Stress by Loren D. Estleman Page B

shit what it says on my birth certificate, The’. He’s my father. I’m not about to do to him what he wouldn’t do to me.”
    “What about you and me? We want to start a family, but we can’t if every time we try to do something about it he interrupts us.”
    He craned his neck suddenly, cocking one ear in the direction of his uncle’s room. She stopped talking and listened with him.
    “What? Do you hear something?”
    “Snoring.” He slid down and hooked a bare leg over her hip. “He ain’t interrupting nobody just now.”
    “I hate it when you talk like that,” she said.
    “Like what?”
    “Like Anthony. He can’t help it. He dropped out in the ninth grade to go to work when his father was killed on the picket line. You graduated in the top third of your class and had twelve weeks’ police training to boot. We’re never going to get anywhere as a people as long as we insist on sounding like Uncle Remus.”
    “Yes’m.”
    “Charlie, I’m serious.”
    “So am I.” He ran a palm up the inside of her thigh. When she opened her mouth to say something, he closed his over it. She whimpered a little and turned into him.
    On the other side of the living room, Battling Anthony Battle awoke to the noise of a headboard thumping against a wall.
    Fucking Larry Shane , he thought. When he ain’t got nobody to kick he jumps all over the fucking canvas like a fucking rabbit. He wondered what that little shit Charlie had done with his lucky trunks.

Chapter Ten
    K UBICEK WORE HIS BLUE SUIT TO THE D ETROIT C LUB. He had wanted to wear his heavy-duty gray, mostly because it was tolerant of his physical short comings and provided protection against the Michigan winter, allowing him to leave his topcoat at home; but his wife had insisted upon the more businesslike serge. Snug across the chest and too light for the razor winds of January, it was stiff with the newness of clothing that was worn only when absolutely necessary. The inspector’s tag was intact in the right saddle pocket of the coat, and a sheaf of old funeral programs occupied the left inside breast pocket. One bore the name of his Aunt Milka, gone to compost these seventeen years. In that time he’d worn out three cars and the chest of drawers she’d left him. But not that fucking suit. If Audrey buried him in it he swore he’d haunt her until the insurance ran out.
    He was in uniform the only time he’d been inside the Romanesque brownstone at Cass and Fort, when a waiter went apeshit over a mixed-up order and stabbed an assistant chef with a grapefruit knife. The chef had recovered, the waiter did two hundred hours of community service for assault with intent to commit great bodily harm other than murder, and the incident never made the press. Eleven mayors and two governors had been elected from inside the club’s walnut-paneled walls. Kubicek supposed the waiter forfeited references.
    He traded his topcoat for a green plastic check and followed a bald geezer in a red jacket past the moosehead into the dining room. This was a square candy box, wood-walled and carpeted and hung with burgundy velour, as quiet as a fart at a formal wedding. Utensils clicked, crystal pinged, conversations conducted in normal voices drifted toward the high ceiling and dissipated like tobacco smoke. The wing collars were gone, also the ruby stickpins and tall hats worn indoors, but aside from that nothing had changed from pictures of the place he had seen in a calendar of Old Detroit on the wall of an inspector’s office at 1300. The same basic faces had gone on slurping soup while outside the brown stink of horseshit gave way to the blue-gray stench of auto exhaust and five wars came and went. The must in the air reminded him of the Collector’s Corner at the Historical Museum, a building he’d visited twice, both times to have his picture taken as Policeman of the Month.
    Nothing about which was conducive to his appetite. When it came to eating, he’d take the heat