Roses Are Dead (23 page)

“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.

He cleared his throat and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, making it obvious he was waiting. He thought of saying something to the guy, maybe even reaching out and breaking the connection himself, and a week earlier he would've, but his nerves were better now. Finally at 6:07 by the bank clock across the street the guy pegged the receiver and picked up his briefcase and folded the trench coat over his arm and smiled tight-lipped at Roger and walked off. Roger jumped on the instrument and dialed the number he had memorized.

The telephone rang seven times. He was starting to lean against the box, resigned now, waiting for ten so he could hang up and go somewhere for a drink, when the line clicked and a voice Roger had never heard before said hello.

The address Burlingame had given Macklin belonged to the back half of a duplex on Dix Road in the downriver community of Melvindale, an old frame building with split and curling shingles on the roof and the white paint rubbed down to leaden gray in spots. The lawn was shaggy and sprouting weeds in the dirty moonlight.

It was an eight-block walk from the bus stop. Although there had been seats available aboard the DSR, Macklin had stood throughout the ride because the shotgun under his coat would not let him sit. The only other passenger not seated was an old black man in a cloth cap, whose pained expression whenever the bus clattered over broken pavement or took a corner too fast advertised a bad case of piles. From time to time he and Macklin exchanged sympathetic glances.

Had Macklin more of a sense of humor, he might have reflected with amusement upon the irony of busing killers out of the city into the suburbs.

“Hey.”

Stretched out on the musty-smelling mattress in the guest room on the second story of the house across the street, Detective First Grade Arthur Connely came out of a light doze and rolled over to look at his partner seated on a rickety wooden chair at the window. Officer Richard Petersen, Uniform Division, on temporary assignment with C.I.D. Homicide, was little more than a dark bulk against the slightly lighter outline of the glass. “What you got?” whispered Connely.

“Male cauc, five-ten and a hundred and eighty.” A twisting sound in the darkness, Petersen adjusting the infrared binoculars. “Around forty.”

“Going in?”

“Heading that way.”

“That's our guy.”

The uniform, in plainclothes tonight, pressed the speaker button on his headset. “Baker two, look alive.”

“Shut the fuck up,” crackled a voice over the earphones. “I want orders from a guy in a blue bag I'll join the park patrol.”

“What's he doing now?” Connely asked.

“Walking. Looking around a little. He's at the driveway.… Shit.”

“What?”

“He's walking past.”

“Keep tracking him. Pontier says this guy's a pro.”

Dix Road declined steeply toward Outer Drive, where traffic was swishing by heavily between shifts at the Ford Rouge plant. After passing the duplex Macklin walked all the way down to the corner, then crossed the street and started back up the shadowed side. Darkness was no obstacle to the infrared equipment he knew was trained on the house, but the trees and parked cars on that side would help break up the continuity of any attempts to track his movement.

A big blue 1969 Mercury was parked just below the crest of the hill. The front door on the passenger side was unlocked. He opened it and reached in and flipped the automatic transmission out of gear, then stepped back out of the way. For a long moment the car didn't move, and he was thinking of giving it a push when the pavement creaked under a tire and the vehicle began rolling backward down the slope. It picked up speed as it rolled, and he turned his back to it and resumed walking.

“What?” Connely was sitting on the edge of the mattress now, wide-awake.

“I'm not sure.” Petersen adjusted the glasses. “I saw something moving. There! Guy walking.”

“Him?”

“Can't tell. Damn the trees.”

The detective got up. “Let's have a look.”

Petersen was pulling the strap off over his head when a horn blared not far away. Brakes screeched and a tremendous walloping wham splintered the air.

“Jesus Christ!” Connely fumbled for his sheep-lined jacket.

“Baker two, Baker two.”

“Fuck that. Let's go!”

The uniform tore off the headset and hurried off after his partner.

Standing in the doorway of a house two lots down from the duplex, Macklin watched the two men running down the street in the direction of Outer Drive, where other horns were blasting now, the traffic knotted around the collision site. He had already seen two others break cover from the bushes next door and hurry that way. He waited two beats, then stepped out and continued his path up the street.

The house described an
L
, with Blossom's number etched in rusting wrought-iron script over the door in the short rear section at the end of the driveway. The only window visible in that section was lighted. Macklin tried the door, then used the edge of his driver's license to slip the antique latch and mounted a steep rubber-paved staircase lit by a dim bulb in an amber globe over the landing. At the top he paused, listening for footsteps on the other side of the flat wooden door in front of him. There were none, but he heard voices inside. He couldn't make out the words.

He thought about that, then decided that anyone talking with Blossom in his home was an enemy. This door he didn't try. Swinging out the shotgun, he braced himself, threw a heel at the lock with all his weight behind it, and let his momentum carry him forward as the door flew open and slammed against the wall inside. He glimpsed movement in front of him, a flash of light-colored shirt in a dark coat, and released a charge. A full-length mirror mounted on the wall opposite the door collapsed, showering tiny reflections of himself all over the floor.

Without pausing to assimilate, he swung right in the direction of the continuing voices, but this time he curbed his impulse to fire. On the bluish TV screen in front of him two scantily dressed women were beating up a gangling young dark-haired man under the rustling racket of a mechanical laugh track.

Macklin was alone in the apartment with a rerun of
Three's Company
.

From the sidewalk across from the duplex, the explosion inside was a massive hollow
crump
, simultaneous with a throb of brighter light at the window, and Roy Blossom's first surprised thought was that the television set had blown up. But then logic came rushing in to fill the vacuum and he recognized it as the report of a shotgun contained in a small room.

He had gone to a restaurant on Oakwood for supper and had been on his way back home when a loud crash from the direction of Outer Drive told him another damn fool had tried to nose his way into the rush-hour traffic at the loss of his fenders. As he came within sight of the duplex two men had come running out the front door of the house across the street and gone down that way. Gawkers, although they both looked too young to be visiting the elderly couple who lived in the house. Blossom wondered if they were relatives. Then he had spotted a third man turning into his driveway, and as the man passed beneath his own lighted window, he recognized him as the one he had seen going into and coming out of Moira's apartment house a couple of nights before. The man's posture as he walked was unnaturally stiff, as if his back hurt. Well, that was what came of balling girls half his age. Blossom had waited on the street, absently opening and closing the clasp knife he had taken from his pocket.

Now, as lights in private houses on both sides of the street sprang on in the echo of the blast, he turned around and hurried back the way he had come. By the time he reached the restaurant where he had just eaten he was out of breath and had to wait, gasping, his pulse hammering in his ears, before he was steady enough to lift the receiver off the pay telephone on the wall in front of the cash register and fumble two dimes into the slot. He listened to the purring, saying,
“Come on, come on,”
and then a voice greeted him with the number he had just dialed.

“This is Blossom,” he barked, breaking in before the voice had finished. “Let me talk to Mr. Brown.”

Chapter Thirty-one

He didn't invest any more time watching great comedy on the black-and-white set. It was an episode he had seen anyway. Instead he allowed the shotgun to subside back under his sport coat and let himself out the door.

The fire exit at the rear of the lobby was chained and padlocked. Macklin considered blasting through it, then decided not to risk a faceload of ricocheting pellets from the steel door and went back out the way he had come in, swinging out the Remington as he opened the door. He looked into a red Irish face as big and close as a curious gorilla's at the zoo.

“Freeze, motherfucker!” A nickel-plated magnum came up in two outstretched hands.

Macklin's finger was tightening on the shotgun's trigger when hurrying footsteps rattled to his left. The Irish cop, still gasping from a hard run, twitched his face in that direction. Realization of the mistake came in an instant, and he was correcting himself when Macklin swung the Remington's butt. It collided hard with the other's hands and the magnum flew glittering off the front stoop into the dewy grass. The cop grimaced, opening his mouth to curse, and the barrel came back the other way and gonged along the side of his jaw. As he reeled backward Macklin fired over the head of the young man running up on him with something dark and gleaming in his hand. The muzzle flare washed them all in light for a pulsing microsecond, catching the young man in mid-dive for the ground, his partner falling off the stoop, Macklin throwing himself the other way. His momentum carried him down to one knee and jarred loose the belt sling. He lurched upright and forward without pausing while the shotgun slid down his leg and fell to the ground. Running, he left it there. From that point on it was excess weight anyway.