Kill Zone

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Wait, mister. You have to wait for the cops.”

  Macklin stopped and looked down at the hand on his arm, then at the face of the delivery man. After a beat the hand dropped. Macklin resumed walking. The crowd parted before him.

  He quickened his pace, cutting through a drugstore parking lot and circling back to the service station where he’d left his car. Every breath he took needled his left side.

  The attendant at the cash register rang up his purchase and told him he was a quart low on oil. He divided his attention between his customer and the police car speeding past outside the front window, its siren yelping. “Must of been some accident,” he said. “Heard the bang clear over here.”

  “You’ve got rotten drivers in this town,” Macklin told him.

  “Weekends, you can have ’em. I get Monday and Tuesday off, when all the nuts are off the road.”

  Macklin eased himself behind the wheel of the Cougar with his teeth clenched. There was no scraping, and he was satisfied that none of the ribs was actually broken. As he pulled out of the station the handle of Herb Pinelli’s knife pressed his right kidney. If anyone knew who Freddo was, he considered, it would be Herb.

  CHAPTER 18

  Bill Chilson found red Burlingame in his shirtsleeves in the conference room with a nautical chart of the Greak Lakes spread out on the long walnut table and a group of agents in snug suits and silk ties, not one of whom looked older than seventeen. The granite Art Deco buildings of downtown Detroit huddled gray and brown outside a row of double-paned windows along the back wall. The fog appeared to be lifting, lying like meringue on a layer of golden sunlight.

  The bureau chief didn’t look up as the Secret Service agent entered, but motioned him around to his end of the table. He was holding a metal rule down on Lake Huron with one hand and bisecting a previously drawn line with a thick carpenter’s pencil in the other.

  “We got a possible fix on the boat,” he said, apparently to the chart.

  “Visual?” asked Chilson.

  “Radio. They’ve got portable units aboard and they’ve been jabbering away like women for the past couple of hours.”

  “I thought they were observing radio silence.”

  “They are, ship to shore. But those walkie-talkies are little and cute and it’s easy to forget how far a signal will travel on the water with fog to boot. Coast Guard puts them right here as of five o’clock this morning.” He squashed a broad thumb down on the point where the lines crossed. “Steaming on their current course at an average cruising speed of six knots, that puts them two points to the southeast by now.”

  “How’s the visibility out there?”

  “Improving slowly. Fog’s drifting back the way it came, and those Canuck bastards can have it.”

  One of the younger agents spoke up. “Excuse me, sir, but I was born in Winnipeg.”

  “Next time you write home, tell them to keep their fucking weather to themselves.” To Chilson: “Coast Guard expects to have copters up by noon and will let us know direct as soon as visual contact is established.”

  “What then?”

  Burlingame looked up at his friend for the first time and smiled his canary smile. “Sorry, Bill. Clearance.”

  “What about Macklin?”

  “That’s all, gentlemen,” said the chief, straightening.

  The other agents shuffled out. Burlingame watched them until the door closed behind them, then sniffed the air and scowled.

  “They’re supposed to be field men. When I find out which one of them is wearing that cheap cologne I’ll put the punk on suspension.” He turned to Chilson. “The Bureau’s arrangement with Michael Boniface is classified information, Bill. Only you and I and the Mob and the brass in Washington know about it.”

  “Sorry, Red. I haven’t been under cover in twenty years. My cloak’s got mildew and my dagger’s rusty.”

  “Yeah. Some nights when I have trouble getting to sleep I start thinking about it all, the compound code names and the security rituals, and I wonder what a grown man and a grandfather is doing running around playing Captain Midnight.” He rolled down and buttoned his cuffs and hooked his suitcoat off the back of a chair. Slipping into it: “Macklin hasn’t shown since he shook our tail yesterday. That we’re sure of.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Yesterday afternoon the police in River Rouge investigated a complaint off West Jefferson, in one of those old warehouses they’ve turned into apartments. They found the manager beaten to death in his office. Whoever did it used the baseball bat the poor bastard kept there for his own protection. Witnesses saw a man entering and leaving the building earlier whose description fits Macklin. One even saw him talking to the manager.”

  “From what you’ve told me about him, it could fit any one of a thousand men in this area.”

  “That’s what I thought when it hit my desk. But just for the hell of it I sent a man around with a telephoto shot those Treasury men took of Macklin leaving Maggiore’s place. Two of the three witnesses identified him from it.”

  “Do you think it has anything to do with this?” Chilson indicated the marked chart.

  “I don’t know. On the manager who was killed we turned a couple of stray ties to organized crime in the area, but it was strictly broom-pushing, and you can’t hardly push a broom around here that it’s not some Mob trash you’re pushing. I can’t spare the men to dig any deeper into a case that will as likely as not turn out to be nothing more than an unpaid loan.”

  “Bludgeoning doesn’t sound like Macklin’s style.”

  “Our information says he’s pretty versatile.” Burlingame produced his pipe from a breast pocket, charged it, and patted his trunk for a match.

  Chilson flipped a match folder on to the table. “Anything on that spooky one?”

  Lighting the pipe, the FBI man shook his head. “If he’s an eraser he’s not local. Washington’s slow getting back to us on his picture. Back-up for Macklin, most likely. Either that or Maggiore’s playing his own game. That snake has more than one head.”

  “Nice people we’re dealing with these days.”

  “A numbers runner pumped full of holes and stuffed into an automobile trunk at Metro Airport, a V.C. spy shoved out of a helicopter a thousand feet over a jungle in Vietnam; each one’s just as dead as the other. Macklin and Maggiore are in the same business we’re in. Why doesn’t make any difference to the Sixth Commandment.” When Burlingame had the tobacco going he returned the matches to the Secret Service agent. “I didn’t know you smoked.”

  “I don’t. We all carry them to light the President.”

  “I didn’t know he smoked.”

  “One of our jobs is to see that nobody does.”

  “Ah, hell.” Burlingame blew a gray cloud. “How’d a couple of swell guys like you and me wind up doing what we do instead of selling vacuum cleaners?”

  “We took a civil service exam,” said Chilson.

  Macklin blacked out on the Edsel Ford Freeway near the New Baltimore exit.

  He came around a second later with the vague euphoria of a man awakening an hour ahead of the alarm to see the gray concrete of an overpass abutment filling the windshield. His reflexes kicked in and he tore the wheel left, skidding sideways across the lane in front of a station wagon. The other car’s brakes shrieked and the Cougar climbed the grassy inside bank and scrambled back down onto the pavement just before slamming into the thick beam that supported the center of the overpass. Macklin straightened the wheels and drifted back into the slow lane.

  The station wagon roared past blaring its horn. The steering wheel shivered in Macklin’s shaky grasp and his heart was bounding painfully off his ribs as if trying to force its way through the fissures. He drove another mile doing the minimum and pulled into a rest area to test his legs and splash cold water on his face. His reflection in the mirror over the sink was greenish.

  After walking around the paved parking area for a few minutes, sucking in
lungfuls of fresh air and holding his side against the sharp ache, he got back in and drove the rest of the way to Detroit with the window down and the radio going to help his concentration. There was nothing new on the Boblo boat hijacking, and the item had slipped to third place in the news report after a summary of the President’s latest address to the nation and speculation on the Mayor’s proposed layoff of a thousand Detroit police officers.

  Instead of backing into his driveway in Southfield as he usually did so that the car would be facing out, he pulled straight in for fear the strain of twisting around to look out through the back window would put a rib through his lung. He unlocked the front door of the house and climbed the stairs. There was no sign of Donna in the living room and when he passed the open door of the bedroom he saw her bathrobe flung over the end of the bed. She had dressed and gone out. He didn’t care where. He was grateful to be able to avoid another confrontation like the last. He didn’t want to spend too much time there. If the police investigating that collision in Port Huron traced witnesses’ descriptions of the man seen leaving the scene to that service station and the attendant remembered his license plate number, they wouldn’t be long coming to Macklin’s address. The dead man could have been killed in the accident but the .44 magnum under the back seat would be hard to explain. And yet Macklin hadn’t been about to risk carrying away an unregistered weapon in broad daylight with all eyes on him.

  He stopped two feet short of the door to his study. It was open a crack. He remembered locking it. And even if he didn’t remember, he’d know it was locked because he always locked it when he left, even if it was for only a few minutes. While he was standing there thinking about it a vague shadow fluttered in the fan of sunlight spreading out from the crack across the hall runner.

  He unsheathed the knife—he wondered if Herb Pinelli had ever had cause to use it as many times in twenty-four hours—and pressed a palm against the door, opening it silently on its well-oiled hinges. A man in a black T-shirt and faded jeans was hunched in front of his file cabinet with his back to the door. The muscles in his back twitched with the movement of his arms, their elbows close to his sides. Macklin heard the uneven clicking of metal against metal.

  The killer leaned all his weight into his forward leg to pounce and a floorboard under the carpet moved under his foot. The infinitesimal noise made his man turn just as he leaped. His blade scraped sparks off a long glittering something in the man’s hand and they collided, white pain throwing off sparks of its own in Macklin’s side. He felt a black void opening in his skull and clawed at the man’s face for support, bringing the knife in a short underhand arc toward a flat abdomen under a dark T-shirt.

  “Dad?”

  At the last instant he pulled back. The point snagged a hole in the black material. He dropped the hand with which he had been about to gouge out the eyes of his son.

  At 16, Roger Macklin was as tall as his father and built slighter, but with hard knots of muscle in his upper arms. He wore his black hair long and parted in the middle, and because he had his mother’s features it gave him a girlish look. His mouth hung a little open, but that was normal. A foot-long Johnny Bull screwdriver dangled in his right hand, and that wasn’t.

  Macklin smacked his son’s chest with his open free hand, shoving him back against the file cabinet. A smaller screwdriver and a shoemaker’s awl rolled off the top and clinked to the floor. “How the hell did you get in here?”

  “I picked the lock. You going to cut my throat for it?”

  Already his native insolence had supplanted fear. Macklin put away the knife and slapped the curl off the boy’s lip. It was back almost immediately. “What do you want from my file drawers, drugs?”

  “Money. I was going to ask to borrow some, only nobody was home.”

  “So you decided to help yourself. Where are you sleeping these days?”

  “In the Goodwill box behind K-Mart.”

  Macklin slapped him again. Roger’s head banged the tall cabinet.

  “A friend’s house,” he said then, reaching up to flick blood off his split lip. The underside of his wrist was dotted blue.

  “What’s the matter, he can’t supply you?”

  “Not for free.”

  “What’s it up to now, a hundred a day?”

  “Seventy-five.”

  “Horse’s ass,” Macklin snarled.

  The boy smiled. Macklin hit him again. Roger spat blood and lunged, then stopped short. His father stepped back and peeled off his coat.

  “Let’s do this right,” he said, unsnapping the sheath holding the knife and tossing it atop his coat on the work table.

  Roger said nothing. With one hand he slid open one of the jimmied file drawers, lifted out a box of cartridges, and flipped it to the floor at his father’s feet. Some of the brass-bodied .38s tumbled out and lay gleaming on the carpet.

  The boy said, “I didn’t know you owned a gun. You never even went hunting.”

  “I’ll be years dead before you know everything there is to know about me.” Macklin unbuttoned his cuffs and turned them back.

  “Yeah. Like what it is you do.”

  “I’m an efficiency expert.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Suddenly Macklin had had enough. He came forward and the boy raised his fists to defend himself. But his father shoved him aside roughly and unlocked the bottom drawer containing the safe and worked the combination and lifted the lid and drew out the Smith & Wesson. The barrel swung Roger’s way and he whimpered and ducked, but it kept swinging to the side and down and when it was pointing toward a wooden crate full of potting soil on the floor Macklin pressed the trigger. The report slammed deafeningly inside the room. The dense black soil swallowed the bullet.

  “Now you know why this room is soundproofed.” Macklin shouted over the ringing echo. “You have to be in the bedroom next door to hear anything, and then it sounds like a door slamming down the block. I usually wear earplugs. Each time I get a gun I test it. One shot, one gun, and I never use the same one twice. There are eight spent slugs in that box of dirt. That’s just since I replaced the last box.”

  While Roger watched, his father unloaded the revolver, shaking the five cartridges and the empty casing out onto the table, then got his cleaning kit in a flat metal case out of the drawer that had held the cartridge box and cleaned the barrel.

  “Does Mom know?” asked the boy.

  “She suspects.”

  “That’s why she hates you.”

  “She doesn’t hate me.” When the boy opened his mouth, he added, “Don’t say ‘Bullshit’ again. You got away with it in here once.”

  “How come it’s okay to kill people, but not to swear?”

  Macklin held the barrel up to the window and peered through it with the cylinder swung out. “Did you study any biology before you dropped out of school?”

  “Sure, but what’s that—”

  “Learn anything about alligators?”

  “Alligators?”

  “They live in swamps in Florida and South America and eat small animals.”

  “So?”

  “So if we didn’t have alligators we’d all be up to our asses in small animals.”

  “That’s a copout,” Roger said after a moment.

  Macklin wiped off the gun and laid the cleaning rod and rag back inside the case. “No, it isn’t.”

  “How long you been an efficiency expert?”

  “Save that stuff for television. I’m a killer. I was a killer when you were born and I was a killer when I met your mother. Anything that happened before that isn’t your business.”

  Roger grinned then. Seeing his own wolfish look reflected in his son’s face startled Macklin.

  “I never got to do show-and-tell in kindergarten,” said the boy. “All the other kids had fathers who were firemen and plumbers and they got up and talked about it. I never did because I didn’t know what an efficiency expert was. I could’ve been a hit.”

  �
�Now you know why I never told you.”

  “How come you’re telling me now?”

  “It doesn’t matter any more. After this job everyone will know anyway.”

  “What’s the job?”

  Macklin didn’t reply. He replaced the cartridges and flipped the spent shell into the potting soil and filled the empty chamber with a cartridge from the floor. Then he put the rest back into the box and slid the box into his pants pocket, where it made an unsightly bulge. He carried the cleaning kit back to the file cabinet and put it away and holstered the Smith & Wesson and snapped the holster to his belt next to the knife.

  Roger said, “Take me with you.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t work with addicts.”

  A corner of the boy’s lip turned up, starting the split bleeding again. “I thought maybe you were going to say you didn’t want me to get hurt.”

  “You’re too high most of the time to hurt.”

  “Look.” Roger held out a hand as steady as a bough.

  “Do that again in a couple of hours when the stuff’s worn off.”

  “You’re kind of old. You need someone like me to back you up.”

  Macklin took the thick envelope out of the safe, returned to his work table, and scribbled a name and address on the top sheet of his telephone pad. He ripped out the sheet and counted ten bills out of the envelope swiftly. Then he thrust them and the scrap of paper at his son.

  “That’s a thousand dollars,” he said. “That’s what the man whose name is on that piece of paper charges to dry you out. Use it for that or use it to put yourself in heaven for two weeks. But if you use it for that, don’t come back here.”

  Roger stood there for a moment, holding the cash on his open palm. Then he fisted it and left. Macklin heard the front door slam a minute later.

  CHAPTER 19

  The burning in Macklin’s side was at high flame. Just the touch of his fingers sent a white bolt shooting clear to his back teeth. In the bathroom he turned the shower on high and stripped gingerly, unbuttoning his shirt with one hand and letting his pants drop and stepping out of them without bending. He used each foot to pry the shoe and sock off its mate, kicked them away, and stepped naked into the clouds of steam. There he let the hot spray pummel his side. He didn’t remember hurting this much the last time this had happened.