-shocked and uncomfortably aware of the disparity between a predominately white police department and an overwhelmingly black community, were inclined to deal leniently with the common run of portable TV thieves, but Watson was a hard-shell criminal and an opportunist with an agenda. A judge sentenced him as an adult to twenty years at hard labor for his ambition. He served only eleven, despite getting caught placing bets on the 1968 World Series through his attorney, who was disbarred shortly thereafter.
    The friendships you form in prison are the longest lasting. In return for teaching him that the gambling culture offered a higher return for less risk than narcotics, the acquaintancesWatson made while inside found