Kill Zone (15 page)

“Let's do this right,” he said, unsnapping the sheath holding the knife and tossing it atop his coat on the work table.

Roger said nothing. With one hand he slid open one of the jimmied file drawers, lifted out a box of cartridges, and flipped it to the floor at his father's feet. Some of the brass-bodied .38s tumbled out and lay gleaming on the carpet.

The boy said, “I didn't know you owned a gun. You never even went hunting.”

“I'll be years dead before you know everything there is to know about me.” Macklin unbuttoned his cuffs and turned them back.

“Yeah. Like what it is you do.”

“I'm an efficiency expert.”

“Bullshit.”

Suddenly Macklin had had enough. He came forward and the boy raised his fists to defend himself. But his father shoved him aside roughly and unlocked the bottom drawer containing the safe and worked the combination and lifted the lid and drew out the Smith & Wesson. The barrel swung Roger's way and he whimpered and ducked, but it kept swinging to the side and down and when it was pointing toward a wooden crate full of potting soil on the floor Macklin pressed the trigger. The report slammed deafeningly inside the room. The dense black soil swallowed the bullet.

“Now you know why this room is soundproofed.” Macklin shouted over the ringing echo. “You have to be in the bedroom next door to hear anything, and then it sounds like a door slamming down the block. I usually wear earplugs. Each time I get a gun I test it. One shot, one gun, and I never use the same one twice. There are eight spent slugs in that box of dirt. That's just since I replaced the last box.”

While Roger watched, his father unloaded the revolver, shaking the five cartridges and the empty casing out onto the table, then got his cleaning kit in a flat metal case out of the drawer that had held the cartridge box and cleaned the barrel.

“Does Mom know?” asked the boy.

“She suspects.”

“That's why she hates you.”

“She doesn't hate me.” When the boy opened his mouth, he added, “Don't say ‘Bullshit' again. You got away with it in here once.”

“How come it's okay to kill people, but not to swear?”

Macklin held the barrel up to the window and peered through it with the cylinder swung out. “Did you study any biology before you dropped out of school?”

“Sure, but what's that—”

“Learn anything about alligators?”

“Alligators?”

“They live in swamps in Florida and South America and eat small animals.”

“So?”

“So if we didn't have alligators we'd all be up to our asses in small animals.”

“That's a copout,” Roger said after a moment.

Macklin wiped off the gun and laid the cleaning rod and rag back inside the case. “No, it isn't.”

“How long you been an efficiency expert?”

“Save that stuff for television. I'm a killer. I was a killer when you were born and I was a killer when I met your mother. Anything that happened before that isn't your business.”

Roger grinned then. Seeing his own wolfish look reflected in his son's face startled Macklin.

“I never got to do show-and-tell in kindergarten,” said the boy. “All the other kids had fathers who were firemen and plumbers and they got up and talked about it. I never did because I didn't know what an efficiency expert was. I could've been a hit.”

“Now you know why I never told you.”

“How come you're telling me now?”

“It doesn't matter any more. After this job everyone will know anyway.”

“What's the job?”

Macklin didn't reply. He replaced the cartridges and flipped the spent shell into the potting soil and filled the empty chamber with a cartridge from the floor. Then he put the rest back into the box and slid the box into his pants pocket, where it made an unsightly bulge. He carried the cleaning kit back to the file cabinet and put it away and holstered the Smith & Wesson and snapped the holster to his belt next to the knife.

Roger said, “Take me with you.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don't work with addicts.”

A corner of the boy's lip turned up, starting the split bleeding again. “I thought maybe you were going to say you didn't want me to get hurt.”

“You're too high most of the time to hurt.”

“Look.” Roger held out a hand as steady as a bough.

“Do that again in a couple of hours when the stuff's worn off.”

“You're kind of old. You need someone like me to back you up.”

Macklin took the thick envelope out of the safe, returned to his work table, and scribbled a name and address on the top sheet of his telephone pad. He ripped out the sheet and counted ten bills out of the envelope swiftly. Then he thrust them and the scrap of paper at his son.

“That's a thousand dollars,” he said. “That's what the man whose name is on that piece of paper charges to dry you out. Use it for that or use it to put yourself in heaven for two weeks. But if you use it for that, don't come back here.”

Roger stood there for a moment, holding the cash on his open palm. Then he fisted it and left. Macklin heard the front door slam a minute later.

CHAPTER 19

The burning in Macklin's side was at high flame. Just the touch of his fingers sent a white bolt shooting clear to his back teeth. In the bathroom he turned the shower on high and stripped gingerly, unbuttoning his shirt with one hand and letting his pants drop and stepping out of them without bending. He used each foot to pry the shoe and sock off its mate, kicked them away, and stepped naked into the clouds of steam. There he let the hot spray pummel his side. He didn't remember hurting this much the last time this had happened.

Later he broke an Ace bandage out of the medicine cabinet and wound it around his abdomen, securing it with a safety pin. The ribs still throbbed but now he could think of other things.

Roger was beyond help. Macklin wasn't one of those fathers who neglected their children for years and then woke up and suddenly decided to turn them around. He had seen this coming from a long way off, back when things were hotter and he was working all the time and sometimes had to stay away from home for months rather than attract trouble to his family. Donna's drinking was a problem even then and her attitude hadn't welcomed the dual role of mother and father. Macklin's own father had worked in a junkyard; his calluses had made iron paddles of his hands and when the boy stepped out of line he wore their mark on his face for days. But a man to whom killing came easily feared to touch his son in anger, and Donna had little enough discipline of her own to spare any for the boy. When Roger wanted help, real help, he would have to seek it out himself or it would do no good. Macklin believed he wanted help the same way he believed that thousand dollars would end up in the hands of the drug therapist Macklin had recommended.

He dressed skin out in fresh underwear and a dark blue sport shirt and jeans and black sneakers—real sneakers with a suction-cup tread that gripped and held, not those slippery track shoes that were crowding them off the shelves in most stores—and put on a reversible windbreaker with the dark side in. Finally he transferred the revolver in its holster from his leather suit belt to the canvas web he was wearing with the jeans, tugged the elastic of the jacket down over the butt, and put Herb Pinelli's knife and sheath inside one of the slash pockets. It had come in handy for more than getting in a door. He tipped a handful of .38 cartridges out of the box into the other pocket and left after tidying up.

Where was Donna?

“You won't get a bushel of miles to the gallon, but the ones you get will be pure gold.”

Smiling chipmunk fashion as if amused by his own words, the fat little used car dealer squeaked his swivel chair contentedly and gazed out the picture window at the square blue Oldsmobile parked next to the door. The car was four years old, a discontinued model, and starting to scab up around the rear wheel wells, but Freddo liked its 550-cubic-inch Cadillac engine and speedometer that topped off at 140, and he knew that it would probably do better. He said, “Stop selling it. You got the money.”

Indeed he had, thought the dealer, eight hundred dollars in hundreds and fifties straight out of the young man's wallet. It was a shame to have to let a good car go for so little, but that oversize fuel tank scared off a lot of customers and anyway, cash was cash. He watched the new owner signing the title transfer. Nice suit, a little wrinkled as if he hadn't had it off recently, thin blond hair, slight swelling and discoloration on the forehead. The dealer had been about to ask about that when the wallet came out. So much cash in hands so young with Detroit so close tended to discourage questions.

When the papers were pushed away the dealer craned his short neck to read the signature and stood, offering his hand. “Come back and see us any time, Mr. Metzger. We're a full-service dealership.”

Freddo folded the bill of sale and title slip into his inside breast pocket and went out without shaking the hand. The Oldsmobile rumbled into life and squirted forward the instant he put it in drive. That meant the idle was high. He pulled out of the lot, detoured around the area where a wrecker summoned by the police was hitching up to what remained of the Cordoba, found a commercial garage on a side street and parked in front of the doors.

A pimple-faced teenager in blue coveralls with a smudge of grease on the end of his nose greeted Freddo in a cluttered office paved with concrete. Freddo spiked a hundred-dollar bill on a spindle layered high with canceled statements.

“I got an Olds out front needs idling down,” he said.

The garage attendant's eyes were fixed on the skewered bill. “That's just a sixteen-dollar order, mister. I can't change no hundreds. You'll have to wait till my boss gets back.”

“It's a twelve-dollar order. The hundred's yours if while you're adjusting the idle you accidentally knock loose all the anti-pollution equipment.”

“That ain't legal.”

“Excuse me. I didn't know I was doing business with Dick Tracy.” Freddo reached for his money. The attendant's hand was quicker, covering it. Freddo straightened. “Ledger stays closed on this one, right?”

“What ledger?” The boy displayed brown teeth and got up to open the doors. The hundred was gone.

Out of boredom, Freddo stood by watching as the boy worked under the hood and then drove the car onto the hydraulic lift to free the catalytic converter. Judging by the look on the used car dealer's face as Freddo had counted out the eight hundred under his nose, he'd have been glad to yank the environmental baggage that curtailed speed and performance free of charge, but Freddo had used the Lyle Metzger identity to make the purchase and since the request was suspicious he didn't want to waste an alias he might need later. He had had driver's licenses and Social Security cards under three names besides his own, acquired on birth certificates issued to children who had died in infancy, but he had been forced to tear up one set of identification after abandoning the wrecked Cordoba. Police would trace the registration to an Italian youth killed in an apartment fire in Philadelphia in 1960.

He was angry, too, about the .44 magnum he had been forced to leave in the car. It was a good gun and still unblooded. But he didn't worry about having left fingerprints on it and all over the car. His prints weren't on file anywhere. And he had held on to the .22, now nestled in its holster under his right arm. It was accurate and effective within thirty feet, his usual working distance.

It saddened him a little to have lost Link Washington. Loyal fetches were rare. The redhead must have been dead to the world to let Macklin get behind him like that. Well, he was sure enough dead to the world now.

Freddo thought about calling Maggiore again, then rejected the idea. The cocoa-butter bastard would just sneer at him like before. So the old man had a little more tread on his tires than Freddo had given him credit for. So he had outsmarted Link. An orangutan with arrested development could outsmart Link. The whole episode so far was an ugly wrinkle in Freddo's smooth record of nine quiet kills.

He wanted Macklin badly.

The silver Cougar's right signal flashed.

“He's turning right,” said the man riding on the passenger's side of the gray Plymouth a block behind.

“Oh, is that what that blinking light means,” said the man at the wheel dryly.

“Well, close it up. This is where we lost him yesterday.”

The driver used the center turning lane to pass a foreign hatchback poking along in front of them and turned right a fraction of a second behind Macklin. “He's going to know we're tailing him,” he said.

“He knows now, shithead.”

The two cars crossed the street where they had been separated the day before, the Plymouth just barely squeezing through on the yellow. They might have been chained together. They undulated over a series of hills and hollows. The Cougar slowed down and sped up and slowed down again. The driver of the Plymouth tapped his brakes to avoid ramming the car ahead.

“Don't give him any slack,” barked his passenger. “If we blow it again our ass is grass.”

The driver touched the accelerator. The cars were as one angling down the first of a brace of steep hills. A small city of brick splitlevels showed behind a skin of trees on either side of the paved road. At the bottom of the hill the Cougar's brake lights flashed on.

The driver of the Plymouth stood on his brakes. They locked with a hideous wail of rubber on concrete. A car following a short distance behind braked and slewed sideways, nearly clipping the rear of the Plymouth. Then the Cougar's lights went off and a puff of black smoke escaped its exhaust pipe and it tore up the next incline. The roar drowned out the idling of the Plymouth's engine.

“He's rabbiting! Step on it!”