“I always had the impression the captain ran this tub,” Don said, breaking the reverie. “You’ve got a man on the wheel, a man to look out, and another man to look out for what the lookout missed. What do you do, just stand around waiting for someone to say ‘Ahoy, the white whale’?”
His tone was bantering, with no animosity in it. The old sailor answered without rancor. “When there’s a big blow or a pleasure craft coming the wrong way downriver, eight men up here wouldn’t be too much.”
“Yeah, someone has to blow the whistle.”
“Captain Fielding is the best skipper on the river,” Holliday snapped.
Don crinkled his eyes at Cap’n Eddie. “Kind of like having the best-looking legs on a girls’ Olympic weightlifting team, huh, Popeye?”
“It’s been claimed that if you can navigate the Detroit River, you can sail any body of water in the world,” said the old man.
“It isn’t like waving a pistol around and saying stick ’em up.”
Lazily the armed man turned his attention to the first mate. “We don’t need you, Wyatt. We’ve got a lookout and Barney Fyfe here to look out for the lookout.” He inclined his head toward the young security guard seated glumly on the turning stool near the starboard hatch.
“I might not be as easy to hit as a fat bass player.”
“Phil, for Christ’s sake!” the captain exclaimed.
“You tell him, Popeye. Old Wyatt’s quick on the draw for someone with dust in his holster.”
The captain changed the subject. “Why do you call him Wyatt?”
“’Cause his name’s Holliday but he looks more like Earp.”
“I guess he does at that, with that handlebar.” Cap’n Eddie kept his tone light. “But maybe not as much as you look like Wild Bill Hickok.”
He had struck the right chord. Don smiled slowly behind his own moustache. “You won’t find my back to any doors on this bucket, old man.”
“These bulkheads weren’t built to stand up to Coast Guard bullets,” put in Holliday.
Don said, “They’ll have to find us first.”
The fog had remained uniformly dense all day, as if the boat were towing its own cloud. Once they had heard the beating of helicopter blades overhead, but the noise hadn’t returned and Don supposed that if it was a Coast Guard craft they were waiting for the curtain to lift before searching in earnest.
Holliday said, “This soup can’t last forever. What are you going to do when the wind comes up and takes it away?”
“That’s up to the Governor.”
Cap’n Eddie adjusted the hearing aid attached to his glasses. Moist air was hard on the transistor. “Do you really believe the Governor will release those prisoners?”
“You better hope so, Popeye.” Don lifted and resettled the Luger under his belt. “You better get down on your knees and pray to King Neptune he does just that.”
The security guard stood up suddenly. The gun leaped into Don’s hand. “What’s wrong, Barney, you got a bite?”
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Head,” Holliday corrected automatically.
“Head, whatever. I have to go.”
“So go.”
The guard edged past Cap’n Eddie and descended the short flight of steps to the captain’s quarters above the crown deck.
That had been the most complicated part of Siegfried’s plans, seeing to the functional needs of the passengers and crew. There was a head for the captain and one for the crew and two on the dance deck for the passengers, and after they had been searched for weapons the hostages were allowed to visit them two or three at a time. The two-man teams on each of the three main decks took turns relieving themselves and watching their charges, and when Don felt the need he radioed Larry to come up and keep an eye on the bridge while he used the captain’s toilet. The choreography worked. But eight hundred frightened people with bladders and sphincters ranging from healthy to minimal were a lot, and there had been a number of accidents that had done little to improve either the atmosphere or the dispositions of captive and keeper alike.
“Where are we going?” Holliday wanted to know.
“East.”
It wasn’t the first time the question had been asked or the answer given. This time the captain involved himself.
“For how long?” he asked. “We’ve only got fuel for twelve more hours. Erie’s a big lake. We could drift for days before anyone rescues us.”
“Nice try, Popeye. You could steam for four days and still have enough oil to burn Toronto.”
Cap’n Eddie looked at him with the first faint blue glow of the dawn of admiration. “You did your homework.”
Don said nothing.
A stuttering noise sounded below, as of an outboard motor revving up and then stalling abruptly. A scream, then silence.
Don snatched up his portable radio. “Who fired that burst?”
A pause, then Larry’s voice crackled out of the speaker. “I think it came from the bottom deck.”
“Fay?” Don released the speaker button, waited, pressed it again. “Fay, you there?”
“Yeah.” She sounded breathless.
“What went down?”
“Nothing. Benny Goodman just tried something sweet.”
“Who the hell is Benny Goodman?”
“Mr. Big Band. Crane. Nobody’s bleeding, don’t fret yourself.”
“Easy on that ammo.” He set the radio back down on the chart table just as the security guard came bounding up from the captain’s quarters, tucking his uniform shirt into his pants. The guard’s face was as white as the shirt. “Who got shot?”
“Sorry. You’ll have to stay and see it again.”
The guard gave Don a puzzled look.
Three tiers below, Fay was standing with her radio hanging from its strap on her shoulder and the smoldering muzzle of her M-16 almost touching Chester Crane’s long thin nose. The bandleader sat spraddle-legged on the deck at her feet, his bald pate glistening through wisps of gray hair. His toupee had slid off finally and skidded ten feet along the highly polished boards. A ragged line of closely spaced holes stitched the back of the bandstand where Fay had fired when Crane had tried to jump her. Coming down hard from her last cocaine toot, she had been yawning bitterly and he had thought to catch her off guard.
“White boy,” she said, “I don’t know how you got this old.”
He tried out his best Trocadero grin on her. It lost some of its glitter under the few lights allowed to burn on the dance deck. “Can’t blame a guy for trying.”
“Oh yes I can, Mr. Music. I got no sense of humor.”
“Everything square, Fay?” Sol’s voice rang out calmly from the stern.
She called back that everything was sweet. Her smile as she went on looking at Crane was brilliant against the old gold of her face. He watched her through squinted eyes. The smoke from the automatic rifle was making them water. Still grinning, she raised the barrel, holding the weapon horizontal, stepped back a pace, and sank to her heels, laying the rifle on the deck. Then she straightened and moved back another step.
“You call it, Baton Man,” she said. “All you got to do is pick it up ahead of little Fay and fill her full of holes. You can move fast when you want to. For an old man with no hair.”
Crane looked down at the weapon just beyond his feet for a long moment before raising his eyes back to hers. “You’re nuts,” he told her. “Doped up.”
“I’m stone cold. Pick it up, Señor Swing. ’Cause if you don’t, Fay will.”
He placed his palms on the deck and shook his head, gathering his feet beneath him. The woman shook her own head, mocking him, and moved to scoop up the rifle. He kicked out with one leg and felt the jar to his knee when his foot connected. She howled. It was a nasty thin tearing sound, like the shriek of an enraged cat. He launched himself up stumbling, spun around and ran, scattering passengers from his path. Ran with his shoulders hunched and his head sunk between them, his
back burning where the bullets would go. Behind him the black woman was screaming curses. The rifle’s loose parts rattled. He made for the railing. He was a strong swimmer, had kept in shape at an age where most of his contemporaries were retired or taking their mail in hospitals. If there was a boat nearby, if he could tread water while his arms rested. It was a better chance than he had at the moment. His hands gripped the clammy beaded steel of the railing and he tensed his muscles to swing himself over.
He almost made it.
CHAPTER 14
“Just once I’d like to eat in a place where the food was as good as the view,” complained Bill Chilson, spreading butter on one half of a roll the approximate size and consistency of a cue ball.
Randall Burlingame sipped his wine and chuckled. “It comes into the building fresh, but a lot can happen in seven hundred and forty feet.”
“It should take the elevator.”
They were dining in the revolving restaurant atop Detroit’s tallest hotel, decorated in leatherette and plush to resemble the inside of a candy box and just now overlooking through its tinted wraparound windows the shadowy skyline of Windsor across the river. Although it was not yet evening, a dusky gray screen blurred and flattened the details.
Chilson sneaked looks at the FBI bureau director over his meal of pressed sawdust masquerading as roast beef. He admired Burlingame, who, although he had been up since midnight, looked as fresh as if he had just had eight hours’ sleep. Chilson himself had managed to catch a few winks at his room in the hotel, but he knew that the only break Red had taken was to shave and change shirts. He was an iron man, and if not for all that time wasted hassling with Hoover, would have been warming a chair in an office on the top floor of the Bureau’s Washington headquarters years ago.
“What’s the good news the Secret Service is bankrolling this gourmet dinner for?” Chilson asked.
“We’ve got a line on this Macklin.” Burlingame put away a steaming forkful of mashed potatoes. He never blew on his food, never waited for it to cool. His companion decided his mouth and tongue were lined with asbestos. “He’s a button like we thought, been with the Boniface family since old Papa Joe Morello got his tonsils taken out the hard way in Victor’s Barbershop. Talk is Macklin worked the razor on that one.”
“Christ, he must be fifty.”
“Coming up on forty. He got an early start. Anyway, he’s Boniface’s chief samurai, and maybe the last of the loyal old guard. No wonder the old man saddled him with this one.”
“Record?”
“One arrest eleven years ago, suspicion of ADW. It never got to court. Victim refused to identify him and then went away on a vacation he’s still not back from. That just came in from Washington. We dug up an informant, someone close. Been feeding one of our field men for months, but it was all locked up in his own file and he’s been out sick all week. Of course it’s all hearsay. But good enough to work on.”
“How does it help us?”
“It’s the first chink we’ve found in Macklin’s armor. If we hang on to it he may just lead us all out of this mess.”
“Who’s your informant?”
Burlingame stuck a covered wicker bowl under Chilson’s nose. “Another roll?”
Smiling, the Secret Service agent shook his head and got off the subject. “So where do we go from here?”
“You I can’t speak for. I’m going to lock up and go home. I’m not interested in finding out how long a man can live without sleep. Nightside will ring me if anything breaks. It won’t for a while.”
“What about Macklin?”
“We’ve got men watching his place. He has to sleep too, and those boys change their underwear now and again, not like the old days. He has to go home sometime, if only to see how the crabgrass is doing. They won’t lose him again.”
“What if they do?”
“They won’t.”
“But what if they do?”
“They won’t, I said.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I’m tired and I need more sleep than I used to. If I thought they could lose him again I’d wind up counting the porpoises on the ceiling. They won’t lose him again.”
The view had shifted, and now they were looking west from downtown out toward the suburbs, where the skyline lay down and a crescent of orange sun splintered the fog into rainbows. Chilson said, “That’s your secret, huh?”
“Bill, if I’d discovered it twenty years ago, I’d look five years younger. More wine?” He lifted the carafe.
Chilson started to shake his head again, then shrugged and raised his glass. Burlingame poured. Finally the Secret Service agent gave up and asked the question.
“You have porpoises on your ceiling?”
CHAPTER 15
Port Huron was that uniquely American phenomenon, the tourist city, feeding off transients in summer and then hunkering down to wait out the long winter under eight-foot snowdrifts while the icy winds skimming off the lake blew scraps of litter down its bleak deserted streets. Macklin had never been there in wintertime, and although he saw banks of permanent residences among the antique stores, fish markets, and souvenir shops, he always had the feeling that as soon as he passed them they were rolled up and placed in storage, to be unrolled again when the next visitor came. The fog dripping from the trees and cornices under congealing darkness added to the illusion of fairytale impermanence.
The address the black man in River Rouge had given him belonged to a small white one-story frame house with green trim, situated on an eighth of an acre near the mouth of the St. Clair River with similar cottages built so close on either side that a greyhound couldn’t pass between them. There were lights on in the neighboring buildings. Macklin kept on rolling to the end of the pocked and rutted private road that dead-ended on the river, made a tight Y-turn between parked cars in an area as wide as a salt shaker, and drove past again and out of the neighborhood.
Half a block north of the cul-de-sac, two men sat in the front seat of a brown Cordoba parked in the entrance to a public landing site. The man on the passenger’s side, in his early twenties with unnaturally bright red hair teased forward in a woodpecker’s crest, a nose that turned up like Howdy Doody’s, and freckles the size of pennies on his cheeks, peered through the gathering gloom at Freddo’s motionless profile behind the wheel.
“You sure that was him?”
“It was him,” Freddo said.
“Ain’t we going to follow him?”
“He’ll be back.”
“When?”
“When it gets dark. Relax, brother.”
Lincoln Washington hated being called brother. It was bad enough he had been born with a name commonly associated with blacks. In moments of self-pity he blamed that for his errant life, and for the fact that he had fulfilled his first contract on a black Baptist minister. Two men who had called him brother hadn’t lived to regret it. But when Freddo did it he said nothing. Washington liked to think it was because they were partners.
He shivered a little in the damp cool and moved to crank up his window. Freddo’s wire-strung hand gripped his knee.
“Leave it down. We’ll fog up the glass.”
Washington left it down. In the cool dark they waited.
Macklin ate a fine black bass in a restaurant downtown with a lifeboat suspended from the ceiling and paintings of schooners under full sail on the walls. Uncharacteristically, for he hated attracting attention, he visited the salad bar twice. Soon he would be skipping a meal in preparation to move and he’d need the extra energy. He left a generous tip for the fat, cheerful waitress and drove back under a black sky to the private road outside town. The fog threw back his headlight beams like a wall.
Instead of turning into the road, he went on past and parked at a nearby landing site. There were two cars there already, looking dark and empty. Waiting for late boaters. He left the Cougar in the shadows at the other end where the license plate wouldn’t be visible, glanced ar
ound, and started south on foot along the main road.
“Now,” said Freddo.
The two men in the Cordoba had switched places, and now Link Washington was in the driver’s seat. They came up from their slump below the level of the windows and Washington turned the key in the ignition, flicking on the headlights at the same time. The beams caught Macklin from behind. Freddo skinned his .44 Colt magnum out of the holster under his left arm and leveled the eight-inch barrel across the ledge of the open window on the passenger’s side.
A black-and-white sheriff’s patrol car swung into the line of fire, cutting off Freddo’s view of his target. He dropped his gun below the window just as the spotlight sprang on and washed the parking area in white light.
“Move out slow,” he told Washington.
“What if they try to stop us?”
“Let’s all hope they don’t.”
The Cordoba coasted to the edge of the pavement, stopped, then swung out onto the highway, gravel crunching under its rear tires as it accelerated. The two uniformed officers climbing out of the scout car paid it only passing attention. The spotlight had come to rest on Macklin standing on the apron of the highway squinting into the glare.
“Car trouble, sir?” asked one of the officers. He was tall and tanned. Silver hairs glinted in his neat black moustache.
“I think it’s the starter,” Macklin replied. “I parked and took a walk to see if the salmon were running and when I got back it wouldn’t start. I was looking for a phone.”
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