Peeper by Loren D. Estleman

uniform.
    O’Leary ignored him. “I don’t know what you are to her, Poteet; friend, pimp, favorite John, what, it doesn’t matter. She wants to talk to you, which does. We need you to ask her who it was rigged that blast.”
    â€œWhy the hell should I?”
    â€œLet’s just say if whoever it was isn’t you, we won’t have to bother you anymore about where you were night before last and who you were with.”
    â€œThat why you brought reinforcements?”
    â€œExcuse my crappy manners. This is Officer Mileaway. Officer Mileaway, this is Ralph Poteet.”
    â€œPleased,” said Ralph.
    â€œYeah.” The uniform watched the scenery.
    â€œI brought Officer Mileaway along to remind you what it’s like when we bother you.”
    â€œI can live with it. Just drop me off at the corner there.”
    O’Leary drove past it. “Just for the hell of it I ran you through the computer downtown. The information just kept coming out and out. You’ve spent more time at headquarters than I have. I’m surprised I never saw you there.”
    â€œToo much smoke.” Ralph opened the window for air. The arson investigator had a cigarette between his fingers and another burning in the ashtray.
    â€œThat disturbing-the-peace beef on Livernois last year was a hoot. How’d you get an ordinary camera to work underwater in a Jacuzzi?”
    â€œSaran Wrap. I was proud of them shots. I sent them to National Geographic but they bounced them back. I told them they were narwhals.”
    â€œToo bad that was his own wife State Senator Coopersmith was with.”
    â€œPeople that age shouldn’t be doing that kind of stuff in a public pool.”
    â€œI guess it’s okay, with a buddy.”
    Ralph got out a matchstick. “So I had a couple of run-ins with the law. It’s the job.”
    â€œBonnie and Clyde had a couple of run-ins with the law. Two more weeks on the premises and you’d qualify for a departmental pension. What I can’t figure out is why you aren’t rich or dead.”
    â€œLuck.”
    â€œWhich kind, good or bad?”
    â€œIt evens out. Am I busted or what? ’Cause if I ain’t, this here is kidnapping.”
    â€œTechnically it’s abduction. But that’s for private citizens. For a guy with your rap sheet it’s an afternoon drive. Relax and enjoy.”
    Ralph gave up. He had no place to go but home anyway, and if the bishop called, it would do him good to stew a little. Ralph watched the big Uniroyal tire display sliding by and jets taking off and landing at Metro Airport. He had never been on an airplane. He had had a chance once, but arrived late and it left without him, carrying a load of hijacked microchips to Colombia in trade for twelve hundred kilos of high-grade cocaine. On the return trip, a mechanical malfunction had forced the plane down on some jerkwater island in the Gulf of Mexico, where the pilot and copilot were immediately elected to head the revolutionary government. The U.S. State Department was currently considering sending $300 million in military aid to President Ziggy Blumberg and Vice President Oscar Torporino. Ralph had lied to O’Leary about his luck. He always got the short handle.
    Inside the Ann Arbor city limits they took the State Street exit and parked in a towaway zone outside the University of Michigan Medical Center. A nurse at the desk in the lobby informed them that the patient had been removed from intensive care and transferred to the third floor of the Burn Center. There a young resident in a white coat with a fresh crop of acne on his chin directed them to a ward at the end of the hall. He hesitated.
    â€œEr, there are rules against that,” he said, pointing. “Even if there weren’t, don’t you think it’s, er, inappropriate, considering why these people are here?”
    O’Leary apologized and dropped his cigarette butt