Free Kill Zone by Loren D. Estleman Page A

here. I didn’t know it was an apartment house.”
    â€œGo away.”
    It seemed a strange thing for the manager of an apartment building with obvious vacancies to say to a stranger.
    â€œYou know Herb Pinelli?”
    â€œNever heard of him.” The whisperer went off into a fit of coughing. It had fluid in it and a measured cadence, as if he had had plenty of practice.
    Macklin glanced down the hall. Three numbers down a door moved shut when he turned his head. He inserted his back between it and the manager’s door and put his lips almost to the crack. He could barely hear himself under a margarine commercial jabbering away in the adjoining apartment.
    â€œIf you open the door I’ll show you Herb sent me.”
    â€œSure, I open the door, you cave my face in.”
    â€œI could sneeze it open. But I’m polite.”
    â€œTry it. I got a .357 Colt magnum in here for the gesundheit .”
    â€œThen you won’t lose anything by opening the door. Unless you don’t have any gun in there at all.”
    There was a long stretch during which Macklin kept his ear close to the crack. Next door, Edith was explaining to Archie how she’d managed to dent a man’s car with a can of cling peaches.
    â€œStand away.”
    Macklin straightened and took a step backward. There was a succession of metallic snaps, clicks, and jingles, then the knob rotated and the door moved inward three inches. A small steel chain hammocked in the space between. Darkness beyond, rheumy eye-whites bluish in a smear of dusky face, a splash of red flannel.
    No words were spoken. After a pause, Macklin slid Herb’s knife out of its sheath on his belt under his jacket, reversed the ends slowly, and extended it handle first through the space. A dirty brown hand accepted it. The door closed.
    Seconds passed. The killer was about to knock again when something tinkled and the door swung wide. He was looking at a short black man in a faded shapeless bathrobe with a fringe of hair the color of chalk teased up over a bald crown. His eyebrows were thick and mealy, his nose flush to his face as if pushed by an insistent hand. Coils of whisker like trench wire clung to his jawline. He was holding the knife by its handle like the weapon it was. His other hand held a Louisville Slugger with its top four inches gone and silver duct tape wound halfway up its length.
    A stench of urine and daily deposits of sweat going back several weeks unfurled and smacked Macklin in the face like a moldy towel.
    The manager gestured him inside with an impatient jerk of his head and closed the door behind him, manipulating the locks and chains. “Where’s the magnum?” Macklin asked.
    â€œAin’t got one. Guns scare the shit out of me. I like baseball.” The black man gestured with the bat.
    â€œNice place you have here.”
    Part of a window extended below the raftered and plywood-boarded ceiling, but it had been painted over from inside and no lamps were lit, making ominous hulking shadows of the piles of ragged clothing and stacks of newspapers and magazines in the corners and on the furniture, which included a bed with an iron frame, a painted dresser, a folding card table with a torn vinyl top, and a two-burner stove with dead flies preserved in a layer of grease on the surface.
    â€œI know it’s a dump. I could get better, you think I’d live here? What’s Herb Pinelli’s middle name?”
    â€œI didn’t know he had one.”
    The black man drew a split fingernail down through his coiled whiskers. Then he held out his palm with the knife balanced on it for Macklin to take. “I guess you’re from him, all right. If he’s got one, only him and someone that studied would know what it is.”
    Macklin returned the weapon to its sheath. “If we’re through playing who won the pennant, I want to talk to you about Daniel Ackler.”
    Some of the blood went out of