“For you, a grand.”
“I don’t have a grand on me. If I did I wouldn’t trade it for this.”
“You’re hot. You can’t go back to your place and you can’t tap your bank. But you’d have walking-around money, a pro like you.”
“You get five hundred, same as before.”
“Gimme the gun.”
“Five-fifty, and you toss in a case of ammo.”
“Eight,” Treat said. “Box of a hundred.”
“Six and I don’t put a hole in you right here.”
“Gun ain’t loaded.”
“I’m wearing one that is.”
The dealer grinned. “We did this before. I didn’t have to tell you then, but I’ll tell you now. I got a file of test-fired bullets from every gun I’ve sold, all labeled as to who bought them. A friend’s holding them along with a note telling him where to send them if he don’t hear from me once a week.”
“That old snore.”
“Hey, I deal to killers. I sold you three pieces in the last two years. That’s three counts anyway. Unless you missed once.”
“Six-fifty. Box of a hundred.”
“Seven and I make it a case.”
“I needed a case I’d be in some other business,” Macklin said.
“Why’d you ask for one before?”
“Thrill of the deal.”
The exchange was made.
“Mister, would you put in a quarter?”
The old man, standing on the covered sidewalk fronting the mall, started and looked over the top of his glasses at the little girl in jeans and a Smurf sweatshirt straddling the coin-operated hobby horse. She had bright red hair and blue eyes and freckles the size of dimes. He returned her smile and folded his chins on his chest while he fished among the keys and change in his pants pocket. The afternoon was almost balmy and he had left his coat in the car. His green sweater and the feathered hat were protection enough.
The quarter clanked inside the machine and the horse started undulating. “Thanks, mister.”
“You’re welcome.”
When he returned his gaze to the other end of the lot, the gray-haired man was standing alone beside the scuffed blue car. The old man looked around quickly and spotted Macklin coming up the next aisle to where his silver car was parked. He smiled again at the little girl and stepped off the curb and into his rental parked in front.
Mantis was an expert at following people. Back home it had been his specialty for years before he had stepped up into what the Americans called the K unit. It had been said of him that he could track a grain of sand in a duststorm, and he was vain enough to enjoy the myth, but in truth it was very simple business. Most tail men tried too hard to be inconspicuous, scuttling from cover to cover on foot and speeding up and slowing down and passing their subjects behind the wheel in the belief that this was preferable to holding a steady pace. He had known one who kept a collection of hats and caps in the backseat of his car so that he could keep changing them, imagining that this would distract his quarry from the fact that the same car was still behind him after several miles. Mantis had helped bury the man after he was found parked in a ditch with a bullet hole in his temple and an American baseball cap on the back of his head. The trick was to drive a nondescript vehicle and give your man some distance and maintain the gap.
He followed Macklin down East Jefferson and turned right onto the Belle Isle Bridge a block and a half behind him. The sun was bright and struck sparks off the surface of the Detroit River. Upstream a pair of sailboats skated the water like bright moths around a long rust-colored ore carrier hognosing its way down from Lake Superior. The old man’s tires whistled on the bridge’s steel ribs.
He parked in a lot several spaces down from the Cougar, pulling in just as Macklin alighted from the driver’s side. Mantis stayed where he was while his man strolled down the footpath leading away from the big marble fountain where most of the island’s visitors congregated. He knew Macklin would be coming back to his car, and he knew what he had come to the island to do. Mantis would have done the same thing if he had a used gun to dispose of.
There was a pay telephone at one corner of the lot, within sight of both cars. The old man got out and fed it and dialed Mr. Brown’s number.
“I am just calling to determine that plans have not changed with regard to the package,” he said when the other’s smoothly lathed voice came on the wire.
“They’re the same. You’ve found him?”
“Through the King woman. I am watching his car now.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Admiring the river, I suspect. Dropping things into it.”
The pause on Brown’s end asked a question.
“Not bodies,” the old man assured him. “He moves no faster than I. I think I like him.”
“Don’t become too attached.”
“I have liked others. It has never interfered.”
“When can you act?”
“Sooner than I would like. He appears to be a man of no habits at all. I have been following him for a day and he has done nothing the same way twice or in the same place. It is all very challenging and I should like to pursue the matter for a month but for the time factor. There have been opportunities. I think that I will use the next one that presents itself.”
“Very good. You’ll call me if you need anything.”
“I will call when it is done.”
He pegged the receiver, inspected the coin return and found it empty, sighed, and went back to the Oldsmobile. Removing the Walther from the glove compartment, he checked the load and laid it on the seat beside him. After shadowing Macklin to his motel the night before, he had waited until the light had gone off in Macklin’s room, then gone back to his own hotel to retrieve the pistol. It felt good next to his thigh, like an erection in his younger days.
Chapter Nineteen
Moira King left the recording booth for coffee and a cigarette. The afternoon session had not gone well, and the pressure of the earphones had given her a headache.
She found the small employee lounge deserted and carried her Styrofoam cup of coffee from the machine to the first cafeteria table, sitting with her back to the open door. The room smelled of coffee and cheap floor wax. It was an improvement over all those makeshift studio bedrooms she had performed in with their bitter marijuana stench and the cloying odor of human biology at its basest.
The telephone office was a good place to work. She could wear what she wanted—today it was corduroy slacks and a sleeveless blue cotton blouse, no tight garter belt or slippery step-ins or net stockings that felt like barbed wire on her toes after a full day’s shooting on five-inch heels—and she always learned something from the messages she recorded for callers seeking information on the weather or books available at the library or the fishing around Michigan or any of the half a hundred other topics the telephone company kept tabs on for its subscribers. She had a good speaking voice, no thanks to the minimal dialogue provided by the scriptwriters for her films, and she sometimes picked up extra money weekends recording books and magazines for the blind. If any of her employers had seen her previous work, none made mention of it, probably because none wanted it known he sought such entertainment.
But today she had found herself unable to concentrate on the words she was reading. There had been many retakes, until she grew sick of saying the same things over and over and started making mistakes out of irritation. Thinking got in the way. Retakes were not her strong suit. They were practically unknown in her former profession, whose low budgets didn’t allow for make-goods, and in which it was next to impossible to make the sort of error that would require one in the first place. Sex was difficult to get wrong.
That thought reminded her of last night. It had been very different with Macklin. She wasn’t sure why. She was hardly an adventuress anymore and doubted that she was aroused by what he did for a living, although she had known women who talked about grisly murders they had read
about in the papers and who wondered aloud what it would be like to go to bed with the culprits. Nor was it that he was particularly good. His foreplay consisted of fumbling for her breasts and then her vagina, after which he got down to business and was through in under five minutes. But there was an animalistic simplicity about his lovemaking that she had not known in the false prolonged titillation under the strobes or with a marathon man like Roy or with the panting, French-kissing boys she had gone into backseats with in high school. He was a simple needs-and-fulfillment man, knew how to go about it, and yet somehow managed to seem to remain aware of her throughout the act.
It wasn’t love, she decided. She didn’t even like the man. He frightened her at least as much as Roy. But if she were to plan sex with a man for the first time in months, it would be with someone who wouldn’t forget she was there.
“Penny for ’em, Slick.”
She looked up quickly from the inside of her empty cup. Roy was just swinging a leg cowboy-fashion over the bench facing hers on the other side of the table. He had on his favorite navy peacoat, open over bare chest, and his thick wheat-colored hair broke in twin wings over his forehead the way she remembered watching him train it to do after he had seen James Cagney in Angels with Dirty Faces. He had Cagney’s sneering grin and Robert Mitchum’s sleepy lids and one of the things that had always unnerved her was that she never knew how much of it was him and how much the old movies he was always watching on afternoon television.
“How’d you get in here?” She almost shrieked it. She glanced around quickly. They were alone in the room, but she forced her voice down anyway. “Only authorized personnel are allowed in this part of the building.”
“Yeah, but there ain’t no guards. Them signs scared the living shit out of me but I got over my scared and here I am. Thought you’d be glad to see me.”
“I told you to leave me alone.”
He got out his oversize pocketknife, making a face as he pried it loose from the pocket of his tight jeans, and unfolded the big curved blade, then folded it again and pulled it out again, playing with it. “I see you had a guest last night. He stayed a lick.”
His fifth-grade dropout way of talking had always annoyed her. He had studied a year at Penn State before his parents’ money ran out. He saw her looking at the knife and grinned wider.
“She’s brand-new and a little stiff. They took away my good one when they busted me. Had that one so loose I could flip her open by the blade. Man, wasn’t that nigger surprised in that parking lot, though.”
“Why do you have it? Nobody carries pocketknives anymore.”
“That’s what happened to this country. Guys stopped carrying jackknives. Then Kennedy got shot and all hell broke loose. Who’s your new boyfriend? Kind of old, ain’t he?”
“Why are you watching my apartment?”
“Bet he don’t get it up but once a week. Me, I’m hard all the time. This lady shrink was going to write a paper on me in Ypsi. Said I was a psycho-physical phenomenon.” He stumbled over the syllables. “Aw, but then the rest of the shrinks got together and turned me loose. She wouldn’t of been too bad if there was a paper bag handy. Nice high tits. How’s yours, Slick? They still nice and high?” He looked.
“I’ll call security.”
“I’ll wait.” He drew her empty cup over to his side of the table and started working at it with the knife, carving curved slices out of the side.
She didn’t move. “I’ll lose my job.”
“There’s jobs and jobs. You put on a couple of pounds, use that body makeup, you’ll do okay. Look at Linda Lovelace. Bowwow.”
“I’m out of that, I told you. I made my decision when you killed that man. Did I tell you I wasn’t surprised? What surprised me was I stayed long enough to see you do it.”
“You wasn’t there.”
“I didn’t mean it literally.”
“Who’s your boyfriend?”
“I don’t have boyfriends. I’m not a cheerleader.”
“Maybe I find out myself.” He had finished cutting up the cup and was subdividing the pieces, the edge of the blade clicking on the table’s metal top.
“Why are you doing this?”
“You got to use a knife now and again or you’re always sharpening it.”
“You know what I mean.”
“We’re just talking. I like to talk. So do you. Didn’t matter what we was doing, you just went on jabbering right through it. Remember? It’s the one time I wanted you to shut up.”
“My break’s over.” She rose.
A hand shot out and closed tightly on her wrist. The other held the knife with its butt on the table and the blade pointing up. “Dump Grandpa, Slick.”
“You’re cutting off my circulation.” But she made no attempt to pull free.
“There’s better ways.”
“Miss King?”
They looked at the doorway. A middle-aged man with gray hair and a moustache and glasses stood in it. He had a hearing aid clipped to the handkerchief pocket of his blue suit with a wire leading to a plug in his right ear.
“I’m just going back, Mr. Turner.” She was watching Roy now, who smiled and let go of her wrist. He had folded the knife one-handed and put it away.
Mr. Turner looked at him for the first time. “Sir, are you an employee? If not I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
Roy opened his mouth and closed it several times without making a sound.
“I’m sorry?” Mr. Turner twisted the dial on the hearing aid.
Roy got up and leaned forward and cupped his hands around his mouth, opening it wide. Nothing came out. Turner unclipped the instrument and frowned at it, tapping the case.
“Roy—” Moira said.
The man in the suit caught on then. He returned the device to the outside of his pocket. “I see. Very funny. Is this man a friend of yours, Miss King?”
“I was just giving him directions to the billing department.”
“You the guy in charge?” Roy said.
“I’m the supervisor on this shift.”
“I got a bill needs adjusting. You guys stuck me with two long-distance calls I didn’t make. I figure you’re making up for all them other phone companies taking away your business.”
“I’m sure it was an oversight. If you’ll—”
“Oversight hell!” He was shouting. His face was white, the skin drawn tight. “You fuckers think you got us all by the balls. How you like I cut off that flash necktie and shove it up your ass?” His hand went to his pocket.
Turner looked away. “You’ll find that department on the ground floor. Miss King?”
She hesitated, watching Roy. His hand was out of his pocket now, empty. His color was normal again. She turned toward the doorway.
Roy said, “I mean it, Slick. Old fart stays he could get hurt.”
She went out past the man in the suit without turning around.
“I’ll show you to the right elevator,” Turner said. “Mr.—?”
“Bates.” The young man walked out in front of him. “Norman.”
Chapter Twenty
Judge Flutter closed the file, handed it to his bailiff, a retired black Wayne County Sheriff’s deputy with a smudge of purple ink on the left side of his nose, and folded his big slow hands on the desk in front of him. “Very equitable. I think we can set the date for a final hearing. Does November the eighth meet with any strong objections? It’s a Thursday.”
Howard Klegg, seated at one corner of the desk with his long thin legs crossed, glanced at Macklin, who nodded. He raised his eyebrows at Gerald Goldstick, sitting next to Donna Macklin at the other corner. The young lawyer was studying a pocket calendar card. Klegg distrusted people who carried them. They always knew exactly where they would be on any given date three months in advance. It suggested an arrogant faith in their longevity.
“Friday’s better,” Goldstick said, looking up.
“This court doesn’t sit Fridays,” the ju
dge explained.
“Thursday then.”
Little twerp had Thursday clear all along, thought Klegg.
The lawyers shook Flutter’s hand and the four left. In the hallway outside chambers, Macklin trotted ahead of Klegg to catch his wife. Goldstick hesitated, but Donna touched two fingers to his forearm and he went on ahead. Klegg, lagging along behind, caught some of the conversation as the pair walked.
“Seen Roger lately?” Macklin asked.
“No. I called Lonnie Kimball’s. He moved out yesterday. Lonnie didn’t know where.”
“That stinks.”
“What do you want me to do, put a detective on him?”
“Call the cops. He’s still a minor.”
“He’d just run away again. If what you said to him did any good, that might be enough to change his mind back the other way.”
“It didn’t do any good,” he said. “I just wasted time.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know Roger.”
“Like hell you do. If you knew him, we wouldn’t have this problem. You were never home.”
“You were, though. All you had to do was count the empties to see that.”
They walked along for a few yards without saying anything. “Why didn’t you call Klegg when you found out he left the apartment?” he demanded.
“I’m through running to you.”
“When did this happen?”
“I’m a grown woman. I don’t have to tell my soon-to-be ex-husband when I’m going to the toilet.”
He looked down the hall at Goldstick, who was standing before the floor directory with his hands folded in front of him on the handle of his briefcase. “Yeah.” Macklin fell back.
“What was all that about?” asked Klegg, drawing abreast.
“Not much. My wife’s sleeping with her attorney.”
“It sounded serious.”
“With her it never was a lot of laughs.”
The old lawyer glanced sideways at Macklin, wondering if he was developing a sense of humor.
“Roger Macklin,” Gordy announced.
Charles Maggiore, bench-pressing on the Nautilus in his basement gym, paused with the bar across his naked chest. “On the phone?”
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