Kill Zone (8 page)

“What do you mean by fighting?”

Burlingame sat back in his chair, straining the buttons on his vest. “I think you're better off not knowing, Bill. Just so that when this breaks, however it breaks, you'll be able to say your people had nothing to do with it.”

“If anything happens to that girl, I come back from Washington with my head under my arm.”

“Your capacity isn't investigative. I'll take the heat.”

“I hope you can, Red,” Chilson said. “It gets harder to take the older you get.”

Still leaning back in his seat, the FBI director blew several smoke rings before he realized he'd filled and lit his pipe. He looked at his hands accusingly.

The address Herb Pinelli had given Macklin belonged to a crumbling warehouse on a street with broken paving that opened off West Jefferson and dead-ended on the River Rouge. It was charred brick with high segmented windows gone blank with grime and exposure, and it would have started out by housing cases of liquor smuggled from Ontario during Prohibition, but in the intervening years it had not quite been converted into apartments. Cheap curtains moved in some of the windows as Macklin climbed out of his car and waded through calf-deep fog from the Rouge and then slid sideways through a two-foot space where the great steel fire door was propped open with a cement block.

His soles scraped a concrete floor the color of river mud, the noise echoing right through plywood partitions on either side of a narrow aisle. From where he stood he could hear six television sets and a radio playing seven different programs. The doors to the various apartments had been cut straight out of the plywood, hinged, and fitted with cheap white china knobs and locks with keyholes big enough to stick in a finger and turn the tumblers.

He didn't. He walked all the way to the end of the makeshift hall, smelling cooking smells and concrete mold and sawn wood and, he swore, bootleg whiskey sixty years gone, stopping at last before a door with a cheap metal plate screwed to it reading MANAGER. The lock was different from all the others, new-looking and brass, a dead bolt. He knocked lightly. The whole wall shivered under his knuckles.

“Who is it?”

A rerun of
All in the Family
was playing next door, and the voice was so low and whispery under the canned laughter that it had to repeat itself before Macklin was sure it wasn't just a gust of wind brushing a high windowpane. It seemed to originate from just behind the hairline crack between the door and the wall.

“My name's Macklin. Herb Pinelli gave me the number of this building and told me to talk to the man I found here. I didn't know it was an apartment house.”

“Go away.”

It seemed a strange thing for the manager of an apartment building with obvious vacancies to say to a stranger.

“You know Herb Pinelli?”

“Never heard of him.” The whisperer went off into a fit of coughing. It had fluid in it and a measured cadence, as if he had had plenty of practice.

Macklin glanced down the hall. Three numbers down a door moved shut when he turned his head. He inserted his back between it and the manager's door and put his lips almost to the crack. He could barely hear himself under a margarine commercial jabbering away in the adjoining apartment.

“If you open the door I'll show you Herb sent me.”

“Sure, I open the door, you cave my face in.”

“I could sneeze it open. But I'm polite.”

“Try it. I got a .357 Colt magnum in here for the
gesundheit
.”

“Then you won't lose anything by opening the door. Unless you don't have any gun in there at all.”

There was a long stretch during which Macklin kept his ear close to the crack. Next door, Edith was explaining to Archie how she'd managed to dent a man's car with a can of cling peaches.

“Stand away.”

Macklin straightened and took a step backward. There was a succession of metallic snaps, clicks, and jingles, then the knob rotated and the door moved inward three inches. A small steel chain hammocked in the space between. Darkness beyond, rheumy eye-whites bluish in a smear of dusky face, a splash of red flannel.

No words were spoken. After a pause, Macklin slid Herb's knife out of its sheath on his belt under his jacket, reversed the ends slowly, and extended it handle first through the space. A dirty brown hand accepted it. The door closed.

Seconds passed. The killer was about to knock again when something tinkled and the door swung wide. He was looking at a short black man in a faded shapeless bathrobe with a fringe of hair the color of chalk teased up over a bald crown. His eyebrows were thick and mealy, his nose flush to his face as if pushed by an insistent hand. Coils of whisker like trench wire clung to his jawline. He was holding the knife by its handle like the weapon it was. His other hand held a Louisville Slugger with its top four inches gone and silver duct tape wound halfway up its length.

A stench of urine and daily deposits of sweat going back several weeks unfurled and smacked Macklin in the face like a moldy towel.

The manager gestured him inside with an impatient jerk of his head and closed the door behind him, manipulating the locks and chains. “Where's the magnum?” Macklin asked.

“Ain't got one. Guns scare the shit out of me. I like baseball.” The black man gestured with the bat.

“Nice place you have here.”

Part of a window extended below the raftered and plywood-boarded ceiling, but it had been painted over from inside and no lamps were lit, making ominous hulking shadows of the piles of ragged clothing and stacks of newspapers and magazines in the corners and on the furniture, which included a bed with an iron frame, a painted dresser, a folding card table with a torn vinyl top, and a two-burner stove with dead flies preserved in a layer of grease on the surface.

“I know it's a dump. I could get better, you think I'd live here? What's Herb Pinelli's middle name?”

“I didn't know he had one.”

The black man drew a split fingernail down through his coiled whiskers. Then he held out his palm with the knife balanced on it for Macklin to take. “I guess you're from him, all right. If he's got one, only him and someone that studied would know what it is.”

Macklin returned the weapon to its sheath. “If we're through playing who won the pennant, I want to talk to you about Daniel Ackler.”

Some of the blood went out of the manager's face, turning the brown a dead beige. “What'd Herb tell you about me and Ackler?”

“Nothing. He wouldn't even give me your name. Just this address.”

“He gives it to you, you give it to Ackler?”

Macklin took the paper with the address written on it out of his pocket, showed it, and tore it into little pieces, letting them flutter to a thin carpet with all the color trod out of it. “I'm lousy with numbers,” he said. “Can't even remember my own telephone. It's Ackler I want. He doesn't have to know who told me about him.”

“I don't know nothing but what I said to Herb.”

“Is he after you?”

“Christ, no. That's why I'm living in this here luxury penthouse apartment, because he ain't after me.”

“Can I sit down?”

“Watch you don't scratch the finish on that there Chippendale.”

The killer tested the broken overstuffed rocker with his hands braced on the scaly arms before trusting his weight on it. When he lowered himself onto the cushion he kept sinking until his knees were higher than his belt. He crossed his legs to a chorus of senile groans from the superstructure. His host leaned back against the stove with his arms folded across his chest. He had leaned the baseball bat against the loose oven door. His ankles were bare and painfully thin above rundown slippers.

“I don't care why he's after you,” Macklin said. “I'm going to kill him. Or he's going to kill me. Either way he doesn't know my source. Unless I find him some other way.”

Barney Miller
was starting on the other side of the partition separating the apartments. The bass notes of the theme
spong
ed through the thin wood.

“What are you—cop?”

“I'm a killer.”

“Oh,” said the black man, twining and untwining whiskers around his index finger. “Oh.”

“That make a difference?”

“Some. You drink?”

“Not when I'm working.”

The manager grinned for the first time, and Macklin would just as soon he hadn't. There were things in his teeth. “Now I know you're not cop.” He moved the baseball bat, opened the oven door, and hoisted out a green gallon jug with a screw top and a smeared china mug. The two-dollar wine made a gurgling noise going into the mug, like blood from a slashed jugular.

CHAPTER 11

The spooky-looking man with the thinning blond hair and one lazy eyelid watched the middle-aged man in the untidy off-the-rack suit step outside the warehouse and glance up and down the street before striding to his car. That was what gave them up, that quick once-over they shared with their opposite numbers on the other side of the badge. The uninitiated, noticing the gesture, might take Macklin for a cop; he had that sad, well-worn look. Freddo himself was often mistaken for a professional athlete because of his fluid grace and good clothes. It was an impression he never tried very hard to correct.

He followed Macklin's car for six blocks until it nicked a light on the red and Freddo had to stop or be smashed by a U-Haul van barreling through the intersection. He drummed his fingers on the leather-covered steering wheel until the light changed, then squirted ahead, dusting the fender of a Volkswagen Rabbit attempting a left-hand turn in front of the pack. He drove several more blocks, craning his head around, tried a number of side streets, then gave it up and went back the way he had come. He was irritated but not upset. It was a hazard one ran when tailing someone alone. The smart shadow always kept an alternative.

He parked two streets north in case someone might remember seeing his car and walked back to the warehouse-apartment building with the fog boiling around his ankles like a special effect from a Universal horror film.

Port Huron, for chrissake.

That was where the old black man had said Daniel Ackler was living, in a cottage on the lake, when he had gone up there to deliver an envelope full of cash for the general contractor for whom the black man had mopped floors until he was promoted to messenger. He wasn't supposed to know it was money, but he had peeped. He couldn't say why his employer had sent it to Ackler, but Macklin was free to draw whatever conclusions he wanted from the fact that the firm's major competitor went bankrupt shortly after its president vanished. The janitor/courier/apartment house manager had made a poor thing of concealing his nosiness from Ackler, and he'd been in hiding ever since. The grandeur of his current title was somewhat dulled by the knowledge that he had made more money mopping floors.

The wildcat killer had been entertaining a house guest at the time of the visit, but the black man retained only a vague impression of a tall, youngish man with styled blond hair and a sleek moustache passing into another room just as the messenger entered on Ackler's invitation. He didn't remember seeing a scar, X-shaped or otherwise, but the rest of the description jibed with what the escaped hostages had said about the man in charge of the terrorists aboard the Boblo boat. It also fit any one of a hundred pedestrians one could see in downtown Detroit any hour of the day. In any case, Macklin had no wish to make a 120-mile round trip by road and lose two and a half hours to look at what was probably by now an empty rental cottage on Lake Huron.

And yet he knew he would do just that, if his next step failed to yield anything worth biting into.

The thought of biting set his stomach growling, and he remembered grudgingly that he hadn't eaten in twenty-one hours. Well, he could use the break. He doubled back to Outer Drive and took the Southfield Freeway into Dearborn.

The woman who answered the bell was thirty, with green eyes and black hair that was red in sunlight, parted in the middle and caught behind her neck to spill in a loose pony tail down her back. It wasn't a style Macklin particularly cared for, but it was the way she usually wore it, and it had been twenty years since he had looked for his last ideal. She was slender, almost painfully so, and nearly as tall as he in sandals with modest heels, but there was nothing masculine about her softly rounded features and full lower lip under a minimum of makeup. She had on an outfit that looked to him like a black sweatshirt and matching jeans, though it would go by a French name and cost more than his best suit. When she recognized him she snaked her arms around his neck and kissed him. Sharp teeth speared his lower lip like thorns.

“Hello, Christine. What's for lunch?”

“Is that all you can think of to say after not seeing or calling me all week?” She leaned her forehead against his, the corners of her mouth upturned mockingly.

“I've been working,” he said. “What's for lunch?”

She bumped him with her pelvis. “I missed you.”

“What's—”

She placed a scarlet-nailed finger against his lips, stopping the question. “I'll rustle up something. But it'll cost you.”

“I'll pay my way.”

She closed the door behind him and led him into the apartment by his hand. It was a long living room with a bedroom opening off to the left and a stainless-steel-lined dimple at the end that was the kitchenette, just big enough for two to stand in if they didn't move and kept their arms down. But the carpet was rich pile and the furniture was new. She left him to go into the kitchenette, and he wandered around the living room with his hands in his pockets, studying the pictures he had seen before on the walls and looking through the end window at the view he had looked at a hundred times. The morning
Free Press
lay open on the table in front of the window to the Help Wanted section. Several items were circled in black Magic Marker.