out.â
âThat part surprised me,â Chilson said. âI never knew you to make a deal.â
âWe havenât 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
âMeanwhile what happens to those people on the boat?â
âYou mean what happens to HEW Secretary Clarence Turnbullâs daughter Carol. Weâre working on it.â
âWorking on it how?â
âWeâve 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, whoâs been AWOL since the stuff was discovered missing. His description fits one of the terrorists. Itâs our first solid lead.â
âHow does it help?â
âIf 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 youâre fighting.â
âWhat do you mean by fighting?â
Burlingame sat back in his chair, straining the buttons on his vest. âI think youâre better off not knowing, Bill. Just so that when this breaks, however it breaks, youâll be able to say your people had nothing to do with it.â
âIf anything happens to that girl, I come back from Washington with my head under my arm.â
âYour capacity isnât investigative. Iâll take the heat.â
âI hope you can, Red,â Chilson said. âIt gets harder to take the older you get.â
Still leaning back in his seat, the FBI director blew several smoke rings before he realized heâd 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 didnât. 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.
âWho is it?â
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 wasnât 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.
âMy nameâs Macklin. Herb Pinelli gave me the number of this building and told me to talk to the man I found
Rebecca Hamilton, Conner Kressley