Kill Zone (28 page)

Macklin said, “It's done.”

Pinelli hesitated. “Ackler as well?” The other nodded. “You were lucky, Pietro.”

“Didn't you once tell me that sometimes luck accounts for better than half?”

“But it is not a thing to depend on. You must behave as if it does not exist until it is needed.” His eyes flicked toward the bandage on his visitor's forehead. “You are in pain?”

“Yes, Umberto.”

The old killer studied his face. After a beat he moved aside to admit Macklin and closed and locked the door behind him. “There is tea in the office.”

The storeroom was cluttered as always. Pinelli waved a big hand in the direction of a standing bolt of fabric by way of offering a seat and removed a second cup from the drawer of his gray steel desk and lifted a white china teapot from a hotplate on a shelf of tall ledgers. Macklin remained standing, leaning against the door jamb. “None for me, thanks.”

Shrugging, his host topped off his own cup with steaming yellow liquid. Macklin wondered if it was ginseng. “My heart swelled when I saw you,
figlio
.” The old man blew on his tea. “The odds were great against you.”

“Greater than I'd thought.”

He set down the cup untasted. “And now, my friend, you will retire and come to work with me. You can afford to buy in.”

“I still don't know anything about selling clothes.”

“I will teach you. The eyes are your most important tools. They will tell you what is stylish and what is not. Your eyes are good, like mine. They are one reason we have lived to our respective ages.”

“I don't think so, Umberto.”

“It would please your wife. That is no small thing, whatever other problems you may have. The pain of my existence is that I did not listen to my Clovis when she pleaded with me to change occupations. It killed her. That is why I gave her name to this store. It is small penance and does no one good.”

“I won't have a wife much longer,” Macklin said. “That's done too.”

“I am sorry, Pietro. Will you then marry Christine?”

Macklin paused. “I'd forgotten you knew about her.”

“We confide in each other much. I myself have told you more than I have any priest.”

“Not just me.”

Pinelli had been standing with one foot propped up on a wooden forklift pallet. Now he lowered it to the floor and leaned back against the desk, folding his arms and bunching further the mound of muscle atop his shoulders. “I wish you would tell me of your trouble, the one that brings you here today.”

“I think you know. I saw it in your face when you opened the door.”

Unexpectedly, the Sicilian flashed Macklin his old wolf's grin. “I am proud. It was I who taught you to read faces, remember?”

“Stop it! That proud tutor act has been phony from the start.”

“No,
amico mio
.” The grin was gone. “It was not, as you say, phony. It was never that.”

Macklin said, “I accused Christine of informing on me to the FBI. She denied it but I didn't believe her. I thought because Randall Burlingame knew enough to try to reach me at her number, she was the one who filled their file on me. But you knew I was seeing her. And you knew about some of the hits I made, because I discussed the knottier ones with you before making them. Christine couldn't have known about them. The Feds did. Not enough to convict, not on hearsay when their informer refused to testify. But enough to hobble me if I ever came in handy.

“What did they promise you, Umberto?” he asked. “I'd always thought you were incorruptible.”

The storeroom-office swelled with silence. Macklin watched Pinelli's expression, but without the element of surprise there was no reading the face of a man who had been reading faces since before he was born. The old killer unfolded his great arms, looked down at his hands. There was no shame in the gesture, only sadness.

“There are no incorruptibles, Pietro. Not one. I would not have had you know for anything. I would rather you'd died on that boat.”

Macklin felt his face get haggard. Until that moment he had hoped the old man would deny it, even lie. He would then have gone away to convince himself. Now he spoke from the depths of his exhaustion.

“What could you have wanted that would make you do it? You have money.”

This time it was Pinelli who looked hurt. “How could you think I would do this thing for money? How could you think that? I did it for freedom.”

“You are free.”

“No man is free who owes a debt. I told an untruth on my application for citizenship. It was an old arrest, for a small burglary during my youth in Messina. It was so long ago that more than once I thought of it as a childhood nightmare. I made no mention of it. Twice when I was employed here I was summoned to police headquarters for questioning. I was released both times for no evidence, but had the police known of this forgotten untruth I could have been deported. But a federal agent who knew of this questioning took my immigration file home for study. Afterwards he came to me.

“I left enemies in Messina, Pietro, enemies who remember the old ways. I am strong but I am old and they are many. They would nail me to a tree and slice off my
virilità
and thrust it down my throat to choke me. I am not afraid to die. But I fear dying in this disgraceful way. I could take my own life, but that is the most difficult killing of all when one is still in good health and has his wits. And so once a month, sometimes twice, I meet this young man for lunch and we talk.”

“You have nothing to fear from deportation, Umberto,” Macklin said after a moment. “You have no
virilità
to lose.”

The big man straightened. “It has come to this?”

Macklin's jaw ached. He realized he was grinning. “You're a clown.
Buffone
. You talk of honor and loyalty as if you had any and you've killed, but when a man insults you that's the greatest sin of all.”

“To kill is not the sin. Not when it is in the service of one to whom you swear fealty. It matters not to whom, only that you swear and that you uphold the oath.”

“Where is the honor in being another man's instrument?”

“You are an instrument too; you forget.”

“Not any more. I'm leaving Boniface.”

“Then you are retiring?”

“Maybe. Probably not. There won't be a great deal left of the hundred thousand after I divorce Donna. I had a dream. It does no good to be an assassin for the king and be damned for his sins. There are people out there with good reasons to kill but no talent for it. It's a big market and where I agree with those reasons I can make a living. A living from other people's dying,” he added, when the thought struck him.

“A wildcat.” Pinelli looked grim. “I would see you dead first.”

“Just so.”

The other hesitated. “This is how you would have it?”

Macklin said it was the way it was.

The wolfishness stole back over the old Sicilian's face. Macklin saw the tension go out of his muscles. “In my country, when a man knows his enemy is looking for him he puts on his finest clothes and goes into the town square to wait for him. But there are no town squares here. A man must make his own.” He put a hand behind his back and brought it around holding the knife that had belonged to his great-grandfather. The hand moved quickly and the weapon flipped up and he caught it by the point, then flipped it again so that it landed point-first in the softwood floor halfway between them. Then he removed the studs from his cuffs and put them on the desk. “I am old and not so strong as once I was,” he said, turning back the cuffs. “But you are wounded and tired. It should be an even contest. One of us will remain here. The other will watch the sun set tonight.”

Hours later, Macklin decided that he had seen better sunsets.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Peter Macklin Thrillers

Chapter One

Goldstick thought, here's my partnership.

With the marinated grace of a professional pallbearer, the young attorney held the door for the frumpy woman in the dark skirt and beige silk blouse and drifted past her to slide out the chair on the clients' side of the desk. When she sat down, a small triangle of bare flesh showed at her waist where she'd neglected a button. Wads of Kleenex boiled out of her shoulder bag when it touched the floor. But it was an expensive bag.

From behind the desk he liked what he saw even better. In the puffy face framed by its horseshoe of gray-streaked blond hair he read anger and the ache for revenge. It carried down to her hasty dress and the solid way she sat, as if she were filling a notch in a fort wall. This one wasn't going to go gooey on him at the bargaining table and accept the first offer made by her husband's attorney. It shaped up to be a profitable relationship, one an ambitious young barrister with a Galahad flair could ride to a slot on the company letterhead.

He touched the razor point of a hard pencil to the page of notes his secretary had taken over the telephone. “Your husband's name is Peter Macklin?”

“That's right.”

“And you've been married seventeen years?”

“As of last May.”

“You have a son named Roger, age sixteen?”

“Seventeen next month.”

The next month was November. Goldstick did some mental arithmetic and decided not to press the matter. He was of a generation that was always a little surprised to learn that it had not invented sex before marriage. “You're seeking a divorce on what grounds?”

“Well, the legal terminology is your department. But I'm sick of being married to the son of a bitch.”

“Breakdown of marriage,” he wrote in the margin of the sheet before him.

“May I ask who recommended us to you?”

“My neighbor, Marge Donahue. You handled both her divorces and she owns a Mercedes.”

He loved it. Aloud he said: “The object, of course, is not to make you wealthy, although your support is imperative. We're chiefly interested in seeing that you receive fair compensation for the years you invested in the partnersh—the marriage.”

“Mr. Goldstick.” She finished lighting a cigarette and spoiled the immaculate brass ashtray on her side of the desk with the burned match. “I'm chiefly interested in taking the bastard for every cent he has. You're chiefly interested in getting your cut. Let's get that straight before we both climb in up to our chins.”

He watched her for a moment. She looked like a woman in her forties but was probably younger, given the statistics involving parents of teenaged children. Her eyes were light and pretty in a face going to fat and showing the beginnings of whiskey welts. Take off fifteen pounds, cut back on the chain cocktails; he had seen the transformation take place enough times once the pressure of a bad marriage was released. He asked some more questions, not paying much attention to the answers, letting the rhythm lull them into the conspiratorial atmosphere so crucial to a successful divorce action. There would be plenty of time later for his secretary to get the stuff down.

“What does your husband do for a living, Mrs. Macklin?” he asked.

“He's a killer.”

It took him a moment to assimilate the answer. By then he had already written it down. He read it and looked up. “I'm afraid you misunder—Do you mean to say he beats you?” His inner cash register chimed.

“No, I mean he kills people for a living. He's a killer for hire.”

He smiled tentatively. Her face didn't move. Smoke curled in front of it. “You're serious?”

“Ask the widows of his victims.”

“A hit man.”

“A killer.”

He nodded, made two marks with the pencil, and sat back, tickling his ear with the eraser. “And what is his gross income?”

Jack Dowd drove into the little lot behind the apartment complex in Southfield, spotted the silver Cougar, and parked two slots down.

He didn't get out of the car. At forty-six, with twenty-two years in the investigation business, he knew better than to accost a subject at his door, on enemy ground with only one way to run when the job was finished. What you did was you followed him to neutral territory and served the papers there. Preferably with a fence to jump over afterward and a supply of witnesses handy, not so much to confirm success as to save yourself a severe beating like the one he had drawn his first week on the job from a Chrysler dock foreman. The court had awarded Dowd twenty-five hundred dollars in damages (someone else had served
those
papers), and he had given no one else the opportunity to be sued by him.

The weather was cooling, but the sunlight refracting through the windshield was drowsily warm. He cranked down the window to avoid succumbing, tilted his porkpie hat forward, and slid a fresh toothpick between his lips from the pocket where he used to keep cigarettes. This had the effect of shooting his jaw and bulldogging his potato-lumpy face. It was how he had posed for the picture he ran with his display in the Yellow Pages.