Kill Zone (4 page)

Macklin was a killer. Not a mechanic or a heavyweight or a terminator or a lifetaker or any of the other euphemisms affected by the young ivy leaguers with their icy eyes and laser gunsights. He had sunk garottes into fat necks in moving cars and heard arteries popping like corn in an oven when he applied pressure; felt first the stiff, corded resistance, then the soft slick give when his blade penetrated major organs in filthy alleys and hot blood boiled over his hand; burned his nostrils with spent cordite and biological stench when his bullets slammed through his victims' skulls in family restaurants and their sphincters let go. None of those other antiseptic names fit what he did for a living.

He was an even six feet and a hundred and eighty pounds, with jagged features under a quilting of flesh and the kind of eyes that were considered sleepy and dangerous-looking in his youth but now just looked tired. His hair was retreating in twin horns along his widow's peak, which had started to go from brown to gray and then stopped, leaving it the color of house dust. He was in good condition but growing thick through the middle, and no amount of exercise and diet had made a difference in the hard roll over his belt. He was 39—“Jack Benny's age,” he reported, in his lighter moments—and there were times when he felt 90.

But not now. As always when working, he was running an adrenaline high. Having eaten nothing since the night before (a custom he had kept since his first high school football game), he felt the stuff pumping pure and heady as strong wine through his veins.

He was sitting behind the wheel of a stolen car in the parking lot of a small supermarket just off the main four corners, watching a large silver refrigerator truck backing up to the entrance of a low building labeled ZACHARY'S FINE MEATS on the other side of the intersection. Every Tuesday and Thursday between two and three in the afternoon, Zachary delivered beefs and hams from his Detroit slaughterhouse to his market here, climbing into the trailer and sliding the laden meathooks along the overhead runners for his two assistants to unhook and carry across the sidewalk to the runners inside the building. Once the truck was in place, the assistants took four to five minutes clearing the walk-in freezer and oiling the inside runners while Zachary shoved the great slabs of meat up to the truck's open doors. For that four to five minutes he was alone in the truck. In the two weeks Macklin had been following him around, that was the only time he was alone all day except at home, which according to the old tradition was off limits.

Macklin didn't know what Zachary had done that had brought him to his attention. He wasn't told such things and he never asked. But he knew the pattern: money borrowed to bolster a sagging enterprise, failure to repay when things were better, threats from one side, taunts from the other, an example to be made. In any case, Macklin was thinking of the what, not the why.

When the truck shut down—he could hear the engine dying from where he was—Macklin left the car and started across the street There were a few pedestrians in sight, but the automobile traffic was slackening with the close of the lunch hour. He loitered on the flashing pedestrian signal while Zachary's men went inside, then when they were out of sight he hustled across on the red, trouser cuffs flapping in the slipstream from a car sweeping past behind him. On the sidewalk he climbed out of the light jacket he'd had on over a pair of blue coveralls like the kind Zachary and his assistants wore. He draped the jacket over a municipal mailbox and hoisted himself up into the dim flesh-smelling dankness of the trailer and drew the doors shut behind him.

Zachary had his back to the intruder when the trailer darkened. He was a short, broad cylinder of a man with sloping shoulders and a shaved head, an animated fire hydrant. He turned to face the man in blue coveralls like his own and said, “Hey, what the hell—” and then the muzzle of Macklin's gun flashed and three-quarters of an ounce of lead pushed in the butcher's face. The report battered the insulated walls and slammed back on itself, inaudible outside the truck.

Macklin favored .38 revolvers. Twenty-twos were in vogue, but the heavy caliber rendered the
coup de grâce
unnecessary and its intimidating bark kept witnesses in their place. No one on the street was looking at the truck when he let himself out, closing the door again to keep the smoke inside. He retrieved his jacket, ditched the rough-taped and untraceable gun in the mailbox, and recrossed the street. He took the plugs out of his ears and put them in a pocket. Zachary's men were just ambling out of the building when he got back in the car and started the engine.

Driving under the limit and stopping for signals and school buses, he reached Detroit seventy-two minutes later, parked the car legally, fed the meter, and hiked eleven blocks before hailing a cab for Southfield and home.

This circuitous drudgery, combined with the familiar emotional letdown of an assignment's completion, made his arms and legs heavy. Yawning bitterly, he unlocked the front door of his little two-story house on Evergreen and headed for the stairs.

He stopped to glance into the living room. Donna was sprawled snoring in the green Lay-Z-Boy in front of the television set. She was barefoot and wearing her quilted purple bathrobe. An empty shot glass and a half-empty beer bottle stood on the end table next to the chair. Her mass of thick hair, dyed blonde to cover the gray, was tangled and the cigarette between the first and second fingers of her left hand had burned down almost to the flesh. Gently, Macklin removed it and stubbed it out in the rounded-over ashtray on the table.

She had burned holes in three chairs that same way and set one afire. If Roger, who had been 13 then, hadn't come home from school and awakened her, she'd have burned to death. Now Roger was 16 and had no school to come home from, and Lord knew whose home he was going to these days. Macklin had seen his son three times in the past month. The first two times, Roger had stopped in just long enough to change clothes before going out again. The third time he had been high on something and Macklin had told him to leave. The boy had evidently taken it as a permanent eviction.

Macklin carried the shot glass and the bottle into the kitchen and washed the glass and poured the stale beer into the sink. The kitchen was filthy. The whole house was filthy except for his study and the bedroom he shared with Donna, which he cleaned himself. She hardly ever slept there any more, spending most of her time drinking and sleeping in that chair in the living room, those moments when she wasn't sniping at him. He found it hard to believe that it was that acid tongue that had attracted him to her when they were both 22.

He had considered hiring a housekeeper, but he hardly looked forward to explaining Donna to a stranger and didn't want another pair of eyes and ears around the house anyway. He went back and got the ashtray and emptied it into the kitchen wastebasket and climbed the stairs and took off his shoes and stretched out fully clothed on top of the bedspread.

He was almost asleep when his private line rang in the study down the hall.

CHAPTER 6

A slab of fog two feet thick lay like a silver ingot on the lawn of the big half-timbered Elizabethan house in Grosse Pointe, undisturbed by a slight breeze smelling of metal from Lake St. Clair. Sunlight filtered filmy gray through the overcast. Macklin teased his nickel-colored Cougar up the inclined composition driveway and braked in front of a big man in a black suit standing on the flagstone path, who got bigger as Macklin climbed out and dropped the keys into a cupped palm the size of a canoe paddle.

“'Morning, Mr. Macklin.”

The big man's voice was a surprising tenor, and butter-soft.

“Gordy.”

Gordy's eyes glittered black in deep slits under a carapace of scar tissue, considering the Cougar's bright metallic finish. “You ought to think about getting some kind of car that don't stick out like a bad rash,” he said.

“Reverse psychology,” Macklin explained. “Police never suspect someone who drives a neon sign.”

“Aw, that ‘Purloined Letter' stuff don't work in the real world.” The big man wedged himself in behind the wheel, ground the starter, and drove the car around behind the house out of sight of the Treasury men photographing license plates from the back of the delivery van parked across the street.

Macklin walked up the flagstones and stabbed a mother-of-pearl button set in a brass socket next to the door. While he was waiting he snugged up the knot of his necktie and frowned at his reflection in the diamond-shaped window.

“Good to see you, Mac.”

The killer hesitated. He could never get used to Charles Maggiore answering his own door. Then he shook the hand that was offered him. “It's been a while.”

“Too many Senate committee hearings on organized crime. All my profits go into hiring buffers. Come in.”

He complied, and Maggiore closed the door behind him. He was not a small man, but he was shorter than Macklin, and after Gordy everyone looked tiny until you got your proportions back into order. Maggiore was one of those white Sicilians who owe their blond hair and blue eyes to Scandinavian island-hoppers from previous centuries, and several lifts and many hours spent in conference with sun lamps had given him the smooth golden look of an aging surfer. Smart tailoring and a practiced list to starboard made the congenital hump on his right shoulder almost unnoticeable. He was wearing a youthful plaid sportcoat, tan corduroy pants, and cordovan half-boots. Macklin felt overdressed.

“How's work?” Maggiore asked.

“Work's fine.”

That meant Zachary was dead. The Sicilian uncovered capped teeth in a boyish grin and made as if to slap him on the arm, though his hand never got that far. Macklin moved in a world of half-gestures and incomplete intimacies. He was used to being feared.

He accompanied his superior down a short carpeted hallway hung with original modern oils in steel frames and through a door into the room Maggiore called the library, although it contained no books. Red leather chairs and a scimitar-shaped desk with a clear glass top and no drawers stood in front of a wall that was all window, made of the same tough plastic that telephone receivers are made of, that repels bullets. Gray sunlight made a tall rectangle where the green floor-length drapes came within eight inches of meeting. The killer had been in the room only once before, the day Maggiore had called him in to introduce himself as Michael Boniface's surrogate while the latter was serving his prison sentence. Since then all Maggiore's orders to Macklin had come through subordinates. The personal call to his private line had been a surprise.

“You've met Howard Klegg.”

“Briefly.” Macklin took the hand of the man who had risen from one of the chairs, and stopped feeling overdressed. The older man's pinstriped suit hung on his wiry frame like the drapery on a statue of a Roman senator. A diamond winked on the ring finger of his long bony left hand.

“I've given the servants the day off like the last time.” Maggiore waved both his visitors into seats and cocked a leg over one corner of the desk. “Two of them are undercover cops. I'm not sure about the cook.”

“Why don't you get rid of them?” The leather chair Macklin was sitting in gripped his thighs like a doughy hand.

“I would. But they're so damn good at their jobs I hate to see them go. Drink?” He cocked his head toward a portable bar laden with bottles and decanters in the corner.

“Not on an empty stomach.”

“I forgot. Howard?”

Klegg shook his head. He hadn't said a word since Macklin's entrance.

“We'll do this without fanfare, then. Howard has made a deal with the authorities. A new parole hearing for Mike Boniface in return for his assistance with a hostage problem, without official interference in the proceedings. It's a compromise, but a good one. It practically amounts to a promise of a release.”

“The Boblo boat?” suggested Macklin.

Maggiore's carefully plucked eyebrows slid up. “Where'd you hear it?”

“On the car radio coming over. Just a short bulletin. They said terrorists took the boat last night and were steaming toward Lake Erie with eight hundred hostages.”

“They say anything about Clarence Turnbull's daughter?”

“Who's he?”

“Later,” said Maggiore. “Well, this saves us some time. How soon can you be ready to go?”

“Go where?”

Maggiore glanced at Klegg. At last the lawyer opened his mouth.

“Mr. Boniface asked for you specifically,” he said. “Take as many men as you need. Name your transportation, boat or car. Helicopter, if you want it and if the fog lifts. You have sixty-one hours before the boat blows with all aboard.”

“To do what?”

“Whatever you have to do to fulfill our part of the bargain with the authorities, preferably without killing any innocents. The method is up to you.”

“I wouldn't know what to do with a boat or a helicopter,” Macklin said. “I wouldn't know what to do with a car. I'm not Errol Flynn or Roger Moore. I'm just a killer.”

Maggiore said, “You're being overly modest, Mac, and there's no time for it. If a killer was all we wanted we could cruise down John R or Erskine and hire ten to a block. This job calls for a cool head and a cake of ice for a heart. Mike knows that and that's why he chose you.”

“I'm flattered. I'm also passing this one.”

“Can the crap.” The Sicilian colored under his tan. “I'm not running a union shop.”

“I didn't know that you were running anything without Mr. Boniface's say-so.”

“You take your orders from me just as you would from him.”

Macklin rose, looking down at Maggiore. “My work is killing. I'm not into boarding ships this week. Call me when you get something I'm good at.”

“I'll have you hit!”

“You'll try.” One of Macklin's rare wolfish grins cracked the lower part of his face.