Kill Zone (19 page)

While he was at Maggiore's house waiting for his first glimpse of Macklin, Freddo had gone over a folder full of material on the killer, and among the driver's license pictures and telephoto shots taken of him getting into and out of his car and walking down the street, there had been a family photograph, shot against a professional blue backdrop and gleaned from some commercial photographer's file of negatives. It had shown a younger Macklin, less tired-looking, with more hair and a wary smile on his face, standing behind a chair containing an attractive tawny-haired woman with a dark-haired boy of eleven or twelve at his side. This woman was heavier and broad streaks of gray showed in her home bleach job, and anyone could see by the way she walked that she was a lush. He thought at first she was the housekeeper. But it was the kind of neighborhood where servants attracted attention, which wasn't Macklin's way.

If this was what had become of his wife Donna, Freddo could see why Macklin didn't spend much time at home.

Hardly had the door closed behind the woman when another actor entered the scene. He appeared from between houses on the opposite side of the street and strode across with a nervous, jerky gait, yanking his head from side to side in a way that said he wasn't looking for traffic so much as seeking to avoid detection. His sudden appearance on the woman's heels suggested that he had been waiting just for her arrival, and Freddo cursed himself for not having seen him earlier. He watched the youth look around one last time on the front stoop, then pull the door open and duck inside quickly.

He had grown at least a foot and lost his baby fat, but Roger Macklin looked a lot like his mother in the old picture.

Freddo sat watching the house and drumming his fingers on the Oldsmobile's steering wheel. Assimilating. In the old days, he had been told, there had been some unwritten rule that no matter how hot things got, a man's home and family remained off limits. Those were the days when fat greaseballs in loud silk suits with garlic on their breath kissed each other in restaurants and sent flowers to each other's funeral “from the boys.”

He was glad the old days were gone. He touched his underarm holsters and reached for the door handle.

The secretary in Randall Burlingame's outer office said “Yes, sir” into the intercom and removed a finger with a plum-colored nail from the speaker button. She measured out a frosty smile for the lean bald man. “You can go in now, Mr. Chilson.”

“Thanks, Miss MacNamara.”

He was rewarded when the smile chipped loose from her face. “Gabel.”

He shrugged and walked around the end of her desk. It actually blocked any direct entrance to the private office, making Miss Gabel a kind of Cerberus at the gate to Hades. Except that she was too good-looking in her polished porcelain way to be compared to a dog with three heads.

On his way in, Chilson passed a man coming out in a light-colored windbreaker and jeans. He looked like a repairman for the telephone company and the Secret Service agent's eyes flicked downward automatically to see if he was carrying a toolbox. But his hands were empty.

“I see you've had the British workman in your house, Watson,” Chilson said, closing the door and shaking Burlingame's hand. “He's a token of evil.”

“When are you going to stop reading that Conan Doyle crap?” grumbled the FBI chief.

“As soon as the secret agent business gets as good. Who was that, one of your deep cover men?”

“That was Peter Macklin.”

“You're kidding.” Chilson glanced back stupidly at the door.

“I'd have introduced you, but he's in a hurry.”

“He looked like a telephone repairman.”

“That's the idea. In the murder game it's called dressing for success. Is this important, Bill? I've got a lot of work kicking me in the behind.”

“Why was Macklin here?”

“We adjourned here from the hotel. The charts were here.” As he spoke, Burlingame walked back to his desk and folded the great chart of the lakes he had shown the Secret Service man that morning.

“You let him see it? You told him where the boat is?”

“He'll need it. Look, Bill, I'm really swamped.” He pulled at the top drawer of the desk to put away the chart. The drawer came all the way out and spilled papers onto the carpet. He threw the drawer down in disgust.

“Did you kiss him before he left?” Chilson asked in the silence that followed. “Or do they still do that?”

“It was the victims that got kissed. This is my case, Bill. It has been from the start. Your involvement is strictly courtesy. If one hostage aboard that boat loses a toenail it'll be my head in the basket, not yours.”

He had been shouting, and it was a moment before either of them realized the intercom was buzzing. Burlingame jammed down the switch. “What is it, Louise?” He spoke quietly, recoiling from his own outburst.

“Is everything all right in there?”

“Swell. Why?”

“Someone in the next office asked if you were rehearsing
The Ring of the Nibelung
.”

“Louise, you're fired.”

“I'm a civil servant, Mr. Burlingame. It would take an act of Congress to fire me.”

He turned off the intercom and scowled at Chilson. “I'm beginning to understand why people hire someone like Macklin.”

“I didn't mean to come on like Jack Armstrong,” Chilson said gently. “I forgot how far your neck was out on this one. But there has to be a better way. What about that plan you wouldn't tell me about?”

“There never was a plan. Not really. That's what I didn't want to tell you.” The FBI man cocked a hip on to the corner of his desk. “The Bureau has standard procedures for dealing with hostage situations in tall buildings and airliners parked on runways. Give us a crazed Philippine national barricaded in an underground bank vault with a Russian pineapple and a pregnant teller and we'll have them both out quicker than you can make a legal withdrawal. We even have commandoes trained specifically to scale the Washington Monument just in case someone threatens to blow it up like that nut did last spring. But for seven kamikazes holding eight hundred citizens aboard a floating firecracker on one of the Great Lakes, we're strapped. They'd hear a helicopter or a power boat coming for miles and turn the whole works into burning flotsam in less time than it takes me to light my pipe.”

“That's hardly an indication of speed,” the other commented.

Burlingame ignored the crack. “One man might get aboard, but it's what he does when he gets there that will make all the difference. He sure wouldn't do it for love or patriotism. But he would for money. That's Macklin.”

“There are more desirable alternatives.”

“Name one.”

“I just got off the phone with my boss. He had an idea all ready.”

“I won't release those prisoners from Jackson.”

“It's not your decision to make. Only the Governor has the power to issue pardons and commute sentences. I'm driving up to Lansing to see him this afternoon.”

“The Governor does what the federal revenue sharing people tell him to do. The Director in Washington is with me on this. He has files. Not like Hoover had files, but he has files nonetheless. There's a hooker in Chevy Chase whose name whispered in the right ears is as good as a presidential veto. Those cons don't walk until I say they walk.”

Chilson said, “I didn't realize so much of the old fart had rubbed off on you.”

Burlingame's face turned a dark cherry color. But instead of shouting he looked down at his desk and realigned the edges of some typewritten sheets in a stack on the blotter. When he raised his eyes the flush was gone.

“Back when I wore a crewcut and you could nick your finger on the lamination on my ID, I thought rules were the berries,” he said. “They were what separated us from the gorillas in uniform in places like Mississippi. My first assignment was as auditor to a bureau chief named Yerkovich in Yuma, Arizona. He was a foul-mouthed, cigar-chomping tin Napoleon who had been with the bunch that shot Dillinger and anyone could see he was going to die in Yuma, because he didn't look like any of the agents who got their pictures in the papers when the big busts went down. One day he sat me in a chair and stuck that cigar a quarter-inch from my right eyeball and said there weren't any rules. That was just something the Bureau wanted your criminal element—he said it just that way, your criminal element—to believe in. They thought they could lie and cheat and commit mayhem and we couldn't, and so they swaggered into Interrogation clicking their gum and grinning. They came out six hours later with two black eyes and the gum stuck on the end of their noses, and that's why Dillinger was dead and not still robbing banks in Indiana.

“It was two years before I believed a word of it. Those two years cost me a partner and a reprimand for ‘recreant display' during a loan office robbery in Baton Rouge. Read that ‘coward.' I refused to shoot an unarmed bandit standing at a window. Five seconds later the unarmed bandit swung a sawed-off shotgun out from under his overcoat and blew my partner into Sunday without even bothering to open the window. It's still in my file, otherwise I'd be cooling my Guccis on a desk three times this size in Washington.”

“Red, I never thought you were that kind of agent.”

“There aren't any other kinds outside training.”

“Bullshit. We never did things that way in the Service.”

Burlingame sighed theatrically. “You Service boys put on striped ties and comb your hair and have tea with blue-haired old ladies who write letters to the President telling him to go fuck himself. When it looks like you might get a spot on your cuffs you come to us.”

Chilson had been leaning forward over the chair in front of the desk with his fingers sunk into the upholstered back. Now he straightened.

“I'm talking to the Governor. He can put the wheels in motion, buy some time.”

“Go ahead. When the seventy-two hours is up Siegfried will just tack on a new demand, and when that isn't met they'll make a waterspout out of the Boblo boat.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I've been wading ass-deep in David Blakemans since the first Marine set foot in Vietnam.”

“What about Peter Macklins?”

“The Macklins of this world just go on and on. If Cain had had a choice he'd have paid someone to take out Abel for him.”

Chilson took his eyes from his old friend's to read his watch. “I'd better get going if I'm to have dinner with the Governor.” He moved to the door. “Orders, Red. If Carol Turnbull gets killed there'll be two heads in that basket. One bald.”

The FBI man nodded. He was still perched on the edge of the desk. “I guess you know this conversation didn't happen.”

“It hasn't been that long since I had tea with my last blue-haired old lady.”

Burlingame sat there a long moment after the Secret Service agent had left without saying good-bye. Then he got up, turned around, and slammed the flat of his hand down on the desk hard enough to sting himself and jar the telephone receiver out of its cradle. A second later the intercom buzzed.

CHAPTER 24

Christine finished unwinding the bandage from around Macklin's midsection and gasped. “What did they use, a baseball bat?”

“It was an accident.” He was sitting stripped to the waist on the edge of the bed in her apartment. Under the reddish burns the bandage had made, a pattern of purple bruises had spread amorphously across his abdomen. There were other, older scars on his back and upper arms and chest that she had never asked about. Her probing fingers found a spot that made him take in his breath. He grabbed at her hand and she slapped his wrist.

“I know what I'm doing. Not all of Carmine's clients paid up with a smile. I got enough practice on him to qualify for my nurse's license.” Carmine was the loan shark she had been living with until his violent death.

She untinned a roll of adhesive from the bathroom medicine cabinet. “I wish I had some linament.”

“That stuff just raises blisters and burns like hell so you think it's doing something. Just tape me up.”

“Well, raise your arms.”

He did so, and she wound the white adhesive around his ribcage until it felt like tight armor. When she was done she put down the empty spool and stepped back. “You look good in a girdle.”

“You look good out of one.”

She squinted at him. His shoulders sagged and the failing light sliding through the window at his back found strands of silver in his mud-colored hair. “Don't go starting things you can't finish,” she warned him.

“I was counting on you helping.”

“I'm afraid I'll break something.”

He raised his head a millimeter, and though his face was in shadow she knew he was grinning. “You damn well better try.”

Afterward he was sorry, and he lay on his back with his chest heaving and little bursts of pain going off in his side like timed charges. Christine sighed sleepily, laid her head in the hollow of his shoulder, and drew a bare thigh across his groin that took his mind off his agony. He slept.

The telephone's keening ring found a place in his dream, and he didn't stir until the bedsprings moved and he heard Christine padding into the next room. The ringing stopped.

Grunting, he hoisted off the covers and sat on the edge of the mattress for a moment and stood and stepped gingerly into his shorts and jeans. The sun was not yet down, shedding rose light tinged with gray into the room. Christine, on the telephone, was standing with her back to the bedroom door and he paused in the doorway to admire her long back and curving buttocks with the marks from the bedsheets tattooing her smooth white skin. He had first been attracted by her skin. He hated tans.

She must have heard his bare feet brush the carpet, because she turned with the receiver in her hand and held it out. “It's for you. A man named Burlingame.”