Kill Zone (7 page)

Macklin remained standing. “Gyp said I'd find you back here.”

Pinelli grinned at the clipboard. “When he sees you I bet he shits.”

“I can't think why. I've never had any business with him.”

“He gets himself into some trouble six months ago, boffing the sister of a numbers man in Pontiac. The numbers man, he sends two niggers to wait for him in the alley with iron pipes. I come out first. They don't come back.”

Macklin said, “Then he's got no reason to spook.”

“You are not two dumb niggers with iron pipes.”

Macklin warmed to the compliment in spite of himself. Pinelli was a big man in a snug vest and shirtsleeves with French cuffs and gold studs, and he brushed his silver hair straight back without a part, accentuating the Indianlike planes and hollows of his face. He was a well-preserved 60, retaining the strong Sicilian accent of his boyhood and an adolescence spent in New York's Little Italy. It was said that he had killed his first man at the age of 16. He scorned firearms of any kind, and legend had it that before his retirement from heavyweight work he could decapitate a man from behind with a single backhand slash of his seven-inch blade. He had large powerful hands and his old shoulders were stacked with muscle. For the past fourteen years he had been using them to build up the haberdashery business he had named for his late wife Clovis.

He lowered his foot to the floor, set aside the clipboard, capped the fountain pen, and clipped it to his shirt pocket, looking expectantly at his visitor. He never shook hands, a thing for which the much slighter Macklin was grateful.

“Daniel Oliver Ackler,” Macklin said.

Pinelli touched the other's lips with two fingers and moved past him to close the door. He then tugged on the chain to an overhead fixture, banishing darkness from the windowless room. He was standing so close now that Macklin could smell the raw oysters on his breath. The old man believed they kept him vital.

“Wildcat.” He spat out the word like filth in his mouth. “One of these beardless fish-eyes with no loyalty to no one and a purse for a soul.
Serpente
. You are not working with him?”

“Just the opposite. I'm after anything I can find out about him. Who he is, where he came from, who he hangs out with. The information I have is sketchy and comes from a questionable source.”

“I am retired, Pietro. I do not keep up.”

Macklin slid into the Sicilian dialect. “Come, Umberto. Retired athletes follow the sports pages. That great gray head of yours is a computer. It is one reason you are still alive. What have you heard?”

Pinelli laid a hand like a steam shovel on Macklin's shoulder. “You are my friend,” he said in English. “
Mi amico
, which is more. If I had a son he would be you.”

“You have a son.”

“A young man in the state of Washington shares my name. He sends back the Christmas presents I send to his children. You are my son. Who taught you that you do not stab with the knife, you push? I have, how you say it, an investment in your well-being. So I say, forget about this Ackler. He is not worth spilling purple legion blood over. Leave him to the barbarians.”

Macklin returned to English. “You forget I'm not Italian.”

“Not in your name or your birth or your father's father. Here you are Italian.” He doubled his other hand into a great fist and touched Macklin's heart. “So I say again, forget about this Ackler.”

“Is he that good?”

“Good, who's to say who is more good? He is young, not thirty, and you are forty.”

“Thirty-nine.”

“I sheathed my knife at forty-six. I know now that I was a lucky man for six years. The hands, they slow. The eyes dim, the ears thicken.”

“You heard me coming well enough just now.”

“Ackler would have known your footfall the moment you entered the store. You see? Everything is relative.” The big man sighed, a little theatrically. “You are now where I was when a young man with an Irish name came along—”

“Scots.”

“—came along to remind me that the longer you remain alive the closer you are to death. Fine clothing has interested me since the day I bloodied my first silk shirt. So I withdrew my savings, of which there were not much considering the high cost of crash cars and good drivers, and invested in the little sideline that is now my life. Follow where I lead, Pietro. Do not end up naked in a tray with your insides showing.”

“All I know about clothes is how to work a zipper. Also I'm strapped. Most of my savings has gone into keeping my wife in booze and my son out of jail.”

“How is the boy? Roger.”

“I haven't seen him in days.” Macklin paused. “Ackler.”

Pinelli blew some more oyster-fragrant air. “All I know of him has been told to me by others. I do not listen, understand. But I hear. One year ago he is not known here. Eight months ago, nine, his name is whispers on the air. You remember a man named Fishbein?”

“Vegas accountant. Pumped full of holes at Metro Airport last January on his way to a congressional hearing in Washington.”

Pinelli grinned his old wolf's grin. “You, too, hear.”

“I listen.”

“The federal marshals, they drive a bulletproof car right into the lobby of his hotel in Las Vegas to pick him up. From there they go straight to the loading ramp of a private jet. At no time is he in the open, except during the five-minute walk between planes in Detroit. A man steps out from behind a pillar and swings out a light machine pistol, one of these Swedish things with no more craftsmanship than goes into a good Boy Scout knife. A two-second burst, and then he is gone between luggage carts before the marshals can draw their weapons or even say holy shit. Fishbein is on his face in a puddle of blood and brains.”

“That wasn't Ackler,” Macklin said. “The Warren police ID'd a stiff they found in the trunk of a parked car a couple of days later as the killer.”

“They find a dead man who matches the description the marshals give. The marshals, who you must understand are looking very foolish now, but perhaps a little less foolish if the killer is not still at large, go to the morgue and glance under the sheet and say, ‘Yes, that's him.' But I ask you, when a man appears before you as on a puff of wind with death stammering away in his hands, how much time will you spend looking at his face? Do you remember what was learned from the corpse?”

“Nothing. His features were battered and his teeth had been knocked out and his fingers cut off. There was no way to identify him from records.”

“Was there nothing else?”

Macklin started to shake his head, stopped. “Was he an addict?”

“Excellent!” The big old man was beaming like a college professor before a bright student. “His arms are full of old punctures and they find traces of heroin in his system, enough to kill a Hollywood film crew. Now, Fishbein's testimony would be disastrous to the Las Vegas interests. Who would risk someone so unreliable as a dope fiend to remove this threat? But the alleys are filled with young wrecks. Our man had but to find one whose height and weight and coloring resembled his own and then keep him supplied—tethered, if you will pardon the poetic indulgence, on a leash of white powder until the time came to end the investigation. An extra few grains in the needle, a short drive to Warren, a leisurely walk back, and Daniel Oliver Ackler is as one born again. I applaud the simple beauty of it even as I abhor its mercenary motive.”

“Who hired him?”

“Those animals out West. They have no sense of family. Employing a wildcat, bah!”

“What else has he done?”

Pinelli shrugged, straining the seams of his vest. “His signature is his audacity. Select any five daring murders committed over past months in which the killer slipped away. Four will be his.”

“Where was he before he came here?”

“New York. Philadelphia. I have heard him referred to by the nickname Baltimore, but perhaps the oriole is his favorite bird.”

“What about friends?”

“How many friends have you, Pietro?”

Macklin smiled. “Just one.”

“He has fewer.”

“Has he ever been seen hanging out with hippie types?”

“I do not know what a hippie type is. Once it meant long hair and a beard, but now that is how one describes a politician.”

“Radicals. Revolutionaries.”

Pinelli still looked puzzled.

Macklin blew some air of his own. “The kind of person that would grab a boatload of civilian passengers and make big noises about blowing it up.”

“Ah!”

“You heard?”

“It's on the news. Eight terrorists. One was killed.”

“Ackler killed him. Just to show the rubes who's in charge. He's going by Sol on the boat.”

“If it is Ackler, someone is paying him.”

“I have to know who. I don't walk into a room with the light off.”

Pinelli pointed a finger like a cucumber. “Walk away from this one, my friend. What do you know about boats?”

“For a hundred thousand I can learn.”

“What is a hundred thousand? It will not even cramp you in your coffin.”

“Are you going to help me, Umberto? If not I'll look for someone else. But yours is the only information I trust.”

“I have told you all I know.”

“Who's your source?”

The big man breathed noisily in the silence. The room was close and Macklin felt the illusion that all the air in it was going up Pinelli's tomahawk nose. Finally the retired killer took out his fountain pen and picked up his clipboard and leafed to a fresh page. He wrote something, unclipped the sheet, and handed it to Macklin. It contained an address in River Rouge.

“Talk to the man you find there. No names.”

“What can he tell me?”

“Much more than I. He has seen Ackler.”

Pinelli had an inspiration and reached behind his back, pulling something from inside the waistband of his pants under his vest. Macklin folded the sheet with the address on it and put it in his pocket to accept the item. He took hold of a smooth ivory handle and drew two inches of gleaming nickel out of black leather. Three more inches remained in the sheath.

“Be very careful with it,
mi amico
. It is sharper than a razor and never surrenders its edge. I have replaced the sheath three times. It came with my family to Messina and belonged to my father's grandfather, who threw Napoleon off the bridge at Arcole in 1796.”

“
Grazia
, Umberto. I have knives.” Macklin started to return it. Pinelli closed both his huge hands over Macklin's.

“Show it to the man you are going to see. That way he will know you come from me.”

“I could have stolen it.”

“In that case there would be blood on it.” The old killer patted his hand.
“Buona fortuna, figlio mio
.”

CHAPTER 10

Randall Burlingame answered the telephone in his office, listened for a moment, said, “Son of a bitch,” and thumbed down the plunger, breaking the connection. Secret Service agent Bill Chilson, throwing a lot of light off his white shirtsleeves and bald head, started to ask something, but was cut off by the FBI director's upraised hand. Burlingame dialed a number.

“Treadaway? Me. Radio your men at Macklin's house to call in when he shows. Einstein and Schweitzer managed to lose him two blocks from Maggiore's place.” His tone dripped acid.

When Burlingame hung up, Chilson said, “What is Macklin to Maggiore, anyway?”

“We ran his picture through the computer. Treasury man on stakeout at Maggiore's took it. The machine matched it with a file on Addison Camera in Taylor. It's a mob subsidiary. He's on staff there, some desk job. But if Boniface asked for him on this one you can bet he's a button.”

“Seems to me that would show up on the machine.”

“Only the ones who get caught.” Burlingame played with his pipe. He hadn't recharged or relit it since Howard Klegg had left the office—he was cutting down—but the bowl was worn to a smooth deep rose color from much handling. “This other one, this spooky-looking one who showed up at Maggiore's a half hour ahead of Macklin and left a couple of minutes afterwards, he's not in the file. We Telexed his picture to Washington. Still waiting on that. I don't know where he fits in.”

“Isn't all this surveillance just what we promised Klegg we wouldn't do?”

A smile tugged at the FBI man's lips. “I've been waiting for a chance like this as long as I've been here. When this is over, no matter how it winds up, we'll have a stronger line on the way these boys work than we've had since Joe Valachi.”

“They'll find out.”

“Oh, they know. You don't duck two experienced field agents by accident. I expect Klegg to come in here any time and pound the desk, but in the end they won't do anything about it. Boniface wants out.”

“That part surprised me,” Chilson said. “I never knew you to make a deal.”

“We haven't just been scratching our balls since the gate closed on him. There will be a team of field men waiting for him when he steps outside to arrest him for tax fraud and eight other charges that will keep him under glass till they wheel him out toes first.”

“Meanwhile what happens to those people on the boat?”

“You mean what happens to HEW Secretary Clarence Turnbull's daughter Carol. We're working on it.”

“Working on it how?”

“We've got the dope on a recent theft from the National Guard Armory up in Grayling. Three M-16s, four Army Colts, six cases of ammunition, and about five pounds of gelatin explosives with caps. Guard has a warrant out for a Captain Philip MacKenzie, who's been AWOL since the stuff was discovered missing. His description fits one of the terrorists. It's our first solid lead.”

“How does it help?”

“If we can find out who he was hanging around with before he dropped out of sight we might be able to put a name to each of the people who are holding that boat. It helps to know who you're fighting.”