Free Kill Zone by Loren D. Estleman Page B

the manager’s face, turning the brown a dead beige. “What’d Herb tell you about me and Ackler?”
    â€œNothing. He wouldn’t even give me your name. Just this address.”
    â€œHe gives it to you, you give it to Ackler?”
    Macklin took the paper with the address written on it out of his pocket, showed it, and tore it into little pieces, letting them flutter to a thin carpet with all the color trod out of it. “I’m lousy with numbers,” he said. “Can’t even remember my own telephone. It’s Ackler I want. He doesn’t have to know who told me about him.”
    â€œI don’t know nothing but what I said to Herb.”
    â€œIs he after you?”
    â€œChrist, no. That’s why I’m living in this here luxury penthouse apartment, because he ain’t after me.”
    â€œCan I sit down?”
    â€œWatch you don’t scratch the finish on that there Chippendale.”
    The killer tested the broken overstuffed rocker with his hands braced on the scaly arms before trusting his weight on it. When he lowered himself onto the cushion he kept sinking until his knees were higher than his belt. He crossed his legs to a chorus of senile groans from the superstructure. His host leaned back against the stove with his arms folded across his chest. He had leaned the baseball bat against the loose oven door. His ankles were bare and painfully thin above rundown slippers.
    â€œI don’t care why he’s after you,” Macklin said. “I’m going to kill him. Or he’s going to kill me. Either way he doesn’t know my source. Unless I find him some other way.”
    Barney Miller was starting on the other side of the partition separating the apartments. The bass notes of the theme spong ed through the thin wood.
    â€œWhat are you—cop?”
    â€œI’m a killer.”
    â€œOh,” said the black man, twining and untwining whiskers around his index finger. “Oh.”
    â€œThat make a difference?”
    â€œSome. You drink?”
    â€œNot when I’m working.”
    The manager grinned for the first time, and Macklin would just as soon he hadn’t. There were things in his teeth. “Now I know you’re not cop.” He moved the baseball bat, opened the oven door, and hoisted out a green gallon jug with a screw top and a smeared china mug. The two-dollar wine made a gurgling noise going into the mug, like blood from a slashed jugular.

CHAPTER 11
    The spooky-looking man with the thinning blond hair and one lazy eyelid watched the middle-aged man in the untidy off-the-rack suit step outside the warehouse and glance up and down the street before striding to his car. That was what gave them up, that quick once-over they shared with their opposite numbers on the other side of the badge. The uninitiated, noticing the gesture, might take Macklin for a cop; he had that sad, well-worn look. Freddo himself was often mistaken for a professional athlete because of his fluid grace and good clothes. It was an impression he never tried very hard to correct.
    He followed Macklin’s car for six blocks until it nicked a light on the red and Freddo had to stop or be smashed by a U-Haul van barreling through the intersection. He drummed his fingers on the leather-covered steering wheel until the light changed, then squirted ahead, dusting the fender of a Volkswagen Rabbit attempting a left-hand turn in front of the pack. He drove several more blocks, craning his head around, tried a number of side streets, then gave it up and went back the way he had come. He was irritated but not upset. It was a hazard one ran when tailing someone alone. The smart shadow always kept an alternative.
    He parked two streets north in case someone might remember seeing his car and walked back to the warehouse-apartment building with the fog boiling around his ankles like a special effect from a Universal horror film.
    Port Huron, for