“Fucking steel shot.” The words were slurred through spittle and blood.
“Treat.”
“Lead’ve done the job quick.”
“Treat, who’s got the information on the guns you’ve sold?”
“I don’t sell guns. I give music lessons.”
“It’s Macklin, Treat. Who’d you leave the stuff with?”
“Macklin?”
“Yeah. The stuff.”
“Ain’t no stuff.”
“Too late for that,” Macklin said.
“Ain’t no stuff, that’s the joke.” He spasmed, drooling blood, and the killer realized he was laughing. “I’m going to write that shit down, hear it read back to me in court?”
Macklin let go of his hair. Christ, there were pellets caught in it. “Fucking steel shot,” he said.
“Fuckstlsht.” Treat was twitching all over now, the end close.
Decoys. Rolly and his partner, dead by now on the front lawn. Flush the game and catch it when it breaks. Macklin was supposed to have been the one coming out the door. A siren wound up far away, high wail switching to yelp at corners and intersections. Mantis, whatsizname, Novo, would have to abandon the trap soon. But not before the police came and sealed off the house.
Acting out of habit, Macklin retraced his steps over the bodies and picked up the ejected shotgun shell, pocketing it. He fingered a fresh one out of the coat over his arm—evil-smelling, a charred hole in the wool big enough to put his head through—and poked the shell into the magazine. Then he climbed the stairs.
From up there he could hear more sirens joining the first. He found the three hundred dollars he had given Treat in the workbench drawer and put it in his wallet. He looked around at the boxes and cases of ammunition stacked on the floor, the guns on the walls. A man could hold out there for a week if they didn’t set fire to the house.
Alone in the cramped room, Macklin grinned.
He went through more drawers until he found a carton of Pall Malls and a book of matches. Leaving the cigarettes, he took the matches, tugged a wooden case full of red-and-white cans marked SMOKELESS POWDER out of the knee hole in the bench, tore a handful of ballistics charts off the sloped ceiling, and stuffed the paper into the spaces between the cans. Then he set fire to the paper and hurried toward the stairs, the shotgun tucked under his arm.
The end of the hall opposite the living room opened into a small kitchen with a breakfast nook and a refrigerator and electric stove and a sink stacked high with dirty dishes. The back door was dead-bolted and required a key to unlock it from either side. The key wasn’t in the lock. He stepped back, clamped the shotgun to his hip, and blasted the lock and four inches of heavy wooden door around it into the backyard.
The sirens were in front now, growling down. Car doors slammed in ragged succession like a string of firecrackers going off. A woman’s bored voice throbbed out of a police radio turned up to full volume, the words distorted and crackling with static. Macklin retrieved the spent shell and waited.
The first explosion shook the walls. In the ringing echo following the thud he heard voices shouting. He refolded his coat over the shotgun, the gaping hole inside, opened the splintered door, and went out.
The tiny backyard was enclosed by a six-foot board fence. Macklin started around the side of the house just as the second blast ripped off the roof and burst every window in the building. A cloud of flying glass just missed him. He ran through a shower of debris, slammed into a uniformed police officer back-pedaling to get clear of the falling wreckage, spinning him around, and found himself face-to-face with a big black police sergeant washed in the orange light of the flames.
He froze. The shotgun bundled in the coat was pointed at the blue-covered belly bulging over the man’s gun belt.
“Get the hell out of the way!” bawled the sergeant, seizing Macklin’s arm and shoving him toward the sidewalk. “Can’t you damn gawkers see the whole place is going up?”
A large crowd had begun to gather on the sidewalk. They were watching the flames rolling out of the windows on the top floor and shouting encouragement and obscenities at a pair of officers trying in spite of the searing heat to get to the thin, long-haired body lying in front. Seeking the open, Macklin made his way through the press of bodies and official cars parked all over the street. Behind him, cases of small-arms ammunition were going up in cracks and pops.
Chapter Twenty-nine
“Yes?”
“Klegg?”
“Yes.”
“Macklin. Any calls?”
“You son of a bitch.”
Macklin, standing with his back to the wall in the hallway of the administration building at Wayne State University, scowled absently at a pair of students walking by hand in hand. They were both men. He changed hands on the telephone receiver.
“Cops found Moira already?”
“Pontier was just here. He’s got a bulletin out for you. You’re wanted for her murder.”
“You know it wasn’t me.”
“It might as well have been. She hired you to protect her from that animal.”
“She hired me to take care of him.”
“You didn’t do a very good job.”
“How’d the police find out I was involved?”
“Who cares? She was as close to a daughter as I ever came, and now she’s dead.”
“I told Burlingame at the FBI I was looking for Blossom. His computer must have turned up Moira. He must have something going with the cops.”
“He called too. He wants you to call him. He left a number.”
“I’ve got his number.”
“This one’s different, he said.” Klegg read it off. Macklin committed it to memory.
The lawyer said, “Listen, you better give yourself up. The police have weird ideas about men who murder women and then mutilate their bodies. They’ll shoot first and claim resisting arrest later.”
“It’s not my skin you’re worried about. You’re afraid of being charged as an accessory.”
“You son of a bitch. I was going to help her make something of her life. I was going to pay her way through law school.”
“She was going to let you?”
“I didn’t get the chance to tell her.”
“It galled her to have to ask you to help save her life,” Macklin said. “Can it be you really don’t know what she would’ve told you to do with your offer?”
“Get yourself another divorce lawyer.” The line clicked and buzzed.
Macklin pressed down the fork, then fed another quarter into the slot and dialed the number Klegg had given him. Burlingame’s voice came on after the first ring.
“Killers’ hotline. Freelance touches and ex-Mafia hit men a specialty.”
Macklin paused. “How’d you know it was me?”
“I’ve never given the number out before. It’s a new addition to the office system, supposedly tap-proof. It doesn’t go through the switchboard and puts out some kind of signal that squelches listening devices. I figure it’s good for about two weeks, until the electronics industry finds a way around it. Kind of dropped the ball there with the King woman, didn’t you?”
“Go to hell.”
This time Burlingame hesitated. “I didn’t know it was personal.”
“What’d you turn on Blossom?”
“Uh-uh. You first.”
Macklin leaned his shoulders back against the wall. Classes were starting and the hallway traffic had slowed to a trickle.
“Your spy in Homicide’ll be reporting an explosion in a house in Taylor any time now,” he said. “Two men dead inside, the owner and a black man named Rolly. The owner’s name was Treat. He’s in your files if you’re up on your Detroit area gun runners. Another dead one in the front yard, name unknown. Cops should have a sheet on him and Rolly. The two inside were shotgunned. It’s my guess the coroner’s men will dig two seven-sixty-fives out of the stiff out front. Unless they exploded.”
“Our fr
iend?”
“His style. Man’s got moves.”
“Like him, huh?”
“I’ll send his widow a card, that’s what you mean.”
“Bullshit. You’re having more fun than you’ve had in years. He wasn’t the one scattershot the two inside, though.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
“Uh-huh.” The FBI man stopped talking again. Macklin thought he heard a match striking. “What makes you think we’ve got someone in Homicide?” The words broken up while he puffed the tobacco into life.
“Your style. Now you go.”
“We got an address on Blossom from Ypsilanti.” He recited a number and street in Melvindale. “He’s working in the salt mines under the river there, the day shift. We’re waiting on a court order to go in and get a look at the hospital records on his stay there. I’ve got a hunch but I don’t want to say anything about it until I know. Macklin?”
“I’m here.”
“I wasn’t sure. You were awful quiet. I guess you liked her.”
“What else you got?”
“It for now. We aren’t making any moves on Blossom before we see the stuff from the hospital. What about you?”
“Have Pontier lift the APB on me, can you?”
“I don’t think I can get him to do that. Also, we’re talking accessory on those two in Taylor. Another count should anything happen to Blossom.”
Macklin laughed dryly. “You got a lot to talk about, after Viola Liuzzo.”
“Jury found for us in that one. Anyway, that was Hoover.”
“You guys blame everything on Hoover. Like you were all wired into him and he was working the buttons.”
“I’ll talk to Pontier. It won’t do any good.”
“Call you later.”
“Watch what you say if it’s after working hours. I can get calls forwarded to my house from this line, but it won’t be eavesdrop-proof that last six miles.”
“I’ll talk in a high voice and use an accent.”
Burlingame chuckled. “Hey, that was pretty good. You’re coming along fine.”
“Deputy chief on two, Inspector.”
Pontier, in his shirtsleeves with the cuffs turned back once, took a sip of the coffee Sergeant Lovelady had brought him and lifted the receiver, punching the button. “Afternoon, sir.”
“You’ve been on this flamethrower thing a week now,” said the voice with the music behind it, “Cabaret” this time. “I assume you’re about to make an arrest.”
“As a matter of fact we are, sir, but for a different murder in Redford Township. Same man. I don’t expect to hold him, though, not on that charge.”
“Why on earth not?”
“Because he didn’t do that one. We know who did but we aren’t picking him up just yet. What he is, we’re using him as bait. Things break right we can bust the whole thing wide open when they get together.”
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about your vision of official procedure, Inspector. I don’t think you could draw a straight line between two points if you had a ruler.”
Jesus, now it was “Rocky Mountain High.” Pontier hated John Denver. “Sir, I think we can wipe the board clean on two murders in Redford on top of the flamethrower thing and take a contract killer and a psycho off the street with this one bust.”
“You promised me a tie-in to organized crime.”
“Well, we’re still thumping on that.” Go ahead, tell him about the Russians and the FBI, we’re in James Bond country now. Remember the road? Backache all the time because they haven’t designed a car seat yet that can be sat on eight hours at a stretch, call in Code Three and get one mouthful of tuna fish on white when some scroat with a sawed-off takes the head off a liquor dealer right around the corner. “Very least we got a guy used to do heavyweight work for the wise guys. Press’ll treat it the same.”
“Oh, you know how the press thinks? There’s an opening in Public Information if you’re interested.”
“Sir, there’s always an opening in Public Information. I’m just saying we’re on the hot box now and it’s going to blow anyway, so we might as well be on top of it when it does. Be there to catch the pieces, if that’s not too much to try to get out of a metaphor.”
Denver was still singing. The song went on and on, like the flu. “Okay. You know who to call when it goes down.”
Yeah, and if that’s at two in the morning? Aloud he said, “You’ll be the first.”
Lovelady was still in the office when he hung up. The fat sergeant stirred himself from Pontier’s Academy class picture on the wall to lay a scribbled message on his superior’s desk.
“From the Taylor Police,” he said. “That four-alarmer today?”
Pontier squinted at Lovelady’s scrawl. “Three dead gunshot.”
“Two with a shotgun. Maybe more; the upstairs is gone. No IDs yet but the house was in the name of a guy named Treat. Maybe you remember it.”
“Treat.”
“Fire cops said the place had to of been full of dynamite or powder, way it went up. Coming clear?”
“Gun runner. We had him down here a couple of times on gang shoots, nothing stuck. If it’s him.”
“I pulled his file. Address checks out. Do we want it?”
“No. Christ, no. They’re starting to call me the garbageman already in the burgs. Just leave your unsolved murders out at the curb for Pontier to pick up. But set up a liaison, offer them the use of our facilities in return for a pipeline. Murder rate’s gone up a half a percent since someone pricked Macklin’s hide.”
“You got Macklin on the brain, maybe.”
“Maybe. But he has to get his hardware from someplace, and Treat was first-string. Just for now I’m going to look on every K that crosses this desk like it had Macklin’s thumbprint on it and blow out the chaff later.”
“I put men on Blossom’s place like you said. Melvindale cops said okay as long as we don’t shoot any innocent civilians. Then they don’t know anything about it.”
“That’s as good as carte blanche. You can fire a cannon in any direction these days and not hit an innocent civilian.”
“I saw a T-shirt—” Lovelady said, and stopped.
“What?”
“I saw a guy wearing this T-shirt in the supermarket the other day. Just something I thought of. It said, ‘Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.’”
“I like it.” Pontier played with a pencil. “We’ll see it gets put on Macklin’s headstone.”
Chapter Thirty
Macklin returned to his motel room, a fairly large one maintained by a nationwide chain, with a television set and its own bath and a telephone he didn’t trust because using it meant going through the switchboard in the lobby. He tossed his paper-bag-wrapped package onto the bed and peeled out of his sport coat. It was cheap polyester, bought to replace the blasted hunting jacket he had discarded and the good checked sport coat that had blown up with his car, and it was uncomfortably hot, but it covered his pistol and didn’t attract as much attention as walking around in shirtsleeves in the brisk weather.
He experienced a moment of panic when he got down on one knee to feel under the bed and couldn’t find the sawed-off Remington, but then his fingers closed around the barrel and he pulled it toward him carefully. A friend of his father’s had died with a double load of buckshot in his belly after climbing over a barbed-wire fence and then pulling his shotgun barrel-first between the strands, where the triggers caught. At least, that was the story his father had told him at the funeral. Whatever its truth, the story had made an impression on the boy.
He unloaded the gun on the bed and slid the cheap cleaning kit he had purchased with the sport coat out of its bag. He took his time polishing the inside of the barrel and wiping excess oil off the action. After reloading he put the gun back under the bed and unholstered the 10-millimeter to check the load. In this manner he managed to kill twenty minutes.
His stomach growled, a long low intestinal complaint
that was familiar to him. He hadn’t had anything to eat all day except a corned beef sandwich on stale rye with a glass of milk at a diner, and if he decided to eat anything more it would just be something light to quiet his stomach. His blood pumped faster and purer on an empty belly, feeding his brain and sharpening his instincts and senses. Predators in the wild hunted only when they were hungry. He had survived to this age following their example. To change would be worse than to invite bad luck.
His watch read ten after four. He called time to confirm it and switched on the television set. He knew he needed sleep but he was wide-awake. At length he made himself comfortable on the bed to watch an Ironside rerun on channel 2. Something about a crazed gunman out to kill the policewoman assigned to Chief Ironside’s detail. At the climax he wasted time telling the woman what was going to happen to her and how clever he was, giving the Chief and his assistants time to get there and kill the gunman and rescue the woman.
Happened every time, on television. Killer had to have good lines.
When the show was over he turned it off and stretched out and even napped a little. He woke precisely at six without having dreamt, splashed some water on his face in the bathroom, and got out the shotgun again. It was the work of a few minutes to fashion a makeshift shoulder sling out of his belt. When he put on the sport coat, the hem came down just low enough to conceal the barrel. Standing in the middle of the room, he practiced swinging it out a couple of times, then fixed the holstered pistol into the inside pocket of the coat and went out. It was almost completely dark outside. The days were getting shorter faster.
A stout, gray-haired man in a charcoal suit was using Roger’s favorite public telephone when he got there a few minutes past six. The man’s briefcase stood on the sidewalk near his leg with a beige trench coat folded over it. Roger saw guys like him all the time, always on the telephone, and not one in ten ever wore the damn coat. He wondered if the sleeves were even real.
Talking to his wife from the sound of it. Guys that had been married a long time never called their wives by their names, or by anything else. Not even “dear” or “honey.” They just talked, and it was like they knew each other so well they could tell it was them being talked to without having to ask. Roger hoped no one would ever know him that well.
Roses Are Dead Page 17
