Nicotine Kiss (2006) Estelman

This is an Amos Walker book, and it’s great fun so far!

It is set in is Detroit after 9-11, which you can tell because the federal law is this story is a guy from Homeland Security and he’s all worked up about terrorist cells..

The book opens a bar in the hunting town of Grayling Michigan on Opening Day for “firearms deer season” (which implies that there’s a deer season not using firearms).

Our hero Amos Walker is up there to pick up the tail of a fellow he’d been hired to find. The only known pleasure in this guy’s life is deer hunting in this area.

Amos is thinking about:

• the target (sympathetic and sad),
• the client (greedy, divorced wife),
• the bar he’s in and
• his waitress (hilarious).

Walker’s witty dialog and witty internal monologue are the real charm of these books. It’s an Estelman feature in general!

[He has another series of books which are Westerns starring Page Murdock. Picture if you will, a Deputy US Marshall in the 1880’s wise-cracking like a Detroit private eye in the 1980’s. They are very entertaining.]

In that bar he encounters a fellow named Jeff Starzek, who he’s known for years. He makes his living as a cigarette smuggler, buying a trunk full of cartons in Canada or another low tax place and bringing them back and selling them to bodegas in Michigan, which is evidently a very high tax place (see map below for the geographic reasons this works).

He spots his quarry in his orange hunting togs. For reasons that still aren’t clear to me, the guy shoots Amos in the parking lot … and in the leg, and then kills himself. Starzek is a big guy and scoops Amos up and whisks him to the emergency room in is fast smugglers car. He is of course long gone by the time Amos wakes up.

Amos has a limp for the rest of the book (and maybe forever?).
[As a guy who limps around from the two broken hips I got this year, I can relate!]

22 After Amos is home in Detriot, a fellow called Oral Canon visits his office and says he is Starzek’s brother-in-law and wants to hire Walker to find him. Apparently he ias been missing since soon after that night.

Amos has been thinking a lot about how Starzek probably saved his leg (and maybe his life) by scooping him up after he was shot and whisking him to the hospital so quickly.

He says he will do the job it for free, but the fellow insists on giving him $1,200 in crisp C-notes (as Walker calls them 🙂 as a retainer.

Lieutenant Mary Ann Thaler appears.

Even when she doesn’t have much to do with the story, she seems to get a cameo in every Amos Walker book. I think just so Estelman can comment on how fine she looks! This time, among with looking fine as usual, she brings along a Homeland Security officer named Herbert Clemson who wants to meet Amos.

Starzek is apparently a person of interest to Homeland for possibly carrying something more dangerous than cigarretes.

Amos does his due diligence on his new client Oral Canon, and looks him up on the internet. He finds that Starzek does NOT have a sister! He has a much older brother in Port Huron, no sister. Which means Canon is some kind of fake. There is no sister for him to be married to!

The $1,200 is real though, so now Walker is REAL interested!

He drives up to Port Huron, to Starzek’s brother’s ministry, the Church of the Freshwater Sea. .It’s closed for the winter, because everything up there that doesn’t involve shooting ducks, or ice fishing, or snowmobiles is closed for the winter.

Walker eats lunch at a diner then gets pulled over by a local cop before he gets out of town. Canon paid him with counterfit money!!

[I got this wrong, Canon’s $100 bills were good money, but when Amos bought his lunch at the diner up there was a bad $20 in the change they gave him ! It still fits with out story though, because we’re up here to trace the steps of Starzek, who’s thing is carrying illegal stuff in his car!]

Amos and the police trade wisecracks for a while then they let him go.

57 We meet Rose Canon, wife of his client Oral Canon and the sister who isn’t really a sister!

Walker gives a heartfelt description about how beautiful she is.
[Black hair, pale skin….]

I’m convinced! … I can almost see her in my mind!

Walker’s at her house. He wants to smoke but decides it would be inconsiderate to her and her small child. After she takes the baby to he room she insists that he do smoke because she loves the smell of tobacco(!?).

It’s a kind of a nonsensical set-up, but does give Estelman an excuse for the book’s cool title!

65 Rose and Starzek grew up together…. It’s complicated:

• His parents were young idealists in the 60’s who volunteered to help Castro. They died when their flight to Cuba crashed while Jeff was very young .
• Her dad was an alcoholic.
• Jeff was somehow given to her dad’s care so they grew up as brother and sister even though they’re not.
  • At some point the dad dies of alcohol poisoning.
  • She started calling herself Starzek instead of her birth name.
  • Even her husband doesn’t know all this history!

Somewhere in there her hubby had un-hired Walker, so Rose re-hires him.

So now he has a client and can do the snooping he might’ve done anyway with a legal cover.

88 It’s still the middle of winter in northern Michigan, so when he goes back to Post Huron, everything is frozen solid, including the body of Paul Starzek that he finds buried under the woodpile outside his church.

99 Amos waltzes with the local police again for a while. He eventually pulled out his get out jail card and calls Herbert Clemson, the Homeland Security guy from the first part of the book.

I learned a lot about forging American cash money while those two had lunch at the White Castle.

114 They went back and forth for many pages, until Clemson finally at the very end gives it out the Starzek that Jeff is his undercover informant for the counterfeiting ring!

Amos visits his physical therapist and has this charming dialog:

133 Amos has now now been hired to find Jeff Starzek.

He goes back to in Port Huron to follow what he thinks was Starzek’s smuggling route.

I am loving his descriptions of the barren winter countryside.

He follows what he thinks would be Jeff’s schedule while smuggling stuff to see if he can find things like diner’s where he ate.

• Get up at dawn,
  • drive all day until the time of the evening when he guesses Jeff would of pulled in for the night.

• Stop at a place offering vacancies on the ground floor
  (quick and easy exit)
  • off the beaten track but not too far off,
    • the idea is to blend in after all
  • separate outside entrance for the room

144 The next day he kind of lucks into the actual place where the counterfeiting operation is hidden, see below…

Of course he’s really looking for Jeff, not the fake bills, but he does get himself into a whole lot of drama … as we have come to expect from him 🙂

• 139 Fate causes him to stumble into the Sportsman’s Rest, an aging fisherman’s resort
• He yaks with the owner Miss Maebelle for a while.
  • He finds that Unit 12 has been closed all winter.
• On his way out he peeks into unit 12
  • He catches Miss Maebell watching him from her window.
• 149 He checks out the local trucker’s bar, the Air Horn :))
  • There’s a picture of Jeff playing piano there this Christmas.
• 159 Back in his motel room, Amos changes into his breaking and entering gear to go back to Unit 12.
• He commits Breakins and Entering.
• He finds a big flat of paper which is a large stack of sheets of uncut twenty dollar bills.
• 166 He grabs one
• Then he heard Maebells snowmobile.
• In a very action-filled few pages,
  • he avoids getting shot, and
  • somehow gets involved in a sub-zero chase
  • where he’s comandeered a 40′ tall pickup truck called a CTX …
• He is being chased by sweet ole Miss Maebelle who has an inexhaustable supply of 10 gauge shotgun shells.
• Somehow they end up terrorizine the bleary-eyed truckers on the main highway for a minute, then …
• he plunges down the hill and straignt into Lake Huron.
• He jump out a little before the huge truck and the snowmobile (and Miss Maebelle) fall through tie ice!
• Somehow he drives back to the motel and drops the sheet of evidence into a mailbox for Agent Clemson.
• 190 He wakes up 4 days later in the hospital.
• 194 He spars with a particularly sour-dispositioned state trooper and is about to get locked up when …
• 197 Agent Clemson rescues him with one of the federal John Doe warrants he carries a stack of.
• 206 Clemson drives him from the hospital to the Sanilac County airport, …
• where they spend the next few pages in the lounge of the airport where Walker fills him in on all the excitement described above.
• 215 Confusingly, he does not get on a plane, Clemson drive him back to his car and he painfully drives back to Detroit.
• 225 The next morning on one of his famous hunches, Amos visits the cranky old German guy who keeps his 1970 Cutlass in repair, looking for Starzek.
• The German guy leads him to the painting room, where a 1966 Hurst/Oldsmobile is being repainted.
  • Attentive readers will remember that is what Starzec drives!
• 229 When he takes his protective mask off, the fellow doing the painting is indeed Jeff Starzek!
• 232 They go for a drive (of course).
• 239 They clear up most of the nagging issues of the story, including eventually the counterfeiting ring is run by our favorite federal agent, Herbert Clemson, not shadowy terrorists.
• They stash Jeff’s cool repainted Oldsmobile in Amos’ garage and Jeff sets out on foot, headed to Canada.
• 245 Amos visits his client Rose to tell her about her (not) brother.
• 249 They’re filling in the rest of the loose ends when Clemson surprises them.
• 252 Jeff magically appears (as I guess we knew he would) and kills Clemson by ramming his car with a delivery van he just hot-wired down the street.
  • He didn’t go straight to Canada after all!
• Jeff and Rose get to talk for a couple of minutes then he really is off to Canada.

And that’s basically it!