Something Borrowed, Something Black

by Loren D. Estleman

  Which was only half a lie. After he’d made sure of Edison, he’d wiped off the .38 and dropped it behind the nearest mesquite bush, where the police would find it within half an hour of making the call. Nothing about the gun would link it to the man who’d used it, but until he could get to a shower and a change of clothes, Macklin was a walking evidence kit in two murders. That was the hell of having to be dragged back into the work. He’d been happy to have gotten out just as DNA testing was coming in. It was such a delirious success it made the cops giddy, dumping decades-old homicide cases back onto the table like Halloween candy and gorging themselves on dried blood and old semen and bits of hair and epiderm, closing files right and left that had lain open since Jimmy Carter. Just smearing your prints wasn’t good enough anymore. The process alone left more evidence than it removed. Get in, get it done, and get out fast. Try that while wearing a radiation suit and gauntlets and an oxygen mask.

  The first order of business was to put distance between himself and San Antonio. He couldn’t risk the airport. The odds were better than even that Johns Davis’s watchdogs had decided to check on him in person after that bit of street theater Macklin had treated them to. When they found his body they’d dispatch men to all the gates and the train stations. Roadblocks would go up, but they’d take time. He had a narrow window if he went by car, but not the one he’d rented. They’d have a lookout order on all the rentals outstanding, on the very good theory that the Organization would go out of town for another killer after the first had failed. By tomorrow the police would have been through all the recent airline passenger manifests, cross-matched them with FBI felony murder files, and found out that Macklin, Peter, no middle, no aliases, known associate of Michael “Mike the Bone” Boniface, deceased, and Carlo Maggiore, should-be-deceased, was visiting south central Texas.

  He slowed his pace. He’d broken into long strides without thinking, fresh proof that his internal metronome was out of whack. It was a wonder to him how quickly the habits of a lifetime fled once a man began to think of himself as a citizen.

  Macklin maintained the rhythm when a city cruiser drifted by, both officers in the front seat turning their heads to look at the lone man walking the streets after two-thirty. He didn’t think they’d connect him here with Davis, a suburban job, too far away to walk. But if they questioned him and decided to take him in as a suspicious person and they got a report on Edison, they’d be sure to run a carbon test on his hands and clothing. When he tested positive for gunpowder residue they would book him on suspicion of murder. Then their computer would talk to other computers in Detroit, Atlanta, Cincinnati, and some other places he’d forgotten, and the printout would start. When they convicted you of murder in the Lone Star State, they stamped a freshness date on your forehead, and when it expired they stuck a needle in your arm. He wouldn’t like that. He even avoided getting a flu shot.

  The cruiser slowed almost to a stop. He braced himself from old instinct, and to prepare for the little war that went on with his intelligence: You don’t kill cops, you don’t fight cops, you don’t run from cops. Any one of those things was a gift for the prosecutor. But you didn’t refuse to defend yourself either.

  Then the car’s brake lights went off. It picked up speed, and at the end of the block its flashers and siren went on, a volume of sound he could feel like a blast from a furnace, and the cruiser shot away as if propelled by an enormous rubber band.

  Saved by an emergency. But the officers would remember the man they’d seen out walking, and would have a record of the time, based on when the emergency call had come in.

  He picked up his own pace then, made a few turns. Anyone watching would have thought he knew where he was going and belonged there. At length he entered the parking lot of a four-story apartment building, not new or upscale enough to justify any security beyond a mercury vapor light glowing blue at the top of a twenty-foot tower, as if muggers and carjackers were like moles and feared light. He walked among the rows of cars, window-shopping, until he came to a four-year-old LeBaron. It had been washed recently and its tires were practically new. That indicated it was properly maintained and probably wouldn’t break down. Meanwhile the age and model—it was a Chrysler, after all—kept it off the Top Ten list for targeting by thieves, which meant no LoJack and probably no alarm, although alarms were easily disabled and no one paid attention to them anyway.

  There was little specialization in the killing business. It was blue-collar work and if you were in it for the long haul you needed to develop a number of satellite skills, like a struggling actor taking singing and dancing lessons and learning to ride a horse, in case the part was for a musical or a western. Macklin was a good burglar of the residential variety (subcategorized working class; when motion-and heat-detectors and closed-circuit cameras were involved, he partnered up with an expert) and a fair car thief. He didn’t drill locks or dismantle steering columns, but if the car fell far enough below the anti-theft radar he could hold his own with the average talented high-school dropout.

  The car had button locks, a big help. He fished a twisted length of sixteen-gauge wire out of the pocket of his Windbreaker, straightened it, and bent one end into a crook. A Slim Jim was more efficient, but harder to explain if you were caught with it on your way to work. He inserted it into the door on the driver’s side between the window and the rubber gasket, worked it around until the crook encountered resistance, then jerked it upward. The button popped up with a satisfying clunk.

  He balled up the wire and chucked it into an overflowing Dumpster, where if they wanted to the cops could root around among the used diapers and rotten lettuce, if they thought they had an orchid’s chance in the Arctic of lifting a print off it. No alarm sounded when he opened the driver’s door. He bent under the dash, stripped two wires with his jackknife in the glow of a pencil flashlight attached to a keychain with a couple of dummy keys on it for looks, and crossed the wires. The engine turned over twice and caught. He twisted the wires together and pulled the car out into the street thirty seconds later.

  The gauge read a little over a quarter-tank. He’d stop to fill it before he left the city limits. Waiting at a light—for reasons of caution he was the most law-abiding creature on the planet, if you didn’t count the killing thing—he reached over and popped open the glove compartment to see what had turned up in the Detroit lottery. There was a two-year-old Texas road map inside, a break. That meant one less stop. He missed the days when every service station offered free maps. The times were ganging up on fugitives.

  If he caught another break and the owner of the car didn’t miss it before sunup, he could be as far as El Paso before it showed up on the Public Safety officers’ call sheet. He never counted on breaks. He’d stop off around Fort Stockton and hit an employee parking lot for another low-profile vehicle. Post offices were good. They were too busy looking out for their own shooters inside the building to worry about what was happening outside.

  Once he’d crossed into New Mexico, his options would open. Allowing for food, toilets, and coffee, plus another detour or two for fresh wheels or maybe just to trade license plates, he figured to be in Los Angeles by Friday.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The pretty chiquita at the desk wouldn’t bribe. When Abilene suggested it, she laid a set of fake nails on her telephone and asked him, in that in-your-face accent they all got from Ricky Martin videos, if he’d rather talk to security. Abilene shrugged and left, as if some lard-ass with a Motorola scared the lead right out of his pencil. It was almost noon. He took a seat in the lobby and waited for the shift to change.

  Actually, a round or two with a hotel dick would have been welcome. He’d spent a night at County, getting his asshole checked for drugs or weapons and his record inspected for terrorist activity, and the thought of busting open somebody with a badge gave him a pleasant moment. But he’d been warned to behave himself.

  The lawyer Mr. Major had sent, a flat-chested woman in one of those ugly suits
like a grocery sack, floppy bow tie and all, had done most of the talking when they met in conference, then left him to go talk to the undersheriff. She’d been gone hardly long enough for a proper blow job before she came back to escort Abilene downstairs to sign for his personal effects. Abilene, it seemed, had forgotten all about the knife in his boot when he’d passed through airport security, then when he realized his oversight, took it out and went back to report it like the concerned citizen he was. When he tripped the alarm and the guards saw the knife, he didn’t have the chance to explain himself, lying as he was on his face with someone’s knee in his back.

  Which was the only true part. Nobody would buy the rest, and nobody had, he was sure of that. His record would note that he’d been arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, but there would be no charges filed, and nothing from the feds. His knife had been confiscated and he’d been kicked as not worth the arresting officers’ time in court. All in all he’d gotten off easier than what the guards in the airport were in for.

  He knew Mr. Major had friends all over, but that was impressive. That was federal.

  Mr. Major had picked him up in front of the building in a white stretch limo like the movie stars used when they wanted everyone to know they were movie stars. He was as mad as a bitch. Abilene didn’t say much beyond explaining what had happened with Macklin’s wife at the airport. He didn’t try to defend himself. Mr. Major told him he’d burned up one of his best contacts springing him and it was up to Abilene to prove he was worth it. He could get the Macklin woman back or he could make a run for Mexico, it was Abilene’s choice. He might even reach Tijuana before someone cut him to pieces with a machete and the rurales put it down to an attack by Zapatistas. Then he’d dropped him off at a fucking bus stop. A Mexican woman sat on the bench with her jugs in her lap, Wal-Mart bags at her feet and Gyp gang-bangers all around. He wondered if Mr. Major had picked the spot to make his point.

  The passenger window had whirred down behind him. He’d had to turn and lean down to hear what Mr. Major was saying.

  “… and if you don’t fuck up, I’ll give you Macklin when it’s over. Call it a Mulligan.”

  He said nothing to that. He didn’t know how he felt about it. Yes, he did. He was a hurter, not a killer. The distinction meant something to him. It was like asking a master carpenter to chop wood. Only there wasn’t any asking about it.

  Abilene knew he’d do it. He’d shit the bed and he had to clean up. It was just a matter of bearing down that last inch.

  He’d taken a cab back to the airport to claim his Jeep, then gone to his place in West Hollywood to scrub off the smell of jail disinfectant and sleep. It was better to let the Macklin woman wait, start thinking he was off her case and get careless. She was still in town, he was sure of that. She’d made her run, now she’d wait for Macklin to get her out. Abilene had done a good job convincing her she was no challenge on her own. One way or the other she was tied to that hotel room, the last place she’d seen Macklin. So was he. He’d gone back to wet work for her sake and he wasn’t going to just give her up.

  Abilene had slept eleven hours, and when he woke up in the dark, hungry as hell and with a hard-on from here to Yorba Linda, he’d shoveled down two platters of enchiladas in an all-night greaser place in East L.A. and picked up a hooker on Whittier and broke her nose and three or four ribs in a motel room under a cloverleaf where the traffic drowned out all the wailing. It cost him five hundred to keep her from blubbering to her pimp and avoid having his cojones sliced off and fed to him by a dozen zooters some night when he was too drunk to pay attention to his surroundings, but it took the edge off. He’d stopped himself just short of ducking her head in a tub full of scalding water. You had to leave something for later.

  Later being now.

  At a minute past noon, the spick girl left the desk and the beach bum Abilene had bribed to give him the room adjoining the Macklins’ came on. There was nobody standing on the suckers’ side. Abilene got up and went over, wearing the whopperjawed grin Paul Newman, his man Paul, had used on Patricia Neal in Hud. He’d bagged her with it, his own stepmother.

  A hundred told him there was a message for one of the Macklins and gave him a look. A bargain, after the whore in East L.A. He snorted at the pierced and painted punks in the photograph and turned the card over. It had been posted in the city yesterday afternoon.

  … If you get this before Friday, come to the place where we found the Gypsy. I’ll wait for you there until dark.

  He gave the card back to the clerk and handed him another fifty not to say he’d shown it to anyone. That was a gift. Admitting he’d done it would mean his job. But you never knew when you might need someone’s help again.

  Friday was half gone and Macklin hadn’t picked up his mail. He was probably still in Texas. There had been nothing on the news about any gangland-style murders in San Antonio. Abilene rode up in the elevator and let himself into his room. The bed was still turned down from the night before, and possibly from the night before that. He wondered if they just kept doing it over and didn’t question where he was sleeping. He opened his suitcase and took out the little zip-up case he traveled with, with nail files and clippers in it so the steel picks wouldn’t arouse the suspicion of a nosy maid at a glance. He used two of them to unlock the second door that separated the adjoining rooms and stood on the other side for a minute, looking around.

  The Macklins’ bed had been made, but drawers hung out of the bureau and clothes were scattered all around, draped over chairs and slung from lamps. Hurry had been involved, but Abilene had lived with two women and had traveled with several, and it was his observation that no man could trash a hotel room like a woman, not even a rock star. At home they busted your nuts for missing the hamper with your shirt, but when no one was expecting them to clean up after themselves, they reverted to prairie hogs. It was almost enough to make you understand why so many men turned fag.

  He walked around, lifting slips and hose and unidentifiable garments and letting them drop. He checked the drawers in the nightstands and the writing desk. The notepads and stationery hadn’t been used, even to scribble a telephone number or the time of a restaurant reservation. The bathroom was unenlightening. The maids had replaced the towels and squirted around that sweet disinfectant that smelled like cheap shoes. When he stepped out, his eyes met the black gaze of a Gypsy.

  The painting was propped against the wall above the bureau, turned at a slight angle so that the man in the blue bandanna seemed to be peeping into the bathroom. The leer on his face completed the illusion. Abilene hadn’t seen it because one of those tackle boxes women carried their makeup in blocked the view from the other direction.

  He snatched up the painting and turned it over. Brown paper covered the back of the frame, with a printed gold sticker attached to the lower right corner:

  LOS OJOS ANTIQUES & GIFTS

  94200 Pacific Coast Highway

  Montecito, CA 93101

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Henry Antigua was a native Texan, old Spanish on his father’s side, whose ancestry went back in the region for two hundred years before the Mexican War. There was a viceroy there, and one or two of those commandantes who were always giving Zorro trouble—or was that California? Not that even the slightest hint of autocracy clung to the manner in which he ran the detective bureau. Lieutenant Christie Childs thought Antigua’s bloodline may have had something to do with why there was nothing overtly Texan about the man or his office. He had nothing to prove.

  The walls were painted a very pale powder-blue, almost white, and apart from the requisite police academy class photograph and his Ph.D. certificates in twin brass frames (he had doctorates in criminology and law from the University of Texas at Austin), they were undecorated. Rows of law books with buff-colored, thumb-smeared spines filled two barrister cases, and pictures of his blonde wife and towheaded, brown-faced children smiled up at him from under a sheet of laminate stuck to his desk blotter. He combed his
graying hair forward over his thinning widow’s peak and wore glasses in heavy black frames, without which his rather bland face looked naked. Today he had on a gray suit and a red conventional necktie—no bolo—on a shirt the same pale blue as his walls. His long slender fingers, inherited from the Court of King Philip-the-Something-or-Other, wore only a plain wedding band and a class ring.

  He stood and reached across his desk to grasp Childs’s hand, clamping the lieutenant’s wrist with his other hand at the same time in a politician’s grip. But Antigua was no politician. He exerted torque to steer Childs toward the comfortable leather chair that faced the desk. That was an improvement—one of many at that station—over the torture chair his predecessor had used to keep his visitors ill at ease.

  The man who had been chief of detectives before Antigua was a martinet, and from his first day in the office the new man had worked to wean the Criminal Investigation Division away from militarism. Old Glory and the Lone Star flag no longer intimidated people from behind the desk, having been removed to less conspicuous corners, and Antigua discouraged officers from saluting him on uniform occasions. These things didn’t sit well with some senior detectives, who referred to him as “Auntie,” but Childs knew him to be a tough administrator who stood up for his subordinates and refused to interfere with their work except when it involved department policy. Shortly after taking charge, he had quietly dismissed two ranking detectives within months of their pension qualification, and when challenged by union representatives to defend the action, presented them with evidence that the men had been in the pay of a Mexican druglord to escort his shipments for three years. Not a word of scandal reached the ears of the media. Even more impressively, Antigua had declined the FBI’s offer to assist in the investigation, and made it stick. In another time, he’d have led the fight to break with Spain.