Kill Zone

by Loren D. Estleman

  “We’ll do this right.” He twirled the big .44 western style and snugged it into his left holster, raised and resettled it. Set his feet.

  Macklin lowered his arms. “You’re kidding.”

  “Anytime you feel lucky.”

  “I’m unarmed.”

  “Like hell.”

  “Someone’s holding a gun for me. I was going to get it when Burlingame called. You can frisk me.”

  A thin vertical line cracked the smooth marble of Freddo’s forehead. Finally he nodded and moved to slide the .22 target pistol out of his right holster. Macklin scooped out the Smith & Wesson and shot him three times in the chest.

  The long-barreled revolver bobbled out of Freddo’s hand and they hit the ground together. He lay twitching on his stomach, one eye staring up at Macklin. A dot of blood darkened the visible corner of his open mouth. The mouth was working.

  Someone had turned off the twenty-third psalm. There was an outline at the window of the house next door.

  “Who hired you?” Macklin demanded. He was standing over the wounded man with the .38 smoking in his hand.

  “I needa doc’or,” said Freddo.

  “I’ll get you a doctor. Who drew up the contract?”

  “I can’t breeve.” He coughed. A string of bloody saliva stretched between his mouth and the wet grass.

  “Was it Maggiore?”

  “Mashy.”

  “Maggiore?”

  “Mashorry. Yeah. Getta doc’or.”

  Macklin leaned down, grinning. “Die, you rat-faced bastard,” he said.

  He found Donna and Roger sitting back-to-back in hard chairs in the kitchen. They had been gagged tightly with dish towels and their wrists and ankles were bound to the chairs and each other with copper wire from the garage. Wild eyes stared at him when he switched on the light.

  “I don’t have time to untie you,” he said, reloading the Smith & Wesson from among the cartridges in his pocket and dumping the spent shells into his other pocket from old habit. “I’ll let the police do that. If our neighbor is as civic-minded as he is religious he’s called them already.”

  Donna hummed something frantic through her gag. He holstered the revolver and stepped forward and loosened the dish towel.

  “Son of a bitch,” she snarled. “I suppose you killed him just like all the others.”

  “No, each one is different.”

  He reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew the thousand dollars he’d taken off Freddo. His thousand. Some of the bills were stained dark on one corner. He approached Roger, who shrank back in his bonds, and poked the bills into his son’s jeans pocket. “Don’t come running to me if the police take it off you.”

  He went upstairs and got the rest of the fifty thousand out of the safe in his study. Then he went back down to the kitchen and folded ten thousand in hundreds into the flour canister on the linoleum counter. He could hear a siren now, a long way off. He looked at Donna. “I never wanted this here.”

  She spat at him.

  CHAPTER 25

  He drove the Cougar to a chain restaurant on Lahser and waited in the parking lot. During the next fifteen minutes, three people came out and got into their cars and left and two more parties drove in. None of the cars was more than five years old. A few minutes later a fourteen-year-old GMC pickup with a six-foot-high cab and holes rusted through its rear panels trundled into a space thirty yards down and a five-foot-high man with a handlebar moustache got out tugging down the hem of his zip jacket and went inside. Macklin gave it another five minutes, then left the Cougar with his key still in the ignition and hoisted himself into the driver’s seat of the pickup and tried the wheel. It turned both ways. The vehicle had been built before the development of the self-locking steering column. He stripped two wires under the dash and had the engine started in thirty seconds. He had dropped out of school at 16 to go to work for an automobile repossessions firm, and except for some cosmetic computerization and a couple of clumsy security devices, cars hadn’t changed all that much inside. By now there would be a BOL bulletin out on a silver Cougar with Macklin’s plate.

  Just to tangle the chain of investigation, after twenty blocks he switched to a cream-colored Dodge Dart of similar vintage parked at a curb in a residential district and left the pickup in its place. In a shopping center lot on Twelve Mile Road he traded plates with a blue AMC Spirit and drove away feeling cleansed. Stopping at a bank of public telephones outside a service station on the corner of Telegraph, he dropped a quarter into a slot without getting out of the car, dialed a number from memory, and spoke for a few minutes with a man whose voice sounded as if he had a fishbone caught in his throat. Then he took Telegraph south to I–75.

  He changed cars once again in Toledo and followed the shore of Lake Erie east. Around eleven o’clock his back began to ache from all the driving and he stopped to stretch his legs and drink a cup of black coffee at an all-night diner. The waitress traded ribald jokes with a party of rowdy truckers in a corner booth and paid him scant attention. He left a modest tip. His stomach growled on his way out but he wasn’t eating.

  Stars were peering through breaks in the overcast when he entered the Sandusky city limits. He left the car in a small factory employee parking lot during a shift change and walked to a motel, where he rented a room from a sleepy clerk for two hours’ sleep and changed a ten-dollar bill into dimes and quarters. After awakening he washed his face and shaved with bar soap and a disposable razor he’d stopped to buy on the way. He threw away the razor and used the pay telephone in the hall around the corner from the registration desk to call Randall Burlingame’s Detroit office long distance.

  “Macklin, where the hell are you?” The FBI man’s voice was wound tight, and Macklin guessed he hadn’t been home. “All hell’s busting loose here. The Detroit police want you for murder.”

  “It was self-defense. I’m calling to see if you’ve got a fix on the Boblo boat as of this morning.”

  “Listen, we can smooth over the thing in Southfield. The stiff was wearing a Colt Python in a shoulder rig and there was a .22 revolver found nearby. Just come down here and we’ll have you out in an hour.”

  “Can’t make it. Where’s the boat?”

  “I’m dangling from a bush over the rapids on this, Macklin. If it gets out we engaged the services of a hunted murderer, Washington will saw it off at the roots.”

  “Burlingame, I don’t care.”

  “You will if the Bureau disavows responsibility for your actions. You’ll be a guest of the state into the next century.”

  “I’m looking at that now. For the stiff in River Rouge.”

  “You’re off the hook on that one. An old lady in the building found the manager’s body. She saw a man leaving his apartment just before. She didn’t see his face, but the description she gave matches the stiff at your place. That doesn’t mean you won’t go down for that one.”

  The operator cut in, demanding money for the next three minutes. Macklin fed quarters into the slot.

  “Macklin, where are you?”

  “Where’s the boat?”

  “Fuck you.”

  Macklin checked his watch. “Eighteen hours, Burlingame.”

  The FBI man swore again and left the line. A moment later he came back on with a new set of chart points. “Got those written?” he asked.

  “I got them.” Macklin didn’t bother to say he never wrote anything down.

  “One favor?” asked Burlingame. “Seeing as I’m about to blow my pension and violate policy by interfering in a civil murder investigation, will you at least call me before you move? I’d sort of like to look like I know what’s going on when the reporters get here.”

  “I can’t promise that.”

  “Who the fuck said anything about promises? Say you’ll try.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Okay. And Macklin?”

  “I’m running out of change, Burlingame.”

  “Macklin, I don’t care. I
just wanted to say that if the Bureau had ten men like you, the J. Edgar Hoover Building would still be a swamp.”

  Not having a topper, Macklin hung up.

  He left the motel and walked northeast. The wind freshened his cheeks and buckled his windbreaker and grew stronger with the scent of moisture and fish as he walked. Sunlight flashed metallically between buildings, reflecting off water, and then he followed steep cracking pavement downhill to a row of sagging docks glittering with millions of fish scales with the choppy cold blue surface of Lake Erie yawning endlessly beyond. Men in Tshirts and filthy jeans and khakis were at work, had been for hours despite the sleepy red disc of the sun still struggling with inertia over the water, climbing up and down ladders and across gangplanks carrying cans of fuel and boxes of tackle and ice chests. In spite of his workman’s clothes and rumpled look, Macklin felt as out of place as any landlubber.

  Finally he found the dock number he wanted and walked to the end, where a thirty-foot launch slightly lower than the dock rode the water, with Wolf Larsen stenciled across the fantail. A fat man with lumpy white-stubbled features under a crushed yachting cap sat in the back of the open cabin pouring beer down his throat from a gold can. He was naked to the waist and wisps of white hair stirred against rolls of shocking pink lard on his chest. His feet, planted firmly on the deck, were large and bare and the square toenails were as thick as horns.

  “Captain Stephenson?” Macklin asked.

  The fat man looked up at him, screwing up his face and shielding his eyes under a hand cross-hatched with old dirt and tar. He looked like a bloated Popeye. “Mister Stephenson,” he corrected, in a voice furry with phlegm. “You get busted down from chief petty to ABS three times in eighteen years in the Coast Guard and you get so you don’t ever want to hear no officer’s titles. Who are you?”

  “My name’s Macklin. Manny Felder gave me your name. I talked to him on the phone in Detroit last night.”

  “Manny, how is the thieving kike bastard?”

  “Doing okay. He’s semiretired now, turned over the tug and the salvage business to his son Aaron. He said to ‘tell that lard-butt Scandihoovian he still owes me five hundred from that poker game two years ago Christmas.’”

  “He’s got it backwards. He owes me. Only Yid I ever knew could tell a sextant from his abbreviated dick. How do you know him?”

  “He helped me dump a load of cement into Lake St. Clair a couple of times. With someone inside.”

  Stephenson paused with the beer can halfway to his lips, squinting up at Macklin. Then he slugged down the rest of the contents, crumpled the can, and flipped it over the side, where it bobbed on the surface a long time before shipping enough water through its opening to sink. “I don’t deep-six cold meat,” he said, and burped. “They fine the shit out of you for just dumping garbage into the lake. I was to get caught I might lose my skipper’s license.”

  “You had it yanked once for thirty days already. For smuggling Havana cigars and Russian caviar into the United States from Canada.”

  “I still got friends in the Coast Guard or I wouldn’t’ve got it back at all. I get into accessory to murder one, that shit, they don’t know me from Davy Jones.”

  “I’m not doing any dumping today. I want to hire your launch.”

  “There’s a marina a hundred yards down the beach. They rent everything from rowboats to minesweepers.”

  “Marinas keep logs.”

  “So do I.”

  “Not always, according to Manny.”

  “Manny talks a lot for a Hebe. When you figuring on going out?”

  “Tonight after dark.”

  Stephenson lifted the lid off a battered cooler full of ice and gold cans and popped the top off one, spraying the inside of the boat. “Can’t help you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Tonight I’m taking a doctor from Dayton out after coho. Fancies himself a dark fisherman.” He tipped up the can. It gurgled twice before he lowered it.

  “Cancel him.”

  The sailor patted his huge pink stomach and burped again. “Let me give you some free advice, just in case you ever decide to get into this business. Don’t ever cancel a doctor. None of ’em knows the first fucking thing about anything once they get out of that white coat, and they pay and pay and pay anyone who looks like they do know.”

  “This one paying a thousand?” Macklin took out his roll, to which he had added from the envelope in another pocket, and skinned off ten one hundred-dollar bills. Stephenson watched him, marble-blue eyes glittering in folds of pink fat.

  “I don’t stand in front of no bullets,” he said. “I’d bleed Budweiser.”

  “You won’t get near any shooting.”

  “How long’s the trip?”

  Macklin gave him the chart points he had gotten from Randall Burlingame.

  “That ain’t no thousand bucks’ worth,” Stephenson said.

  “I want you to throw in a crash course in skin diving. Manny says you used to be an instructor.”

  “You ever been?”

  “Never.”

  Stephenson chuckled, his stomach a bellows. The chuckle turned into a bubbling cough and he hawked something up from his square toes and spat over the side. “Forget it. I might could turn you into a diver that won’t suck in a double lungful of Lake Erie and go to stay with the bottom-feeders his first time out alone. In about six weeks. There’s an undertow out there will suck you under like Granny Gums’ best blow job.”

  Macklin unwrapped another five hundred. “I’ve got fifteen hundred says you’re a better instructor than that.”

  Stephenson drained the can, tossed it after its predecessor without bothering to crush it, and hoisted himself to his feet, rocking the boat violently before he got his hands on the rope ladder and climbed up to the dock. Macklin was surprised to see that he was barely five feet tall, and nearly as broad. “Where are you going?”

  “I got a place on the beach,” Stephenson said, closing a sandpapery paw on the money in the killer’s hand. He stank of fish and sweat, none of it fresh. “You wasn’t planning on doing no skin diving without equipment, was you?”

  CHAPTER 26

  “‘Life is a mess.’”

  “What?” asked Macklin. He was poised on the rope ladder, handing down fins and a mask and a wet suit and a safety vest and a knife in a waterproof scabbard to Stephenson, who stood in the boat to receive and stow the items. They had selected the equipment, some of it mildewed and evil-smelling, from various niches and corners in the sailor’s cluttered fiberboard-and-aluminum shack on a patch of littered beach a quarter-mile from the docks.

  Stephenson said it again. “‘It is like yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves and may move for a minute, an hour, a year, or a hundred years, but that in the end will cease to move. The big eat the little that they may continue to move, the strong eat the weak that they may retain their strength. The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is all.’ Know who wrote that?”

  “Cole Porter?”

  “No sir, Jack London. He had Wolf Larsen say it in The Sea Wolf. Know that book by heart. It’s the Great American Novel and the best story there is about life on the water. Cast off that line.”

  “I always heard it was Moby Dick.” Macklin slipped a loop of hemp made green and stiff with dead plankton off a dock piling and tossed it to Stephenson. Then he climbed down into the boat. The hull slid on the water and his stomach shifted a little the way it did when a fast elevator came to a stop with him inside. He would have to get used to that before nightfall.

  “Moby Dick, shit. Melville would of had a cute little story there if he flushed all that bilge about the wonderful history of whaling and spent some time developing Ahab. Christ, you don’t even see the fucking white whale till the last third of the book. No, it’s The Sea Wolf.” Coiling the line aft, he raised his voice to a singsong tenor. “‘What can I tell you?… Of the meagerness of a child’s life? Of fish diet and coarse living? Of going out wi
th the boats from the time I could crawl? Of my brothers, who went away one by one to the deep-sea farming and never came back? Of myself, unable to read or write, cabin-boy at the mature age of ten on the coastwise, old-country ships? Of the rough fare and rougher usage, where kicks and blows were bed and breakfast and took the place of speech, and fear and hatred and pain were my only soul-experiences?’ I nearly shit my pants when my old man read that to me when I was six.” He slipped into a bright orange life jacket that came to within eight inches of tying in front, tossed another to Macklin, and clambered into a seat upholstered in tough Naugahyde behind the helm, rocking the boat alarmingly. The big inboard started with a pleasant belching rumble when he turned the key. Macklin sat on the bench at the rear of the cabin. They pulled away from the dock and swung in a long arc toward open water. Wind teased Macklin’s hair.

  He raised his voice over the whining engine. “You ran away from home to take up the sailing life, right?”

  “Hell, no. Home was a sixty-foot sealer built in Frisco in ’ninety-eight with a steam clanker and quarter-inch boiler plate bolted to the inside of the hull. My old man floated good hooch across the lake from Ontario during the dry time. I bet I personally loaded a million gallons of Old Log Cabin by the time I was eight.” Steering with one elbow, the fat man opened a fresh can from the cooler. He had laid in two more six-packs from the tiny refrigerator in his hut. “He was a terrible old man. Used to get drunk every Tuesday night and screw my sister. Someone smothered him with a pillow when he was dying of cancer in ’forty-six.”

  The engine pounded Macklin’s eardrums for a half hour before Stephenson cut the throttle and killed the noise. There was water all around them with no sign of land and only one other craft in sight, a sailboat whose bright-colored sheet stuck up like a sharkfin out of the far horizon. Seagulls swooped at the water and made rusty creaking noises through their sharp beaks.