Comeback p-17

by Richard Stark

  'Jesus!" Zack cried, blinded by all the light, and would have made the fatal mistake of switching on the car engine if Ralph hadn't been just smart enough to yell, "No!" and grab his elbow.

  They sat in the car in the empty parking lot, impaled by all that light, specimen bugs on a display board, and shadows moved out there. Cops, armed to the teeth, easing through the light as through heavy fog, moving cautiously in this direction.

  "You in the car!"A hugely amplified voice, coming from everywhere. "Don't move! Make no movements!"

  Woody started to cry. "I don't fucking believe this," Zack said, but it wasn't clear whether it was the cops' sudden presence or Woody crying that he didn't believe.

  Ralph, amazed at his own capacity for quick thinking, leaned another inch forward over the seat back and said, "We didn't break any laws. We're driving to the coast, we stopped here for a pizza and rest a while."

  "Right right right," Zack said. He was blinking like mad, his fingers twitching on the steering wheel.

  One cop, braver than the others, approached Zack's door, opened it, and stepped back. He was carrying a shotgun—a freaking shotgun, for Christ's sake!—at port arms, and what he said was ridiculous: "Sir, would you step out of the car, please?" Sir!

  "Officer," Zack said, his voice sounding much younger and more vulnerable than usual, "officer, uh, something wrong, officer?"

  'Just step out of the car, please, sir."

  So Zack, fumbling a bit in nervousness, stepped out of the car, and the cop asked to see

  ID, continuing with the horrible grotesque parody of politeness. In the car, Woody hunched down in his corner of the front seat, moaning, while Ralph kept unwillingly looking at that switchblade knife on the dashboard, as big as a bayonet in all that light.

  Zack's driver's license was handed on back to some other cop, and then more cops approached the car, also loaded down with weapons, and called on Ralph and Woody to get out, which they did. Woody, no longer crying, just stood there and trembled, like a horse on the way to the dogfood factory, while Ralph looked all around, trying to see, interested despite himself in what was happening.

  More sirs, more requests for ID, more licenses passed back into the darkness behind all that light. Then the frisk. Sir, would you face the car? Sir, would you place your hands on the car roof? Sir, would you move your feet back? Farther apart, sir. Thank you very much, sir.

  Pat pat pat; nothing. They were permitted to stand normally again, feeling a little better. Damn good thing the two pistols were stashed with their bags in the trunk.

  "Sir, would you mind opening the trunk?"

  They stared at one another, stuck, screwed, completely fucked over, and another cop came out of the darkness into the light to say, "Which one is Quindero?"

  A distraction from the question of the trunk. But was this a good thing, or a bad thing? "Me," Ralph said, raising his hand like a kid in school. "Ralph Quindero."

  The cop was a little older than the other cops, and not in uniform, and with no guns in his hands. It was hard to see people's faces in all this light, expressions and features got washed out to nothing, but still Ralph had the feeling there wasn't much he'd like in that face. The plainclothes cop, no inflection in his voice, said, "You're from Memphis?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "You know a Mary Quindero?"

  Woody made the weirdest sound Ralph had ever heard, like a screen door being crushed or something. Ralph looked at him, just as Woody dropped to his knees, arms hanging at his sides. What the hell?

  "Sir? You know a Mary Quindero?"

  "She's my sister," Ralph said. "What's going on?"

  The plainclothes cop turned away to the other cops. "Bring them in," he said, and walked away into the darkness, and Woody began to keen, like a dog when somebody's died.

  9

  Dwayne was in Archibald's suite, waiting. He didn't want to be there, but if he went to his own room down the hall Archibald would just keep telephoning every five minutes, so it was better to be here in the comfort of the man's suite, with Calavecci given this number to call if anything happened, even if that did mean he had to put up with Tina marching back and forth in a tight robe all the time, like a hooker on a runway, flashing those heavy legs.

  Archibald marched, too, back and forth, back and forth, stopping every once in a while to glare at the phone, as though it had betrayed him in some fashion. "Why don't they call?"

  "Cause they don't have anything to say," Dwayne suggested.

  Tina, voice dripping sympathy, said, "Will? You want a massage? Come on in the bedroom, I'll give you a nice massage."

  Well, Dwayne knew what that meant, but Archibald was too distracted by the loss of the money even to respond to his harlot. "No, I can't think," he said. 'You go to bed, Tina, I'll be along later."

  "I want to wait with you," she said, and so she did.

  What was this like? In some ways, it was like a wake, sitting around being polite in the presence of a death in the family. More than that, it was almost as though the money hadn't been stolen, it had been kidnapped, and they were waiting to hear from the kidnappers, hear what the terms were for getting the money back.

  When the phone finally did ring, at almost three in the morning, it seemed at first as though nobody was going to answer it. Archibald and Tina, both pacing, stopped to stare at the instrument, on a round table at one end of the sofa. Dwayne, seated at the other end of the same sofa, also looked at the phone, but didn't reach for it because this, after all, wasn't his suite. Then he realized that while he was deferring to Archibald, Archibald was deferring to him, as the professional in this situation. Once that became clear,

  Dwayne lunged across the sofa, scooped up the receiver, and said, 'Thorsen."

  "Calavecci. You want to come down to Broad Street?" That was what they called police headquarters, a big old pile of limestone built during the Wobbly scares, back in the twenties.

  "You got them?"

  "No, I don't," Calavecci said, "I'm sorry to say. I got something else, though. Very interesting."

  "Be right there," Dwayne said, but of course he had to give Archibald about ten minutes of explanation about that one-minute phone call before he could leave.

  Calavecci met him in a small barren office that had the look of a place whose regular occupant had just been fired, but which was in fact nobody's regular space. It was a meeting/conference/interrogation room, with an extra chair in one corner for the stenographer, for when the confession was to be taken, and a phone on the desk for calling the stenographer.

  Calavecci and Dwayne sat across the desk from one another, both comfortable in this room, and Calavecci said, "We couldn't believe we were so lucky, so of course we weren't. What we had was three white males in a car with Tennessee plates, where you people are from, and it's parked for

  hours in a professional building parking lot, where the building's closed for the night."

  "Three's the right number," Dwayne agreed.

  "But the wrong guys." Calavecci grinned and shrugged. "But interesting nonetheless. Your boy Tom Carmody—"

  "The inside man."

  "The clown," Calavecci agreed. "His girlfriend Mary Quindero turns up drowned in a closet. Not a usual way to go."

  Dwayne, trying to be patient, said, "That's right."

  "One of the three guys in the Tennessee car is her brother Ralph."

  "Ah," Dwayne said, getting it. "Tom to George Liss to a couple of his pals, so that's our doers. Then Tom to Mary Quindero to her brother Ralph to his pals, they decide to do the doers."

  "The sheer quantity of assholes in this world," Calavecci said, "never ceases to amaze me. You want some know-nothing clown come in, louse things up? No problem."

  "But the sister's dead," Dwayne said. "How does that come into it?"

  "The other two," Calavecci said, "Isaac Flynn and Robert Kellman—"

  "Isaac Flynn?"

  Calavecci shrugged. "That's what it says on his driver's license.
Twenty, twenty-five years ago,

  people named their kids all kinds of stuff, like they were brands of cereal. Anyway, these two, Flynn and Kellman, they leaned on the sister because she clammed up when she realized what her brother had in mind. Of course, these are not guys who get the details right."

  Dwayne shook his head, having trouble here. "They killed his sister, and the brother kept on with them?"

  "He didn't know. He still doesn't know." Calavecci smiled like a wolf. "I thought you'd like to be here when we tell him, see what falls out of the tree."

  He's tougher than I am, Dwayne told himself, a thought that didn't come to him often and which left him slightly uneasy. But if this was a test, he'd have no trouble passing: "Should be interesting," he said.

  Ralph Quindero was about what Dwayne had expected: Beede Bailey without the comedy, a sad sack who would always be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just smart enough to get into trouble.

  What do you do with such people? Dwayne had dealt with a number of them in his Marine years, and they were a real problem. They weren't mean or vicious, they were just inevitable losers who screwed themselves up and made trouble for everybody near them along the way.

  Your only hope was a war; you'd put them on patrol till they didn't come back.

  It was too late for a war to help Ralph Quindero, who came shuffling into the interrogation room with his guard and, at Calavecci's direction, sat in I he chair Dwayne had vacated, Dwayne now being in the corner on the stenographer's chair, to observe. Quindero gave him one curious look on his way in, but Calavecci was clearly the authority figure here, and Quindero was doing what his brand of clown always did; once it's too late, be polite and cooperative with everybody. Ingratiating.

  With Calavecci and Quindero seated facing one another, Dwayne in the corner, and the uniformed guard leaning against the door, Calavecci said, "Well, Ralph, you're a lucky man."

  Quindero looked confused, as well he might: "I am?"

  "Oh, absolutely," Calavecci said. "After all, what've we got on you? Eating a pizza in a parking lot. No crime there."

  Quindero's slumped spine was beginning to straighten, hope was lifting him up. "That's right," he said, his voice tinged with awe.

  "Of course," Calavecci went on, "there's the issue of those handguns in the trunk, but they weren't yours, right?"

  "No, sir. They're not mine."

  "And the car isn't yours. The car's Zack's, so the guns are his problem."

  "Yes, sir!"

  "Of course," Calavecci said, "if we wanted to get really technical..." He waited, and grinned at Quindero, a sly and nasty little grin.

  Hope stumbled. Quindero began to fidget in the chair. "Sir? Technical?"

  "Well," Calavecci said, "there's the matter of the robbery out at the stadium."

  Quindero blinked, confused now. "Sir? I didn't have anything to do with that, we didn't, we didn't rob anybody!"

  "But you knew it was going to happen," Calavecci pointed out. "That's why you came to town, because you knew the robbery was going to happen, and the problem is, you didn't inform us about it. You knew a felony was going to be committed, and you didn't inform the authorities, and that's called accessory before the fact. If we want to get technical, you know, just to be a pain in the ass with you."

  Quindero didn't know exactly how to respond. He snuck another look in Dwayne's direction, then said to Calavecci, "The reason we came here? Sir, we were just—"

  "Now, take it easy, Ralph," Calavecci said. "Be careful you don't say anything to make me think you're trying to be a smart guy."

  "No, sir, no, sir, I'm cooperating."

  "That's right. So's your pal Woody, by the way. That boy's singing like a miner's canary, on videotape. He's the one told us why you're here."

  "Woody?" You could see Quindero trying to figure out where the bullet was coming from, so he could dodge it. Or try.

  "Now, Tom Carmody," Calavecci said, "he was the inside man in the robbery, we know all that, Tom told us in the hospital. And Tom was good friends with your sister. Mary, is it?"

  "My sister— Yeah, she's Mary. But she doesn't have anything to do with this!"

  "Well, she did," Calavecci said. "Tom told Mary what was gonna go down here, and she told you, and so you and your pals thought you'd come on out, see what there might be in it for you. Isn't that right?"

  "I, uh, I guess. But Mary isn't part of it!"

  "Take it easy, Ralph," Calavecci advised. "The point is, you may have had something naughty in mind, but you didn't do anything yet. Unless, that is, like I said, we want to get technical with this accessory-before-the-fact business. But I don't think that's going to happen," he finished, and grinned at Quindero.

  Who grinned back, falteringly, and said, "I'm glad. Thanks."

  Calavecci nodded. "After all, we're gonna want you as a witness, because the other two, you know, Woody and Zack, we got them on all kinds of stuff. The handguns, the accessory count, murder one—"

  "What?"

  "Oh, that's right," Calavecci said, snapping his fingers, "you don't know about that part. Still, your testimony's gonna be very important there."

  "Nobody got killed!" Ralph's eyes were actually bulging, his breathing had become audible.

  'You're wrong about that, Ralph," Calavecci said. "Somebody got killed, all right. Drowned in a bathtub. Took a long time at it, too, what I hear."

  Panicky, Quindero leaned forward, hands gesturing out in front of himself as he said, "We didn't kill anybody! We just drove here, we parked, we didn't—"

  "Before you drove here. Now, we could almost pull accessory on you there, too, but I accept it, you didn't know about the murder, so that's—"

  "What murder? Nobody was murdered!"

  "Oh, come on, Ralph," Calavecci said, grinning in high good humor, "figure it out. You can figure it out."

  Quindero could, too, though he didn't want to. Watching the young fool's profile, Dwayne saw him struggle with it, shaking his head, half-saying words, taking them back, finally saying, as though it were all just nothing but a joke in bad taste, "No, come on." And then again, asking for mercy, decency, humanity, something, "No, come on, no."

  "You know who it is," Calavecci told him, almost crooning now. "Spit it out, Ralph. Tell me the name."

  Quindero's mouth hung open. His big eyes filled with tears. He couldn't seem to move or breathe or blink; certainly he couldn't talk. Calavecci studied him with mock sympathy, and then said, "Ralph? You really don't get it? Come on, boy, you're smarter than that."

  Dwayne got to his feet, surprising everybody, breaking the moment. Ignoring the punk, he went over to the desk and nodded at Calavecci. "You're having too good a time," he said. "I'll be going off on my own now. That was the Seven Oaks Professional Building? Where you picked these people up?"

  Calavecci didn't like being interrupted. Irritated, he said, "What do you mean, off on your own?"

  Dwayne turned away, finished with Calavecci, and looked at Quindero's tear-stained face. "Shut up, kid," he said, "until you see a lawyer." And he left.

  Sending them out on patrol was a lot cleaner.

  10

  When Bill Trowbridge woke up, he had to pee real bad. Also, he'd finished the magazines those crooks had let him bring into the locked storage room with him, when they'd taken over the service station. He'd slept for a while, curled up on the hard floor, but now he was awake, and he had to do something, soon.

  He'd figured out who those people had to be. The news of the robbery at the stadium had been all over TV and radio yesterday afternoon, before he'd come to work. They'd said it was three men that had done the job, but they must have gotten that part wrong; it was two men and one woman. And they were hiding from the cops here.

  What to do? They were tough and mean, no question about that. They'd beat up one guy at the stadium so bad he was in the hospital. They were, like the radio and TV said, armed and dangerous. He was lucky all they'd done was lock him in here with
the batteries and fan belts.

  On the other hand, he did have to pee. And he didn't have any more magazines to distract his mind. And who knew how long they meant to keep him in here, or even if they'd remember to let him out before they left. Or if they even intended to let him out. So, for all those reasons, Bill Trowbridge was climbing the walls.

  Literally. The room was deep and narrow, crowded with deep high wooden bins and shelves on both sides, all the way to the top, full of auto parts of various kinds. Fourteen feet up was the ceiling, obscured in darkness, far above the hanging light. Bill climbed up the shelves and bins, finding it easy, using the construction on both sides, and when he got to the top the ceiling was Sheetrock. He punched a hole in it with a length of tailpipe from one of the bins, yanked Sheetrock down and out of the way, dumping the pieces as quietly as possible into nearby empty bins—all the bins above the ten-foot level were empty, dusty, dry—and found two-by-six beams up there, sixteen inches apart. The roof, resting on those beams, was made of planks.

  The storage room had plenty of tools. All Bill had to do was be careful about noise. Using screwdrivers, pliers, a flat-sided tire iron and a wrench, he gouged away sections of plank, exposing the tar paper and then the gravelly tar of the surface of the roof itself.

  The more he worked, the easier it got, because the more room he had to work in. When he first broke through a section of tar paper and tar to the outer air, the sky was still black, but as he worked it began to lighten out there, and when he finally squeezed himself up between two of the support beams and out onto the rough-surfaced roof it was morning. Real early morning, but morning.

  The first thing Bill did was go to the edge of the roof at the back of the building, where it overlooked a narrow stretch of scrubland with bushes and skinny little plane trees on it, and pee over the side, trying to hit branches that wouldn't make too much noise. Then he looked around, wondering how best to get himself down off this roof, and saw the police car!