Black and White Ball
Page 3
“Shame on you. Hands across the border and all that.”
“They’re too picky for my taste. They won’t extradite to capital-punishment states. Lifer place like ours, they’d probably insist we feed them gluten-free.”
“Got a picture, or is he like Dracula?”
“I pulled it after you called.” She opened a drawer and skidded a glossy sheet my way. It was a driver’s license photo and vitals downloaded from the computer files in Lansing. I’d seen that same receding hairline, nondescript nose, and bland expression on three faces that week. He was a few years younger than I was. Height 5'11", weight l70, eyes gray. They say the eyes are the windows of the soul. His curtains were drawn.
I gave it back. “That’s the closest thing to a walking brown paper bag I’ve ever seen.”
“His best asset. The eyewitnesses he left breathing gave us swell descriptions, if you like stick figures.”
“Dorfman says he’s going through a divorce.”
She nodded. “Laurie. Half his age and smarter than any moll you ever met. Had her down here a couple of times, comparing our exes. She knows more about mine now than I do about hers. She’s either more afraid of him than she is of us or she stands to clean up by not sending him over to the system.”
I grinned. “Seriously, ‘moll’? Someone’s been watching TCM.”
“A girl’s got to unwind. I read where Napoleon took his mind off war by playing chess.”
“I read where he cheated.”
“Another thing we have in common.”
I drank coffee. She made it strong without making it bitter. You have to be born knowing how. “You painted her in broad strokes. You’re a better judge of character than that.”
“That’s like telling an artist he can draw a straight line. It’s in the job description.” She shook her head, making the hoops wobble. “I can’t decide whether she took it into the marriage or learned on the run. She cracks about as easy as bedrock, but to talk to her you’d think you’d tapped the debutante’s ball. That’s if you can find her. We couldn’t justify spending the money to keep her under surveillance, but the last spot check we made, she’d sold her place in Southfield and didn’t leave a forwarding.” The hoops stopped moving. “Tell me that isn’t the job, Amos: fingering her for the thirty-eight-caliber divorce.”
“Come on, Deb.”
She wouldn’t come on, though. Her eyes were as dead as asteroids.
I said, “Okay, so past performance doesn’t guarantee future results. If he’s as slick as you say, he doesn’t need me to flush her out. Anyway Dorfman gave me a contact number, and if he’s got it, so has his client.”
“What is it?”
“You know better than to ask.”
“If there’s one thing I do know, it’s to ask anyway. Amos, if she knows where Macklin is, we might nail him before he can ditch any evidence that would put him out of our misery for years.”
“Yours; not mine. Not sharing that kind of information is what puts the ‘private’ in private detective. It’s all I’ve got to offer that you can’t.”
“We could sweat it out of you at County.”
“I wish you’d try. You can’t buy advertising like that.”
“You’re taking the job?”
“I won’t know that until I know what the job is.”
She looked down into her cup, reading the grounds. “You don’t tell me how to be a cop, I don’t tell you how to be a snoop.”
“Sounds like you’re telling me anyway.”
The phone on her desk rang. She rested a hand on the receiver. “Just watch your step. Whatever Macklin’s up to, it’s to his neck.”
* * *
Thirteen Hundred is as easy to get out of as it is to get into, which is not at all. I think the city reverses the direction of all the one-way streets on a rotating basis. If you don’t concentrate, you wind up driving a pile of scrap. I’d negotiated three of the four when I realized I’d taken on a passenger.
“Keep driving. Don’t run any lights.”
I spun the wheel, taking aim at the lamppost on the corner.
But the man on the right side of the backseat, out of range of the rearview mirror, had learned the same lesson I had. I was climbing the curb when something cold and hard crackled the hairs on the nape of my neck. The air was dry that day; a steel muzzle generates enough static electricity to light a room. I swung the car left, not quite in time to avoid skinning paint off the right fender, but with enough space between me and the driver of the panel truck behind to hit me with his horn instead of his bumper. I drove, with a gun at my head.
HIM
FIVE
It’s difficult to acquire a gun in Canada: The government in Ottawa practically spelled it out on its license plates.
Like so many civic mottoes, it lied.
The country was a hunter’s paradise. The demand far outweighed the legal restrictions. You just had to know a guy who knew a guy, and not so well either.
The guy Macklin knew directed him to four blocks of business district off the Queen’s Highway and a shaggy dog of a shop elbowed in between a Rexall Drugs and a butchery with a take-a-number dispenser visible through the glass door and no takers. The shop he needed was paneled in knotty pine. There were racks of camo suits, deer whistles in baskets, pinup queens on retro tin signs, packages of beef jerky, and dead flies embalmed on hanging strips that looked like curls of whittled wood. The head of a moth-pocked moose looked down on the counter from high on a wall with a brown Christmas wreath drooping from one antler. It wasn’t this year’s wreath. It was too far out of reach to bother retrieving.
The place had a stale cedar smell that might have been piped in—bootlegged, like the pine and taxidermy, for the benefit of Yank tourists who thought the world had stopped turning north of Lake Erie; in that particular location there were no cedar trees, only birch and jack pine, stunted and twisted like arthritic old men. A computerized cash register was the only thing in the shop that hadn’t been smuggled in from Jack London, and it wore a deerskin hairside out. The man behind the counter had on leather suspenders and a red-and-black-checked shirt buttoned to the throat. It was too hot for flannel with the radiator going full blast; sweat drops glittered on his bald head and the rash around his neck generated heat at a distance of ten paces. He looked up from whatever he was doing when the front door opened, disturbing sleigh bells attached to a harness.
Macklin stopped at the counter. “Gullstrand.”
“You just missed him. He’s been dead eight years.”
“They said in Windsor it was seven.”
“Who said?” Baldy had returned his concentration to his project. It involved a precision screwdriver and some unidentifiable metal parts scattered on the counter.
“Doesn’t matter. It’s nearer six. Gullstrand sold me a thirty-eight on a forty-five frame six and a half years ago and he wasn’t a ghost.”
“You Peters?”
Macklin nodded.
The bald man’s hands were thick-veined and mottled, but they moved so fast the fingers were a blur. In three seconds he had the parts assembled and Macklin looked into the muzzle of a two-shot over-and-under .22 magnum pistol.
The face on the public side of the counter remained bland. They were the kind of features even the man in Windsor wouldn’t remember enough to describe them in a way that would do anyone any good. Baldy registered disappointment at the lack of surprise on the customer’s face. Macklin stood motionless while Baldy disassembled the piece as swiftly as he’d put it together. He spread his palms on the counter. “Still got that remounted thirty-eight?”
“I lost it.”
“Too bad. I’d’ve bought it back for more than you paid. You always so careless?”
“Always.”
“Wait here.”
“I go with you.”
The counterman looked again at that expressionless face, nodded, and flipped up the gate at his elbow.
Macklin waite
d while he drew out a key on an extender attached to his belt and unlocked a steel door with a painted woodgrain behind the counter. A sign bolted to it read OWNER DOES NOT KEEP CASH ON PREMISES. When the man opened it and held it for him, he inclined his head forward. The man went in first.
A windowless storeroom took up most of the ground-floor space. It smelled of disinfectant, dust, and the vanilla odor of gun oil. An exit door, steel also but lacking cosmetic paint, was chained and padlocked, contrary to the fire laws, and a surveillance camera mounted high on an electric swivel prowled the room with its unblinking red eye. Gray steel utility shelves stood perpendicular to the walls, with aisles between, lit by fluorescent tubes that flickered and buzzed when the wall switches were palmed up. The shelves contained folded flannel shirts, heavy-duty dungarees, more camo, ear-flapped caps, insulated boots, vials of doe urine, and other items that were on display in the shop. Here as there, no sign of firearms was visible.
A number of yellow-painted steel drums sporting HazMat warnings formed a row against the back wall. The bald man lifted the top off one, releasing an earthy smell and a glimpse of cut-up carrots nearly filling it to the top.
“Deer feed,” he explained, plunging both arms to the elbows in the pile. “Draws water like a shop vac. You could store a car in here for five years and it’ll come out clean of rust like it never left the floor. Cars keep getting smaller, you’ll be able to do just that in a couple-three years. Your Washington and its fucking EPA.”
Macklin said nothing, which was the extent of his store of small talk. The man rummaged, stopped, spread his feet, and lifted out a transparent forty-gallon trash bag, grunting under the weight. Inside were handguns, rifles, assault weapons, and unattached sniper scopes, all sealed in thick semi-opaque plastic. “I got M-sixteens, Mac-tens, Uzis, a reconditioned Kalashnikov: You name it. Claymores, if you care to relive the good old days in ’Nam. Had me a cherry Tommy, but I sold that to a Capone buff last month.” He separated two feet of camo-painted steel and plastic with two grips and a barrel as big around as a plastic toilet tube and held it up. “Grenade launcher. Take out a platoon of Isis ragheads with one squeeze of the trigger.”
“Let’s see that Rossi.”
Baldy took out a blue revolver with a four-inch barrel and lowered the sack to the floor. He pulled open the seal with a ripping sound, slid out the weapon, a .38 with a four-inch barrel, freed the cylinder, and ran it up and down his opposite arm, making it buzz, like in a western. “Sure you don’t want a semi-auto?”
“Yeah.”
He grinned. “‘Get rid of that revolver. They’re always empty when you need them most.’ Jimmy said that in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. Cagney?”
Macklin held out his hand.
The man surrendered the gun. It had a checked walnut grip, warm to the touch and a little worn. Macklin inspected the empty chambers, extended it at arm’s length at shoulder height, aiming at the wall, and squeezed the trigger. The hammer cocked and struck the firing pin with a sharp snap. He spun the revolver, offering it back butt-first.
“Stiff. Let’s see the Smitty.”
The bald man resealed the Rossi in its package, laid it on a convenient shelf, and dug another blue .38 revolver out of the bag.
It was a Bodyguard Airweight, hammerless, with a two-inch barrel. This time he handed it over without demonstrating the cylinder action. The butt was Neoprene, still shiny from the manufacturer. It smelled like a new toy. Again Macklin inspected the chambers, aimed at the wall, and worked the trigger. The Smith & Wesson responded smoothly, bringing forth the same crisp snap.
“Where can I try it out?”
From between two stacks of shelves the other dragged a square fiberboard carton filled with dirt. “Floor sweepings,” he said. “I get all the use out of stuff everyone else throws out; just like Henry Ford.”
“How about I knock ten percent off the price every time you spin a story?”
“Hey, it’s a slow day.” But the bald man shut his trap.
He stepped to another shelf stacked with shallow boxes labeled THERMO-SURE UNDERWEAR, counted down from the top, slid one out, and lifted off the top. He drew out a box of cartridges and carried it to his customer. Macklin took one, blew on it, inserted it in a chamber, adjusted the cylinder. He pointed the barrel at the carton on the floor. “Noise?”
Baldy pounded his fist against the nearest wall. “Lath-and-plaster. Stuffed with asbestos. Don’t tell the inspectors.”
The side of the carton was stenciled CANADIAN CLUB. As Macklin took aim, the bald proprietor stuck his fingers in his ears.
The report rang off the walls. Macklin lowered the weapon and looked at the ragged hole the bullet had torn through the triangular space in the first A.
“History?”
“None to speak of. Service station robbery in Saskatoon last April. It wasn’t fired.”
“It will be once more if you’re telling another stretcher.”
A pair of palms shining with callus came up. “I bought this place at Gullstrand’s estate sale, month after he croaked. After all this time, I made that kind of blunder, I’d’ve hosted my own. Ask Windsor.”
“I did. That’s why I’m here. How much?”
“American?” When Macklin nodded: “Two grand even. My business, I don’t got to charge tax.” He tried a grin; couldn’t manage it.
“Quote me another price.”
“I can’t beat Bass Pro, you want to go that route. I’m thinking you don’t.”
Macklin gave him points for showing spine. “Fifteen hundred.”
“I got to make some profit!”
“You will, if that service station heist isn’t a dodge. You paid more than three hundred, you’d’ve been out of business before I got here.”
“Seventeen and I’ll throw in the box of ammo.”
“Six.”
“Six boxes? Hey, man, I was just kidding about the ragheads. I sell ordnance, I don’t ask questions, but if you’re fixing to go into a church or someplace, make a donation in lead—”
“Six cartridges.” Macklin plucked the spent shell from the cylinder and held it out.
“Fifteen hundred.” Baldy put the shell in his pocket. He waited for the cash to change hands before he tipped six fresh cartridges into the customer’s palm.
Macklin opened the door to go out, but turned to glance back through the gap as the bald man tugged the top off another yellow drum and stuffed the wad of bills into a sea of green.
OWNER DOES NOT KEEP CASH ON PREMISES, the sign said. He hoped for the owner’s sake he was more truthful than his advertising.
SIX
The car was what they used to call a mace; Macklin was too long away from the people he once associated with to keep up on the terminology. Anyway it was a code the cops could crack, often with the cooperation of the crooks who used it.
Which was one of a host of reasons he’d dropped out of the underworld and gone solo. The colleague you confided in could have a dozen killings on his sheet and still put himself in good with the law by whispering in the correct ear.
Maybe it had always been that way. For all Macklin knew, the myth of the code of silence was a cop’s idea, made up to lull the guilty into spilling their guts to each other.
Call it what you like, the car was a ten-year-old Chevrolet Impala with a week-old title, ante-dated and distressed to show wear in the creases and present the right shade of yellow. The VIN agreed with the number engraved where the original had been filed away from the block and smeared with grease that matched the rest of the engine. Stolen in Wisconsin too long ago to interest the insurance company, it had the pedigree of a mongrel, and the color of the chalky finish was best described as sun tea filtered through bad kidneys, but the tires, brakes, and transmission were new and heavy-duty shocks installed, courtesy of a warehouse filled with unused Soviet military equipment in Kiev. With just enough rust and mud and missing a wheel cover, it was as nearly invisible as the man who drove it.
He wouldn’t be selling it back. He’d lined up a speculator to scrap it when he was finished with it and sell it to whoever got the bid to build another bridge between Detroit and Canada.
The performance was likely as advertised, but he wasn’t impressed. High-speed chases were for cowboys. The low profile and under-the-radar history were more important to him, along with simple reliability. In his work, the real successes died in their beds without leaving a mark.
There’d been a delay—which he’d allowed for—while he waited for U.S. plates. If he was pulled over for any reason with a Canadian registration, his American license might make the authorities suspicious enough to trace it to its forger, and to determine that “Max Peters” had died at the age of two the year Macklin was born, and therefore could not have a valid Social Security Card in his name. The plates were from Nebraska, a break: The state carried no associations to most of the rest of the world. Contestants on Jeopardy routinely did not ring in when the subject came up.
It was a thin tightrope, he had to remind himself; this constant quest for invisibility. After a point, it attracted attention by its very obscurity. Personal camouflage was a must. He routinely traveled with a canceled ticket to a baseball game involving a contender for the most recent World Series in his wallet along with the obligatory ancient condom, a souvenir ballcap suitably crumpled between seats, and a few travel brochures picked up at Visitors Centers along the way: historical exhibits, natural features, and such. Of course, this required some knowledge—not too technical—of the subjects involved, or at least an expression of interest. One side of his brain must be reserved for this, keeping the other side locked in on the target his client had paid him to eliminate.