Kill Zone

by Loren D. Estleman

  “White jocks. They’re the only kind you ever wear.” The FBI man went on without pausing. “Blakeman is thirty-six and a Vietnam vet with two purple hearts and a DSC rec that never came through because the army doesn’t award important medals to psychos. A piece of fragmentation grenade put half of that X on his cheek; army surgeons made the other half taking it out.

  “What the khaki shrinks call his psychological profile places him a shade to the conservative side of Charles Manson. Delusions of grandeur with pathological tendencies. That’s what a hundred and forty pages in his medical file boils down to. Local cops questioned him twice on suspicion of receiving stolen property in his pawn shop, but no charges were ever filed for lack of evidence. We’d have had all this sooner but we’re computerized now.” He made a face and put away his pipe.

  “He’s the one they call Don.”

  Burlingame nodded. “We matched witnesses’ descriptions with Blakeman’s known associates and came up with some possibles. The kid of the group has got to be John Carlisle. He’s a teenager with rich parents in Grosse Pointe, no criminal record, and runs with an older girl named Melissa Stein. She’s got a history of arrests for shoplifting and one drug bust, no convictions. Her folks have money too. She’d be the blond twist on the boat.

  “The black woman is Tonda Kalu, right name Purifying Buchannan, Fay on the boat. As much as she hates anything white I’m surprised she bothers to brush her teeth. Federal agents put holes in her Panther boyfriend on Mt. Elliott four years ago. She did eight months in the Detroit House of Corrections for harboring and campus cops threw her off the Wayne State grounds a couple of times for circulating hate literature. One bust for soliciting, even black revolutionaries have to eat. We got a positive ID on the one calls himself Teddy. His name’s Philip MacKenzie and he’s a captain in the National Guard wanted for desertion from Grayling, where a number of weapons and explosives were removed from the armory on a forged requisition the day he went AWOL. Their demolitions man is James Delbert. They want him in California for parole violation because he left the state. San Quentin hosted him for over a year on a manslaughter rap. Seems he blew up another employee while they were laying charges for one of those car-crash-and-boom pictures Hollywood likes so much. He’s either Ray or Mike; the witnesses weren’t sure.”

  “What about the one they killed?”

  “Franklin Green, musician. His job was finished after smuggling the weapons aboard in his instrument case, so they dusted him. He was a heroin junkie and therefore a liability. Musical bastards, this bunch: Doris, Ray, Mike, Fay. Sol.” The pause before the last name was significant. “He’s the only one we can’t put a name to, the one killed Green. Howard Klegg said you know who he is.”

  “Klegg mentioned me?”

  Burlingame snicked his teeth with his tongue, the first sign of impatience he had shown. “I mean the collective you, meaning you guys. Klegg said he was an independent contract killer and that he knocked down the band’s original bass player so Green could take his place. Just a few minutes ago you said you’d traced one of the terrorists to a beach house in Port Huron. That doesn’t fit with any of the information we have on the others. What’s his name, Macklin?”

  “Who’s your informant?”

  The FBI man frowned his puzzlement. This time it was Macklin who made the impatient noise.

  “The one who filled your file on me,” he said. “Somebody had to. I haven’t seen any agents going through my underwear drawer lately.”

  “You know I can’t tell you that. Who would come forward if we started running to the very people we get the information on and pointing fingers?”

  “You’ve done it. When the people you had information on had information you wanted worse.”

  Burlingame smiled. “The collective you. I haven’t.”

  The killer straightened, crossed his ankles the other way, and leaned back again with his arms crossed.

  “You forget you’re standing on shit, Macklin.” There was now no evidence that a smile had ever lived on Burlingame’s square face. “Those officers are still downstairs. I can remand you to them and they’ll kick you over to River Rouge for the murder of the apartment house manager.”

  “It won’t stick.”

  “You’d be surprised what you can make stick when you’ve got the glue. Oh, hell.” He unbuttoned his vest. The atmosphere in the elevator was cloying. “You’ve got the background you wanted on Siegfried. You’ll be dealing with one pro, two semis if you count Blakeman and MacKenzie and their combat training, and two dangerous amateurs, Tonda Kalu and Delbert, the Beast That Blew up Hollywood. Frankie and Annette aren’t worth losing sleep over. It’s no good to you if you don’t know where to find them. I do. Let’s trade.”

  “I can’t believe one man’s name is worth this much dope,” Macklin said. “What have you got in mind, Burlingame?”

  “Oh, hell,” he said again, and pushed another button on the control panel. The elevator lurched and began descending. “The Bureau is just coming back from all that bad press in the seventies. We haven’t had our pick of recruits in years. The good men are nearing retirement, getting careful, and the new men aren’t good enough. I haven’t a man I’d trust on a boat full of innocents with a blooded killer aboard.”

  The car settled. Burlingame held his thumb on the Close Door button and said, “I’m going to have to go ahead with you, Macklin. You’re the only professional I’ve got.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Larry wished the boat would start moving again.

  It had been at anchor several hours now under Don’s orders, groaning as it drifted against the taut pressure of the chain. The engine was shut down, and the gentle undulation of the wooden hull on the flat waves shifted the sodden potato chips lying lumped in the 18-year-old hijacker’s stomach. There was nothing to eat aboard but packaged snacks from the concession stand on the bottom deck, delivered to the upper levels by big-eyed passengers with loved ones below, and Don had forbidden smuggling more nourishing food up the gangplank for fear of arousing suspicion before their first move. Larry’s glittering high had given way to a black void as the cocaine wore off. His head hurt and he yearned for some movement of air over the bow to stop his lungs from creaking. He wished he hadn’t accounted for his share of the powder in his first blow. He wondered if he was an addict, like Mike was or like the crater-faced wrecks he had seen snuffling around that boarded-up store on Erskine the first time Doris had taken him to meet her connection.

  Doris.

  His sweat was a greasy sheen on his face and plastered his body like a clammy shroud under his clothes. The bends of his elbows made wet tearing sounds when he straightened his arms, and the checked butt of the heavy .45 was slippery in his palm. It did no good to change hands and wipe the palm on his pants; his glands were stuck open. Even his toes squelched in his shoes.

  He wondered if Doris had anything left. She could leave her hostages for a few seconds. Most of them were lying or sitting on the deck, not even bothering to look at their captors any more, and any who had it in his head to take a flying dive off that topmost passenger deck into the middle of Lake Erie wasn’t going to be a problem. He called her. It came out a croak. He hadn’t spoken in hours. He cleared his throat, wet his mouth as well as he could, and called again. That time it rang out clearly, if a little too loud. Some of the passengers started and looked up at him.

  Doris’ blond head appeared around the base of the crown deck that separated them. “Yes, John?”

  “Larry,” he corrected automatically, angrily. Well, it didn’t much matter now. Don had said their names would all be known to the authorities after thirty-six hours. “You got any stuff?”

  “A little.”

  “Bring it here.”

  She hesitated. Her head disappeared for a moment, and then he saw her walking his way along the railing, holding the M-16 across her body in both hands like a balancing rod. She looked like someone’s kid sister playing soldier and Larry
would have smiled if he thought he wouldn’t look like a death’s-head. He felt the hairs in his nostrils standing out as if reaching for what was coming.

  “Doris, get back to your station.”

  Larry saw the girl stop and look up. He followed her gaze. Don was leaning one hip against the railing of the starboard bridge wing with a heel hooked on the bottom rail and the Luger in his right hand resting on his raised thigh. The extended cartridge clip protruded four inches below the pistol’s square butt. Larry had watched him convert the gun to full automatic in five minutes one afternoon.

  “John”—Doris corrected herself—“Larry wanted—”

  “I know what he wanted. Go back.”

  “But he needs it.”

  “No one needs coke. It isn’t like heroin.”

  But after a second, Don slipped two fingers of his left hand into his pants pocket and came up with a flat cellophane package, which he flipped over the wing. Larry watched the package turning end over end in a long arc, felt the weight of his heart on his tongue when a breath of wind pushed it toward the outside railing, then lunged forward as it dropped straight down and landed on the edge of the deck with a flat smack.

  Don divided his attention between his own prisoners in the pilot house and those on the top passenger level while Larry knelt with his gun in his pocket and spilled a little of the powder on to the deck and separated it into lines with the razor he carried and then snuffed up two lines through a tightly rolled dollar bill. He scooped the remainder back into the package and stood, his eyes glittering in the sunlight that was just beginning to break through the overcast. “Keep it,” Don told him, when he resealed the cellophane and made as if to flip it back. “Just try to make it last another day and a half, okay?”

  Larry said he would and Don was turning back away from the railing when the boat lurched to starboard, throwing him hard against the painted metal. He grabbed the top rail to keep from pitching over, almost losing his gun, spun around, and loosed three shots in a half-second burst into the pilot house. One bullet starred the windscreen. Another splintered the oak paneling on the port side. The man at the wheel, who had spun it in an attempt to hurl Don overboard, cried out and grasped his right arm above the elbow. The other men in the pilot house stood back against the walls with their hands raised.

  The wheel man swooned, blood streaming down his arm and pattering to the deck. The weight of his body turned the wheel and the boat swung into a slow starboard drift. Covering the others, Don strode in past his portable radio and unpegged the microphone to the public address system. His voice, clear and loud and quivering with emotion, rang through the boat.

  “We got a comedian up here. If there’s a doctor aboard this tub he might think about coming up and bringing his bag with him. Otherwise we’ll all hear a splash.”

  He replaced the microphone, watching the old captain and the glaring mate and the pale and shaking lookout and the security guard staring at the deck. The wounded man was semiconscious, slumped on one knee at the base of the wheel with a hand clasping his injured arm. There was a lot of blood.

  It had been a mistake to take Larry along, Don thought. He wondered if it would be a mistake to keep him along.

  CHAPTER 23

  Freddo wondered where the G-men had gone.

  Parked across the street and down the block from Peter Macklin’s house in Southfield, he abandoned the pretense of reading his road map and folded it and socked it into the glove compartment of the blue Oldsmobile. It was obvious no one was watching. With his jacket and tie off and his hair tucked up under a cloth cap he had bought in a five-and-dime on the way down from Port Huron, he had walked casually up one side of the street and down the other, letting his gaze slide inside the few cars parked along the curbs, and convinced himself that no federal men were watching the place. There was a bare chance they were forted up in one of the other houses on the block with binoculars and cameras with telephoto lenses, but he doubted it. That was for big operators of Maggiore’s stamp, not for street soldiers like Macklin. And it still required a radio car for the tail. Freddo felt like the guest who had read his invitation wrong and come one night late for the party.

  He had stopped off at the room he rented in the city to put on a fresh shirt and exchange his suit for a tailored blazer and checked pants and break his spare .44 magnum out of the false ceiling he had rigged in his closet. He had hardly hoped to find Macklin at home afterward, but if the FBI were still in residence he would have had hopes the master of the castle would show up. The feds were dumb as telephone poles but all that sitting around on their piles generally paid off. He didn’t like their not being there. He never thought he’d want to see a cop.

  There was more than money in it now, or even simple ambition. No old man in a floppy suit let himself into Freddo’s car and spilled his partner and walked away to write his memoirs. This was a new sensation for Freddo. Poor old Link had had to work himself up a good hate every time he hit someone or helped someone else make a hit. He used to stand in front of a mirror and pretend his reflection was the mark and make his eyes bulge and his face red thinking up all this crap the mark would be handing him, then barge out the door like a big-ass Mexican bull. You couldn’t even talk to him until afterward when he was like a wet rag with a mouth that wouldn’t stop. He wasn’t what Freddo called a natural. But Freddo could eat half a sandwich, get up, go out, drop the nickel on the stiff whoever he was, then come back and finish the sandwich and wait for the news on television. He wondered if Macklin was like that. Well, he’d give him another half hour and then go try something else.

  Twenty minutes later a woman came walking around the corner on the side of the street where the house was, carrying the kind of striped paper bag liquor stores sold their merchandise in. She had a dumpy figure under a blue blouse that needed ironing and a roll of flab jiggled over the top of the wide plastic belt that went with her dark skirt, and at first Freddo paid her no more attention than a bored dog would spend watching a caterpillar climb a blade of grass. But she slowed her pace as she neared Macklin’s house and when she turned into the front walk, juggling the bag under one arm while rummaging in a big black purse, he sat up, blinking.

  While he was at Maggiore’s house waiting for his first glimpse of Macklin, Freddo had gone over a folder full of material on the killer, and among the driver’s license pictures and telephoto shots taken of him getting into and out of his car and walking down the street, there had been a family photograph, shot against a professional blue backdrop and gleaned from some commercial photographer’s file of negatives. It had shown a younger Macklin, less tired-looking, with more hair and a wary smile on his face, standing behind a chair containing an attractive tawny-haired woman with a dark-haired boy of eleven or twelve at his side. This woman was heavier and broad streaks of gray showed in her home bleach job, and anyone could see by the way she walked that she was a lush. He thought at first she was the housekeeper. But it was the kind of neighborhood where servants attracted attention, which wasn’t Macklin’s way.

  If this was what had become of his wife Donna, Freddo could see why Macklin didn’t spend much time at home.

  Hardly had the door closed behind the woman when another actor entered the scene. He appeared from between houses on the opposite side of the street and strode across with a nervous, jerky gait, yanking his head from side to side in a way that said he wasn’t looking for traffic so much as seeking to avoid detection. His sudden appearance on the woman’s heels suggested that he had been waiting just for her arrival, and Freddo cursed himself for not having seen him earlier. He watched the youth look around one last time on the front stoop, then pull the door open and duck inside quickly.

  He had grown at least a foot and lost his baby fat, but Roger Macklin looked a lot like his mother in the old picture.

  Freddo sat watching the house and drumming his fingers on the Oldsmobile’s steering wheel. Assimilating. In the old days, he had been told, there had bee
n some unwritten rule that no matter how hot things got, a man’s home and family remained off limits. Those were the days when fat greaseballs in loud silk suits with garlic on their breath kissed each other in restaurants and sent flowers to each other’s funeral “from the boys.”

  He was glad the old days were gone. He touched his underarm holsters and reached for the door handle.

  The secretary in Randall Burlingame’s outer office said “Yes, sir” into the intercom and removed a finger with a plum-colored nail from the speaker button. She measured out a frosty smile for the lean bald man. “You can go in now, Mr. Chilson.”

  “Thanks, Miss MacNamara.”

  He was rewarded when the smile chipped loose from her face. “Gabel.”

  He shrugged and walked around the end of her desk. It actually blocked any direct entrance to the private office, making Miss Gabel a kind of Cerberus at the gate to Hades. Except that she was too good-looking in her polished porcelain way to be compared to a dog with three heads.

  On his way in, Chilson passed a man coming out in a light-colored windbreaker and jeans. He looked like a repairman for the telephone company and the Secret Service agent’s eyes flicked downward automatically to see if he was carrying a toolbox. But his hands were empty.

  “I see you’ve had the British workman in your house, Watson,” Chilson said, closing the door and shaking Burlingame’s hand. “He’s a token of evil.”

  “When are you going to stop reading that Conan Doyle crap?” grumbled the FBI chief.

  “As soon as the secret agent business gets as good. Who was that, one of your deep cover men?”

  “That was Peter Macklin.”

  “You’re kidding.” Chilson glanced back stupidly at the door.

  “I’d have introduced you, but he’s in a hurry.”

  “He looked like a telephone repairman.”

  “That’s the idea. In the murder game it’s called dressing for success. Is this important, Bill? I’ve got a lot of work kicking me in the behind.”