Little Black Dress (Peter Macklin Novels) Read online

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  BOOKS BY LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  For Jim O’Keefe,

  a kind friend in the mean streets

  ONE

  It was always a mistake to generalize; but, dear God, security guards were dumb. Grinnell spotted him two steps inside the door, browsing the Japanese Animation racks in a Hawaiian shirt with the tail out over his sidearm, khaki slacks, and clod-buster black oxfords, the kind whose soles formed a lip all around with white stitching to make the feet that wore them look even bigger. He never stooped even once to look at the videos on the lower shelves, saving his energy to pretend to read the descriptions on the boxes he took off the top. He wore a bar of black moustache as thick as his thumb and his hair looked as if he cut it himself. He might as well have been wearing a uniform.

  The layout was identical to all the other stores in the chain, a case man’s dream. It had separate doors for entering and exiting, the latter charged with a magnetic field to set off an alarm when a customer tried to sneak Free Willy out unchecked, and a blind room in back where they displayed the porn. Two employees stood inside the hollow square of the counter while a third restocked the racks, carefully avoiding conversation with the security lunk. Midnight closing was ten minutes away and only a few customers prowled the store. The locustlike Saturday-night crowd had swept through more than two hours earlier, scooping up New Releases by the armload and cracking twenties and fifties into two cash registers. Now the gold dust had settled. Even the monitors narrowcasting annoying trailers for Adam Sandler and Austin Powers were switched off.

  Showtime.

  Grinnell made a little dumb show of exasperation at the shelves of empty boxes that had contained the latest hot-ticket title, then left, answering a curious glance from the clerk nearest the door with a rueful shake of his head.

  The minivan was parked on the far edge of the lot, just outside the range of the near lamppost. The man in the passenger’s seat in front rolled down his window as Grinnell approached. The man wore his sandy hair long but neat, with a drooping gunfighter’s moustache stained yellow at the edges from nictoine. Grinnell supposed he dipped snuff, the most pointless abuse of tobacco he could imagine.

  “Three clerks,” Grinnell said. “One guard.” He described the man in the Hawaiian shirt.

  “Anything there?” The man in the van had a Kentucky accent that he could dial up or down according to mood. Grinnell couldn’t tell if it was genuine. The other three men in the vehicle called him Wild Bill.

  “Not to look at, but you want to pin him down first. This is the fourth time for this chain.” It was a warning, but he stopped short of making it a suggestion. He hadn’t had any trouble with this crew, but it was never wise to underestimate the sensitivity of a wrecker, much less of one who allowed his team to address him by an Old West nickname.

  “What else?”

  “The clerk stocking the racks wears a nose ring; tattoos on both wrists. He might be a user.”

  “What else?” he asked again.

  “That’s it.”

  “Okay.” The window slid back up.

  The parking lot was common to eight shops assembled in a strip, occupying one long building with only drywall separating each establishment from its neighbor. Grinnell had parked a hundred yards away, near a number of vehicles in front of a twenty-four-hour drugstore. The car was a rental, not his usual choice of models when he wasn’t working, a deliberate decision. He never used his personal car on a job and always took care to dress suitably for the community. The video store stood within easy walking distance of two trailer parks and a housing tract designed for families of modest means; he wore a plain pocket T-shirt, faded Lee jeans, and inexpensive track shoes worn round at the heels.

  He drove a mile to the crowded motel lot where he’d left his Lexus, changed inside it into his comfortable heavy silk sport shirt, pleated slacks, and Belgian loafers, and drove the Lexus home. In the morning he’d return the rental. The agency was only twelve blocks away, comfortable walking for a fortyish man in excellent condition.

  “What do we need him for, anyway? I guess I can count noses and spot a rent-a-cop.”

  Wild Bill glanced back at the speaker. His features were in shadow, but Carlos always sat in the same place, as if the seat were assigned to him, and if there was a complaint to be made he was always the one to make it. Then there was the bullshit macho border accent. Wild Bill was pretty sure he was East L.A. and had never spent any more time in Old Mexico than forty-five minutes in a cockshop in Tijuana.

  “It ain’t them he’s watching,” Wild Bill said. “Toledo protects its investments.”

  “What investment? Guns are cheap.”

  “Not these guns.” The man in front lifted the shotgun from his lap and worked the pump. It slid noiselessly on graphite and chambered the round with a double clack he felt in his testicles. The weapon was less than twenty-two inches long, manufactured that way without recourse to a hacksaw, with a composition stock and a pistol grip. It was loaded alternately with twelve-gauge slugs and buckshot. He always used the same order so he knew what was coming out of the barrel when. He’d learned that hunting elk in Wyoming.

  “Yeah.” Carlos’s grin reflected what light there was. He was looking down at the Sig Sauer in his hand, a cop gun he’d turned out to prefer to the Saturday-night busters he’d used in his solo past. It took a little more persuasion each time to get him to part with the model between jobs.

  “Then there’s the credit-card slips,” Wild Bill said. “Folks’re using plastic more and more. We can’t lay them off in a year.”

  “Fucking Visa’s ruining the economy,” Carlos said.

  The other man shifted his line of vision. “Mark?”

  The man seated next to Carlos in the rear passenger’s seat waggled his own Sig Sauer to indicate he was ready. He was black, a Detroit native with back-to-back nickel bits in Michigan’s two state penitentiaries on his record, whose given name—Wild Bill had seen his arrest sheet to confirm it—was Mark Twain. During one of his rare open moments (on parrot tranquilizers) he’d confided that his father was drunk when he’d named him, having smuggled a fifth of Ten High into a movie theater in suburban Redford to celebrate his son’s birth. The feature happened to be Tom Sawyer. In the time
he’d known him, Wild Bill had never heard Mark Twain say anything remotely clever, but he had eloquent instincts. When the time came to talk Carlos out of his weapon, it would be Mark Twain who did the talking.

  “Take it slow,” Wild Bill said.

  The driver turned the key and rolled the van out of its space. Prematurely bald, he cropped the fringe to the length of his perennial three-day beard and answered to Donny. Wild Bill knew nothing about him except that he’d come with Mark Twain, who said he’d worked as an instructor with a driving school in Kentucky that taught evasive skills to chauffeurs of wealthy businessmen. So far he’d only been called upon to deliver his companions to and away from work, without having to demonstrate special abilities. He was always there when they came out, which made him worth his equal share if he never took another risk.

  As they wheeled into the fire lane in front of the video store, Wild Bill leaned forward and spat the rest of his cud into the coffee can. He gave himself a moment to enjoy his personal vision of success. Bank robbers were lucky if they got away with a couple of thousand from a teller’s drawer, for which they had the opportunity when caught to be tried twice, at the local and federal levels, and get themselves butt-fucked by an entirely different class of con. Meanwhile a place that rented out videotapes and DVDs in a greater metropolitan area pulled in eight to ten thousand on a Saturday night, most of it cash, with nothing to protect it but civilian security more interested in shoplifters than armed robbers. Hit them just before midnight, when the suburban cops were busy changing shifts, and you could take the rest of the month off. Hooray for Hollywood.

  Emily Grass, checking the last of a thousand returned videos against the labels on the cases, suppressed a groan when the gong went off announcing the entrance of a new customer. It was three minutes to twelve, and you just knew this was some trailer-park ’tard who couldn’t remember the title of the movie he’d come in for, or didn’t know what he wanted, Cannonball Run or Faces of Death IV, and would wander the aisles for twenty minutes looking for inspiration. Worse, he might ask her to identify a movie based on a cast headed by Whatsername, that played the lady lawyer in Whateveritwascalled, breathing Old Milwaukee into her face the whole time and not budging from the counter even if you turned out all the lights. Which Cy would never let her do because he might squeeze three more bucks out of the night and put himself in solid with the corporate blanks that owned the chain. Come next term break, she’d find something in retail foods. Those supermarket managers shoved you out the door at closing and dropped a piano on overtime.

  Then she saw the ski masks.

  All three were dressed the same, in the navy masks and green polo shirts with an animal on the pocket, black jeans, and black Nikes; she saw the swoosh. The first one in the door, who did most of the yelling, made big circular gestures with a rifle kind of gun while the others separated, one pointing his handgun at the three customers lined up at the counter, the other pointing his at Andy the guard, who was caught looking at Inspector Gadget and dropped the box to put his hands up. The one with the rifle, or maybe it was a shotgun, hoisted it to his shoulder and shouted at Michael, coming back for more videos to return to the shelves, to join the others at the counter. He obeyed, hands lifted with the blue FOREVER DEAD and GARCIA LIVES tattoos showing on his wrists. Then the man stood back to cover—cover, she’d seen enough crime trailers to speak the language—cover them all while he screamed at Emily and Dylan to empty the registers into bags. Emily got her drawer open okay, but Dylan hit two keys at once, jamming the electronics, and got yelled at some more until he cleared it, sobbing, “Okayokayokayokay.” And all the time there she was, stuffing stacks of bills and fistfuls of credit-card slips into a white plastic bag with the chain’s logo printed on it, a cartoon squirrel rolling a reel of film like a hoop. It was a movie.

  Then it wasn’t at all.

  Cy came charging out of the room where they stocked the dirty pictures, fat Cy in his black indestructible manager’s suit and Tweety Bird tie, waving a gun. Cy with a gun; he couldn’t reprogram the VCRs after a power failure put out the clocks. Cy with a gun, shouting at three men, also with guns, that they were under citizen’s arrest, drop your weapons and stand back. He ran right past the man covering Andy, heading straight for the man with the shotgun, who just kind of turned half away from the counter and blew all the sound out of the room.

  TWO

  “Look, they poured a floor,” Laurie said.”This used to be a Michigan basement.”

  Macklin sniffed the dank cellar air. “I thought we were in Ohio.”

  “You know what a Michigan basement is. It was just a hole in the dirt, and it smelled like potatoes. The bin used to be in that corner. I reached in once to get a big baker and grabbed hold of a rat.”

  “Good thing it was a dirt floor. You’d have had a mess to clean up.”

  “I screamed, all right, but I’d had worse scares. Old Nick chased me clear to the fence once. I’ve still got a scar on my ankle from scrambling over the barbed wire.”

  “I wondered about that. Old Nick was the idiot farmhand?”

  “I was the idiot farmhand. Old Nick was an Angus bull, mean as a snake. I knew better than to take the shortcut. Papa Z spanked me but good when he found out. He was more scared than I was.”

  “How’d he find out?”

  “I told him.”

  “You’re right. You were an idiot.”

  She found a second switch at the base of the stairs and flipped it. A second set of track lights illuminated the rest of the basement. The current owners had laid rusty shag on the concrete and paneled the walls in particleboard with a maple veneer. A small bar with two stools stood in front of the partitioned-off utility room and four craters showed in the carpet where a pool or Ping-Pong table had stood until recently. A plaid sofa and love seat and some chairs, probably belonging to a living-room set demoted to the rec room, had a neglected look. The bar hadn’t been used in a long time. The cellar had begun to reclaim itself. The atmosphere was mildewy and spots of white mold showed on the paneling on the north wall.

  “How long did your grandfather own the place?” Macklin asked.

  “Fifty years, until his stroke. Mama Z was gone by then and Mother put him in a nursing home.” Laurie grinned. “Are you nervous about meeting Mother?”

  “I met her at the wedding.”

  “That doesn’t count. Everyone has to be nice at a wedding.”

  “A woman my age, whose daughter I stole? Why worry?”

  She shook her head. “I never can predict you. My friends said I shouldn’t marry you because you had no sense of humor.”

  Macklin walked to the end of the basement and paced off its length. It came to sixty feet, the length of the house minus the garage that had been built on within the last ten years. He looked up at the exposed joists. “I wonder what it would cost to install a soundproof ceiling.”

  “Why?”

  “I might put in a workshop. I wouldn’t want to disturb you with power tools some night while you’re watching TV.”

  “Why do you need a shooting range? You told me you were retired.”

  He smiled, without amusement. Her fresh, pretty face and unclouded blue eyes made him forget sometimes how quickly her mind worked. Her mouth was tense.

  “My enemies aren’t,” he said. “I need to hit the bull’s-eye every time.”

  Peter and Laurie Macklin had been married almost a year, and it had been a time of learning for them both: for him, that she was capable of things no one else suspected, including herself; for her, that the quiet, somewhat dull man she’d chosen to wed was a killer. Or had been a killer. Maybe it was a once-and-always thing, like a former chief of state still being addressed as President years after he’d left office.

  Or maybe not. Because that would make her a killer too.

  They went back upstairs and revisited the half-empty rooms on the ground floor. The atmosphere had changed since they’d gone to the basement. Earlier, she�
��d run from room to room like a little girl, showing him where Mama Z’s huge six-burner range had stood in the kitchen, describing the heavy mahogany table in the dining room, the one that had come over from Germany with Mama Z’s grandmother, the parlor used only by company and Papa Z, who employed it evenings as a den, smoking his bent-stem pipe and reading Karl May. On the second floor, she’d opened the door of her old room and told Peter, drawing him inside, that no man had ever been allowed to cross that threshold in her tender years. They’d kissed, and if there had been a full-size bed in the room instead of a child’s twin, they might have had to scramble for discarded clothing when the real-estate agent came looking for them.

  Now things were different, and all because of a question about a soundproof ceiling.

  The agent, a tall, big-shouldered woman whose dyed black hair made her face look even harder, sensed immediately that they had had some kind of fight. Laurie could feel her apprehension. The woman stood holding her handbag in front of her, trying to blend into the hideous contemporary wallpaper. Most newlywed couples wanted to build, or buy new. Old farmhouses were a drug on the market, and there was just enough wetland in the eighty acres that accompanied this one to discourage developers. Laurie’s mother had once sold real estate, and she herself had waded through every swampy inch at one time or another; she knew the value as well as anyone. The family that had bought the property from her grandfather’s estate had placed most of their things in storage and moved in with relatives, leaving behind the desolate air of a house that had grown stale in the listings. The longer a realtor remained saddled with a white elephant, the more the stigma was likely to affect her career. Squabbling customers were not good prospects.

  Laurie took pity on her. She gazed out the window at the emerald planting beyond the barn. “Who put in the corn?”

  “A local farmer. The owners lease out twenty acres to keep it from becoming overgrown with brush.” The agent’s voice regained its professional chirp. “The rent goes a long way toward paying the taxes.”