The man in the backseat didn’t tell me to resist any more stunts like the one I’d tried with the lamppost. Evidently he knew enough about me to know it was unnecessary.
“Gun,” he said.
“In the safe at the office. Carrying a piece into the cophouse just makes them mad.”
“You’d better be a fast draw if you’re lying.”
“Is that my spare piece you tickled me with? I thought of finding a better hiding place, but the last time I did that I could only remember where I used to put it.”
“Don’t kid me it won’t fire. It wouldn’t be worth keeping as a spare.”
“You’re Macklin.”
“Where can we talk?” He’d withdrawn the gun and sat back a little, but it would still be handy.
This was encouraging. People who are planning to kill you don’t usually engage you in conversation. The chatty villains you see on the screen are rare in life, for obvious reasons.
“We can pull over anywhere,” I said.
“I mean face-to-face. The answers you get looking at the back of a man’s head don’t count.”
“A restaurant, then.”
“I know you’ll feel safer in public, but you might get ideas. I’ve gone to a lot of trouble just to have to kill you.”
“I don’t like to cause inconvenience. My office is close.”
“Not bad. It’s the only one occupied on the top floor.”
“You can put away the gun,” I said.
“When you put away the car.”
For years I’d paid a derelict five bucks to protect my car from vandals like him while it was parked in the empty Cold War gas station across from my building. He’d been shoved out by a pub-style restaurant, but when that failed another homeless entrepreneur had shoved in, hiking the price to ten. Detroit abhors a vacuum.
Holding my Luger inside the slash pocket of a leather windbreaker, Macklin stayed close by my side crossing the street and then the foyer. I got my first good glimpse of him through the corner of my eye. He was about my height, built slighter but not slight, and his profile belonged on the Before side of an advertisement for a male makeover. An ordinarily observant person could forget what he looked like while he was still looking at him. I’m an experienced detective; I held the image until he stepped behind me to climb the stairs.
Rosecranz, the troll who kept the building from sliding into its foundation, knelt on a step halfway to the second floor, scraping petrified gum off the underside of the banister with a stone chisel. He got up to let us pass.
“Is it Leap Year already?” I said.
Macklin and I mounted the last flight without a word.
“Was that necessary?” he said when we reached the top.
“He’d have been suspicious if I didn’t say anything. Also I got the satisfaction of hearing your sphincter squeak when I opened my mouth.”
“You take chances, Walker.”
“Yeah, but you don’t.”
He confirmed that by throwing me up against the hallway wall and holding me there with a shoulder while he frisked me. All he got was my keys and wallet, and he returned those.
I put my suit back into order and opened the unlocked door to the little waiting room. The only thing waiting there was a ladybug, and it was more interested in the museum-quality copy of Midwest Living it was crawling across to pay us any attention. Well, I’d hardly expected the U.S. Cavalry; but a man can hope.
He’d relocked the door to the confession box. A tidy man, Macklin. No archaeologist would find a footprint to show he’d set foot on earth, not in a million years or ten minutes.
Inside the office, he waved me into the swivel behind the desk with the barrel of the Luger, then slid the magazine out of the handle and worked the cigarette-lighter action, kicking the cartridge out of the chamber onto the floor. He laid it atop a file cabinet outside my reach sitting and tried to move the customer’s chair closer to the desk, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Bolted,” he said. “If I hadn’t checked the place out I’d expect a gun strapped in the kneehole on your side.”
“I’m surprised you missed the bolts. I’ve got a thing about visitors invading my space, especially when they come here straight from Coney Island with a bellyful of chili and onions. You’d just kill them, I guess.”
He sat. “You know me better than that. Lieutenant Stonesmith wants my head on a plate, but she wouldn’t lump me in with Jeffrey Dahmer.”
I looked at the pad by the telephone and a doodle I hadn’t realized I made, of a female face wearing a police cap. “Sigmund Freud, then. I wondered how you got from Leo Dorfman to Thirteen Hundred. You don’t have much practice in taking no for an answer, do you?”
“I do. You’d be surprised if I told you how many people try to dicker me down.”
“I doubt it. I hear all the time what happens to people who go to cut-rate killers. They almost always turn out to be undercover cops.”
He let that line of conversation wither on the vine. Head on, his face was scored deeply from the corners of his nostrils to the corners of his slightly wide mouth. The nose was average like the rest of him, neither big nor small, as straight as it needed to be, and his dark hair was thinning on either side of the widow’s peak. The eyes were the giveaway: pale and colorless, shallow as plastic discs, giving up only reflected light. You saw them in cops who should have retired years ago and in psychiatrists whose patients were cases only, no longer people.
And killers.
I slid open the belly drawer—he didn’t flinch, but then he’d know what it contained—broke open a pack of cigarettes, tilted it his way. He shook his head, a millimeter each direction. I struck a match off an old burn-canal on the desk and got one going.
It was my turn not to talk. I pushed myself away far enough to sit back and cross my legs, gripping the top ankle the way Brits do in spy novels. I could feel my heart banging all the way down the bone.
He drew a fold of stiff shiny paper from an inside pocket of the windbreaker and put it on the desk within my reach, standing it up like a tent. I dragged on the cigarette, laid it in the tray, scooped up and snapped open the paper. It was good photo stock, the image laser-printed in color. I admired a fresh young face above the roll of a white turtleneck sweater, looking out a window white with frost, cleared as by the heel of a hand in a circle that framed the face, like a halo in a Renaissance painting, a steaming mug nestled between two slim white hands. She wasn’t looking at me or anything in particular, and probably not at whoever had taken the picture.
It might have been a model shot for a fashion magazine, but the legend printed out above and below belonged on a wanted poster.
“Your wife?”
“Yes.”
“You got a hundred grand?”
“Ask me a question I’ll answer.”
“Email, I’m guessing. Any idea who sent it?”
“One.”
“‘Just because she doesn’t want to live with you doesn’t mean you don’t want her to live.’ Is that true?”
“I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t.”
“Have you warned her?”
“If I did, she’d clear out, and force the issue. Right now she’s safe, until he has my answer. Just when he wants it is up to him. He didn’t leave contact information, only that ‘more soon.’ If she moves out, he’ll know the answer, and it’s out of my hands.”
“I guess paying the ransom’s not an option.”
“You know the playbook. It’s just an installment. And it wouldn’t guarantee anything. I’m used to final resolutions.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Keep her alive until I can work things out on my end.”
“I haven’t done bodyguard work in years, and then it was only because I was broke. It didn’t turn out so well for the client.”
“I know. I know every case you ever had that made news. I’m just buying time.” From the same inside pocket he took a thick envelope, which made a substantial thump when it struck the desk. It was oversize, and packed tight enough to need a rubber band to keep it from splitting; but even so.
I left it where it was. “That’s not a hundred grand.”
“Fifty. The rest when it’s over to my satisfaction.”
“It’s the satisfaction part that worries me.”
He shook his head again. The movement this time was even narrower. “I only kill when I’m paid, or it’s in my best interest. You finish what you start—however it turns out—and you play it tight to the vest. I can concentrate knowing Laurie’s in capable hands.”
“Concentrate on eliminating the threat. What makes it I wouldn’t be an accomplice to murder?”
“Nobody’s said anything about murder. I’m hiring you to keep an innocent party safe. Where I go from here and what I do, no one can accuse you of knowing.”
“Suppose I tell Stonesmith about this meeting.”
“I wouldn’t. It would move you into the category of my best interest.”
I uncrossed my legs and leaned forward to pick up my cigarette. I grabbed the heavy glass tray and scaled it at his head.
He ducked it—I knew then why he conserved his movements so carefully—and beat me to the Luger by a length. Half a second more and the magazine was in place and a fresh cartridge jacked into the chamber.
“You disappoint me,” he said.
“I know the feeling.”
“What did you hope to accomplish by that?”
“Ounce of prevention. I got bit once by a spider. Now I kill them when I see them.”
We returned to our seats. He laid the pistol in his lap. The cigarette was still in my mouth, to my surprise. I drew on it and squashed it out in the canal. I tapped the printout on the desk. “Why don’t you just do what you have to do before he makes good on his threat? You can track someone down as well as I can. You proved that in Toronto.”
If it was my hole card, I wasted it. Nothing on his face indicated it meant anything. “I’m not a killing machine,” he said, “no matter what Stonesmith says. I don’t pay tribute, but in certain circumstances I’ll give the mark a choice.”
“Circumstances such as?”
“Such as the man who sent me that email is my son.”