Kill Zone (20 page)

He cursed, took two steps, and seized the receiver. “Who gave you this number?”

“Never mind that,” said the familiar voice. “Can you talk?”

“Second.” He looked at Christine. She nodded and walked past him into the bedroom, trailing a scent of sandalwood and feminine musk. The door closed. “Okay.”

“You should have told me his name was Freddo, Macklin. It might have given us a place to start.”

“Who's Freddo?”

“We left that shit back in the elevator,” Burlingame rasped. “He's the growth on your ass, or I've wasted myself in the wrong business all these years. He just called.”

“Called where?”

“Called where. Called here. My office. He says he's got something that belongs to you.”

“As for instance.”

“He wouldn't say. But he said he was calling from your house.”

Macklin felt the ice mask.

“Macklin?”

“What else did he say?”

“Just to go back home. He'll call you. That was the whole message, just that he's got something of yours and to wait for his call. It's your family, isn't it? Macklin?”

He cradled the receiver. After a moment the telephone rang again. He picked up the receiver again and lowered it, severing the connection, then took it off the hook and laid it on the telephone stand.

Christine had on slippers and a lacy blue robe when he went back into the bedroom. She watched him draw on his shirt and when he looked at his socks on the floor she knelt and helped him into them and his shoes and tied the laces. He said, “Where'd he get your number?”

“I was going to ask you that. What are you doing, writing it on men's room walls?” She rose, the smile dying on her face when she saw his expression. “Peter, what is it? Bad news?”

“I'm on the books at the federal building. I didn't know I was on the books there before today. No one knows I come here. I didn't tell anyone.”

She tried the smile. “What are you saying?”

“You tell me.”

“Peter, I didn't tell anyone.”

“Burlingame knows I wear white Jockey shorts.”

“I didn't know that was actionable.”

The back of his hand made a loud crack against her face. She staggered back and put a palm to her reddening cheek.

“I told you before to cut the sarcastic crap. What did they do, threaten you with accessory? Or was it a straight cash deal?”

“Murdering bastard,” she muttered.

“What?”

She said it again, louder. The rest of her face had flushed to match the imprint of his hand on her cheek. “You killed Carmine and then you moved in while my thighs were still warm from him.”

“I didn't kill him.”

“You knew someone was going to and you didn't say anything. It's the same. I hear things. People talk. To everyone but the police.”

“That's why you turned informant?”

“I didn't. If I'd thought of it I would have.”

“How come you still opened your door to me if you didn't?”

“Because I love you and it stinks.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“It happens,” she said. “Maybe it never happened to you. There's nothing good about it. It's like being addicted. If I could get out from under I would in a minute.”

“Lying bitch.” He cocked his hand. She backpedaled swiftly, stepped on the hem of her robe, and fell, the material parting and uncovering her nakedness. Tears slicked her cheeks.

“I guess you'll kill me,” she said.

“I only kill when I'm paid.”

“Whore.”

“You pay a prostitute,” he corrected. “You don't pay a whore. You take her and leave.”

He snatched up his windbreaker and reached for the Smith & Wesson he had left on the same chair. The holster lay empty. He swung around and looked at Christine, standing now with the gun in one hand. He froze.

She smiled. Her eyes were wild. “So much power.” She raised the gun and opened her mouth to put the barrel inside.

He sprang, tromping her toes in her thin slipper. She screamed and he got her wrist between his thumb and forefinger at the break and twisted and the gun thumped the floor. In the same movement he swung his right shoulder into her body and she exhaled and stumbled backward. This time the wall kept her from falling. He picked up the revolver and shoved it into its holster.

“I'll just find something else,” she said. Her robe remained open. Her breasts rose and fell rapidly.

“As long as it's not my gun.” He hesitated, about to say something more. Then he left. He heard her on his way out of the apartment.

He took his time driving north on the Southfield Freeway while the sky purpled and the lights of one shopping center after another strung the landscape. Behind a gauzy haze the sun eased down like an old man lowering himself into scalding bath water. By morning the fog would have lifted completely.

It was dark when he reached his neighborhood. He parked in an empty service station two blocks south and got out and took off his windbreaker, reversing it to its dark side before putting it back on. He loosened the revolver in its holster and started walking. No one had summoned him home to wait for any telephone call.

The air held the slight chill of autumn testing the ground for winter. At the corner before his house he turned, then cut through a neighbor's back yard and swung first one leg over a white picket fence and then the other and crossed a patio paved with flagstones and entered his own back yard with cold dew seeping through the canvas of his tennis shoes. Something crackled. He stopped.

“Raise them hands or they're gonna be combing your brains out of the grass into next week.”

The voice was high, girlish, half whisper. He couldn't place its source. He moved his hands away from his body.

“I said raise them.”

He raised them to his shoulders.

“You shouldn't of killed Link,” said the voice.

There were no fences or hedges or trees in Macklin's yard. Over Donna's protests he had cut down the one cedar that had stood there when he bought the house, explaining that it obscured the view. Actually he had borrowed the idea from feudal lords who had sought to discourage intruders from gaining access to their castles from cover. There were no lights on inside the house, but the slight glow from a neighbor's upstairs window found a triangle of shadow where Macklin's back door stood ajar. There was no place else for Freddo to be hiding.

“You said you had something that belongs to me,” Macklin said.

“They're tied up inside. That's some boy you got, Gramps. After you give him that thousand he comes back to squeeze some more out of the old lady. I figure after I'm done with you I'll save him for last.”

“I thought it was me you wanted.”

“This way the cops'll be looking for some nut that jerks off to old Donna Reed reruns. Mass murder is getting to be Michigan's chief export.”

Macklin moved his right foot a little as if shifting his weight. If he could move fast enough, get the open door between them for half a second. He spoke to cover the slight movement. “I guess you want me pretty bad.”

“Nothing personal. Just business. Stay put or I'll start with your kneecaps.”

He had pushed it too much. He set his feet. In the darkness inside the doorway was a darker patch of shadow, manshaped. “It's personal,” he said. “Otherwise I'd be dead now.”

The door opened farther. The light from the far window found a high forehead, the bridge of a nose, white shirt, gleaming metal farther down. “Back up. Keep backing up till I say stop.”

Macklin obeyed. His feet felt icy in his soaked shoes. He had retreated five feet when Freddo called for him to halt.

For a long time neither man moved. The television in the house next door was tuned to a religious program and the twenty-third psalm came straining through the window. Finally Freddo stepped forward and closed the door behind him. He was jacketless, the dark leather straps of his twin underarm holsters harnessing his upper body. He looked emaciated and his narrow face with stringy wisps of fair hair trailing down on either side and shadows in the hollows made a death mask in the poor light. Ten feet from Macklin he stopped.

“We'll do this right.” He twirled the big .44 western style and snugged it into his left holster, raised and resettled it. Set his feet.

Macklin lowered his arms. “You're kidding.”

“Anytime you feel lucky.”

“I'm unarmed.”

“Like hell.”

“Someone's holding a gun for me. I was going to get it when Burlingame called. You can frisk me.”

A thin vertical line cracked the smooth marble of Freddo's forehead. Finally he nodded and moved to slide the .22 target pistol out of his right holster. Macklin scooped out the Smith & Wesson and shot him three times in the chest.

The long-barreled revolver bobbled out of Freddo's hand and they hit the ground together. He lay twitching on his stomach, one eye staring up at Macklin. A dot of blood darkened the visible corner of his open mouth. The mouth was working.

Someone had turned off the twenty-third psalm. There was an outline at the window of the house next door.

“Who hired you?” Macklin demanded. He was standing over the wounded man with the .38 smoking in his hand.

“I needa doc'or,” said Freddo.

“I'll get you a doctor. Who drew up the contract?”

“I can't breeve.” He coughed. A string of bloody saliva stretched between his mouth and the wet grass.

“Was it Maggiore?”

“Mashy.”

“Maggiore?”

“Mashorry. Yeah. Getta doc'or.”

Macklin leaned down, grinning. “Die, you rat-faced bastard,” he said.

He found Donna and Roger sitting back-to-back in hard chairs in the kitchen. They had been gagged tightly with dish towels and their wrists and ankles were bound to the chairs and each other with copper wire from the garage. Wild eyes stared at him when he switched on the light.

“I don't have time to untie you,” he said, reloading the Smith & Wesson from among the cartridges in his pocket and dumping the spent shells into his other pocket from old habit. “I'll let the police do that. If our neighbor is as civic-minded as he is religious he's called them already.”

Donna hummed something frantic through her gag. He holstered the revolver and stepped forward and loosened the dish towel.

“Son of a bitch,” she snarled. “I suppose you killed him just like all the others.”

“No, each one is different.”

He reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew the thousand dollars he'd taken off Freddo. His thousand. Some of the bills were stained dark on one corner. He approached Roger, who shrank back in his bonds, and poked the bills into his son's jeans pocket. “Don't come running to me if the police take it off you.”

He went upstairs and got the rest of the fifty thousand out of the safe in his study. Then he went back down to the kitchen and folded ten thousand in hundreds into the flour canister on the linoleum counter. He could hear a siren now, a long way off. He looked at Donna. “I never wanted this here.”

She spat at him.

CHAPTER 25

He drove the Cougar to a chain restaurant on Lahser and waited in the parking lot. During the next fifteen minutes, three people came out and got into their cars and left and two more parties drove in. None of the cars was more than five years old. A few minutes later a fourteen-year-old GMC pickup with a six-foot-high cab and holes rusted through its rear panels trundled into a space thirty yards down and a five-foot-high man with a handlebar moustache got out tugging down the hem of his zip jacket and went inside. Macklin gave it another five minutes, then left the Cougar with his key still in the ignition and hoisted himself into the driver's seat of the pickup and tried the wheel. It turned both ways. The vehicle had been built before the development of the self-locking steering column. He stripped two wires under the dash and had the engine started in thirty seconds. He had dropped out of school at 16 to go to work for an automobile repossessions firm, and except for some cosmetic computerization and a couple of clumsy security devices, cars hadn't changed all that much inside. By now there would be a BOL bulletin out on a silver Cougar with Macklin's plate.

Just to tangle the chain of investigation, after twenty blocks he switched to a cream-colored Dodge Dart of similar vintage parked at a curb in a residential district and left the pickup in its place. In a shopping center lot on Twelve Mile Road he traded plates with a blue AMC Spirit and drove away feeling cleansed. Stopping at a bank of public telephones outside a service station on the corner of Telegraph, he dropped a quarter into a slot without getting out of the car, dialed a number from memory, and spoke for a few minutes with a man whose voice sounded as if he had a fishbone caught in his throat. Then he took Telegraph south to I–75.

He changed cars once again in Toledo and followed the shore of Lake Erie east. Around eleven o'clock his back began to ache from all the driving and he stopped to stretch his legs and drink a cup of black coffee at an all-night diner. The waitress traded ribald jokes with a party of rowdy truckers in a corner booth and paid him scant attention. He left a modest tip. His stomach growled on his way out but he wasn't eating.

Stars were peering through breaks in the overcast when he entered the Sandusky city limits. He left the car in a small factory employee parking lot during a shift change and walked to a motel, where he rented a room from a sleepy clerk for two hours' sleep and changed a ten-dollar bill into dimes and quarters. After awakening he washed his face and shaved with bar soap and a disposable razor he'd stopped to buy on the way. He threw away the razor and used the pay telephone in the hall around the corner from the registration desk to call Randall Burlingame's Detroit office long distance.