Comeback p-17

by Richard Stark

  As Ralph opened the right rear door of the Honda, Zack moved leftward, wiping both sides of the knife blade against Woody's thigh, leaving a small faint streak of bloodstain. Woody, grimacing in pain, put his right hand over the wound like a compress and pressed it there with his left elbow. Zack, in better humor, said, "So what'd you get? Pepperoni?"

  "They could do halfies," Ralph told him, sliding into the car, pushing the box ahead of himself across the seat. "Half plain, half pepperoni."

  Zack held up the knife, showing it. "I got my knife out, to slice."

  "The guy did it at the place. Eight slices."

  "I'll just leave it here," Zack said, putting the open knife on top of the dashboard, "in case we need it."

  Woody looked at the knife open on the dashboard, and blinked, and didn't say a word.

  They ate the pizza, and drank three cans of the soda, and then across the way the doors of 16 and 17 opened, and the four people came out. The woman got behind the wheel of the station wagon. Two of the men were carrying duffel bags that they put in back, then all got into the car.

  "She's the driver," Ralph said, surprised. "I didn't think she'd be part of it."

  "Some women are," Zack said. "Why not."

  "I'll have to tell Mary when I get back," Ralph said. "How good things could go, if you had a woman along you could trust to be on your side, and not be nagging you and putting you down all the time."

  Woody put his right fist up to his mouth and gnawed gently on the knuckles. His left arm was pressed to his side. He wasn't talking, he was just staring at the glove compartment door. His left side ached, as though he'd been hit there by a baseball bat or something, not the sharper pain he would have expected from being stabbed. I've been stabbed, he thought, with dulled surprise. How did I get to be here, in this place, stabbed? Jesus, what did I do that I'm here in this place?

  Zack started the Honda engine, and they followed the station wagon, keeping well back, and it did what they'd expected it to do, it went straight to the stadium. There, the wagon stopped, and the three men got out. They collected their duffel bags and strode away across the full parking lot, and the station wagon moved on, and Zack followed.

  Back to the motel. The woman went indoors, and Zack found their old parking spot beside the Seven Oaks Professional Building still waiting for them. "This is nice," he said, as he pulled to a stop in the same old space. "They pull the job, and if it works out she goes and picks them up, and gets them out safe, away from the law. And then we go in and take it away."

  Nobody said anything. Zack gave Woody a hard smile. "Pretty good, huh, Woody?"

  I don't want to be here, Woody thought. I don't want to know these people any more, or be in this place, or anything. I don't even want that pizza, it feels like shit in my stomach, I don't know if I'm gonna throw up or cry.

  He didn't do either. Zack reached out with his middle finger and tapped the bloodstain on Woody's thigh and repeated his question: "Pretty good, huh?"

  "Yes," Woody said.

  5

  During football games, this was the replay booth, where guys with video equipment could second-guess the referees. It wasn't an ideal command post for Dwayne, being so far from the center of activity, but its overview of the stadium couldn't be beat, and the communications between here and the rest of the complex were perfect. Dwayne, not a sitting-down type, paced back and forth behind the long plywood table containing all the electronic equipment, and looked out past it through the line of big windows at the crusade making its measured practiced way far below.

  The main part of the crusade, exclusive of counseling and other activities scheduled for afterward, was planned to take just two and a half hours, and the second hour was not quite over when the phone call came. There were four telephones spaced along the plywood table, and the low-pitched ring was supplemented by a white light that blinked on the appropriate one. Dwayne picked it up, said, "Thorsen," and heard a frightened young male voice say a scrambled nervous sentence in which one word stood out.

  "Robbed."

  Dwayne made it to the money room before the police, but not by much. The normally locked door was propped open, and inside Tom Carmody lay unconscious on a sofa, his gray-white angel makeup blotched with dark dried blood. Dwayne looked at that unconscious discontented face and knew: "So this is what you did, you stupid fuck," he said, and turned as the first cops came in.

  In every organization, there's the one guy who manages things. Not the boss but someone at the middle level, the equivalent of a master sergeant in the army. Dwayne was that one in William Archibald's Christian Crusade, and whenever he had to deal with another organization of whatever kind he always sought out his opposite number, and would settle for nothing less. This time, it was a fellow named Calavecci, a Detective Second Grade.

  Tom Carmody had been ambulanced away still unconscious, the six people in the money room had been questioned and turned over to the medics for tranquilizing, and now the money room had filled up with technicians. Dwayne stood to one side, observing, waiting, and when he heard a voice say, "Who's in charge of security here?" he smiled and turned around, knowing the manager-type on the other side would be just as anxious to make contact with him.

  "Me," he said, and felt an instant coolness toward the man filling the doorway. Large but not beefy, with an irritable yet patiently amused expression, he was the kind of guy, in the Marines, who liked war too much. Well, you worked with who you had. "Dwayne Thorsen," and he approached with hand stuck out.

  The man considered him briefly, considered his hand, then took it. "Calavecci, Detective Second Grade. What happened here?"

  'Three men with shotguns."

  "Inside help?"

  "Yes."

  Calavecci looked surprised: "Usually we get denials," he said, "this early on."

  "This isn't early," Dwayne said. "They're already gone with the money. I don't have time for denials."

  "Good. Got a candidate for the inside guy?"

  'Tom Carmody. The one went to the hospital with a concussion."

  Calavecci considered that. "Trouble before?"

  "He's been building," Dwayne said. "I had my eye on him. I expected something different, though."

  Calavecci looked around the room. "They whomped him to give him cover," he said. "Whomped him pretty good, but that was it."

  "That's right."

  "Be nice," Calavecci said, "if he knows where they went, because we sure as hell don't."

  Dwayne didn't like that. "You mean they're long gone?"

  "I mean they're pros," Calavecci said. "Like you and me. So they're on the next page already. Maybe the loot's in the trunk of a car outside and they're back in here with the audience. Congregation? What do you call this crowd?"

  "The crowd."

  "Well, maybe they're with them. Or maybe they're burning rubber on the interstate, but if they are we've got them, and I assume they know that, so I assume they're not. So maybe they come to town last month and rented a little apartment two three blocks from here. We're checking that. We'll check everything. But it would be nice if your fella, whatsisname—"

  'Tom Carmody."

  "Be nice if he knew what was supposed to happen next," Calavecci concluded. "Take all the guesswork out of it, that's what /like."

  Carmody was conscious when Dwayne and Calavecci got to the hospital, but the doctors wouldn't let him be questioned. "Bullshit," Calavecci said, which was the wrong thing to say to the doctors.

  "Hold on," Dwayne said. "Let me try something."

  "Try anything," Calavecci offered, "just so your friend can tell us where his friends got off to."

  So, while Calavecci went to ask the Memphis police to question Mary Quindero, just in case Tom had told the woman anything useful, Dwayne called the hotel, and Archibald was there in the suite all right, raging in the background when Tina answered the phone in that breathless lisp that made Dwayne's skin crawl. Listen to the man back there, yelling his way around the
hotel suite; how he hates to lose money. "Let me talk to Will," Dwayne said.

  "Oh, Dwayne, he's so upset, I know he wants to talk to you."

  He did. Dwayne stood there at the pay phone in the hospital corridor and listened to a certain amount of unnecessary oratory and then at last cut in with, "Will, you can help down here."

  That caused a stumble in the oration. Archibald said, "Help? Down where?"

  "I'm at the hospital with Tom Carmody. They won't let the law question him, so it's up to you and me. They can't very well keep the man's religious advisers away from him, so we do the questions."

  "Questions? Tom?" Dwayne could almost hear the penny drop. "Dwayne! Do you really think that filthy little pervert— You think it's him?"

  "He's part of it. Come on down, Will."

  In a small bare conference room borrowed from the hospital administration, Dwayne gave Archibald a little orientation talk before they went in to see Tom: "Now, listen, Will. If we get mad, or we make him scared, we won't get a thing out of him."

  "I'd like to get his liver and lights out of him, that wretched little ..." Archibald sputtered, at a loss for words he could permit himself to use.

  "Will, that's the wrong attitude," Dwayne said patiently. "What we want is whatever information Tom Carmody has inside his head, and the only way we're gonna get it is if we go in there and preach sweet forgiveness."

  "Sweet for—!" Archibald choked on the word, his beefy neck flushing all the way around his collar.

  "Shit, Will, you play it to millions all the time. This once, play it to one. We want the money back, dammit."

  "Yes, we do," Archibald agreed, and sat back, and nodded. "All right, let me just get myself settled."

  "Sure."

  Archibald sat there a minute longer, eyes half closed, and when he made a steeple of his hands Dwayne thought in astonishment that the man was going to pray, but he didn't. He took a deep breath instead, managed a smile, got to his feet, and said, "All right, Dwayne. Let us go pour oil on the little prick."

  6

  Miserable, hurt, alone, knowing at last what an utter fool he was, Tom Carmody lay on his back in the high hard bed in this small bare-walled one-patient hospital room and tried to decide what to do. Suicide; confession; silence followed by a life of atonement; silence followed by revenge on—

  On whom? Revenge on whom? Which brought him full circle to suicide once more. Who else should he be avenged on, except himself?

  Mary. Would they think Mary had anything to do with the robbery? Just because they were friends? Because he'd told her about— That he would never let them know! Never bring her name into it at all, never, never.

  His head was heavily bandaged, all across the top and around the back, the thick white layers covering his ears and even pressing his eyebrows down lower over his eyes. He lay cocooned, sounds muffling as they made their way through the swaths of cotton. Why had Grant hit him so hard? Why hit him at all?

  Of course, this way at least the police would never suspect, would have no reason to believe the person brutally attacked by the robbers was himself a part of the scheme. So, if he didn't confess—

  He kept remembering Grant, on that first meeting, look at him with his cold eyes and say, "If the police catch you, they won't ask your motive." No, they won't.

  But he could ask his own motive. Had he ever expected to get away with it, or had he unconsciously been trying to get himself caught all along? Had he ever realistically expected to collect his half of the take? When he didn't even know where they were going with the money from here, where to find them afterward? He knew George Liss's name; the others had probably used aliases. If George wanted to go on pretending to be an honest citizen, if he actually showed up next month at the parole office, Tom could make contact that way. What were the chances?

  And what did it matter? An IV tube fed something or other into a vein in his left forearm; surely, if he wanted to kill himself, he could use that needle somehow. He might even be able to get to his feet and go out that window over there.

  Wait, he told himself, trying to keep control of his mind, fighting the panic, the guilt, the fear. Wait. Wait to see what happens.

  And then Archibald himself came in, followed by Dwayne Thorsen. Tom looked at that smug fat face—he barely registered Thorsen's colder harder face behind the preacher—and his resolve hardened. I'll admit nothing, he promised himself. Nothing.

  There was one chair in the room, armless with tubular chrome legs and green vinyl seat and back, and of course Archibald immediately took that for himself, pulling it over to the right side of the bed and sitting where he could comfortably peer into Tom's face, his own face a mask of false sympathy. Naturally it was false, Tom knew better than to trust any emotional display from William Archibald. His skepticism, however, did not yet lead him to believe that Archibald's falseness was anything beyond the normal insincerity that defined the man's life. He did not at all guess that this time the fakery covered an absolute certainty in Tom's guilt.

  "How are you, Tom?" Unctuous, oily, the moist eyes melting with sympathy. Meanwhile, his hatchet man, Dwayne, leaned his forearms on the foot rail of the bed, watched Tom like a specimen in the zoo, and made no attempt at all to show anything other than his normal cold indifference.

  "Not feeling so good," "Torn said, and was surprised to hear the quaver in his voice. He didn't have to pretend weakness, did he? Weakness and confusion. No pretense at all.

  "Guess that fella hit you pretty hard," Archibald said, and nodded in faux sympathy, agreeing with himself. 'Yes, sir."

  "Shows you what can happen with those bad companions," Archibald said, face and voice as smoothly caring as ever.

  Tom didn't absorb the meaning of the words for the first few seconds, #n
  "What I think happened, Tom," Archibald said, gazing into Tom's eyes as though Tom were the greatest TV camera ever made, "I think we all just got caught up in the money too much. You, and me, and Dwayne here, and all of us."

  "I don't know what you mean," Tom said. He tried to keep his own face expressionless, but

  couldn't help staring at Archibald like a bird in front of a snake.

  Archibald ignored Tom's feeble protest. With a theatrical sigh, he said, "I don't excuse any of us, Tom, no, I don't. We've all been culpable in this matter. I should have spent more of my time talking about what the money does, not just how we have to go out and get more of it."

  He's a liar, Tom reminded himself, he's a liar and a charlatan, and he's just trying his usual crap on me, that's all it is. Tom knew that's all it was, and he was right, and he knew he was right, and yet he found himself being tugged in nonetheless, drawn by that syrupy voice and those smooth words. Grasping at inessentials because he didn't dare think about the essentials, he said, "The money doesn't do any good."

  "Oh, but it does, Tom," Archibald said, "and that's where I've been remiss. Remiss, Tom. I've failed you, and I've failed the Crusade, and I've failed every good soul who has ever put his or her trust in me. Because all I've been saying is, 'Give me money,' and I have slighted, I have ignored, I have failed to make clear, what the money is for."

  "It's for you," Tom said, feeling amazingly brave to confront the man like this, to throw the truth in his face for once, with no softening of the blow at all.

  "It's for the Crusade," Archibald corrected him, but gently, the milk of human kindness still sheening on his face. 'The television costs us so much, Tom, but without the television how will we reach God's creatures? And the counseling, the crusades in the field, all our efforts . . . Now, I know some of the good we do is strictly speaking not in His service, is more social work than religious work, but I believe God can and will forgive us for our lunch programs and our school crusades and—"

  "The money's for youn Tom cried, feeling hims
elf sink under Archibald's platitudes, drown in his false pieties, lose his own hard certainties in the undifferentiated sludge of Archibald's philosophy. "It's all for you! The rest of it, it's all just fake, it's all just to cover for you, for you, for you!"

  Archibald sighed, more sinned against than sinning. He sat back in the small chair, gazing with sad forgiveness at Tom as he contemplated what had just been said, and finally he replied, "I had suspected that was what you believed of our mission, Tom. I'm glad you've unburdened yourself of it, brought it out in the open where we can look at it."

  "It's true, and you know it."

  Another sigh. Archibald said, "And I suppose that's why you helped those men."

  A hard wall. There, right there, in the path of Tom's life. A huge hard impenetrable wall, right there now. His throat pained him, his eyes pained him, with the emotional sense of his loss. He looked at the stolid Dwayne Thorsen, then back at Archibald. They were waiting for an answer. And he too was waiting to hear his answer. He and they all wanted to know: Would Tom lie? At this point in his life, at this nexus, at this nadir, would he lie? or would he tell the truth?

  "Yes," Tom said.

  Archibald's long sigh this time seemed more honest, more human, and even Dwayne shifted position slightly, though his face didn't alter. Archibald, as though the question hardly mattered, said, "And do you know where they are now, Tom?"

  "No."

  "Oh, Tom," Archibald said. "Don't disappoint me at this stage, Tom. You have started to open your heart, don't close it again."

  "I don't know where they are," Tom insisted. "And that's the truth."

  Archibald and Dwayne shared a glance. Tom knew they were trying to decide whether or not it was the truth, and he knew Archibald didn't really and truly care whether Tom believed all that stuff about the money, all that face-saving garbage about lunch programs and counseling and of course his own work with former convicts. There's a laugh; the work with former convicts. How do you like your social programs now, Reverend Archibald?