Kill Zone (6 page)

Right now he had only to raise his pistol and squeeze the trigger to activate the device that charged three and a half pounds of volatile gelatin molded under the entire length of the railing on the second deck.

On the top passenger deck, Larry was using his handkerchief often because he had exhausted his entire supply of cocaine in one toot and it was making his nose run and his eyes water. Thanks to Doris he had been on the stuff for months and had a higher-than-average tolerance. He liked the way it cleared his head, isolating each thought in a crystal cell that kept its edges clean and bright, and it made him smile in such a way that his hostages flinched collectively whenever he raised his .45 to scratch his cheek with the iron sight. It also shrank his doubts and fears into nothing more than an annoying, pulsating lump under the euphoria.

Mike's death formed the center of the lump like the grain of sand a pearl is molded around. He had not said ten words during the many meetings before the event, and Larry had come to think of him as a rather dull but important factor in their plan, when he thought of him at all. Mike's toadlike calm bordered on the soporific. Of all of them, he had seemed the least likely to rebel at the crucial moment and force Sol to kill him. Yet that was how Don had explained Fay's hasty report, transmitted shortly after the burp of gunfire sounded below, when he had relayed it to Larry's portable unit. Don had said that he had been worried about Mike all along and had asked Sol to keep an eye on him. Larry supposed that the ability to spot a traitor in his blandest guise was a requirement of leadership. But even the stimulant failed to make clear to him just what was Mike's transgression.

Doris meanwhile prowled aft, holding her M-16 like a furled umbrella and rubbing her upper arms for warmth. She had put on her sweater, but the thin expensive material was no match for the damp cold that was still in her bones from last night. The drug in her veins helped, but her extremities remained chilled. She had had circulation problems and an abnormally slow heartbeat since childhood. The condition had been the prime mover behind the exaggerated tenderness of her upbringing and the petulance that came as a result. She knew no standard of values beyond those given her by Larry, and that was why she was prowling the deck of an excursion boat full of hostages, looking to them like some hollow-eyed spectre from the deep with pale seaweed for hair and chewed nails against the plastic stock of death in a blue steel case.

All was quiet aboard ship. In the pilot house, Don sang his “Do, re, mi” song under his breath and contemplated the gray fog skidding past the windscreen.

CHAPTER 8

Daniel Oliver Ackler.

Macklin figured he'd remember the initials even if he forgot the name. He wondered if it was an affectation, a cocky killer's idea of a grim joke, or if it was genuine and, if so, if it had had anything to do with his choice of occupations. Macklin liked it either way. If a joke, he would be the overconfident type, likely to swagger into Macklin's sights out of sheer hubris. If genuine, his decision to follow a vocation in keeping with his initials might make him superstitious, a believer in signs and portents, and therefore predictable in his actions. Macklin himself believed in no signs not sanctioned by the highway department.

If the information in the packet he had open on the work table in his study was reliable, Ackler was the man known to those passengers who had succeeded in jumping ship while it was still in the river as Sol, the same man who had pulled the trigger on a fellow terrorist as an object lesson for the hostages. He had come to the Detroit area four years earlier from places unknown and in spite of his youth had racked up an impressive number of independent hits, sometimes working for Macklin's own employers, but most times earning his fee from persons outside the organization with grudges and the cash to settle them. According to Howard Klegg, who had presented Macklin with the folder of typewritten data from his briefcase, Ackler was also the last man to see Jack DeGrew, bass violinist with Chester Crane and his Whoopers, alive.

So far as could be told from cold print, the young button man had just two weaknesses, vanity and an inordinate regard for automatic weapons. The first, which placed him in a professional hairdressers' chair twice a month to have his hair styled and dyed platinum, was something to keep in mind should Macklin meet him face to face. The second he could do something about right now.

He finished memorizing the information and tipped it, folder and all, into a square wastebasket under the broad oak library table he used for a desk. Immediately the basket growled and chewed the sheets into confetti and deposited the tiny pieces into a reservoir in the bottom. Then he rose, drew forth a key attached to a reel in the steel container on his belt and unlocked a green metal file cabinet in the corner next to the shaded window. There was a safe in the bottom drawer with a double combination lock whose numbers could be changed at will and soon he had it open and drew out the only item it contained, a new blue Smith & Wesson .38 revolver with a natural rubber grip, smeared with pink cosmoline and sealed in clear plastic. He had purchased it only that day from a private source for three times the list price to make up for the lack of legal paperwork. Coming up, he had known killers who sneered at his costly caution while patting the favorite weapons they had used on half a dozen jobs and given names like Eloise and Baby Blue, but all of them were pushing government time or feeding worms in unhallowed ground, nonstop from the little room where they drop the little cyanide pellet into the bucket of acid. One killing to a gun, and there was no percentage in being greedy.

Machine guns held no appeal for Macklin. Since the passing of the old Thompsons there was little aesthetically pleasing about the new sausage-shaped rattletraps stamped out of plastic and sheet metal in countries with no culture and muddy unidentifiable languages. And any idiot who could bend his finger and point could vomit a stream of lead over a broad area. It took something special to maneuver within revolver range of a dangerous target and let one well-placed bullet do the work of ninety hastily splattered ones.

And yet he was not a lover of firearms. He called them all guns regardless of fine definitions, and once he had this one out of its wrapper and had wiped it clean of preservative gelatin and tested the action and loaded it from the box of cartridges he kept in another file drawer, he locked it away again, along with an envelope containing fifty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills, hand-delivered by special messenger on Klegg's orders.

“Big shot executive type,” said a voice behind Macklin. “What's in the safe, doubloons?”

He was deliberately slow in turning. He had observed Donna still asleep in the living room on his way upstairs and so had not bothered to lock the study door. Now she was standing in the doorway, still in the quilted bathrobe that needed cleaning, her gray-streaked blond hair sticking out at angles like burrs in a dog's coat. At 35 she had deep lines at the corners of her mouth and dark thumbprints under her eyes. She was glaring.

“How long have you been there?” His tone was dead calm.

“What's it matter? You think I don't know you keep guns in there? You think I don't know what you do?”

“I'm an efficiency expert.”

That was what he wrote in the OCCUPATION blank on his income tax form, and it was how he was listed on the payroll at the camera-construction firm where he worked in Taylor. The company was one of the organization's legitimate enterprises.

“You're efficient, all right. You're always home, and when you're not and I call you at the office you're always in a meeting. Have you ever seen your office, Pete? Have you ever met your secretary?”

“You're drunk, Donna. You only call me Pete when you've been drinking.”

“I drink because I'm married to you.”

“You drink because you like it.”

“I'm an alcoholic.”

“You're a drunk. Alcoholics drink because they have to. You do it for the pure pleasure of getting numb. Don't romanticize yourself for just me. I'm a lousy audience.”

“Okay, I'm a drunk. But I'm not a killer. Is that what they call you where you work? Killer?”

He said nothing, waiting her out. Her tirades never lasted long.

“I'll bet you like it as much as I like getting blasted. How is it pulling the trigger on someone, Pete? Do you get a boost out of the way their eyes bug out just before you do it, do you give them a chance to plead for their lives? Or do you prefer shooting them from behind? I guess that would be the safest way, the most efficient for an efficiency expert like you.”

“It would be. If I were a killer.”

“Stop playing! Don't lie about it like I'm a kid asking about sex. I want you to tell me what I know. Do you kill people for a living?”

“I'm an efficiency expert,” he said.

She must have slid the heavy brass ashtray into one of the voluminous pockets of the robe before coming upstairs. He jerked his head right and the heavy projectile dusted his left ear. When she saw she'd missed, Donna screamed—a terrible animal shriek—and rushed him, clawing at his face with her long nails. But he turned his left shoulder into her and bowled her into the file cabinet, slamming shut one of the open drawers, and got her into a tight bearhug. Her blows bounded dully off his back, her screams tore his eardrums. He increased pressure and after a few seconds the noise died and she went slack in his arms.

She had fainted, with a little help from the alcohol in her brain. He picked up her feet, hoisted her into an unromantic fireman's carry, and bore her, his discs groaning, through the doorway and down the hall to the bedroom. He stopped once to lean against the wall and catch his breath, then finished the trip and dropped her, not gently, onto the bed. While the springs rocked to a halt he stood there wheezing and waiting for the black spots to fade. Sixteen and a half years ago he had swept her through the front door and up the stairs and still had enough energy to make love to her. She was heavier now, but she had been pregnant with Roger even then and no wraith. He determined to step up his weightlifting next session. Then he determined not to. What if it didn't help?

Donna was snoring with her mouth open and her hair in her eyes. He went through the pockets of her robe and excavated a crumpled pack of cigarettes and two books of matches from a wad of stained brittle Kleenex and gray lint and put them in his own shirt pocket. Then he backed out, closing the door behind him. He wondered where in hell Roger was.

His left ear burned where the ashtray had grazed it. He stopped in the bathroom to examine it in the mirror. The flesh was red. He wet a facecloth and held it against the ear until the pain lessened. Then he changed shirts, put on a fresh necktie, brushed back his thinning hair, and left the house carrying his jacket. It was a warm day in spite of the overcast.

He had left the gun in the safe and kept no weapons in his car. That was another way to end your career in a hurry, lugging unregistered firearms everywhere you went. He only carried one when he had use for it. Just now he was dry-stalking; the hunt itself would come later.

He spotted the federal men by the second corner. There were always two of them, and they always drove nondescript cars and followed no closer than a block behind. The gray Plymouth pulled over to the curb a hundred yards back while Macklin was waiting for the light to change, but no one got out. A high black four-wheel-drive pickup was stopped next to him in the right lane. Macklin let his car creep ahead a few feet, and when the green light came on he goosed the accelerator and cut across the pickup's path, angling right into the cross street. By the time the flustered truck driver blew his horn, the shiny Cougar was approaching the next street over and Macklin bumped the curb turning right again and cut across an empty lot, barking his suspension on the sidewalk. A minute later he hit one of the Mile Roads and blended into the late lunch-hour traffic on Telegraph. There was no sign of the Plymouth in his rearview mirror. He paid no attention to the brown Cordoba that pulled onto Telegraph half a minute behind him, nicking the red light, or to the young sandy-haired man behind the wheel, watching the road and the Cougar burbling along two cars ahead, his face tilted a little to see out from under an eyelid that drooped.

CHAPTER 9

“Hello Gyp.”

Wyler G. Ibsen, head tailor at Clovis Haberdashers on Greenfield, glanced up between the parted thighs of the fat man whose inseam he was measuring to see who had addressed him by his old nickname. When he recognized Peter Macklin, his perennial half-smile froze and the color slid from his face. The measuring tape slithered free of his thumb and forefinger and coiled on the carpet, but his hand stayed where it was. The tiny black moustache that made his round head look too big for his slight frame twitched and crawled like feelers.

“Oh—hello, Mac,” he managed. “Guess I'm stuck here for a spell. Got appointments back-to-back till closing. Some friends are picking me up then,” he added quickly, his half-smile flickering.

“That's okay. My business today is with your boss. He in?”

The question took a moment to ring up. When it did, Gyp almost leaped to his feet. “Oh—Herb? He's in the office. In back.”

“I know where it is.” Macklin paused before turning. “It isn't that business,” he said.

“Oh. Oh!” The smile became brilliant.

“Who was that?” asked the fat man, when they were alone again.

“Efficiency expert.” Ibsen's hands were shaking so badly he had to use both of them to pick up the tape.

The fat man grunted. “Mine affects me the same way.”

The “office” was really a working storeroom, jungled with cartons of Arrow and Van Heusen shirts and bolts of material lying at odd angles and accordions of tissue-paper patterns tacked elbow-deep to the lath-and-plaster walls. Macklin found the door open and Herb Pinelli, standing with one well-tailored leg bent and a patent-leather shoe propped on a crate stuffed with crushed newspapers and a clipboard on his knee, checking off a list of items on a typewritten sheet with a fat green fountain pen. He didn't look up as Macklin approached. “Pull up a box, Pietro. It's good to see you.”