Kill Zone

by Loren D. Estleman

  And yet he was not a lover of firearms. He called them all guns regardless of fine definitions, and once he had this one out of its wrapper and had wiped it clean of preservative gelatin and tested the action and loaded it from the box of cartridges he kept in another file drawer, he locked it away again, along with an envelope containing fifty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills, hand-delivered by special messenger on Klegg’s orders.

  “Big shot executive type,” said a voice behind Macklin. “What’s in the safe, doubloons?”

  He was deliberately slow in turning. He had observed Donna still asleep in the living room on his way upstairs and so had not bothered to lock the study door. Now she was standing in the doorway, still in the quilted bathrobe that needed cleaning, her gray-streaked blond hair sticking out at angles like burrs in a dog’s coat. At 35 she had deep lines at the corners of her mouth and dark thumbprints under her eyes. She was glaring.

  “How long have you been there?” His tone was dead calm.

  “What’s it matter? You think I don’t know you keep guns in there? You think I don’t know what you do?”

  “I’m an efficiency expert.”

  That was what he wrote in the OCCUPATION blank on his income tax form, and it was how he was listed on the payroll at the camera-construction firm where he worked in Taylor. The company was one of the organization’s legitimate enterprises.

  “You’re efficient, all right. You’re always home, and when you’re not and I call you at the office you’re always in a meeting. Have you ever seen your office, Pete? Have you ever met your secretary?”

  “You’re drunk, Donna. You only call me Pete when you’ve been drinking.”

  “I drink because I’m married to you.”

  “You drink because you like it.”

  “I’m an alcoholic.”

  “You’re a drunk. Alcoholics drink because they have to. You do it for the pure pleasure of getting numb. Don’t romanticize yourself for just me. I’m a lousy audience.”

  “Okay, I’m a drunk. But I’m not a killer. Is that what they call you where you work? Killer?”

  He said nothing, waiting her out. Her tirades never lasted long.

  “I’ll bet you like it as much as I like getting blasted. How is it pulling the trigger on someone, Pete? Do you get a boost out of the way their eyes bug out just before you do it, do you give them a chance to plead for their lives? Or do you prefer shooting them from behind? I guess that would be the safest way, the most efficient for an efficiency expert like you.”

  “It would be. If I were a killer.”

  “Stop playing! Don’t lie about it like I’m a kid asking about sex. I want you to tell me what I know. Do you kill people for a living?”

  “I’m an efficiency expert,” he said.

  She must have slid the heavy brass ashtray into one of the voluminous pockets of the robe before coming upstairs. He jerked his head right and the heavy projectile dusted his left ear. When she saw she’d missed, Donna screamed—a terrible animal shriek—and rushed him, clawing at his face with her long nails. But he turned his left shoulder into her and bowled her into the file cabinet, slamming shut one of the open drawers, and got her into a tight bearhug. Her blows bounded dully off his back, her screams tore his eardrums. He increased pressure and after a few seconds the noise died and she went slack in his arms.

  She had fainted, with a little help from the alcohol in her brain. He picked up her feet, hoisted her into an unromantic fireman’s carry, and bore her, his discs groaning, through the doorway and down the hall to the bedroom. He stopped once to lean against the wall and catch his breath, then finished the trip and dropped her, not gently, onto the bed. While the springs rocked to a halt he stood there wheezing and waiting for the black spots to fade. Sixteen and a half years ago he had swept her through the front door and up the stairs and still had enough energy to make love to her. She was heavier now, but she had been pregnant with Roger even then and no wraith. He determined to step up his weightlifting next session. Then he determined not to. What if it didn’t help?

  Donna was snoring with her mouth open and her hair in her eyes. He went through the pockets of her robe and excavated a crumpled pack of cigarettes and two books of matches from a wad of stained brittle Kleenex and gray lint and put them in his own shirt pocket. Then he backed out, closing the door behind him. He wondered where in hell Roger was.

  His left ear burned where the ashtray had grazed it. He stopped in the bathroom to examine it in the mirror. The flesh was red. He wet a facecloth and held it against the ear until the pain lessened. Then he changed shirts, put on a fresh necktie, brushed back his thinning hair, and left the house carrying his jacket. It was a warm day in spite of the overcast.

  He had left the gun in the safe and kept no weapons in his car. That was another way to end your career in a hurry, lugging unregistered firearms everywhere you went. He only carried one when he had use for it. Just now he was dry-stalking; the hunt itself would come later.

  He spotted the federal men by the second corner. There were always two of them, and they always drove nondescript cars and followed no closer than a block behind. The gray Plymouth pulled over to the curb a hundred yards back while Macklin was waiting for the light to change, but no one got out. A high black four-wheel-drive pickup was stopped next to him in the right lane. Macklin let his car creep ahead a few feet, and when the green light came on he goosed the accelerator and cut across the pickup’s path, angling right into the cross street. By the time the flustered truck driver blew his horn, the shiny Cougar was approaching the next street over and Macklin bumped the curb turning right again and cut across an empty lot, barking his suspension on the sidewalk. A minute later he hit one of the Mile Roads and blended into the late lunch-hour traffic on Telegraph. There was no sign of the Plymouth in his rearview mirror. He paid no attention to the brown Cordoba that pulled onto Telegraph half a minute behind him, nicking the red light, or to the young sandy-haired man behind the wheel, watching the road and the Cougar burbling along two cars ahead, his face tilted a little to see out from under an eyelid that drooped.

  CHAPTER 9

  “Hello Gyp.”

  Wyler G. Ibsen, head tailor at Clovis Haberdashers on Greenfield, glanced up between the parted thighs of the fat man whose inseam he was measuring to see who had addressed him by his old nickname. When he recognized Peter Macklin, his perennial half-smile froze and the color slid from his face. The measuring tape slithered free of his thumb and forefinger and coiled on the carpet, but his hand stayed where it was. The tiny black moustache that made his round head look too big for his slight frame twitched and crawled like feelers.

  “Oh—hello, Mac,” he managed. “Guess I’m stuck here for a spell. Got appointments back-to-back till closing. Some friends are picking me up then,” he added quickly, his half-smile flickering.

  “That’s okay. My business today is with your boss. He in?”

  The question took a moment to ring up. When it did, Gyp almost leaped to his feet. “Oh—Herb? He’s in the office. In back.”

  “I know where it is.” Macklin paused before turning. “It isn’t that business,” he said.

  “Oh. Oh!” The smile became brilliant.

  “Who was that?” asked the fat man, when they were alone again.

  “Efficiency expert.” Ibsen’s hands were shaking so badly he had to use both of them to pick up the tape.

  The fat man grunted. “Mine affects me the same way.”

  The “office” was really a working storeroom, jungled with cartons of Arrow and Van Heusen shirts and bolts of material lying at odd angles and accordions of tissue-paper patterns tacked elbow-deep to the lath-and-plaster walls. Macklin found the door open and Herb Pinelli, standing with one well-tailored leg bent and a patent-leather shoe propped on a crate stuffed with crushed newspapers and a clipboard on his knee, checking off a list of items on a typewritten sheet with a fat green fountain pen. He didn’t look up as Mac
klin approached. “Pull up a box, Pietro. It’s good to see you.”

  Macklin remained standing. “Gyp said I’d find you back here.”

  Pinelli grinned at the clipboard. “When he sees you I bet he shits.”

  “I can’t think why. I’ve never had any business with him.”

  “He gets himself into some trouble six months ago, boffing the sister of a numbers man in Pontiac. The numbers man, he sends two niggers to wait for him in the alley with iron pipes. I come out first. They don’t come back.”

  Macklin said, “Then he’s got no reason to spook.”

  “You are not two dumb niggers with iron pipes.”

  Macklin warmed to the compliment in spite of himself. Pinelli was a big man in a snug vest and shirtsleeves with French cuffs and gold studs, and he brushed his silver hair straight back without a part, accentuating the Indianlike planes and hollows of his face. He was a well-preserved 60, retaining the strong Sicilian accent of his boyhood and an adolescence spent in New York’s Little Italy. It was said that he had killed his first man at the age of 16. He scorned firearms of any kind, and legend had it that before his retirement from heavyweight work he could decapitate a man from behind with a single backhand slash of his seven-inch blade. He had large powerful hands and his old shoulders were stacked with muscle. For the past fourteen years he had been using them to build up the haberdashery business he had named for his late wife Clovis.

  He lowered his foot to the floor, set aside the clipboard, capped the fountain pen, and clipped it to his shirt pocket, looking expectantly at his visitor. He never shook hands, a thing for which the much slighter Macklin was grateful.

  “Daniel Oliver Ackler,” Macklin said.

  Pinelli touched the other’s lips with two fingers and moved past him to close the door. He then tugged on the chain to an overhead fixture, banishing darkness from the windowless room. He was standing so close now that Macklin could smell the raw oysters on his breath. The old man believed they kept him vital.

  “Wildcat.” He spat out the word like filth in his mouth. “One of these beardless fish-eyes with no loyalty to no one and a purse for a soul. Serpente. You are not working with him?”

  “Just the opposite. I’m after anything I can find out about him. Who he is, where he came from, who he hangs out with. The information I have is sketchy and comes from a questionable source.”

  “I am retired, Pietro. I do not keep up.”

  Macklin slid into the Sicilian dialect. “Come, Umberto. Retired athletes follow the sports pages. That great gray head of yours is a computer. It is one reason you are still alive. What have you heard?”

  Pinelli laid a hand like a steam shovel on Macklin’s shoulder. “You are my friend,” he said in English. “Mi amico, which is more. If I had a son he would be you.”

  “You have a son.”

  “A young man in the state of Washington shares my name. He sends back the Christmas presents I send to his children. You are my son. Who taught you that you do not stab with the knife, you push? I have, how you say it, an investment in your well-being. So I say, forget about this Ackler. He is not worth spilling purple legion blood over. Leave him to the barbarians.”

  Macklin returned to English. “You forget I’m not Italian.”

  “Not in your name or your birth or your father’s father. Here you are Italian.” He doubled his other hand into a great fist and touched Macklin’s heart. “So I say again, forget about this Ackler.”

  “Is he that good?”

  “Good, who’s to say who is more good? He is young, not thirty, and you are forty.”

  “Thirty-nine.”

  “I sheathed my knife at forty-six. I know now that I was a lucky man for six years. The hands, they slow. The eyes dim, the ears thicken.”

  “You heard me coming well enough just now.”

  “Ackler would have known your footfall the moment you entered the store. You see? Everything is relative.” The big man sighed, a little theatrically. “You are now where I was when a young man with an Irish name came along—”

  “Scots.”

  “—came along to remind me that the longer you remain alive the closer you are to death. Fine clothing has interested me since the day I bloodied my first silk shirt. So I withdrew my savings, of which there were not much considering the high cost of crash cars and good drivers, and invested in the little sideline that is now my life. Follow where I lead, Pietro. Do not end up naked in a tray with your insides showing.”

  “All I know about clothes is how to work a zipper. Also I’m strapped. Most of my savings has gone into keeping my wife in booze and my son out of jail.”

  “How is the boy? Roger.”

  “I haven’t seen him in days.” Macklin paused. “Ackler.”

  Pinelli blew some more oyster-fragrant air. “All I know of him has been told to me by others. I do not listen, understand. But I hear. One year ago he is not known here. Eight months ago, nine, his name is whispers on the air. You remember a man named Fishbein?”

  “Vegas accountant. Pumped full of holes at Metro Airport last January on his way to a congressional hearing in Washington.”

  Pinelli grinned his old wolf’s grin. “You, too, hear.”

  “I listen.”

  “The federal marshals, they drive a bulletproof car right into the lobby of his hotel in Las Vegas to pick him up. From there they go straight to the loading ramp of a private jet. At no time is he in the open, except during the five-minute walk between planes in Detroit. A man steps out from behind a pillar and swings out a light machine pistol, one of these Swedish things with no more craftsmanship than goes into a good Boy Scout knife. A two-second burst, and then he is gone between luggage carts before the marshals can draw their weapons or even say holy shit. Fishbein is on his face in a puddle of blood and brains.”

  “That wasn’t Ackler,” Macklin said. “The Warren police ID’d a stiff they found in the trunk of a parked car a couple of days later as the killer.”

  “They find a dead man who matches the description the marshals give. The marshals, who you must understand are looking very foolish now, but perhaps a little less foolish if the killer is not still at large, go to the morgue and glance under the sheet and say, ‘Yes, that’s him.’ But I ask you, when a man appears before you as on a puff of wind with death stammering away in his hands, how much time will you spend looking at his face? Do you remember what was learned from the corpse?”

  “Nothing. His features were battered and his teeth had been knocked out and his fingers cut off. There was no way to identify him from records.”

  “Was there nothing else?”

  Macklin started to shake his head, stopped. “Was he an addict?”

  “Excellent!” The big old man was beaming like a college professor before a bright student. “His arms are full of old punctures and they find traces of heroin in his system, enough to kill a Hollywood film crew. Now, Fishbein’s testimony would be disastrous to the Las Vegas interests. Who would risk someone so unreliable as a dope fiend to remove this threat? But the alleys are filled with young wrecks. Our man had but to find one whose height and weight and coloring resembled his own and then keep him supplied—tethered, if you will pardon the poetic indulgence, on a leash of white powder until the time came to end the investigation. An extra few grains in the needle, a short drive to Warren, a leisurely walk back, and Daniel Oliver Ackler is as one born again. I applaud the simple beauty of it even as I abhor its mercenary motive.”

  “Who hired him?”

  “Those animals out West. They have no sense of family. Employing a wildcat, bah!”

  “What else has he done?”

  Pinelli shrugged, straining the seams of his vest. “His signature is his audacity. Select any five daring murders committed over past months in which the killer slipped away. Four will be his.”

  “Where was he before he came here?”

  “New York. Philadelphia. I have heard him referred to by the nick
name Baltimore, but perhaps the oriole is his favorite bird.”

  “What about friends?”

  “How many friends have you, Pietro?”

  Macklin smiled. “Just one.”

  “He has fewer.”

  “Has he ever been seen hanging out with hippie types?”

  “I do not know what a hippie type is. Once it meant long hair and a beard, but now that is how one describes a politician.”

  “Radicals. Revolutionaries.”

  Pinelli still looked puzzled.

  Macklin blew some air of his own. “The kind of person that would grab a boatload of civilian passengers and make big noises about blowing it up.”

  “Ah!”

  “You heard?”

  “It’s on the news. Eight terrorists. One was killed.”

  “Ackler killed him. Just to show the rubes who’s in charge. He’s going by Sol on the boat.”

  “If it is Ackler, someone is paying him.”

  “I have to know who. I don’t walk into a room with the light off.”

  Pinelli pointed a finger like a cucumber. “Walk away from this one, my friend. What do you know about boats?”

  “For a hundred thousand I can learn.”

  “What is a hundred thousand? It will not even cramp you in your coffin.”

  “Are you going to help me, Umberto? If not I’ll look for someone else. But yours is the only information I trust.”

  “I have told you all I know.”

  “Who’s your source?”

  The big man breathed noisily in the silence. The room was close and Macklin felt the illusion that all the air in it was going up Pinelli’s tomahawk nose. Finally the retired killer took out his fountain pen and picked up his clipboard and leafed to a fresh page. He wrote something, unclipped the sheet, and handed it to Macklin. It contained an address in River Rouge.