Kill Zone

by Loren D. Estleman

  “How good do you have to be with explosives and automatic weapons?”

  “Better than you might think.” He clamped his mouth shut against a yawn. His after-work lethargy wasn’t retreating without a fight. “A hundred thousand.”

  “Ha!” Maggiore got up, put his hands in his pants pockets, and walked over to the window to look out through the gap in the curtains.

  “Fifty up front. Cash as usual. I’ll need operating expenses. If I need help I’ll do the hiring.”

  “We don’t pay by the job,” Maggiore reminded him, without turning. “You’re on salary like everyone else.”

  The killer ignored him, watching Klegg. “No outside interference. Whatever information I need comes through you.”

  “That’s all arranged. Will you do it?”

  “Yes.”

  The lawyer sat back, showing his dentures. “I’m sorry, Charles,” he told Maggiore. “Michael asked me to make all the decisions on this one.”

  The man at the window said nothing.

  “If there are no further questions we’ll get to the briefing.” Klegg picked up his case from the floor and undid the gold clasp.

  Macklin left after an hour, big Gordy appearing as suddenly and silently as a genie to hold the library door open for him. Howard Klegg looked after him with a wrinkle in his high blue forehead.

  “We covered a lot of details,” he said. “He never took a note.”

  “I understand he doesn’t.” Maggiore got up from behind his desk, where he had sat unspeaking throughout the briefing. “I guess you’ll be reporting back to Mike now.”

  “I’d like to tell him you’re with him on this.”

  The Sicilian hesitated less than a second, then grasped the hand that was extended him. “You don’t have to tell him. He knows I’m a team player.”

  Klegg smiled and left. Gordy saw him out to his car. Maggiore adjusted the goose neck of a sun lamp mounted on the wall over the desk and switched it on. He opened his collar, sat down, and undid the catch that reclined the desk chair, relaxing with eyes closed in the lamp’s warmth. A moment later he heard a soft footfall on the carpet in front of the desk and opened one eye to consider the young man standing over him.

  “Did you get a good look at him?” Maggiore asked.

  “Through the window. I’ll know him again.”

  He opened the other eye. His visitor was in his mid-twenties, five-eight or -nine and a hundred and thirty pounds, with a narrow, babyish face that looked as if it had never felt a razor and a right eyelid that drooped mockingly. His hair was stringy and sand-colored and hung behind his ears to his collar from a prematurely thinning front. His suit was soft gray and fit him in such a way that the unmatched revolvers he wore in twin holsters under his arms didn’t show. He had hairless pink hands and a thin voice that embarrassed him so that he didn’t talk much.

  “Freddo.” Maggiore punched a button under the desk’s glass top, switching off the sun lamp. “Is that your first name or your last?”

  “Both.”

  “Siciliano? Neapolitano?”

  Freddo made no reply.

  “If you’re not Italian, why do you use that name? Do you know what it means?”

  “Cold.”

  The Sicilian waited for more, then gave up. He tilted his chair forward and rested his forearms on the desk. “Don’t do anything just yet. Keep an eye on him. When it looks like he’s getting ready to make his move, spliff him.”

  “Okay.”

  “I know how these deals work. When Macklin drops the ball and that boat goes up in flames, they’ll find all kinds of ways not to make good on it. So Boniface stays where he is and I stay where I am. Who are you using?”

  “I wasn’t figuring on using anybody.”

  “No good. This isn’t some fat laundryman you can slam with his arms up to his ass in dirty socks. Who you pick is your headache. Just make sure he’s good.”

  Freddo nodded and withdrew on noiseless heels. Maggiore watched the door close and expelled some breath. Under Boniface, they waited to be dismissed before leaving. He breathed again, shook his head, and turned the sun lamp back on, twisting a little in the chair to put heat on his hump.

  The Treasury agent on the morning shift tracked the shiny car through the small powerful lens mounted in the side of the van across the street and changed bands on his portable transmitter. While waiting for his call to be acknowledged he reached behind him and peeled his shirt away from his sticky back. Hundreds of millions in appropriations each year and Washington still hadn’t gotten around to installing air conditioning in its field units.

  The radio crackled. “Forty-six.”

  “Bealman, Treasury,” he reported. “Just thought you Fibbies might like to know your boy’s rolling west on Maumee in a silver Cougar, last year’s model. Should be passing you about now.”

  “Roger, Treasury. We owe you.”

  “From your mouth to Randy Burlingame’s ear. Out.” Bealman changed bands again and felt his shirt clinging to his back. He had spent two weeks and filled a hundred and forty rolls of film with license plates and grainy faces in pursuit of evidence linking Charles Maggiore to a gun-smuggling ring in Chile, and that’s where the air-conditioning money was going.

  CHAPTER 7

  From the bridge, Erie was a great choppy pewter disc with gray fog like dirty cotton all around the edge. The boat’s steam-whistle, normally hoarse and strident, had made a hollow plaintive hooting sound in the funnel of visibility, aborted when Don clapped the muzzle of his Luger to the base of Cap’n Eddie’s skull where he stood at the handle.

  “Don’t.”

  “We have to blast every few minutes in this soup,” protested the captain. “To avoid a collision.”

  “Just don’t.”

  The tall old man released the handle and stepped away, following the motion of the gun.

  Don had gone almost twenty hours without sleep and it showed in his face, drawn tight as upholstery with the crossed scar white on his cheek. He had tried to get some rest the afternoon before the operation began, but his brain had been racing and at length he had gotten up and laid out the whole thing one more time on the kitchen table in his apartment over the pawn shop, searching for flaws in the plan, using china plates to represent each of the boat’s three decks and the bridge and making seasoning shakers do for the crew and the two security men. The plotting charts Siegfried had been using had by then been burned and the ashes broken up.

  And yet now he didn’t feel tired. If anything he was hyperperceptive, as alert and clear-thinking as if he had made use of the cocaine with which Mike—poor, dead Mike, the first to martyr himself to their cause—had supplied them all to help them through the tortuous hours. But he had no need for it yet. The sensation reminded him of combat.

  The fog was a lucky break. It had been predicted and had been another factor on the side of moving when they did, but no one had much counted on its being thick enough to discourage surveillance from the air. The longer it held the greater their chances were of making it through the next—he inspected his heavy-duty wristwatch—fifty-nine hours and twenty-three minutes.

  On the dance deck, Fay posed forward with her back to the railing and her ankles crossed, the M-16 resting on the angle of her thighs. The excursionists were crowded toward the center, standing against the little cubicle where snacks were sold and seated on the folding chairs with their heads down and their hands clasped between their knees, sneaking occasional glances up through their eyebrows at the small black Amazon holding them in check. The sobbing and cursing had played themselves out hours ago.

  Most of the musicians on the bandstand had shed their scarlet blazers. Chester Crane, the leader, retained his. From time to time he put a hand up to his toupee to make sure it was still in place, but he hadn’t said a word since Sol had pitched his bass player’s punctured body overboard. Mike’s blood was a swatch of rust on the railing.

  Most of the bandsmen were hoojies, an
d not one of them was under 40. Fay bet herself that if she asked them for a little soul they’d throw fish at her.

  Sol was aft in his shirtsleeves, the white cotton transparent against his skin where he had perspired through it while visiting the engine room below. He had waited until they were in the mouth of the lake, when no passengers without suicidal intent would risk swimming for shore. They had lost a few that way in the river—the deck was just too big for two people to hold—and Sol and Fay had wasted a few bursts in the water before Don had radioed orders down to ignore them. But anyone caught moving away from the center of the deck got a good look at the inside of the auto-rifles’ muzzles.

  It had been a close ninety at the base of the steep metal stairs leading down to the engine room, but when Sol had herded the sweating surprised personnel through the portal into the heart of the pistoning, oil-smelling works, the temperature had crept up past one hundred, and Sol had cut short his threatening speech for fear of warping the gun’s cheaply constructed parts in the heat. The chief engineer, a tall knobby man in his thirties with a thick moustache and his naked shoulders and chest cooked to a glistening cherry color, had listened unblinking, his eyes on the gauges in front of him. Here was a place that was not a part of the world above the waterline; Sol had the feeling that nothing he did would change anything in this thrumming womb. On his way out he was surprised at how cool the original ninety degrees felt.

  Now he smoothed back his damp platinum hair with his free hand and resettled the semiautomatic pistol he had taken off Mike in the waistband of his pants and considered his strategy for getting off the boat before the madman he was working for gave the order to turn it into driftwood.

  On the second deck, crewcut Teddy shifted his weight from one sore ham to the other on the hard railing and changed hands on his .45 to mop off his right palm on his dress pants. He could feel the packet of cocaine in his left side pocket when he moved, and wanted to throw it over the side, but he didn’t because he thought he might need it later in spite of his repugnance. In the service he had always avoided the company of his fellow officers when they smelled of marijuana or their eyes seemed too bright. Originally a defense mechanism to preserve his chances for promotion, the resolve had hardened over the years into the same kind of contempt he held for civilians.

  But even it was nothing like the contempt he held for Ray, his partner on the other end of the deck. The rodentlike demolitions expert had something unclean about him that irritated the sensibilities of someone with bootblack and brass polish in his veins. Of everyone in Siegfried—God, the pedestrian melodrama of that name!—he despised this pimple-faced rat most. He personified everything about the group that Teddy found distasteful, and there was much of that. Fifteen years ago he might have been facing their like on the other side of a rifle at a place like Kent State. He sneered at their aims—his own had to do with simple revenge for being passed over in favor of inferiors—but he approved heartily of their methods. Fragging Mike in the presence of their hostages was a masterstroke, the burning of the Reichstag reduced to its purest terms.

  Teddy knew no philosophy but parity. Don had known this when he recruited him, but he had lost no sleep over it because of Teddy’s ability to gain access to necessary equipment and because his glittering hopes for early advancement had been dragged so low that he would follow Siegfried’s course to its logical end.

  Ray, riding aft of the second deck with a leg hooked over the rail and his pistol hanging heavily down his right side, a little motion-sick, thought in simpler terms, if he could be said to think at all. He had no talent or aptitude beyond his skill with explosives, and in fact he had as a boy been enrolled in a class for retarded children for five months until it was discovered that his problems were emotional rather than physical. He had entered college just under the wire and only his grades in those courses bearing upon his specialty had allowed him to graduate. He played timers, detonators, and nitric acids as if they were musical instruments, and if the officers who had investigated the fatal incident on the movie set in Malibu had been able to penetrate the dull shield that protected the animal workings of Ray’s brain, they’d have seen that it was no accident. He had nearly as little regard for himself as he had for the rest of humanity. The cocaine he had taken lessened it further.

  Right now he had only to raise his pistol and squeeze the trigger to activate the device that charged three and a half pounds of volatile gelatin molded under the entire length of the railing on the second deck.

  On the top passenger deck, Larry was using his handkerchief often because he had exhausted his entire supply of cocaine in one toot and it was making his nose run and his eyes water. Thanks to Doris he had been on the stuff for months and had a higher-than-average tolerance. He liked the way it cleared his head, isolating each thought in a crystal cell that kept its edges clean and bright, and it made him smile in such a way that his hostages flinched collectively whenever he raised his .45 to scratch his cheek with the iron sight. It also shrank his doubts and fears into nothing more than an annoying, pulsating lump under the euphoria.

  Mike’s death formed the center of the lump like the grain of sand a pearl is molded around. He had not said ten words during the many meetings before the event, and Larry had come to think of him as a rather dull but important factor in their plan, when he thought of him at all. Mike’s toadlike calm bordered on the soporific. Of all of them, he had seemed the least likely to rebel at the crucial moment and force Sol to kill him. Yet that was how Don had explained Fay’s hasty report, transmitted shortly after the burp of gunfire sounded below, when he had relayed it to Larry’s portable unit. Don had said that he had been worried about Mike all along and had asked Sol to keep an eye on him. Larry supposed that the ability to spot a traitor in his blandest guise was a requirement of leadership. But even the stimulant failed to make clear to him just what was Mike’s transgression.

  Doris meanwhile prowled aft, holding her M-16 like a furled umbrella and rubbing her upper arms for warmth. She had put on her sweater, but the thin expensive material was no match for the damp cold that was still in her bones from last night. The drug in her veins helped, but her extremities remained chilled. She had had circulation problems and an abnormally slow heartbeat since childhood. The condition had been the prime mover behind the exaggerated tenderness of her upbringing and the petulance that came as a result. She knew no standard of values beyond those given her by Larry, and that was why she was prowling the deck of an excursion boat full of hostages, looking to them like some hollow-eyed spectre from the deep with pale seaweed for hair and chewed nails against the plastic stock of death in a blue steel case.

  All was quiet aboard ship. In the pilot house, Don sang his “Do, re, mi” song under his breath and contemplated the gray fog skidding past the windscreen.

  CHAPTER 8

  Daniel Oliver Ackler.

  Macklin figured he’d remember the initials even if he forgot the name. He wondered if it was an affectation, a cocky killer’s idea of a grim joke, or if it was genuine and, if so, if it had had anything to do with his choice of occupations. Macklin liked it either way. If a joke, he would be the overconfident type, likely to swagger into Macklin’s sights out of sheer hubris. If genuine, his decision to follow a vocation in keeping with his initials might make him superstitious, a believer in signs and portents, and therefore predictable in his actions. Macklin himself believed in no signs not sanctioned by the highway department.

  If the information in the packet he had open on the work table in his study was reliable, Ackler was the man known to those passengers who had succeeded in jumping ship while it was still in the river as Sol, the same man who had pulled the trigger on a fellow terrorist as an object lesson for the hostages. He had come to the Detroit area four years earlier from places unknown and in spite of his youth had racked up an impressive number of independent hits, sometimes working for Macklin’s own employers, but most times earning his fee from persons outsid
e the organization with grudges and the cash to settle them. According to Howard Klegg, who had presented Macklin with the folder of typewritten data from his briefcase, Ackler was also the last man to see Jack DeGrew, bass violinist with Chester Crane and his Whoopers, alive.

  So far as could be told from cold print, the young button man had just two weaknesses, vanity and an inordinate regard for automatic weapons. The first, which placed him in a professional hairdressers’ chair twice a month to have his hair styled and dyed platinum, was something to keep in mind should Macklin meet him face to face. The second he could do something about right now.

  He finished memorizing the information and tipped it, folder and all, into a square wastebasket under the broad oak library table he used for a desk. Immediately the basket growled and chewed the sheets into confetti and deposited the tiny pieces into a reservoir in the bottom. Then he rose, drew forth a key attached to a reel in the steel container on his belt and unlocked a green metal file cabinet in the corner next to the shaded window. There was a safe in the bottom drawer with a double combination lock whose numbers could be changed at will and soon he had it open and drew out the only item it contained, a new blue Smith & Wesson .38 revolver with a natural rubber grip, smeared with pink cosmoline and sealed in clear plastic. He had purchased it only that day from a private source for three times the list price to make up for the lack of legal paperwork. Coming up, he had known killers who sneered at his costly caution while patting the favorite weapons they had used on half a dozen jobs and given names like Eloise and Baby Blue, but all of them were pushing government time or feeding worms in unhallowed ground, nonstop from the little room where they drop the little cyanide pellet into the bucket of acid. One killing to a gun, and there was no percentage in being greedy.

  Machine guns held no appeal for Macklin. Since the passing of the old Thompsons there was little aesthetically pleasing about the new sausage-shaped rattletraps stamped out of plastic and sheet metal in countries with no culture and muddy unidentifiable languages. And any idiot who could bend his finger and point could vomit a stream of lead over a broad area. It took something special to maneuver within revolver range of a dangerous target and let one well-placed bullet do the work of ninety hastily splattered ones.