Kill Zone

by Loren D. Estleman

  “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 breakins 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.

  A red-and-black FOR RENT sign lay on a low bureau near the front door. Macklin lifted the cardboard to read it in the beam of his flash, leaving a clean rectangle in the dust on the bureau top. He memorized the telephone number of the rental agency, replaced the sign exactly as he had found it, and left the house the way he’d entered, manipulating the spring latch so that it locked when he closed the door.

  The walk back up the road seemed shorter. The party was still climbing steadily to a peak, jazzy theme music coming from the place with only the television set on told of a chase scene in progress, one or two of the homes that had had lights on before had gone silent and dark. Fishermen preparing for an early run in the morning. To avoid alerting the big dog across the road, Macklin cut around behind an unlighted house with no car in the driveway and a lawn that needed mowing. Then he started the steep climb up the bank to the highway. The place must have been hell to get into and out of in winter.

  A car that could have been brown in better light swept along the shoulder from behind a cluster of cedars and ground to a halt across Macklin’s path with a loud crunch, its rear wheels nearly lifting clear of the ground. A white face came to the open window on his side behind something black th
at gleamed. Macklin fell backward and rolled just as red and yellow fire lanced the night and a hard-edged roar drowned out the still-racing engine.

  “Take your lead foot off the gas, shitface,” shouted a voice Macklin didn’t recognize, in the deafening aftermath of the shot. The engine slowed to a smooth idle.

  He lay half-stunned on his back where he’d landed among damp weeds at the base of the bank and listened to the squeak of a car door opening. A foot chomped into gravel.

  CHAPTER 16

  For an agonizing moment he couldn’t get enough air and he was afraid his lungs had collapsed. Then they filled with a creak that seemed to him audible for yards. The wet, furry leaf of some noxious weed nuzzled his ear like a dog’s tongue and when he jerked his head away, startled, the flesh where it had touched burned and tingled with the beginnings of rash. He yanked loose his necktie and flung it away and cool damp air spilled down his throat.

  A smoky white shaft carved the darkness ten feet away, following the angle of the bank. When it swung his way he lay flat, holding his breath, and it grazed the tops of the weeds around him. Then it swung back and he heard footsteps in the gravel again growing louder. Mist curled in the beam of the powerful flash.

  Macklin turned slowly on to his left hip and groped behind his back for the knife Herb Pinelli had given him. His fingers went inside the empty sheath. It had dropped out during his fall. He felt the ground around him desperately. His hand bumped something solid and he closed his fingers around a two-foot length of fallen tree limb.

  He couldn’t hear the footsteps now. In their place, wet grass and leaves made slithering sounds against shoe leather and fabric. Macklin rolled back the other way on to his right knee and lifted his rude club. The illuminated lens of the flash grew elliptical, becoming round as it rotated back his way. He braced himself to spring.

  “Who’s out there?”

  The shout came from behind Macklin and to his right, a man’s voice, coarse with drink or sleep. At the same time a porch light belonging to a house on his side of the road blazed on. In its indecent glare, transfixed, stood a slight young man with long blond hair in a suit not built for traipsing through wet foliage. He held a foot-long police flashlight encased in black rubber in his left hand and a large revolver in his right. For a suspended instant his eyes met Macklin’s. One lid drooped, and Macklin thought at first the man was winking at him. Then he backed out of the light. Quick footsteps in gravel, and then the engine that had been idling all this time swelled and a car door slammed and tires spat stones that pattered into the brush like fat raindrops. Gears changed automatically and the engine noise was smothered by distance.

  Macklin became aware then of a noise that he had put down to a combination of his pounding heart and panting breaths. The chained dog down the road was barking and had been steadily since the shot was fired.

  A fat juniper bush at his back made a bulky shadow in front of him, and he hugged the bush.

  “Fuckers shining deer right out in the open,” muttered the voice of a moment earlier. “Calling the sheriff.”

  The shadow moved and retreated back the way it had come. A door swung shut. When the porch light went off and darkness spilled back in, Macklin started up the road. Something gleamed dully in the grass at the side and he stooped and picked up Herb Pinelli’s knife, mopping off both sides on his coatsleeve before sheathing it.

  He kept to the edge on his way back up the highway, but no traffic greeted him. When he reached the landing site he sprinted the rest of the way to his car and opened the door. The interior light came on and found a gaping black hole in the dash with red and black wires hanging out like entrails.

  Macklin grinned joylessly at his reflection in the windshield. While he had been busy breaking into an empty house and getting shot at, some of the local talent had made off with his radio.

  Chester Crane awoke with a line of saxophones playing “Satin Doll” in his skull.

  He hated the tune. It had been the band’s signature in the waning days of Swing and he was expected to conduct it everywhere he appeared. Now he had reason to hate it more than ever. He groaned from the pain in his head and clamped his mouth shut against a rising tide of bile.

  “Let it out,” said a voice close to him. “Don’t try to choke it back.”

  It sounded like good advice. He turned his head and splattered the deck.

  Deck. How’d he know it wasn’t a floor? Then he remembered, and cold fear filled the emptiness in his stomach. He opened his eyes and looked at the lights mounted on the ceiling, or whatever the nautical term was for the underside of the next deck. His eyes grated in their sockets when he shifted them to the concerned face in between. The face belonged to a young man with short dark hair and a square jaw, the kind they were making sex machines out of on television that season. Crane didn’t recognize it.

  “Can you sing?” he asked the face. His voice gargled. He swallowed.

  The face rearranged itself into a puzzled smile. “Only in the shower. Why?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Once we get you up on that stand in one of those faggoty red jackets the girls won’t care what you sound like.”

  “Thanks, but I’ve got a career. I’m going to be a doctor. You’re my first patient.”

  As he spoke, the young man mopped Crane’s vomit off the deck with one of the band’s scarlet blazers. Crane was lying on the deck with what felt like another blazer rolled up and placed behind his head. He raised an arm weighted with iron and stroked his bald cranium, sucking in air through his teeth when his fingers touched a pulpy mass behind the crown.

  –“Where’s my rug?”

  “If you mean your toupee, it’s safe. You’ll have to wait until that lump goes down before it will fit.”

  “Am I shot?” The last thing he remembered was being chased along the rail by Fay and her M-16.

  “No. The one they call Sol cracked you on the back of the head with the butt of his rifle. You’ve been unconscious for several hours.”

  “Tommy Dorsey got himself a boo-boo on his gourd,” said Fay, and giggled.

  Crane shifted his attention to the black woman standing over him with the automatic weapon cradled in her arms. It was dark out now and her teeth and the whites of her eyes looked brighter than they actually were as she went on giggling. She had made another visit to her pocket recently.

  “You should’ve let me stay out,” the bandleader said.

  “I thought it best not to move you. You might have a concussion.”

  “What I have is a hangover. Without a night before to take my mind off it.”

  “Carol?”

  A redhead who might have been pretty with make-up and some dental work on her prominent front teeth moved into Crane’s line of sight and a fold of damp cloth was placed on his forehead. Sharp pain raked the bone along his sinuses and submerged itself in the broader ache behind his eyes. He smiled at the girl, and that hurt too. “Are you going to be a doctor too?”

  “Nurse.” Smiling shyly, she lifted the cloth and reversed it. She was wearing a pink sweater over a white summer dress.

  “One of my wives was a nurse. The second one, I think. Hi. I’m Chet Crane.”

  “Carol Turn—”

  “Turner,” broke in the doctor-to-be. “I’m Ted Delano. We’re engaged.”

  “Congratulations.” Crane took his hand. It felt warm, and he realized then how cold his was. He shivered involuntarily.

  “He needs a blanket,” Delano said over his shoulder.

  Fay stopped giggling. “So get one. I ain’t no nurse’s aide.”

  “Obviously not. The job takes character.”

  The muzzle of the M-16 came down. “Bite your tongue, Kildare. I got another clip in my pocket.”

  They stayed like that for a moment, Delano down on one knee looking up the bore of the automatic rifle in the woman’s small hands. Then the transceiver she had slung from her shoulder squawked.

  “Fay?”

  She lif
ted the unit and depressed the speaker button. “Everything’s tight, boss man.”

  “How’s Crane?”

  “Just snortin’ bullets. Fine as pine wine.”

  “Sol?”

  “The Spook is swell as hell and ringin’ the bell. Holding the fort aft.” She giggled.

  “Don’t stand so close to the powder, okay? It’s got to last another fifty hours.”

  “You gots it, Massa Don.”

  She lowered the radio, and with it her toothy smile. Her face now didn’t look as if it could support one. Stepping back, she nestled the rifle in the crook of her arm. “Go get your blanket, Dr. Jekyll. I won’t kill no one till you get back.”

  The motel was one of a dozen in a neon-lit strip along the main highway that had succeeded in making a tiny, glitzy Las Vegas out of what had been a quiet Michigan port village. There were box-print curtains over the sliding windows in Macklin’s bungalow, false maple paneling on the walls, and Plexiglas on top of everything a man could set a drink down on. Macklin broke the bathroom glass out of plastic, colored some water with bourbon from the flat pint he had sent the desk clerk after, and stretched out atop the bedcovers to sip and think. It was the first time in years he had drunk alcohol on the job. He was bending a lot of rules lately.

  He had parked his Cougar behind the bungalow out of sight of the highway, but he was sure the man who had tried to kill him wouldn’t make a third attempt the same night. Professionals knew when to back off and wait for a better chance. And he was a professional, or Macklin would have been aware of his presence long before he made his move, or at least he hoped so. Not a local either: Macklin knew every heavyweight in the area.

  He drained his glass, looked at the bottle, thought better of it, and capped it. Then he lifted the receiver off the telephone on the bedside table and dialed the number of the rental agent whose sign he had seen in what had been Daniel Ackler’s cottage, holding down the base with the hand gripping the receiver to keep it from jiggling off the table. He could never understand why the telephones in most motel rooms were so much lighter than instruments in other places.