Roses Are Dead (16 page)

“How long have I been your secretary?”

A young man hurried in from the hall carrying a brown interdepartmental envelope. He had on a maroon three-piece suit and wore his sandy hair razor-cut around the ears. His ID was attached to his handkerchief pocket by the regulation blue plastic clothespin. The bureau director, who had lost his and used a paper clip, thought he looked like a cross between Robert Stack and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. “Mr. Burlingame, I'm glad I caught you before you went to lunch.”

“What is it, Fieldhouse?”

The young man smiled broadly. “I'm surprised you remember me, sir.”

“I read your ID. What can't wait?”

“This just got in over the Telex from Washington.” Fieldhouse handed him the envelope. “I knew you'd want to see it right away. It's on that man Intertrap operatives photographed with the Chinese and with Vasily Kurof. The one with the sideburns.”

Burlingame lifted the flap and read the printout. When he was finished, he looked at the young agent.

“Who else has seen this?”

“No one, sir. I realize I should have gone to my supervisor—”

“Who's your supervisor?”

“Reed Wallace, sir. Records and Research.”

“Mrs. Gabel, have Mr. Fieldhouse transferred to the director's staff.” To the agent: “That is, if you don't object.”

“No, sir!”

Burlingame retied the string on the envelope. “You've just reported to your supervisor. No need to bother Mr. Wallace with it. Or anyone else.”

“Yes, sir.”

The director looked at the agent's hair. “Grow that out a little on the sides, can you? You look like a G-man.”

Chapter Twenty-one

The farm was overgrown with quackgrass and timothy and the ugly thistled weeds that grew only where land had been tilled and then left to the wild. The barn had fallen in, and where the house had stood, a charred foundation and an exposed dirt cellar scarred a lawn gone over to poison ivy and wild wheat. Even the chimney bricks had been carried off by scavengers. Only the barbed wire enclosing the sixty acres was new, strung taut and stapled to creosoted cedar posts driven four feet into the earth and rising another four feet above, straight as rifle cartridges placed at fifteen-foot intervals.

Macklin used his key on the padlock securing the gate, swung it out, and got back into his car to baby it over the rutted remains of the driveway, parking it behind a spray of young box elders growing out of the cistern. Then he walked back and closed the gate and locked it.

The air was brisk and high cirrus clouds drifted overhead, casting feathery shadows that moved swiftly along the ground. Macklin had shed his sport coat in favor of a new waist-length fifty-percent wool red-and-black-checked fall jacket. The feel and smell of it reminded him favorably of hunting holidays with his father before the bad times came and made them strangers. On his way past the ruins of the house he unholstered the 10-millimeter, fished the fully loaded magazine out of a slash pocket, blew into it to dislodge lint, and heeled it into the gun's hollow handle. Even with the clip in place it felt incredibly light.

The land was his, or rather his and the bank's, secured with a ten-thousand-dollar down payment to the widow of a Hamtramck numbers king who had bought it as retirement property before a sore loser filled him full of .32 slugs in lieu of debts outstanding. Macklin could have purchased it outright from the hundred thousand he had gotten for the Boblo job, but large cash deals attracted too much notice and the investment in mortgage payments and land taxes was as good a way of laundering capital gains as any accountant could arrange. It was located thirty miles west of Detroit and deeded under a fictitious name, and it was flanked by a Metropark that was closed for the season and a much larger commercial farm whose owner added to his millions by agreeing not to plant crops on the federal government's surplus list. Macklin had no neighbors to worry about.

He had no plans to retire or take up farming. Target ranges were growing rare around an increasingly gun-paranoid city and those that remained boasted more off-duty police officers than a bar across from a precinct house. After Pennsylvania, Michigan led the nation in deer hunters; with the firearms deer season coming up November fifteenth, a few more gunshots in a rural area such as this would pass unnoticed among all the modern-day Daniel Boones tuning up their shooting eyes. Even as he headed out across the overgrown field, carrying a rusted can from the farm's forgotten dump, a report plopped in the distance and echoed sizzlingly across the flat country to prove him right.

When he was far enough away from the road to discourage a good view of the weapon he was using, he selected a pile of rocks cleared from the furrows by some long-dead agrarian and perched the can atop it. Then he paced off sixty feet, turned, set himself, brought the pistol down from a vertical position with his left hand supporting the heel of his right, took quick but careful aim, and squeezed the trigger. The report was very loud in the open air. The pistol bucked, shooting a little pain back up his wrist. The can clanked and fell over.

His hand tingled. He reversed hands on the gun and shook circulation back into his right, frowning at his target. He favored handguns with heavy frames that absorbed the recoil. This one's kick had thrown him off or else the sight was askew, forcing the trajectory high and to the right so that the bullet just clipped the top of the can instead of plugging it square in the middle as intended. He took aim again from the same distance. Beyond sixty feet an accurate shot was an iffy proposition with the best of handguns; if he were planning anything longer he would have a rifle.

This time he braced himself for the recoil, and the bullet flew straight, rolling the can against an upthrust rock and twanging off stone. He changed his angle and fired a third time, at the can's circular bottom, piercing the center ring dead on. The sight was true. He flicked on the safety and squatted to collect the ejected cartridge cases.

Something split the air above his head with a crack. An instant later came the report, a loud, nasty, shredded pop in the open air. Reflexes took over and he threw himself forward into a crouching run without waiting to see where the shot had come from. Another slapped the space behind him, followed closely by a third. He dived. He hit the ground on his shoulder and then on his chest and then on his back and came to rest on his other shoulder and pulled himself behind the pile of rocks just as another bullet clipped one of the moss-covered chunks of granite. The projectile exploded on contact, spraying tiny buzzing hornets that caught the light like sparks. One of them plucked at his jacket sleeve.

He leaned a shoulder against the pile, breathing heavily and cleaning bits of grass and dirt out of the 10-millimeter's action. When that was done he drew back a little to clear the rocks out of his line of vision. A little scudding patch of smoke drifted with the wind along the fenceline running parallel with the road. He stretched his gun arm over the top of a rock, sighted in on the smoke, and pivoted in the direction from which it had come.

The man was wearing a green top and at first he missed him against the spruce trees lining the road. Then he isolated him, a small pudgy figure under a cartoon hat standing several yards to the left of the burned-out house foundation with legs spread and both hands grasping something that glinted in the sunlight. Macklin depressed the trigger. It moved a tenth of an inch and stopped.

He cursed and slid off the safety. It was another reason he hated semiautomatics. By the time he was ready to fire, his target was moving, with his back to Macklin. He squeezed off three shots.

The pistol was new and smoked too much. He fanned the smoke away impatiently with his free hand. The swollen little figure was gone. Macklin was scanning the landscape for it when an automobile engine started somewhere with a rumble. Tires spun, scratching gravel, and then painted metal flashed through a space between trees, heading east. Macklin listened to the car swishing into the distance and silence.

He didn't get up right away. The trick was as old as turning out the lights and pretending no one was home; one drove off while his partner remained behind, waiting for the quarry to break cover. Macklin made himself comfortable with his back against a slab of limestone and reloaded the 10-millimeter's magazine from the box in his pocket. He ejected the bullet from the chamber and wiped the action with his handkerchief before reassembling.

Another car came down the road, trailing Boy George out an open window. It passed the padlocked gate without slowing and kept moving. A mile off, a tractor started up with a noise like coffee percolating, then died. Someone's dog began barking and went on doing so in a kind of resigned monotony, as if not expecting anyone to pay attention to it. An airplane droned overhead.

Macklin laid the gun to one side and stripped off his jacket. Cold air touched a Y-shaped patch of sweat soaking his shirt between his shoulder blades and down his spine to his belt. He picked up the gun, bunched up the coat, then grunted and put down the coat to rack a shell into the chamber. Then he lifted the coat and drew his legs under him in a crouch and hurled the coat as far as he could.

Its tail and sleeves uncurled in the air, looking at a quick glance like a man running. It completed a lazy twenty-foot arc and flopped to earth.

The airplane droned. The dog barked.

Macklin came out from behind the rocks, still hunched over. After a minute he straightened. No one shot at him. He stood there a while, the pistol in his hand, then went over and retrieved the coat and shrugged into it as he quartered the ground for shell casings. He had already pocketed the ones discarded at the rockpile. He found two quickly where he had been standing to practice but had to look around for a minute before he located the third, perched upright between blades of grass. He tipped them into the pocket with the others and started toward his car.

On the way he swung through the area where his assailant had stood. The county hadn't had rain in a month and the ground was too dry and hard to hold footprints, but a yellow glitter caught his eye and he bent and picked up a shell casing slightly smaller than those he was using. He turned the flanged end to the sun to read the stamped numbers: 7.65. He put the casing in a different pocket from the others and holstered his pistol and walked over to where his car was still parked behind cover and grasped the door handle on the driver's side and pulled.

Five seconds later the doors flew off and balls of yellow-and-red flame uncurled through the Cougar's burst windows from inside.

“Hell was
that
?” The station attendant jumped at the great hollow
crump
to the west, jerking the hand holding the pump nozzle and splashing gasoline out of the tank onto the asphalt paving and his customer's shoes. He gaped at a column of black smoke smudging the sky where the sun was starting to go down.

The old man scowled down at his shoes and stepped back. “Dynamiting, perhaps?”

“Don't get that much noise and smoke out of the stumps around here.”

“Perhaps an accident. Do I also pay for the petrol we are standing in?”

The attendant, short and broad in filthy coveralls, black grease in his gray hair, glanced down at the nozzle and jumped again. He shoved it back into the Oldsmobile's tank. “Knock off a quarter, sorry. Must of been a tank truck turned over. Drivers ain't what they was when I pushed a rig.”

A siren started up in the direction of town. The station was on the edge of a country village whose sign described it as a city, two miles from Macklin's property. The old man asked if there were a pay telephone.

“Inside.”

There was no one inside the station. He lifted the receiver off the wall unit, slotted a quarter, waited for the fire engine wailing outside to pass, then dialed Mr. Brown's number. When the operator asked for more money for the long distance call, he asked her to reverse the charges.

“That's M-A-N-T-I-S?”

“Yes. Like the insect.”

“Brown,” said a voice on the other end.

“Collect call from a Mr. Mantis. Will you accept the charges?”

“Yes, I will.”

The old man gave the operator time to get off the line, then said, “The package is delivered, Mr. Brown.”

“There were no complications?”

“None.”

“Excellent. When can you come in to discuss details?”

“As soon as I have wiped my shoes.”

He hung up, started out, then went back and retrieved his quarter from the return slot.

Chapter Twenty-two

No one followed Moira home from work.

Once she thought someone was doing it, but after three blocks the car turned off and she didn't see it again. She saw no sign of the silver Cougar she had come to associate with Macklin. But then she had seen nothing of Roy since the incident in the employee lounge. Leaving him with Mr. Turner, she had felt a small thrill of concern and had wanted to warn her supervisor about Roy but could think of no way to do it without going into the details of her past. Fear and disgust with herself had made the second recording session worse than the first, and finally the exasperated technicians had asked her to go home and try again tomorrow. On her way to her locker for her purse, she had passed Mr. Turner in the hall. Her rush of relief as she explained her reasons for leaving early must have puzzled him, but he merely said: “I'm going to put in for more security on this floor. This fellow Bates barging in looks bad.”

“Bates?”

“The man who came to complain about his bill. He said his name was Norman Bates.”

“Mr. Turner, Norman Bates was the name of the killer in
Psycho
.”

“Oh. Maybe I heard him wrong.” He played with the dial on his hearing aid. “Anyway, I wish you'd contact me when you find unauthorized parties on this floor.”