Free Kill Zone by Loren D. Estleman

out.”
    â€œThat part surprised me,” Chilson said. “I never knew you to make a deal.”
    â€œWe haven’t just been scratching our balls since the gate closed on him. There will be a team of field men waiting for him when he steps outside to arrest him for tax fraud and eight other charges that will keep him under glass till they wheel him out toes first.”
    â€œMeanwhile what happens to those people on the boat?”
    â€œYou mean what happens to HEW Secretary Clarence Turnbull’s daughter Carol. We’re working on it.”
    â€œWorking on it how?”
    â€œWe’ve got the dope on a recent theft from the National Guard Armory up in Grayling. Three M-16s, four Army Colts, six cases of ammunition, and about five pounds of gelatin explosives with caps. Guard has a warrant out for a Captain Philip MacKenzie, who’s been AWOL since the stuff was discovered missing. His description fits one of the terrorists. It’s our first solid lead.”
    â€œHow does it help?”
    â€œIf we can find out who he was hanging around with before he dropped out of sight we might be able to put a name to each of the people who are holding that boat. It helps to know who you’re fighting.”
    â€œWhat do you mean by fighting?”
    Burlingame sat back in his chair, straining the buttons on his vest. “I think you’re better off not knowing, Bill. Just so that when this breaks, however it breaks, you’ll be able to say your people had nothing to do with it.”
    â€œIf anything happens to that girl, I come back from Washington with my head under my arm.”
    â€œYour capacity isn’t investigative. I’ll take the heat.”
    â€œI hope you can, Red,” Chilson said. “It gets harder to take the older you get.”
    Still leaning back in his seat, the FBI director blew several smoke rings before he realized he’d filled and lit his pipe. He looked at his hands accusingly.
    The address Herb Pinelli had given Macklin belonged to a crumbling warehouse on a street with broken paving that opened off West Jefferson and dead-ended on the River Rouge. It was charred brick with high segmented windows gone blank with grime and exposure, and it would have started out by housing cases of liquor smuggled from Ontario during Prohibition, but in the intervening years it had not quite been converted into apartments. Cheap curtains moved in some of the windows as Macklin climbed out of his car and waded through calf-deep fog from the Rouge and then slid sideways through a two-foot space where the great steel fire door was propped open with a cement block.
    His soles scraped a concrete floor the color of river mud, the noise echoing right through plywood partitions on either side of a narrow aisle. From where he stood he could hear six television sets and a radio playing seven different programs. The doors to the various apartments had been cut straight out of the plywood, hinged, and fitted with cheap white china knobs and locks with keyholes big enough to stick in a finger and turn the tumblers.
    He didn’t. He walked all the way to the end of the makeshift hall, smelling cooking smells and concrete mold and sawn wood and, he swore, bootleg whiskey sixty years gone, stopping at last before a door with a cheap metal plate screwed to it reading MANAGER. The lock was different from all the others, new-looking and brass, a dead bolt. He knocked lightly. The whole wall shivered under his knuckles.
    â€œWho is it?”
    A rerun of All in the Family was playing next door, and the voice was so low and whispery under the canned laughter that it had to repeat itself before Macklin was sure it wasn’t just a gust of wind brushing a high windowpane. It seemed to originate from just behind the hairline crack between the door and the wall.
    â€œMy name’s Macklin. Herb Pinelli gave me the number of this building and told me to talk to the man I found