Kill Zone

by Loren D. Estleman

  Macklin settled his throbbing head back onto the pillow, listening to the shouts and the answers and footsteps approaching briskly outside. The captain came in, a very tall old man who had to remove his cap and stoop to avoid bumping the ceiling, followed by the crewman and the young intern Macklin had met soon after boarding, three or four hundred years ago. He held up his hand in front of Macklin’s face in what the killer at first took for a sign of benediction.

  “How many fingers?” asked the young man.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “How many?”

  “Two.”

  “Okay.” He lowered the hand. “It’s not scientific, but it’ll do till we get your head under a fluoroscope. How do you feel?”

  “Like I’ve been shot twice and dragged feet first up a flight of stairs.”

  “Five flights, actually. You’re in the first mate’s cabin on the crown deck. From what I pieced together of what went on all over this tub I felt you’d earned the soft berth. You’re one lucky son of a bitch, you know that? Bullets bend around you. Couple of inches to the right and that crease on your hip would have been through a major artery. And Sol’s hand must have jerked when that knife went into him or his bullet would have carried off the back of your head instead of taking the scenic route around the curve of your skull.”

  “Where is he?”

  “With the rest of the dead in the crew’s mess. Which I think is appropriate.” Delano didn’t smile. “You got him square in the heart.”

  The captain spoke for the first time. “We owe you, son. If you don’t get some kind of medal for what you did here, I’ll have one struck for you out of my own pocket. You said you’re a policeman?”

  Delano said, “He’s a federal agent. That’s how he knew my fiance was on board. Her father’s a cabinet minister.”

  “That right, son? You’re FBI?”

  “I’m an assassin for the king.”

  “He’s still fuzzy from the blood loss,” murmured the intern. To Macklin: “Rest now. I’ve got another man with a leg wound and some hystericals. The captain’s radioed for ambulances at dockside and you’ll all be taken care of when we put into Sandusky.”

  “Radio them again,” Macklin said. “Get the state police bomb squad in to defuse the boat. Some of those gelatins are tricky.”

  “They’ve already been notified.”

  Delano turned, and the young sailor held the door for him and the captain. “I’ll take the helm, by God,” Macklin heard the tall old man say as the door was pulled shut. “First time in five goddamn years.”

  In a cabinet with louvers in the doors to prevent mildewing, Macklin found a civilian shirt and trousers among the uniforms and pulled on a pair of deck shoes that were a size too large. But the clothes fit fairly comfortably, and after sitting on the edge of the bunk for a moment while his head spun to a rest he got up again and went out through the door leading onto the deck. The intern was just leaving the captain’s cabin next door, where the wounded wheel man was recuperating, and approached the killer, shaking his head. It was still dark out and the slipstream from the bow lifted his collar.

  “What are you trying to prove? Get back in bed.”

  “I’ll just get stiffer,” said Macklin. “I’ve got work to do when I get to shore. When will that be?”

  “About an hour, according to the Captain. You can’t walk around with a possible concussion.”

  Macklin left him standing there and went below, where the passengers, the clouds lifted from their faces, greeted him warmly and asked him questions he ignored. He strolled the decks and climbed up and down stairs, working the stiffness out of his joints and looking at the heel marks in the patches of blood where the slain terrorists had been removed, all except Doris, who had fallen overboard. In the crew’s mess he looked at the bodies laid out on the long tables with their hands folded on their chests by some pious amateur mortician: Fay of the angry expression and bloodless gash describing an idiot smile from ear to ear beneath her chin, rat-faced Ray with his intestines gathered back inside the tear under his ribs, his mouth set in a sneer; Teddy, his left side crusted with blood, a blue hole in the side of his head, blood and brains messing up his military crewcut; boyish Larry, seeming to smile with a dot of red in one corner of his mouth and his eyes half-open and shining through the net of his lashes; Don, looking surprised, eyes popping, lips parted to show white teeth behind his gunslinger’s moustache, the rude white X all but invisible now against his waxen cheek; Sol of the metallic hair, mussed by his none-too-gentle handling on the way up from the ship’s bowels, his face peaceful despite the handle of the knife no one had wanted to remove protruding from his chest.

  On a sudden thought, Macklin patted down the body, removed a long envelope from the inside pocket of the smeared and snagged sportcoat, riffled through the bills inside quickly, doubled it and stuffed it into his own hip pocket.

  “Do, re, mi,” he said.

  The shoreline was a jumble of rotating red and blue lights and banks of hard white illumination provided by television camera crews snatching final comments from the authorities present before the boat docked. Police radios turned up to maximum volume drowned the babble of voices under garbled calls. Ambulance attendants in white uniforms smoked cigarettes and waited to wheel their stretchers up the gangplank. When all the lines were fast and the plank clattered down, a cordon of uniformed police officers formed around the end to hold back the reporters and gawkers. Macklin, standing on the dance deck now, spotted a familiar dumpy figure in a gray suit flashing his way through the blue guard with an open leather folder whose celluloid window caught the light. He bounded up the gangplank, his eyes darting among the faces gathered at the rail until they landed on Macklin’s. Randall Burlingame seized the killer’s arm in a grip that could split bone.

  “Come on, I’ve got a copter standing by.”

  “Where are we going?” Macklin resisted the pull.

  “To a certain elevator I know. Let’s go before the fucking press stampedes.”

  “This man needs medical attention.”

  The FBI chief glared at Delano. “Who the hell are you?” The intern told him. His expression changed. “Carol Trumble’s Delano?”

  “Turnbull,” he corrected.

  “Whatever. She okay?”

  “She’s fine, but—”

  Burlingame turned back toward the gangplank. “Bill! Let him through down there.”

  A lanky bald man in tinted glasses and a dark suit joined them from the crowd on the dock. Burlingame introduced the stranger as Bill Chilson and sent him off with Delano through the press of passengers. The intern’s puzzled protests were swallowed in the confusion.

  The FBI man looked Macklin up and down. “You look plenty healthy to me. Shoes are too big.”

  “They’re dead,” Macklin said.

  “Who?”

  “All of them. Siegfried.”

  “Son of a bitch. All by yourself?”

  “Bomb Disposal. Coming through.”

  They got out of the way of a group of men in green fatigues and billed caps carrying a leaden chest three feet by two feet by its side handles like a coffin.

  “Let’s move,” said Burlingame, after they had passed.

  The two descended the gangplank. Behind them, the orchestra stood at the rail, playing “Happy Days Are Here Again” under the direction of a smiling bald man whose toupee perched jauntily atop a bump the size of the Astor ballroom.

  The helicopter pilot was a black man with long sideburns, wearing a fisherman’s cap and a denim jacket over a gray T-shirt with white lettering spelling out I’D RATHER FLY THAN MAKE LOVE. Macklin strapped himself in behind the pilot and Burlingame climbed into the front passenger’s seat and the lazily swooping propeller blades picked up speed with a whine and the craft lifted free of the empty parking lot behind a brick factory building and tilted as it swung around in a climbing arc, its skids narrowly missing a forest of television antennas on the roof
of an apartment house. The black surface of Lake Erie to the east was taking on a gray metallic sheen with the coming of dawn.

  Burlingame hung an elbow over the back of his seat and raised his voice above the beating of the blades. “One out of every four people standing on that dock is a federal agent. I’m damn glad to be handing this one over to the Ohio headquarters. I have to say I never thought you’d get as far as the second deck, Macklin. Those Jackson cons were as good as sprung.”

  Macklin said nothing. Away from the scene of his ordeal he felt a deadly fatigue creeping into his limbs and eyelids. He sank his chin onto his chest. Evidently the FBI man noticed, because he said:

  “Do you really need a doctor?”

  “Just a bed.”

  “There’ll be a room waiting for you at the hotel after the debriefing. I want to get everything that happened aboard that boat down on tape while the details are still fresh. Then Howard Klegg wants to see you. He called the office right after I heard from the Sandusky authorities. I think the old shyster has a tap on our phones. He said he wants to give you something.”

  “I won’t be needing the room,” Macklin said. “I’ve got something to do first.”

  “If you mean settling things with Maggiore, forget it. At eleven o’clock last night U.S. Treasury agents arrested him for illegally transporting firearms to South America. He’ll be tied up in court for the next five years anyway. No matter how it comes out, as a power in the Detroit area he’s finished.”

  Again Macklin made no answer, pretending to sleep. He hadn’t been thinking about Maggiore.

  CHAPTER 33

  The sun was well up and shining through a thin haze of blue smog icing the buildings of downtown Detroit when Macklin caught a cab from in front of the hotel. Burlingame had told him an agent would be driving his Cougar in from Sandusky. Macklin didn’t care if he did. He was carrying nearly a hundred thousand dollars in two envelopes on his person and the good will of his employer’s powerful attorney. Klegg had assured him, coming just short of laying his arm across Macklin’s shoulders, that he would brush aside the various gnat-bite charges the government would undoubtedly have ready for Boniface the moment he left prison, and that things would be like old times by Thanksgiving. “And while I can’t speak for Michael, I wouldn’t exactly fall down if you were to find yourself with some new responsibilities—say Midwest sales representative for Addison Camera?”

  In the special parlance of the Boniface family, “sales representative” meant enforcer. The position would place Macklin in charge of persuading reluctant corporation presidents from St. Paul to Cincinnati to surrender controlling interest in their companies to his employer in return for not getting strung up on meat hooks for unpaid debts. It meant also a healthy percentage of every dollar he managed to squeeze out of them. The hundred thousand would be pin money. He’d told Klegg he’d have to sleep on the offer.

  Burlingame had told him to expect arrest by the Southfield police for Freddo’s killing, but that the victim had already been identified from a photograph as the man seen leaving the scene of the apartment house manager’s murder in River Rouge; in the light of that discovery, the neighbor who had witnessed the shooting in Macklin’s back yard was prepared to swear he’d seen Freddo threatening Macklin with a gun.

  As the cab headed west and the cityscape rolling past the window went from vertical to horizontal, flattening into the suburbs, Macklin felt a slight autumn chill and huddled deeper into his borrowed clothing. His feet, sockless in the first mate’s oversize shoes, were still cold from having gone bare so long on the clammy decks of the Boblo boat. But the feeling was as much a reaction after the triphammer activity of the past three days as anything. The driver, a sallow-faced Arab with a moustache, saw his passenger hugging himself in the rearview mirror and turned on the heater. The blower whooshed. “Winter coming, eh?” he said. “I’m sure not ready for the cold.”

  “No one ever is.”

  The driver made a few more attempts at conversation, but Macklin didn’t take it up and they swung north on Greenfield in silence. After eleven blocks Macklin told him to pull over and gave him a hundred-dollar bill. The driver grumbled but made change from an almost-full money box. He drove back to the garage to end his shift.

  Macklin hoped he wouldn’t remember the man who had handed him the big bill and where he’d let him off. But he’d had nothing smaller. He walked north another five blocks, beginning to limp now.

  The front door to the store was locked. His watch read ten of eight. The store didn’t open until nine. But there was a light on in back and he grasped the handle and shook the door, rattling it loudly in its frame.

  He had been doing this for perhaps thirty seconds when a broad figure emerged from the light into the shadows near the front of the store, gesturing impatiently with one arm toward the sign in the plate glass window listing the business hours.

  “Open up, Umberto!” Macklin called. “It’s Peter.”

  After a pause the figure came forward the rest of the way. The light from the display window carved shadows into the rocky hollows of the old Sicilian’s face, making him look even more like an Indian than usual. He had a pearl-gray vest on over a striped silk shirt with a silver tie that shone like his hair. He unlocked and opened the door but stood in the entrance. His massive shoulders extended beyond the frame.

  Macklin said, “It’s done.”

  Pinelli hesitated. “Ackler as well?” The other nodded. “You were lucky, Pietro.”

  “Didn’t you once tell me that sometimes luck accounts for better than half?”

  “But it is not a thing to depend on. You must behave as if it does not exist until it is needed.” His eyes flicked toward the bandage on his visitor’s forehead. “You are in pain?”

  “Yes, Umberto.”

  The old killer studied his face. After a beat he moved aside to admit Macklin and closed and locked the door behind him. “There is tea in the office.”

  The storeroom was cluttered as always. Pinelli waved a big hand in the direction of a standing bolt of fabric by way of offering a seat and removed a second cup from the drawer of his gray steel desk and lifted a white china teapot from a hotplate on a shelf of tall ledgers. Macklin remained standing, leaning against the door jamb. “None for me, thanks.”

  Shrugging, his host topped off his own cup with steaming yellow liquid. Macklin wondered if it was ginseng. “My heart swelled when I saw you, figlio.” The old man blew on his tea. “The odds were great against you.”

  “Greater than I’d thought.”

  He set down the cup untasted. “And now, my friend, you will retire and come to work with me. You can afford to buy in.”

  “I still don’t know anything about selling clothes.”

  “I will teach you. The eyes are your most important tools. They will tell you what is stylish and what is not. Your eyes are good, like mine. They are one reason we have lived to our respective ages.”

  “I don’t think so, Umberto.”

  “It would please your wife. That is no small thing, whatever other problems you may have. The pain of my existence is that I did not listen to my Clovis when she pleaded with me to change occupations. It killed her. That is why I gave her name to this store. It is small penance and does no one good.”

  “I won’t have a wife much longer,” Macklin said. “That’s done too.”

  “I am sorry, Pietro. Will you then marry Christine?”

  Macklin paused. “I’d forgotten you knew about her.”

  “We confide in each other much. I myself have told you more than I have any priest.”

  “Not just me.”

  Pinelli had been standing with one foot propped up on a wooden forklift pallet. Now he lowered it to the floor and leaned back against the desk, folding his arms and bunching further the mound of muscle atop his shoulders. “I wish you would tell me of your trouble, the one that brings you here today.”

  “I think you know. I saw it in your f
ace when you opened the door.”

  Unexpectedly, the Sicilian flashed Macklin his old wolf’s grin. “I am proud. It was I who taught you to read faces, remember?”

  “Stop it! That proud tutor act has been phony from the start.”

  “No, amico mio.” The grin was gone. “It was not, as you say, phony. It was never that.”

  Macklin said, “I accused Christine of informing on me to the FBI. She denied it but I didn’t believe her. I thought because Randall Burlingame knew enough to try to reach me at her number, she was the one who filled their file on me. But you knew I was seeing her. And you knew about some of the hits I made, because I discussed the knottier ones with you before making them. Christine couldn’t have known about them. The Feds did. Not enough to convict, not on hearsay when their informer refused to testify. But enough to hobble me if I ever came in handy.

  “What did they promise you, Umberto?” he asked. “I’d always thought you were incorruptible.”

  The storeroom-office swelled with silence. Macklin watched Pinelli’s expression, but without the element of surprise there was no reading the face of a man who had been reading faces since before he was born. The old killer unfolded his great arms, looked down at his hands. There was no shame in the gesture, only sadness.

  “There are no incorruptibles, Pietro. Not one. I would not have had you know for anything. I would rather you’d died on that boat.”

  Macklin felt his face get haggard. Until that moment he had hoped the old man would deny it, even lie. He would then have gone away to convince himself. Now he spoke from the depths of his exhaustion.

  “What could you have wanted that would make you do it? You have money.”

  This time it was Pinelli who looked hurt. “How could you think I would do this thing for money? How could you think that? I did it for freedom.”

  “You are free.”

  “No man is free who owes a debt. I told an untruth on my application for citizenship. It was an old arrest, for a small burglary during my youth in Messina. It was so long ago that more than once I thought of it as a childhood nightmare. I made no mention of it. Twice when I was employed here I was summoned to police headquarters for questioning. I was released both times for no evidence, but had the police known of this forgotten untruth I could have been deported. But a federal agent who knew of this questioning took my immigration file home for study. Afterwards he came to me.