The Glass Highway by Loren D. Estleman Page A

I’d left standing on my desk. The office was only a couple of miles out of my way. I shot past Hamtramck and home, got off the Ford onto Grand River, and double-parked in front of my building.
    It’s a three-story climb to where I do business at the end of an echoing hall decorated in early Warner Brothers. During the day I leave the door to the outer office unlocked so that any customers I might attract can sit down and read a period magazine while they wait. At night I lock it. I also turn out the light that was now spilling through the glass and across the hall. I had a visitor.
    It was a hell of a time to be without a gun. I hadn’t thought I’d need one to get a bottle out of my own office. I went back down to my car and returned carrying the Luger I kept in a special compartment under the dash. Avoiding loose boards under the runner, I crept along the edge of the hallway to the door with A. WALKER INVESTIGATIONS lettered in black on the pebbled glass and opened it noiselessly, inching the Luger and part of my face around the jamb.
    Paula Royce was sitting on the upholstered bench looking straight at me. She was wearing a light blue belted vinyl raincoat and a soft felt hat like a man’s with the brim pulled down all around her head. Her nostrils fluttered.
    She had a gun I recognized in one hand.

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    S HE WAS CROWDED into the far corner of the bench, her free hand braced on the curved wooden arm, the fingers spread and pressing so tight the bones showed through the flesh. The .32 in her other hand—the same gun I’d taken away from Bud a week earlier—was braced on her knee and pointing where most of the muzzles in this case had been pointing. It was too steady for a frightened young woman from Bolivia. Her eyes were very large under the pulled-down hat brim. The pupils covered the irises. She was as high as a broadcast tower and she didn’t know me from Jack the Ripper.
    I stood there holding my Luger and wondering how long a man could live without breathing.
    Time sneaked past, a great deal more of it than my watch indicated later. Then her chin trembled and the gun lay down on her leg, pulling her hand over with it. My lungs started working again. I unclamped my fingers from the jamb and came the rest of the way inside. It was wonderful how I could do that without my feet touching the floor. Lowering the automatic, I reached down carefully with my other hand and slid the revolver out from under hers. It was that easy.
    I sniffed the barrel. Spent cordite always smells the same. I rotated the cylinder, thumbing out shells and replacing them. Two empties. I dropped it into my coat pocket, there to pick up all kinds of interesting microscopic matter for the lab boys to scratch their heads over, and stuck the Luger inside my waistband.
    “Let’s you and me get cozy in the inner sanctum.” I put out a hand.
    She looked at it, as a pup will when you use it to try to direct her attention elsewhere, then reached up and grasped it. Her hand was cold as expected. I exerted very little pressure and she rose. I had to steer her toward the door marked PRIVATE , and while I was fumbling for the key she sagged against me with all her weight and I had to clamp my other arm around her to keep her face off my rug.
    Not much to inventory in my brain studio. The same oak desk, too old to be smart and not old enough to be back in style, the same odd chairs and backless sofa, the same tired file cabinet with two drawers full of files, one full of cobwebs and mouse droppings, and a change of shirts in the fourth, the same green metal safe, the same framed original Casablanca poster mounted on the wall opposite my investigator’s license in another frame and a peekaboo calendar to preserve the image. Dust and dead flies on the window sill. It was easier to catch leprechauns dancing on a sprig of heather than the building’s fabled cleaning service at work. I deposited Paula in the customer’s chair and walked around the desk