Roses Are Dead (14 page)

Macklin, standing on the other side of the small square painted plywood building where keys were made in the center of the lot, had been watching the car since its arrival ten minutes before. Its driver was still seated behind the wheel and from where he was standing the other seats appeared empty.

“There you go, sir. That'll be five-twenty.” The bearded young man behind the open window in the building handed Macklin back his keys and five colorful copies stamped out of sheet metal.

Macklin thanked him, paid for the keys, and pocketed them. He hadn't needed copies. Two of the originals he had handed the young man belonged to the ignition and trunk of his Cougar, a third opened the front door of the house he had shared with Donna for most of their married life, and of the others, one fit his apartment and the last was a mystery. It had been on his ring so long he had forgotten its purpose. The transaction was just a stall to give him time to study the car and its occupant without drawing notice. With his sport coat over his right arm he crossed directly to the car and opened the door on the passenger side and got in.

Treat, who had been watching his approach, ignored the gun concealed under the checked coat and watched his guest's face. Outside of his home, the gun dealer's shoe-shaped face looked old and drawn and there were burst vessels in his divided nose. The inside of the car smelled sharply of gun lubricant.

“This stinks,” he said.

“Open the window.”

“I mean getting up and getting out. We could of done this back at my place in Taylor.”

“You know I don't go to a place twice if I can help it,” Macklin said. “Never when I'm on the stick.”

“Yeah, well, it's going to cost you. I had to cancel a piano lesson. The kid's father's my dentist and I got a molar needs yanking.”

“What'd you bring me?”

“You said you didn't want a .38.”

“It's getting to be like my thumbprint.”

“In the trunk.”

“Okay, let's have a look.”

“Put up that thing first,” Treat said. “I know how little trigger pull it takes and I don't want to wear any lead just because you slipped getting out.”

Macklin holstered the Smith & Wesson and they climbed out and went around to the trunk. He tucked in the tail of his shirt, which he had been wearing outside his pants to cover the holster, and put on the coat while his companion unlocked and flung up the lid. Treat peeled back the foam rubber pad that concealed the cavity where the spare tire belonged. It glittered with pistols and revolvers and knocked-down rifles wrapped in glassine and pink naval jelly.

“What if you get a flat?”

“I call Triple-A like any good member.” The dealer unwrapped a shiny square pistol, shielding it with his body from the populated end of the parking lot. It was the 10-millimeter semiautomatic he had showed Macklin earlier. The killer swore.

“Cops'll just follow the ejected shells back to me.”

“How? The model's experimental. They'll be a week just arguing over is it a 9-millimeter or a .38. By then it should be rusting in the river with all the other hardware. This one's a prototype. Doesn't even have a serial number.”

“I don't like automatics.”

“You said. But revolvers only come in a few realistic calibers. Thirty-twos don't have the stopping power and .44s are more iron than you like to lug around. You don't like mags.”

“Using a magnum on just a man is like putting five stamps on a letter that only needs one,” Macklin said. “I hate wasting firepower.”

Treat opened his dark palm in the direction of the 10-millimeter.

“How much?” Macklin asked.

“For you, a grand.”

“I don't have a grand on me. If I did I wouldn't trade it for this.”

“You're hot. You can't go back to your place and you can't tap your bank. But you'd have walking-around money, a pro like you.”

“You get five hundred, same as before.”

“Gimme the gun.”

“Five-fifty, and you toss in a case of ammo.”

“Eight,” Treat said. “Box of a hundred.”

“Six and I don't put a hole in you right here.”

“Gun ain't loaded.”

“I'm wearing one that is.”

The dealer grinned. “We did this before. I didn't have to tell you then, but I'll tell you now. I got a file of test-fired bullets from every gun I've sold, all labeled as to who bought them. A friend's holding them along with a note telling him where to send them if he don't hear from me once a week.”

“That old snore.”

“Hey, I deal to killers. I sold you three pieces in the last two years. That's three counts anyway. Unless you missed once.”

“Six-fifty. Box of a hundred.”

“Seven and I make it a case.”

“I needed a case I'd be in some other business,” Macklin said.

“Why'd you ask for one before?”

“Thrill of the deal.”

The exchange was made.

“Mister, would you put in a quarter?”

The old man, standing on the covered sidewalk fronting the mall, started and looked over the top of his glasses at the little girl in jeans and a Smurf sweatshirt straddling the coin-operated hobby horse. She had bright red hair and blue eyes and freckles the size of dimes. He returned her smile and folded his chins on his chest while he fished among the keys and change in his pants pocket. The afternoon was almost balmy and he had left his coat in the car. His green sweater and the feathered hat were protection enough.

The quarter clanked inside the machine and the horse started undulating. “Thanks, mister.”

“You're welcome.”

When he returned his gaze to the other end of the lot, the gray-haired man was standing alone beside the scuffed blue car. The old man looked around quickly and spotted Macklin coming up the next aisle to where his silver car was parked. He smiled again at the little girl and stepped off the curb and into his rental parked in front.

Mantis was an expert at following people. Back home it had been his specialty for years before he had stepped up into what the Americans called the K unit. It had been said of him that he could track a grain of sand in a duststorm, and he was vain enough to enjoy the myth, but in truth it was very simple business. Most tail men tried too hard to be inconspicuous, scuttling from cover to cover on foot and speeding up and slowing down and passing their subjects behind the wheel in the belief that this was preferable to holding a steady pace. He had known one who kept a collection of hats and caps in the backseat of his car so that he could keep changing them, imagining that this would distract his quarry from the fact that the same car was still behind him after several miles. Mantis had helped bury the man after he was found parked in a ditch with a bullet hole in his temple and an American baseball cap on the back of his head. The trick was to drive a nondescript vehicle and give your man some distance and maintain the gap.

He followed Macklin down East Jefferson and turned right onto the Belle Isle Bridge a block and a half behind him. The sun was bright and struck sparks off the surface of the Detroit River. Upstream a pair of sailboats skated the water like bright moths around a long rust-colored ore carrier hognosing its way down from Lake Superior. The old man's tires whistled on the bridge's steel ribs.

He parked in a lot several spaces down from the Cougar, pulling in just as Macklin alighted from the driver's side. Mantis stayed where he was while his man strolled down the footpath leading away from the big marble fountain where most of the island's visitors congregated. He knew Macklin would be coming back to his car, and he knew what he had come to the island to do. Mantis would have done the same thing if he had a used gun to dispose of.

There was a pay telephone at one corner of the lot, within sight of both cars. The old man got out and fed it and dialed Mr. Brown's number.

“I am just calling to determine that plans have not changed with regard to the package,” he said when the other's smoothly lathed voice came on the wire.

“They're the same. You've found him?”

“Through the King woman. I am watching his car now.”

“What's he doing?”

“Admiring the river, I suspect. Dropping things into it.”

The pause on Brown's end asked a question.

“Not bodies,” the old man assured him. “He moves no faster than I. I think I like him.”

“Don't become too attached.”

“I have liked others. It has never interfered.”

“When can you act?”

“Sooner than I would like. He appears to be a man of no habits at all. I have been following him for a day and he has done nothing the same way twice or in the same place. It is all very challenging and I should like to pursue the matter for a month but for the time factor. There have been opportunities. I think that I will use the next one that presents itself.”

“Very good. You'll call me if you need anything.”

“I will call when it is done.”

He pegged the receiver, inspected the coin return and found it empty, sighed, and went back to the Oldsmobile. Removing the Walther from the glove compartment, he checked the load and laid it on the seat beside him. After shadowing Macklin to his motel the night before, he had waited until the light had gone off in Macklin's room, then gone back to his own hotel to retrieve the pistol. It felt good next to his thigh, like an erection in his younger days.

Chapter Nineteen

Moira King left the recording booth for coffee and a cigarette. The afternoon session had not gone well, and the pressure of the earphones had given her a headache.

She found the small employee lounge deserted and carried her Styrofoam cup of coffee from the machine to the first cafeteria table, sitting with her back to the open door. The room smelled of coffee and cheap floor wax. It was an improvement over all those makeshift studio bedrooms she had performed in with their bitter marijuana stench and the cloying odor of human biology at its basest.

The telephone office was a good place to work. She could wear what she wanted—today it was corduroy slacks and a sleeveless blue cotton blouse, no tight garter belt or slippery step-ins or net stockings that felt like barbed wire on her toes after a full day's shooting on five-inch heels—and she always learned something from the messages she recorded for callers seeking information on the weather or books available at the library or the fishing around Michigan or any of the half a hundred other topics the telephone company kept tabs on for its subscribers. She had a good speaking voice, no thanks to the minimal dialogue provided by the scriptwriters for her films, and she sometimes picked up extra money weekends recording books and magazines for the blind. If any of her employers had seen her previous work, none made mention of it, probably because none wanted it known he sought such entertainment.

But today she had found herself unable to concentrate on the words she was reading. There had been many retakes, until she grew sick of saying the same things over and over and started making mistakes out of irritation. Thinking got in the way. Retakes were not her strong suit. They were practically unknown in her former profession, whose low budgets didn't allow for make-goods, and in which it was next to impossible to make the sort of error that would require one in the first place. Sex was difficult to get wrong.

That thought reminded her of last night. It had been very different with Macklin. She wasn't sure why. She was hardly an adventuress anymore and doubted that she was aroused by what he did for a living, although she had known women who talked about grisly murders they had read about in the papers and who wondered aloud what it would be like to go to bed with the culprits. Nor was it that he was particularly good. His foreplay consisted of fumbling for her breasts and then her vagina, after which he got down to business and was through in under five minutes. But there was an animalistic simplicity about his lovemaking that she had not known in the false prolonged titillation under the strobes or with a marathon man like Roy or with the panting, French-kissing boys she had gone into backseats with in high school. He was a simple needs-and-fulfillment man, knew how to go about it, and yet somehow managed to seem to remain aware of her throughout the act.

It wasn't love, she decided. She didn't even like the man. He frightened her at least as much as Roy. But if she were to plan sex with a man for the first time in months, it would be with someone who wouldn't forget she was there.

“Penny for 'em, Slick.”

She looked up quickly from the inside of her empty cup. Roy was just swinging a leg cowboy-fashion over the bench facing hers on the other side of the table. He had on his favorite navy peacoat, open over bare chest, and his thick wheat-colored hair broke in twin wings over his forehead the way she remembered watching him train it to do after he had seen James Cagney in
Angels with Dirty Faces
. He had Cagney's sneering grin and Robert Mitchum's sleepy lids and one of the things that had always unnerved her was that she never knew how much of it was him and how much the old movies he was always watching on afternoon television.

“How'd you get in here?” She almost shrieked it. She glanced around quickly. They were alone in the room, but she forced her voice down anyway. “Only authorized personnel are allowed in this part of the building.”

“Yeah, but there ain't no guards. Them signs scared the living shit out of me but I got over my scared and here I am. Thought you'd be glad to see me.”

“I told you to leave me alone.”

He got out his oversize pocketknife, making a face as he pried it loose from the pocket of his tight jeans, and unfolded the big curved blade, then folded it again and pulled it out again, playing with it. “I see you had a guest last night. He stayed a lick.”

His fifth-grade dropout way of talking had always annoyed her. He had studied a year at Penn State before his parents' money ran out. He saw her looking at the knife and grinned wider.