“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 go
t 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.”
He cursed, took two steps, and seized the receiver. “Who gave you this number?”
“Never mind that,” said the familiar voice. “Can you talk?”
“Second.” He looked at Christine. She nodded and walked past him into the bedroom, trailing a scent of sandalwood and feminine musk. The door closed. “Okay.”
“You should have told me his name was Freddo, Macklin. It might have given us a place to start.”
“Who’s Freddo?”
“We left that shit back in the elevator,” Burlingame rasped. “He’s the growth on your ass, or I’ve wasted myself in the wrong business all these years. He just called.”
“Called where?”
“Called where. Called here. My office. He says he’s got something that belongs to you.”
“As for instance.”
“He wouldn’t say. But he said he was calling from your house.”
Macklin felt the ice mask.
“Macklin?”
“What else did he say?”
“Just to go back home. He’ll call you. That was the whole message, just that he’s got something of yours and to wait for his call. It’s your family, isn’t it? Macklin?”
He cradled the receiver. After a moment the telephone rang again. He picked up the receiver again and lowered it, severing the connection, then took it off the hook and laid it on the telephone stand.
Christine had on slippers and a lacy blue robe when he went back into the bedroom. She watched him draw on his shirt and when he looked at his socks on the floor she knelt and helped him into them and his shoes and tied the laces. He said, “Where’d he get your number?”
“I was going to ask you that. What are you doing, writing it on men’s room walls?” She rose, the smile dying on her face when she saw his expression. “Peter, what is it? Bad news?”
“I’m on the books at the federal building. I didn’t know I was on the books there before today. No one knows I come here. I didn’t tell anyone.”
She tried the smile. “What are you saying?”
“You tell me.”
“Peter, I didn’t tell anyone.”
“Burlingame knows I wear white Jockey shorts.”
“I didn’t know that was actionable.”
The back of his hand made a loud crack against her face. She staggered back and put a palm to her reddening cheek.
“I told you before to cut the sarcastic crap. What did they do, threaten you with accessory? Or was it a straight cash deal?”
“Murdering bastard,” she muttered.
“What?”
She said it again, louder. The rest of her face had flushed to match the imprint of his hand on her cheek. “You killed Carmine and then you moved in while my thighs were still warm from him.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“You knew someone was going to and you didn’t say anything. It’s the same. I hear things. People talk. To everyone but the police.”
“That’s why you turned informant?”
“I didn’t. If I’d thought of it I would have.”
“How come you still opened your door to me if you didn’t?”
“Because I love you and it stinks.”
“Oh, Christ.”
“It happens,” she said. “Maybe it never happened to you. There’s nothing good about it. It’s like being addicted. If I could get out from under I would in a minute.”
“Lying bitch.” He cocked his hand. She backpedaled swiftly, stepped on the hem of her robe, and fell, the material parting and uncovering her nakedness. Tears slicked her cheeks.
“I guess you’ll kill me,” she said.
“I only kill when I’m paid.”
“Whore.”
“You pay a prostitute,” he corrected. “You don’t pay a whore. You take her and leave.”
He snatched up his windbreaker and reached for the Smith & Wesson he had left on the same chair. The holster lay empty. He swung around and looked at Christine, standing now with the gun in one hand. He froze.
She smiled. Her eyes were wild. “So much power.” She raised the gun and opened her mouth to put the barrel inside.
He sprang, tromping her toes in her thin slipper. She screamed and he got her wrist between his thumb and forefinger at the break and twisted and the gun thumped the floor. In the same movement he swung his right shoulder into her body and she exhaled and stumbled backward. This time the wall kept her from falling. He picked up the revolver and shoved it into its holster.
“I’ll just find something else,” she said. Her robe remained open. Her breasts rose and fell rapidly.
“As long as it’s not my gun.” He hesitated, about to say something more. Then he left. He heard her on his way out of the apartment.
He took his time driving north on the Southfield Freeway while the sky purpled and the lights of one shopping center after another strung the landscape. Behind a gauzy haze the sun eased down like an old man lowering himself into scalding bath water. By morning the fog would have lifted completely.
It was dark when he reached his neighborhood. He parked in an empty service station two blocks south and got out and took off his windbreaker, reversing it to its dark side before putting it back on. He loosened the revolver in its holster and started walking. No one had summoned him home to wait for any telephone call.
The air held the slight chill of autumn testing the ground for winter. At the corner before his house he turned, then cut through a neighbor’s back yard and swung first one leg over a white picket fence and then the other and crossed a patio paved with flagstones and entered his own back yard with cold dew seeping through the canvas of his tennis shoes. Something crackled. He stopped.
“Raise them hands or they’re gonna be combing your brains out of the grass into next week.”
The voice was high, girlish, ha
lf whisper. He couldn’t place its source. He moved his hands away from his body.
“I said raise them.”
He raised them to his shoulders.
“You shouldn’t of killed Link,” said the voice.
There were no fences or hedges or trees in Macklin’s yard. Over Donna’s protests he had cut down the one cedar that had stood there when he bought the house, explaining that it obscured the view. Actually he had borrowed the idea from feudal lords who had sought to discourage intruders from gaining access to their castles from cover. There were no lights on inside the house, but the slight glow from a neighbor’s upstairs window found a triangle of shadow where Macklin’s back door stood ajar. There was no place else for Freddo to be hiding.
“You said you had something that belongs to me,” Macklin said.
“They’re tied up inside. That’s some boy you got, Gramps. After you give him that thousand he comes back to squeeze some more out of the old lady. I figure after I’m done with you I’ll save him for last.”
“I thought it was me you wanted.”
“This way the cops’ll be looking for some nut that jerks off to old Donna Reed reruns. Mass murder is getting to be Michigan’s chief export.”
Macklin moved his right foot a little as if shifting his weight. If he could move fast enough, get the open door between them for half a second. He spoke to cover the slight movement. “I guess you want me pretty bad.”
“Nothing personal. Just business. Stay put or I’ll start with your kneecaps.”
He had pushed it too much. He set his feet. In the darkness inside the doorway was a darker patch of shadow, manshaped. “It’s personal,” he said. “Otherwise I’d be dead now.”
The door opened farther. The light from the far window found a high forehead, the bridge of a nose, white shirt, gleaming metal farther down. “Back up. Keep backing up till I say stop.”
Macklin obeyed. His feet felt icy in his soaked shoes. He had retreated five feet when Freddo called for him to halt.
For a long time neither man moved. The television in the house next door was tuned to a religious program and the twenty-third psalm came straining through the window. Finally Freddo stepped forward and closed the door behind him. He was jacketless, the dark leather straps of his twin underarm holsters harnessing his upper body. He looked emaciated and his narrow face with stringy wisps of fair hair trailing down on either side and shadows in the hollows made a death mask in the poor light. Ten feet from Macklin he stopped.
Kill Zone Page 15