Any Man's Death

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I remember it. Where’d you hear this?”

  “I got clients all over. They can’t pay right now, they supply me with information.”

  “That brings us up to a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Maybe you came here with something more current.”

  “It better come to something.”

  Veauxhill’s envelope-flap mouth formed a bland smile. “I got pancreas cancer. Best estimate I got so far is three months. You want to save me the sack time in ICU, you know where to find me.”

  Macklin said, “I need a car. Mine’s on a sheet.”

  The shark sat back and fanned himself with the stack of bills. Macklin counted out another thousand, emptying his wallet.

  “A-1 Rentals on Livernois. Ask for Peterson and use my name. Cash, no paperwork.”

  Macklin watched him arranging the fresh bills. “What are they going to do, bury two boxes?”

  “You do what you do till you stop. You don’t just sit around and wait.”

  The car was a black-and-tan Renault with a brake light that stuck on and drained the battery if he parked it and turned off the engine without pumping the brake. When he returned to it after placing an unsuccessful call from a drugstore to his man in Armed Robbery he ground the battery down the rest of the way trying to start the engine and had to wait half an hour for it to recharge itself. The car had cost him fifteen hundred dollars not counting the thousand he had paid Veauxhill.

  The Dearborn Heights apartment complex was U-shaped, built of bricks laid in blocks that had then been set one atop another by a crane. The balconies were decorative, the rubber plants on either side of the entrance made of plastic. Macklin pressed the button labeled MANAGER and was surprised to learn that it rang.

  On the other side of the glass security entrance, the door to an apartment opened, revealing a barrel body in a green quilted housedress. Something buzzed and Macklin opened the glass door. The woman peered at him through a crooked pair of glasses with a Band-Aid around one bow. She was black and wore a blonde pageboy wig that made her look like a gross Buster Brown. She appeared to be in her early sixties. “Yes?”

  “I’m a friend of Sister Mercer’s. Is she still living here?”

  “She’s in New Orleans with her folks.”

  “She moved?” He let his lips part. “When?”

  “Right after she tried hanging herself.” Imparting the news seemed to delight her. “Got herself mixed up with some white boy. God meant that he wouldn’t of made us different colors. You’re white.” She adjusted her glasses, making sure.

  “Would her friend be named Roger? Roger Macklin?”

  “Roger’s right. I don’t know about the Macklin part. You ain’t with that church of hers?”

  “No. We used to be neighbors. I heard she was living here. I’m between planes and I thought I’d visit. Would you know where Roger is living?”

  “That’s the devil’s church she was mixed up with. That rev’rund of hers wants to take away the numbers, keep the poor folks from bettering theirselves. He’s the devil all right, and a commie to boot.”

  “Do you have a number or an address for Mercer in New Orleans?”

  “The little bitch never told me nothing, God save her. If she did I could of told her there wouldn’t be nothing but hell in it for her. I don’t know where neither of them is.”

  “Would one of her neighbors know, do you think?”

  “They wouldn’t have nothing to do with her. Not the black folks, and surely not the whites. That rev’run, he come here hisself when she strung herself up, all trapped out like a downtown pimp. I seen the devil in his black eyes. I played the number 666 that day, you bet. It didn’t come in.” She sounded affronted.

  Macklin thanked her and withdrew.

  Around eleven P.M. he took a room in a retirement hotel on Dubois run by a doctor who had lost his license for failing to report treatment of gunshot wounds suffered by local drug traffickers during the war with the Colombians. The doctor recognized him and charged him five hundred dollars for two nights. The room consisted of a single bed, a cracked bureau, and a painted-over window on a corner of the ground floor that had been occupied until recently by the janitor. Macklin used the telephone in the lobby to call police headquarters again, but was told that his acquaintance had gone home. He returned to his room, transferred another thousand dollars to his wallet, and used a needle and thread he had bought in a convenience store to restitch the lining containing the remaining seventy-five thousand.

  He couldn’t sleep. The catatonia was off now and all those needless hours of rest were backing up on him. At one o’clock he rose and searched the room for something to read. But the only book there was a scuffed Gideon Bible holding up a short leg of the bureau. He pulled it free, easing down the leg to avoid waking the household, and got back into bed with the Bible. He read Genesis from start to finish and found himself wondering what sort of weapon Cain had used to slay Abel. He drifted off finally around three-thirty.

  The doctor rented him bathroom privileges and a razor the next morning. Freshened and shaved, he used the telephone again. The voice he spoke to at police headquarters informed him that his contact was off duty Saturday.

  He stayed in most of the day, going out only once, to pick up a sack of hamburgers at a White Castle six blocks over and a paperback spy thriller at a drugstore on Brush. The doctor had offered to send someone to do these things for a fee, but Macklin declined. He ate the hamburgers and read the entire novel stretched out on the bed on top of the covers. It was full of foreign agents who spoke English, only the reader was supposed to believe they were actually speaking French and German and Russian, and ran around shooting one another from a mile away with high-powered rifles.

  Macklin supposed he was in a rut.

  Sunday his police acquaintance called. There was nothing in Records on Roger Macklin.

  CHAPTER 32

  Monday morning it rained, one of those icy slanting pavement-pounders that turned the downtown expressways into canals and caused furnaces to kick in all over the city. It swept across the skyline like a massive streetsweeper from west to east, raising steam from sidewalks warmed by an unsuspecting dawn, stitched the surface of Lake St. Clair, and blew out over Canada. By noon the sun had returned to dry Hart Plaza’s sunken concrete surface in patches. Cobo Hall and Ford Auditorium and the poker-chip towers of the Renaissance Center looked shining and new.

  The band hired by the Reverend Sunsmith—lead guitar, backup, bass, drums, and organ—struck up shortly thereafter, interspersing some mild punk with “My Sweet Lord,” “Amazing Grace,” “Day by Day,” and “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Spectators began filtering in in singles, pairs, and groups, and by the time the choir took up their positions in the recessed circle reserved for live entertainment, the plaza was filled. Sister Asaul, who had turned down a recording contract from Columbia to stay with the Reverend, soloed “The Old Rugged Cross” while the others hummed accompaniment, their yellow satin robes shimmering under the high sun. A soprano provided by a local booking agent sang in place of Sister Mercer, who was still in New Orleans, recovering from her suicide attempt. TV cameras recorded details.

  Sunsmith appeared at two o’clock, parting the crowd from the Jefferson Avenue side inside a flying wedge made up of the elders, a splash of bright rose ringed in blue. Three of the bodyguards were new, on loan from a security firm in Clawson. The band hurled itself into “Saviour, Like a Shepherd Lead Us.” The choir sang. Some of those in the crowd joined in. As the five men swept toward the pulpit erected in front of the sisters, the mouth of the bodyguard walking point was moving, but not in time to the music.

  Pontier stood with his back to Jefferson, feeling foolish in the tan raincoat he had slipped into before coming there. At that time the sky had still been threatening. But the left slash pocket was useful for concealing his walking radio. In the shifting of the crowd before the men approaching the pulpit he glimpsed a flash of yellow sportco
at. He drew out the radio. “Lovelady?”

  “Yeah.” The sergeant’s voice wheezed out of the tiny speaker.

  “Who’s got Sunsmith’s back?”

  “Anderson and Cletus. Rubio’s on the roof of Cobo with a sniperscope.”

  “See if you can get some more uniforms close to the middle. Stop any shooting before it starts.”

  “Dream on, Inspector.”

  “Yeah. Hey, what’s that blue suit in front saying?”

  “‘Get out of my way or I’ll kill you.’”

  On “Thou hast loved us,” the music stopped, allowing Sister Asaul’s rich mezzo-soprano to intone “love us still” into a dramatic silence. It was still reverberating when the Reverend mounted to the pulpit behind the bulletproof plastic shield rising above it. He opened the rose-colored Bible he had carried in while the four elders took up their stance on his other side from the sisters. The pages crackled in the charged air, then stopped. The black eyes raked the assembly.

  “‘For many deceivers are entered into the world,’ wrote John, ‘who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.’”

  His voice was strangely subdued, not the booming baritone that hummed along the rafters of his church. As the crowd pressed in to hear his words, Picante moved toward the left, near the choir and away from the bodyguards.

  “‘Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son.’”

  Macklin hurried across Jefferson, toward the murmur of Sunsmith’s voice. He had not reckoned on the amount of traffic coming in for the rally and had finally left the rented Renault at a stoplight on Monroe. The horns of the automobiles stranded behind it were fading now. His clothes were showing signs of not having been changed in three days and he was unshaven. There had been no razor available in the Dearborn motel room where he had spent last night. The doctor in the retirement hotel on Dubois had refused to rent him the janitor’s room for a third night.

  Too late he spotted Inspector Pontier’s bald head on the edge of the crowd. Their eyes met for an instant before Macklin slid in among the bodies.

  “‘If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed.’”

  “Macklin’s here!” Pontier barked into the radio. “Heading your way.”

  Lovelady said, “I don’t see him.”

  “Collier, this is Pontier. Get some asses moving. Clear the plaza.”

  “Who died and elected you President?” A thin voice, strung tight, twanged out of the speaker. “Security’s my lookout.”

  “Then start looking out. We got a known shooter in the crowd. Male cauc, six feet and one-eighty-five, black and gray, about forty, gray coat.”

  “Jesus Christ. All units, this is Lieutenant Collier. Clear everybody out. We got a shooter.”

  “‘For he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds.’”

  For the first time since he had received the Call, the Reverend Thomas Aquinas Sunsmith was losing his audience. Whistles were blowing and the crowd was surging away from him, being poked and prodded by police officers in uniform and men waving black radios. He abandoned his text, stepping around in front of the pulpit and waving his arms, shouting that the Philistines were trying to prevent them from hearing the Word.

  One figure was moving against the tide. Macklin recognized Roger’s gait before he recognized his son’s features, the loose-limbed stride and his own forward-leaning posture. A breeze caught the boy’s long black hair, straightening it behind him. He was reaching inside the front of his tan Windbreaker as he neared the pulpit, threading his way between the heaving bodies.

  “Roger!”

  The shout was smothered under shrieking whistles and raised voices. Macklin shouldered his way toward his son. An officer stepped into his path and Macklin threw an elbow into the man’s face, feeling his nose collapse. The officer melted away before him. He pushed forward, reaching under his coat for the magnum. He had already spotted Picante near the pulpit, saw his hand going under his left arm.

  The elders saw the youth approaching with his hand inside his jacket. The 9-millimeter semiautomatics came out.

  “Roger!”

  That time Roger heard him. Macklin saw his head turning in his direction. The elders saw it too and held their fire. Then the boy’s head swung back. He hadn’t seen his father in the crowd.

  Macklin shouted again. The magnum caught the sunlight. The flash caught the attention of the elders, who swung their guns around. Macklin saw the smoke coming out of the barrels in round puffs. He was struck by bowling balls. He felt himself pitching forward, saw the concrete come up.

  Picante, on a level with the pulpit now, stuck his Colt Diamondback into the Reverend’s robes and squeezed the trigger three times. Sunsmith shuddered. Blood came out of his mouth and skidded down the rose-colored satin.

  Picante jerked backward off the platform and landed hard on his back with his arms flung wide, a crucifix in double-knits with scarlet spreading on his shirtfront and a startled look on his long face. An instant later came the report from the roof of Cobo Hall overlooking Jefferson, its echo retreating toward Windsor.

  The crowd was panicking now, pitching in a writhing mass toward the open. Roger was caught up in the tide. He took his hand out of his Windbreaker empty and turned and let the crowd carry him away from the pulpit, out of Hart Plaza. He hadn’t seen either Sunsmith or Picante fall or whom the bodyguards had been shooting at. His first thought was that a lot of people were mad at the Reverend.

  One of the elders crouched with Sunsmith’s huge head in his lap. The black eyes were open, moist black candle drippings. The other bodyguards stood looking down at him with their guns at their sides lisping smoke. One of the sisters was wailing. Sister Asaul recited the Lord’s Prayer.

  Macklin lay on his side on the concrete. He had been kicked a number of times and his hand had been stepped on, but the shouting and shuffling were receding now. Out of the corner of his eye he saw men in uniform coming with revolvers in their hands, glimpsed Inspector Pontier’s bald head and a fat man in a yellow coat whose name he couldn’t remember. He smelled concrete and blood and spent powder, and as the noise of the crowd died away he thought he could hear the Detroit River lapping the bank. All of his senses seemed abnormally acute.

  “Macklin.” The man’s head and shoulders were lost in the sun’s glare, but Macklin recognized Pontier’s voice. He didn’t respond. His mouth felt as if it were full of saliva.

  “Forget it.” This was the fat man.

  “Shit,” said Macklin then. “I was going to say the same thing.”

  The nurse who undressed him at Receiving wondered about the crackling in his riddled coat and found the lining quilted with hundred-dollar bills, some of them bullet-torn and all of them clotted with gore. This discovery was unknown to Dr. Stepp, then swiftly but half-heartedly scrubbing for the emergency operation. He’d rather be in his office drafting the paper he planned to submit to the Harvard Medical Journal. Gunshot wounds weren’t nearly as interesting as a patient with his own unborn twin grafted onto his left shoulder.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Peter Macklin Thrillers

  ONE

  Johns Davis remembered feeling a chill the first time he entered the mission building of the Alamo, where Mexican troops in Napoleonic shakos and crossed white belts bayoneted and were bayoneted by the defenders of the Republic of Texas. At the time he’d associated the sensation with the presence of the spirits of the honored dead. Now he knew it was the air-conditioning.

  He’d made many visits to the crumbling shrine since establishing himself in San Antonio, and familiarity and repetition had worn the gloss off sacred history. Still, he suspected the Daughters of the Texas Republic of cranking down the thermostat at least two degrees annually, so that the mere act of stepping
in from the sun-hammered flags of the Plaza was like plunging into a mountain stream. It was sad when the pull of the arcade drove the keepers of the flame to special effects.

  It was a weekday, and the tourist season with its gridlock of history buffs, education-bent parents, and ox-faced children in synthetic coonskin caps was over. A couple of dozen whispering visitors loitered in front of glass cases containing flintlock rifles and moth-eaten guidons, obeying signs asking them to avoid touching the parchment-colored walls, sealed though they were by coats of glaze. Davis strolled out the back door, across the courtyard where a docent in a wool suit stood sweating and shuffling three-by-five cards with notes on Travis, Crockett, Bowie, and the names no one bothered to remember, and entered the gift shop.

  Here the crowd was bigger, inspecting Alamo keychains and Kachina dolls and the inevitable T-shirts reading, MY PARENTS WENT TO THE ALAMO AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT. Inside the door he pretended to browse among some pennants and rolled posters as he made his way to the back, where a well-built black man with gray in his short hair and the start of a double chin stood examining a box containing a log cabin building kit. He wore a tailored lightweight tan suit and Davis noticed a slightly lighter patch of skin on the third finger of his left hand where he normally wore his Super Bowl ring. Davis found this half-assed attempt at going incognito touching.

  “It says ages three and up,” the man said by way of greeting. “You think a three-year-old kid could figure out how to put one of these together?”

  “A retarded three-year-old kid.” Davis smiled. “When I was that age I was carving my own struts from balsa to build a toy plane. They might as well sell ’em already assembled, for all the challenge they offer. You want to put him to work? Give him a coffee table.”

  “My old man told me he built wood planes. You ain’t that old.”

  Davis didn’t argue with him. At sixty-one he was the ideal weight for his height, worked out three times a week at a gym, and tinted his hair a light sandy brown. People who didn’t know him when it was black would not guess he’d gone entirely gray. Most of his acquaintances thought he was in his middle forties. Back in his grifting days, he’d posed successfully as a retired NFL player, selling nonexistent shares in well-known computer software corporations, borrowing money on the promise of interest once he’d established his Trans-America Football League, and charging two-thousand-dollar suits and cases of single-malt Scotch to well-placed widows (and some not-quite widows) who enjoyed telling their friends they were sleeping with a professional athlete. He still had the build, and although he greatly preferred his present circumstances, it was comforting to know that if they failed him he could take up where he left off.