Little Black Dress (Peter Macklin Novels)

by Loren D. Estleman

  “That ain’t his lookout. Why stir him up?”

  “He’ll hear the shots.” Wild Bill reached over and gripped Donny’s thigh. “This won’t be Hilliard. This time we know what’s coming.”

  Donny stared at the windshield. “A hit is what it sounds like.”

  “A hit’s when you walk into a restaurant and put two in somebody’s head,” Wild Bill said. “This is nothing like that.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Hunting.” He shrugged out of his jean jacket, exposing his red shirt, and stuck his hand out at Mark for the shotgun.

  TWENTY-SIX

  It was one of the strangest moments in Grinnell’s generally unorthodox Ohio experience.

  When Wild Bill came in the door, they’d locked eyes briefly, but from then on Grinnell might have been one of the books on the shelves for all the attention the young desperado paid him. Wild Bill took his place at the end of the line of empty souls waiting for their ten seconds with a celebrity who couldn’t be bothered to look up and see who was keeping him independent of honest work. When his turn came he told Spain what he wanted him to write—Grinnell was standing too far away to make it out—and stood silent while Pamela took a book off the stack and opened it to the title page and held it for the famous pen. Wild Bill thanked the author and joined the line at checkout.

  Grinnell wasn’t surprised by the visit. He knew the crew wanted to know what the security guard looked like, and Wild Bill’s interest in Macklin was such that he’d need an idea of Macklin’s position before they came through the door. Having a book signed and paying for it would prevent anyone from taking special notice of him. What was strange about the whole thing was it was the first time Grinnell and Wild Bill had been on the scene of a robbery at the same time. A case man had no more direct part in such a business than an accountant had with the actual exchange of cash whose figures he entered in his columns. He was a little surprised that his pulse wasn’t more rapid. Tommy Vulpo would have been astounded. But Tommy Vulpo knew very little about Grinnell.

  In fact he’d felt calmer than he had in weeks. He’d felt that way since the moment he’d decided to visit his bank and take out his discretionary fund—case dough, Toledo would call it. He wouldn’t miss the organization in Toledo, but he was a little sorry to leave behind his comfortable condominium with its view of the lake and its handy hiding place for contraband on the other side of the common wall he shared with his neighbor. He already missed his Lexus. He had nothing against American-made cars—had in fact been most disappointed with the Mercedes he’d owned for a few months in the early nineties—but given the luxury of time he’d have opted for a Lincoln or a Cadillac or even a Chrysler Town Car before driving the bare-bones Ford he’d parked behind the store. His middle-aged frame retained a sense-memory of every fissure and pothole he’d encountered since Mason.

  He owed Pamela one more act of protection. Difficult, selfinvolved, and too critical of those close to her, she nevertheless had a way of making him feel safe when they were together. She was the perfect blind. She accepted his studied dullness with the faith of a convert, reinforced it in the presence of others, and after her husband’s betrayal was so determined to succeed on her own that the lack of competition from her mate attracted her in ways that mere male beauty could not. She trusted him, and he wouldn’t find that again, wherever he ended up. But he’d been too long in one place.

  After Wild Bill left with his purchase, Grinnell went to the employee rest room in the shipping and storage area. He had to walk around a stepladder to open the door. The room was cluttered with racks and books that had been removed from the shop to ease congestion, and someone had shoved aside the ladder to make room. He splashed water on his face and inspected the magazine in the handle of the Browning BDA yet again.

  The door bumped against the stepladder when he came out, and like most people faced with the obstacle of a ladder looked up to the top. A rectangular panel was set in the ceiling with a pull-ring attached, probably to give plumbers and electricians access to the equipment above. He hadn’t noticed it before.

  Laurie suddenly hated being a woman, and hated even more being a woman men found attractive.

  Hated the way the black cocktail dress showed off her wellshaped collarbone and long legs, hated her sapphire earrings—a a six-month anniversary present from Peter—hated the way they brought out the startling blue in her eyes, hated, hated, hated. She wished she were a lesbian, one of the obvious types who wore frumpy sweaters with cat hair on them, baggy cargo pants and Birkenstocks and her hair in a greasy bun. Her luck with women would have had to be better than her luck with men. All the men in her life—her philandering father, her mother’s sinister boyfriend, the man she’d pledged the rest of her days to—had played her false. Well, her grandfather hadn’t, but maybe he’d been just too old to take the trouble. Maybe his past behavior had been the reason for her grandmother’s chronic irritability.

  For Peter she’d turned her back on her own principles, agreed to accept his vile past in return for a promise of honesty—accompliced herself to the act of murder for it—and he’d spat it back in her face. Her mother had been right all along: A man was a man. You couldn’t adopt a massasauga rattler and feed it warm milk and expect it to curl up in your lap, purr, and not be a snake.

  Something hideous was going to happen that night, right there in her mother’s world, and Laurie had brought it. She didn’t know what it was, whether Peter and Benjamin were going head to head or standing shoulder to shoulder, but blood was going to flow. She’d suspected it ever since the night Peter had told her that Benjamin was a player, and yet she’d gone right on dreaming about living on a farm, like some kind of postnuclear Heidi. It made her want to rip off her dress and claw herself until she bled. Instead she pushed through the line standing in front of Spain’s table, forcing a collective grunt from tired customers who thought she was cutting in, and walked around the table to stand beside her mother.

  “I need to talk to you,” Laurie said.

  “In a few minutes, dear. Francis is almost finished.” Pamela slid a book off the top of the stack. They were close to selling out.

  “It’s about Benjamin.”

  Pamela turned toward her, but her eyes went past her daughter, toward the front door. The vertical line between her brows deepened. Laurie turned that way. Two men in red shirts and black ski masks were coming in. The one in front carried a short shotgun.

  “It’s going down! Move in! Now! Now!” Humiliatingly, Prine’s voice cracked. The microphone felt clumsy in his hand.

  The big Econoline van had come wailing around the end of the strip and disgorged its payload of armed passengers before it came to a complete stop. The front door of the bookstore drifted shut behind them. Then from inside came two sharp cracks, followed by the concussion of a shotgun. Prine shoved down the door handle on his side. McCormick already had a foot on the pavement, reaching behind his hip for his deep-bellied Ruger. He wasn’t as far away from active duty as his superior, and his reflexes showed it.

  Blue-and-red strobes and sirens filled the parking lot. Prine had on his hip-length blue jacket with POLICE across the back in reflective yellow letters eight inches high, but as he unclipped the Desert Eagle he stuck his shield up above his head to catch the searchlights. He was just wondering if Mac, in civilian clothes, had thought to do the same thing when a bullhorn voice bawled, “Police! Drop your weapon!” and he saw his lieutenant turn with the Ruger in his fist and topple backward in a rattle of gunfire.

  Wild Bill took a side step inside the door, giving Mark a clear field of fire. Mark located the bodyguard where Wild Bill had said he’d be and shot him twice as he was unharnessing a big semiautomatic pistol. Wild Bill looked for Grinnell in his spot, found the spot empty, and lost a beat that nearly cost him his head, because Macklin threw down on him with a revolver. But just then one of the customers who’d been in line zigged into his line of fire and he held off. The shotg
un whammed, pushing against Wild Bill’s hip, and a shelf of books fell apart; Macklin had flung himself to the floor. Wild Bill tried to follow him down with the shotgun, but lost sight of him in the scatter of bodies, the copies of Serpent in Eden arcing this way and that in midair, jettisoned for flight.

  Sirens howled outside. Shots crackled. So Grinnell had made a call. There went Donny, along with their ride.

  The boss lady was Mark’s second target—payoff for Grinnell’s warning—but Wild Bill was too busy looking for Macklin and Grinnell to see where Mark’s shots were landing. The money had no meaning now. No matter what kind of plan you made, it all went to hell the first time someone fired a gun. But he glanced toward the counter, just in case Grinnell had been crouching behind it, and his eyes locked with Marjorie’s—redheaded Marjorie, with the big freckles—frozen in the act of shoving a book into a plastic bag. He thought he saw recognition there. All the women he’d ever been friendly with had had something to say about his eyes. No Grinnell there.

  Something cracked past his left ear, a tiny sonic boom. It whacked the door frame. He whirled toward its source, swinging the shotgun to shoulder level, and there was Francis Spain, the celebrity author, grinning at him. (Grinning?) Wild Bill squeezed the trigger and blew his head off.

  Macklin saw Kevin, the security guard, drawing, too late for the man standing fifteen feet away with his Sig Sauer already in hand, but although he’d drawn the Dan Wesson the instant he’d seen movement through the glass of the front door, he picked the man with the shotgun instead, because Laurie and her mother were standing in his line of fire and he had to draw him off. Kevin stumbled backward, struck twice by bullets from the Sig, and then a panicking customer crossed right in front of Macklin and he had to dive as the shotgun’s blast walloped the air just above his head. The floor came up hard; he landed on his gun arm and almost lost his grip on the revolver, but he came up on his knees still holding it, found the shotgunner looking away from him, toward the counter, and snapped off a shot that missed because his arm was numb and he couldn’t feel the trigger. Then he had to roll again as the shotgun came up and exploded a second time.

  He struck something with his shoulder and something else, a lot of somethings, rained down on him, bouncing off his head and chest, copies of Serpent in Eden, dislodged from the autograph table when he rolled into it. He looked up, saw Laurie’s black skirt, seized one of her trim ankles, and jerked it out from under her. She fell on top of him in a pile. She screamed something and shoved at him with her hand, trying to push herself up, but he threw his free arm around her waist and held on. He heard what she was screaming then. “Mother!”

  There was no sign of Spain. Pamela was still standing in her original spot, just standing there while everyone else was scrambling for cover, holding a copy of Spain’s book open to the title page, the table at her feet, staring down at Laurie and Macklin in a tangle on the floor beside it. Macklin straightened his other arm and pointed the revolver up at his mother-in-law. “Get down.”

  Literally blew his head off. Wild Bill stared at the ragged top of Spain’s neck, bits of stuff floating down all around, watched the rest of his body teeter and flop over backward like a board, books spilling from his middle, and lie on the floor as flat as a cartoon rabbit run over by a steamroller. Then he turned a little and saw Spain again, standing ten feet in front of him still wearing his head. Half of it was hidden behind a tall, good-looking young woman in a business suit. He was crouching.

  Wild Bill laughed. He didn’t know if he was laughing at the sissy book writer hiding behind a woman’s skirts or at himself for wasting a shell on a cardboard cutout.

  The woman’s face was all white and eyes. “Please don’t shoot me.” She had a New York accent.

  He stopped laughing. Fiber from the ski mask had gotten into his mouth. He snatched it off and threw it away. Then he continued his search for Macklin and Grinnell, in that order. He was pretty sure now Grinnell had lit out the back when he and Mark had come in. Case men were all pussies when the shooting started. He’d lost track of Mark.

  “Police! Put down the weapon and throw up your hands!”

  Someone bumped him, trying to get out of the way. He let go of the shotgun with one hand, grabbed a fistful of hair, and spun into the body. When he had it against him he realized the hair was red and recognized Marjorie’s gingery perfume. Everything about her reminded him of doughnuts. The cop standing inside the front door hesitated. Wild Bill fired. The cop was wearing riot gear, helmet and face shield and shin guards, and probably a vest, but the blast carried him back through the door, his own shotgun firing wide and obliterating a display of self-help guides.

  The display windows were filling with uniforms. Wild Bill backpedaled, taking Marjorie with him. He tripped and fell on his ass, losing his grip on his hostage. She whimpered and fled. He rolled onto his shoulder and looked at Mark, the thing he’d stumbled over, eyes sightless in the holes in his mask.

  Wild Bill flopped onto his stomach, rested the shotgun across Mark’s belly, and using the body as a breastwork swiveled the barrel slowly from side to side, his eyes moving with it. He spotted movement and saw Macklin rising from the floor a dozen feet away, rising up and up until he was as tall as a mountain, the revolver in his hand. Wild Bill tightened his finger on the trigger.

  A block of cement hit him square between the shoulders. The wind gusted out of his lungs and he knew he’d been shot, but he was all animal instinct now, a wounded bull elk with the river at its back, and he rolled over, swinging the shotgun straight up, toward Benjamin Grinnell, Grinnell framed from the waist up in a square hole in the ceiling pointing a pistol down at him. Wild Bill thought he heard his shotgun roar. He never found out for sure.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “I never saw so many shotgun rounds fired with so little to show for it.”

  Edgar Prine looked at the Myrtle police chief, a short fat man in a russet sport coat who looked like the owner of an appliance store, which he probably was.

  “I’ve got a man in Emergency with a collapsed lung and my second in command’s on a table having a kidney removed. How much show do you like?”

  “Your lieutenant was unavoidable. He turned a gun on my officers and he didn’t identify himself.”

  Prine said nothing. His mistake was in bringing in the locals to begin with. He’d long suspected Hoover had been right about that and now his suspicions were confirmed. Mac’s face had been ghastly pale when they were rolling him into the EMS van, like carved soap. That was one picture he’d have a long time. To his grave, if Mac didn’t pull through.

  He looked down at Grinnell, paler yet as the ME’s men worked the zipper up the Mylar bag toward his face. Theory was he’d climbed up into the suspended ceiling in the back room, lifted out one of the frosted glass panels when he’d reached the shop, and plucked off the black perpetrator from above, just like shooting fish in a bucket. But he’d missed the other one’s vitals and paid for it with a load of double-O buck in the chest. He’d fired simultaneously with the shotgunner, put one through the brain on the second try. Not too shabby for the mob equivalent of a file clerk.

  He wondered why he’d bothered. He knew he’d been burned, had shaken a good man and could have kept on driving, but he’d stepped right back into the fire. Prine looked over at Grinnell’s woman, the bookstore manager, talking animatedly with her hands to the officer scribbling in his notebook: good-enough looking for a woman in her middle years, but even from this distance she looked like a pain in someone’s ass. There was no accounting for taste, particularly when it involved a criminal.

  Anyway, that was the cost of three trials spared the People of the State of Ohio—four, counting the one at the motel in Harbor View. The wheelman had surrendered without resistance, and unless Prine applied leverage, the prosecutor’s office would probably let him deal himself out of Felony Murder with a plea to Robbery Armed. He’d see how he felt about that after he spoke to Mac’s surgeons.r />
  He walked away from the chief without excusing himself and approached the group of state police interviewing the manager’s daughter, Macklin’s wife. Another group had gathered around the cashier who’d been taken hostage, rocking back and forth on a straight chair with someone’s uniform jacket draped across her shoulders. He’d been in service long enough to see psychiatric counseling become part of police work. She’d been in the perp’s clutches thirty seconds.

  “Mrs. Macklin, my name is Captain Prine. I’m in charge of the State Police Armed Robbery Task Force.”

  “Yes, I’ve seen you on TV.”

  He watched her closely. She seemed icily calm, and he didn’t know yet if it was shock or the standard pickled-in-brine attitude of the career mob wife. She was a pretty thing, with an athletic body in a short black dress. She didn’t look at all like a tart.

  “Your husband’s in custody. His time will be easier if he cooperates with our investigation. Can you tell me what part he played in what happened tonight?”

  “He was an invited guest at Mr. Spain’s autograph party.”

  “Some people think he was a bit more. He was seen shooting at one of the robbers.”

  “Someone’s mixed up. My husband is retired from the retail camera business. He’s never shot anything more than a picture.”

  He knew what she was then. A tart was a tart in a designer dress or shorts and a halter. He put an edge in his voice.

  “We’ve recovered a revolver, a thirty-eight caliber. One of the robbers had a shotgun and the other was armed with a semiautomatic pistol. Grin—Mr. Grinnell, your mother’s, ah, gentleman friend, had a semiautomatic. The revolver is the only weapon unaccounted for. Does your husband own a gun?”

  “No.”

  “You realize even if he wiped off his fingerprints before he abandoned it, we’ll be able to tell if he fired a gun recently.”