Change of plans.
There would be no payoff to worsen the sting. New dynamic. Laurie’s murder would have to take place without Macklin bearing witness.
Three different parties came out of the house while Roger was watching, spaced ten to twenty minutes apart. One was the wrong age, two the wrong sex. The last, a coot with dirty gray hair coiling out from under his stocking cap, galoshes unbuckled and jingling, slopped around behind the building, came out with a snow shovel, and started in on one of the piles in the little lot marked RESIDENTS ONLY. Roger decided to check inside.
There was a buzzer in the shallow foyer. None of the slips next to the buttons said Laurie Macklin; but he’d already connected her to L. Ziegler in 310.
He tried a couple of buttons, but no one buzzed back. The lock was a slip latch; a common design flaw in automatic locks. He sneezed it open with a piece of plastic he carried in his wallet.
The same dodge got him inside 310. There were clothes hanging in the closet, with empty spaces on the rod; that was inconclusive. On the floor stood two suitcases, a large and a medium, with a gap between them, where a third bag might have stood that was smaller yet, an overnighter.
Next he’d checked the bathroom. More spaces among the bottles on the counter, no toothbrush or toothpaste in the medicine cabinet.
Five minutes after letting himself in he’d come galloping downstairs and didn’t slow down until he was behind the wheel. There would be no fresh picture to tack to his final ransom demand. Satisfaction would have to come with shedding blood only.
“Walker.” It came out between his teeth as he stuck his key in the ignition.
But he started up gently and didn’t spin rubber peeling away from the curb. With the place so quiet under its fall of snow, any show of haste on the street would draw too much fire. At the entrance to I-96 he waited, fingers drumming the wheel, while a double-bottom semi made its wide sloppy swing onto the ramp coming from the other direction, then fell in behind, passing it across the V where the acceleration lane merged with the freeway. By then there’d been enough traffic to warm the asphalt, melting the snow and ice, and he drove east toward Detroit at the customary ten miles above the limit. But on Sunday he had enough room between himself and the cars up ahead to free the magnetic box that held his High Standard from under the passenger seat and switch to the .44 barrel one-handed.
* * *
Macklin was watching the weather reports on TV when the phone rang in his condo in Warren. No greetings were exchanged, but he recognized the voice of his fat FBI contact.
“Dade County, Florida. He registered it under his own name. Two thousand thirteen Corvette, blue in color.”
What else would it be blue in? Macklin thought, writing down the registration number. He hung up without having said a word.
He’d left the TrailBlazer in the private carport he’d paid for, but enough snow had drifted in to cover the windshield. He started it up and switched on the defroster, using the washer-wipers to clear away the rest.
He’d memorized the address he’d been given a few days earlier. It belonged to a quonset-like truss building in Belleville, close enough to Detroit Metropolitan Airport for jetliners to crisscross the sky above it with white trails, turning it into a tic-tac-toe board. A nearly constant roar of air traffic shook its metal walls as planes took off in a convict line; the blizzard had grounded them and they were playing catch-up. It was painted snot-green, with a wooden sign running the width of the frontage facing the road, reading ACE’S BODY SHOP. Another sign, in faded red Sharpie on tacked-up white foamboard, said HONK TO ENTER. He braked in front of a garage door with frosted glass panes and did as directed.
After a moment something clunked, ice broke with a pop, and the door rose slowly as smoke, on chains and rollers that clanked and clattered loud enough to drown out the air traffic directly overhead. Inside, a square scow of a Cadillac Eldorado thirty years old with a dull gold finish perched on a lift and a showroom-quality Dodge Viper with easily eight coats of hand-polished paint—the kind that changed color according to the light—was parked on rubber pads on the concrete floor on the other side. There was just room enough to ease the TrailBlazer between them and get out.
The place smelled of grease, steel tools, and kerosene from a heating stove the size of a refrigerator venting smoke outside through a pipe. The air was warm. A dark dumpy man, young-old, in stained Carhartt coveralls and a flat-topped once-white cotton beanie like house-painters wore, lowered the door at the touch of a button. Coveralls and the man inside them were indescribably filthy. He wiped his hands on an equally filthy rag, with no apparent effect on his black-stained fingers, and switched off a boombox radio wrapped in protective silver duct tape in the middle of a hoarse screaming aria from the ghetto. He’d had it cranked up loud enough to be heard above the soaring jets, and after that the noise of the turbines was almost pleasant.
“Ace?” Macklin asked.
“There ain’t one. But ‘Schuyler’s Body Shop’ don’t track. You Peters?”
“Yeah.”
“Who sent you, Billings?”
“There ain’t one.” No irony rang in his tone. “Dorfman.”
“’Kay. I got to be careful. One more drop and they carry me out of the pen feet foremost.”
Macklin inclined his head toward the Viper. “Chop shop?”
“Strictly up-and-up. What’d I say? Two rackets makes twice as many ways to take a fall.”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
Schuyler stuffed the rag in a hip pocket and rolled a red-enamel tool cart away from the wall next to a workbench littered with tailpipes and things. He grunted with the effort; the drawers were plainly loaded down with hardware. “ATF spooks all got bad backs,” he explained.
This exposed a metal heat register that didn’t belong in a building with a freestanding stove. The man knelt, took hold of it with both hands, and lifted it free. From the space between walls he drew a rusty green toolbox and banged it to the floor.
His customer studied the revolvers, semi-automatic pistols, and suppressers in the box, then selected a Ruger New Model .357 Magnum, the Blackhawk, and a box of shells. Schuyler directed him to test-fire it into a seat cushion from a 1950 Oldsmobile, torn and leaking horsehair. Macklin timed it to coincide with a jet taking off directly above the roof. He pronounced the trigger pull satisfactory and the sight straight. This time there was no dickering; he hadn’t time. He paid for the weapon and left, bound north to I-96 and then west toward Milford.
The private cop lived in a one-story dump on the Detroit side of Hamtramck, square except for an attached garage that had probably been added since it was built sometime during the Industrial Revolution. With fresh snow heaped all around and on the roof, all it lacked was gingerbread. A small Christmas tree stood unlit on a table in a front window.
Roger parked around the corner, lopsided on a granulated pile pushed up by a city plow, and made his way back on foot, the High Standard tucked in the reinforced pocket he’d had built into his peacoat. No light showed through any of the windows, but it was a sunny day. He peered through a garage window, cupping his hands around his eyes. No car was parked inside.
He went around to the narrow backyard, which faced the blind wall of a house fronting on the next street over. This place was nearly identical to Walker’s, but no garage. There was no car in the driveway it shared with its neighbor next door. The drive had been shoveled. Most likely everyone was at church; it was that kind of neighborhood.
The snow soaked his trousers as far as his calves, but he waded through it, mounted a step, peered through the small square single-paned window in a door to what looked like a shallow back porch that had been walled in and roofed to shelter an automatic washer and dryer, another afterthought. The door rattled loosely when he tugged on the knob. It would be fastened with a hook, but a strip of half-round dowel prevented him from sliding his piece of plastic through the seam and lifting it out of the eye. He looked around, drew his pistol, pushed in the pane with an elbow, crooked his free arm inside, found the hook, and freed it.
The unheated back room was musty-smelling, with an underlay of detergent and bleach. A dead bolt secured the door to the house. He was less handy with a set of picks than with his plastic strip, but after five minutes and curses beneath his breath the two times he dropped one of the tools the bolt slid into its socket with a chunk.
There’d been noise, so he exploded through the door, wheeling right and left gripping the High Standard in both hands. A little linoleum-paved kitchen and breakfast nook yawned back, empty.
The same with a living room, decorated once by someone but that had the air of a place where no one had actually looked at the wall art and knickknacks in years. Freestanding bookshelves, a couple of dirty ashtrays, a TV and cable box, the midget tree hung with cheap ornaments, an overstuffed chair and sofa, side table ringed all over on top like the Olympic flag, and in the air a tired blend of stale cigarettes and old cooking odors from the kitchen.
In the little bedroom an unmade bed, more books, and a plain dresser. He opened a closet with two suits hanging inside and a pair of brown shoes. His man would be wearing the black. Roger left the drawers alone. Walker and Laurie wouldn’t be hiding in the drawers.
He let himself out the way he’d come, holding the pistol down behind his hip in case anyone was looking. No one was.
He had one more place to check.
Cranking the ’Vette around the corner onto Joseph Campau, Hamtramck’s main stem, he hit a patch of ice and slued across the dividing line, barely missing the fender of a maroon TrailBlazer coming his way in the lane opposite, causing the driver to brake and cheat the other direction; but Roger turned into the skid without braking, corrected his course, and drove on, not looking back.
* * *
It swung around the corner in a blue streak. Macklin saw the shine on the pavement, like metal where the sun hit it, and reacted simultaneously with the driver of the sports car, touching the brake pedal lightly just to slow his momentum and flirting the wheel right even as the other let his own tires slide to his right. They missed each other by inches.
There was no time to read the plate, but he knew the car was the blue Corvette Roger had bought in Florida; in that neighborhood, where Amos Walker lived, no other explanation applied. He was too late. Again.
He’d wasted little time in Milford. One of the suitcases Laurie had packed when she’d left him was gone from the apartment, and so her with it. The next logical place was Walker’s house. Somehow, possibly with the help of the snowstorm, he’d spirited her away from under Roger’s nose.
But Roger had come to the same conclusion.
When Macklin parked in front of the house, he expected to find nothing inside but a corpse, and likely two.
Footsteps in the snow led around to the back. This time there would be no need to hoist himself through the garage window. The window in the door to the enclosed porch was broken, the hook undone and the bolt securing the connecting door to the house disengaged. Just in case Walker was still breathing and armed, he went in holding the Ruger. The detective would be expecting Roger to come back and finish the job. He might, at that.
He’d seen everything before, studied it in order to form a more thorough picture of Walker’s character, so there was no need to linger in any room. The house was deserted, with no signs of a struggle. He reversed his steps, leaving everything as it was, and when he was sure no one was waiting for him outside he stuck the revolver in his belt under the windbreaker.
He knew where Roger was headed. He kicked the TrailBlazer to life and made a U-turn back toward the freeway. His tires spun briefly on snow that had melted and refrozen. He drove one-handed, dialing Walker’s office line with the other on his cell. It was busy.