Kill Zone (11 page)

“What's the good news the Secret Service is bankrolling this gourmet dinner for?” Chilson asked.

“We've got a line on this Macklin.” Burlingame put away a steaming forkful of mashed potatoes. He never blew on his food, never waited for it to cool. His companion decided his mouth and tongue were lined with asbestos. “He's a button like we thought, been with the Boniface family since old Papa Joe Morello got his tonsils taken out the hard way in Victor's Barbershop. Talk is Macklin worked the razor on that one.”

“Christ, he must be fifty.”

“Coming up on forty. He got an early start. Anyway, he's Boniface's chief samurai, and maybe the last of the loyal old guard. No wonder the old man saddled him with this one.”

“Record?”

“One arrest eleven years ago, suspicion of ADW. It never got to court. Victim refused to identify him and then went away on a vacation he's still not back from. That just came in from Washington. We dug up an informant, someone close. Been feeding one of our field men for months, but it was all locked up in his own file and he's been out sick all week. Of course it's all hearsay. But good enough to work on.”

“How does it help us?”

“It's the first chink we've found in Macklin's armor. If we hang on to it he may just lead us all out of this mess.”

“Who's your informant?”

Burlingame stuck a covered wicker bowl under Chilson's nose. “Another roll?”

Smiling, the Secret Service agent shook his head and got off the subject. “So where do we go from here?”

“You I can't speak for. I'm going to lock up and go home. I'm not interested in finding out how long a man can live without sleep. Nightside will ring me if anything breaks. It won't for a while.”

“What about Macklin?”

“We've got men watching his place. He has to sleep too, and those boys change their underwear now and again, not like the old days. He has to go home sometime, if only to see how the crabgrass is doing. They won't lose him again.”

“What if they do?”

“They won't.”

“But what if they do?”

“They won't, I said.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I'm tired and I need more sleep than I used to. If I thought they could lose him again I'd wind up counting the porpoises on the ceiling. They won't lose him again.”

The view had shifted, and now they were looking west from downtown out toward the suburbs, where the skyline lay down and a crescent of orange sun splintered the fog into rainbows. Chilson said, “That's your secret, huh?”

“Bill, if I'd discovered it twenty years ago, I'd look five years younger. More wine?” He lifted the carafe.

Chilson started to shake his head again, then shrugged and raised his glass. Burlingame poured. Finally the Secret Service agent gave up and asked the question.

“You have porpoises on your ceiling?”

CHAPTER 15

Port Huron was that uniquely American phenomenon, the tourist city, feeding off transients in summer and then hunkering down to wait out the long winter under eight-foot snowdrifts while the icy winds skimming off the lake blew scraps of litter down its bleak deserted streets. Macklin had never been there in wintertime, and although he saw banks of permanent residences among the antique stores, fish markets, and souvenir shops, he always had the feeling that as soon as he passed them they were rolled up and placed in storage, to be unrolled again when the next visitor came. The fog dripping from the trees and cornices under congealing darkness added to the illusion of fairytale impermanence.

The address the black man in River Rouge had given him belonged to a small white one-story frame house with green trim, situated on an eighth of an acre near the mouth of the St. Clair River with similar cottages built so close on either side that a greyhound couldn't pass between them. There were lights on in the neighboring buildings. Macklin kept on rolling to the end of the pocked and rutted private road that dead-ended on the river, made a tight Y-turn between parked cars in an area as wide as a salt shaker, and drove past again and out of the neighborhood.

Half a block north of the cul-de-sac, two men sat in the front seat of a brown Cordoba parked in the entrance to a public landing site. The man on the passenger's side, in his early twenties with unnaturally bright red hair teased forward in a woodpecker's crest, a nose that turned up like Howdy Doody's, and freckles the size of pennies on his cheeks, peered through the gathering gloom at Freddo's motionless profile behind the wheel.

“You sure that was him?”

“It was him,” Freddo said.

“Ain't we going to follow him?”

“He'll be back.”

“When?”

“When it gets dark. Relax, brother.”

Lincoln Washington hated being called brother. It was bad enough he had been born with a name commonly associated with blacks. In moments of self-pity he blamed that for his errant life, and for the fact that he had fulfilled his first contract on a black Baptist minister. Two men who had called him brother hadn't lived to regret it. But when Freddo did it he said nothing. Washington liked to think it was because they were partners.

He shivered a little in the damp cool and moved to crank up his window. Freddo's wire-strung hand gripped his knee.

“Leave it down. We'll fog up the glass.”

Washington left it down. In the cool dark they waited.

Macklin ate a fine black bass in a restaurant downtown with a lifeboat suspended from the ceiling and paintings of schooners under full sail on the walls. Uncharacteristically, for he hated attracting attention, he visited the salad bar twice. Soon he would be skipping a meal in preparation to move and he'd need the extra energy. He left a generous tip for the fat, cheerful waitress and drove back under a black sky to the private road outside town. The fog threw back his headlight beams like a wall.

Instead of turning into the road, he went on past and parked at a nearby landing site. There were two cars there already, looking dark and empty. Waiting for late boaters. He left the Cougar in the shadows at the other end where the license plate wouldn't be visible, glanced around, and started south on foot along the main road.

“Now,” said Freddo.

The two men in the Cordoba had switched places, and now Link Washington was in the driver's seat. They came up from their slump below the level of the windows and Washington turned the key in the ignition, flicking on the headlights at the same time. The beams caught Macklin from behind. Freddo skinned his .44 Colt magnum out of the holster under his left arm and leveled the eight-inch barrel across the ledge of the open window on the passenger's side.

A black-and-white sheriff's patrol car swung into the line of fire, cutting off Freddo's view of his target. He dropped his gun below the window just as the spotlight sprang on and washed the parking area in white light.

“Move out slow,” he told Washington.

“What if they try to stop us?”

“Let's all hope they don't.”

The Cordoba coasted to the edge of the pavement, stopped, then swung out onto the highway, gravel crunching under its rear tires as it accelerated. The two uniformed officers climbing out of the scout car paid it only passing attention. The spotlight had come to rest on Macklin standing on the apron of the highway squinting into the glare.

“Car trouble, sir?” asked one of the officers. He was tall and tanned. Silver hairs glinted in his neat black moustache.

“I think it's the starter,” Macklin replied. “I parked and took a walk to see if the salmon were running and when I got back it wouldn't start. I was looking for a phone.”

“Let's take a look.”

The man's partner was already standing next to the Cougar on the pasenger's side when Macklin opened the driver's door and the interior light came on. The partner's hand rested on the butt of his sidearm. Only the belt and the gun and the hand were visible through the window. Policemen were jumpiest around cars. They called it the kill zone. Macklin inserted the key and ground the starter. It turned over twice and caught with a low rumble.

“Seems okay now,” observed the officer with the moustache.

“Must've been flooded.”

“Can I see your license and registration?”

He got the driver's license out of his wallet and the registration slip from the glove compartment and handed them to Moustache. The partner came around the car and collected them and walked back to the black-and-white to use the radio.

“Have you got a fishing license?” Moustache asked Macklin.

“I didn't think I needed one just to look at fish.”

After a few minutes the other officer returned with the papers. “No warrants.”

Moustache returned them to their owner. “Sorry for the trouble. We've had some auto break-ins at these landing sites, radios and tape decks ripped off. Kids.”

Macklin said nothing.

“You don't happen to know those guys that just drove off in the Cordoba, do you?” Moustache asked.

“No.”

“Okay. You see someone coming out of one of these places without a boat or a trailer or a top carrier to put one on, you get curious. We'd of stopped them, except a man walking away down the road from one is curiouser.”

When the officers were in their patrol car, Macklin backed around and left the site. It was nearly seven-thirty by his watch; at eight there would probably be a shift change and he could come back without fear of being questioned by the same men. He spent the time parked in a lighted shopping center lot on the edge of town, watching the evening browsers pass in and out through the electric doors and thinking about the brown Cordoba.

Those sudden lights coming from a car he'd thought was empty had sent ice up his spine and he had been about to leap into some trees at the side of the road when the sheriff's car came. Standing in the glare of the spotlight he hadn't been able to see who was inside the other vehicle or read its license plate as it pulled out. But he would remember the car.

Eight o'clock came and went. Inside the department store, a middle-aged man in shirtsleeves and a necktie saw out the last customers and locked the glass doors from inside. Cars parked on either side of Macklin's sprang to life. He pretended to doze until they had driven away. Employees came out of the big building and got into their cars and left. A few minutes later the lights mounted on poles over the parking lot went out and Macklin sat in darkness. A blue Chevrolet Impala stopped in front of the drugstore and honked its horn and a pretty blond pharmacist in a white slack suit and high heels click-clicked across the sidewalk and ducked in on the passenger's side and the car got rolling while she was still closing the door. Then silence crawled in like jungle vines reclaiming lost territory.

Macklin kept glancing at the luminous dial of his watch until it read half-past eight, reasonable time to expect Officer Moustache and his partner to go off duty and be replaced by others. Macklin started the engine, pulled on his lights, and returned to the highway. He checked his rearview mirror. Nobody was following.

The last car had left the landing site. He parked in its spot, nose out this time. Before getting out, he took off his necktie and turned up the lapels of his dark suitcoat and tied it around them to cover his white shirt.

Once during the trek back to the private road leading to Ackler's cottage he heard tires swishing on pavement around the next bend and slid into the foliage until the car passed without slowing, its lights brushing stark black shadows across the highway. Then as its taillights slid below the rise beyond the landing site he resumed his walk. His pantslegs felt clammy against his calves from the heavy dew on the grass and bushes.

A number of residences along the spiraling road down to the river were lit, and Macklin walked down the middle beyond reach of the yellow illumination spilling out the windows. A large dog tethered in front of a house trailer up on blocks barked as he went past and lunged to the end of its chain with a wham. Macklin shifted to double-time to get away before anyone investigated the noise. The dog quieted as soon as he cleared the lot.

Television sound effects racketed out of a cottage with no lights inside but the silver glow of the 21-inch screen. Two houses down from Ackler's a party was going on, with loud electronic music and tipsy laughter. That was a break. He wanted all the noise he could get. The lights had gone out in one of the next-door cottages, but they were still burning in the one on the other side. Macklin mounted Ackler's porch in shadow and rapped on the door. He waited five minutes, rapped again, waiting the same length of time, then squeezed around to the back on the side next to the dark neighboring house. In the faint light reflecting off the surface of Lake Huron's southernmost corner, he saw a back yard angling down to a dock from a weathered sundeck running along the rear of the house. Fog smoked up from the water.

Shielding the beam of his penlight with his hand, Macklin peered at the lock on the back door and grinned wolfishly. He hadn't seen one of those in fifteen years. It was the work of two minutes to slide the thick celluloid window from his wallet and insert it between the latch and the jamb as he leaned the doorknob toward the hinges. When the latch snapped back he glanced around quickly and let himself inside.

The air smelled stale, as of a house that had been shut up for days or weeks. Under it was an old cooking smell that told him he was in a kitchen. When he got so he could make out some of the room's more threatening shapes he moved along the walls and felt around the lighter oblongs of the windows, determining that the curtains had been drawn shut and weighted to the sills to discourage unwanted visitors from peering inside. Only then did he flip on his penlight and begin his search.

It was an ordinary kitchen, furnished with just the essentials under a fine film of dust. The living room, two bedrooms, and bath were hardly less ordinary, and just as securely curtained. The furniture was worn but clean, the framed pictures on the walls good prints of landscapes and maritime subjects by top-ranking American artists. They were bolted to the walls, and in fact everything that could in good taste be nailed down had been, after the fashion of rental home owners since the first lease was signed with a stylus. The mattresses on the beds had been rolled up, slipcovered, and lashed tight. There wasn't a personal item on the premises. All the drawers were empty and lined with newspapers weeks old. He lifted the receiver off the telephone on a stand in the living room. Dead.