Comeback p-17

by Richard Stark

"That's where the people are," Parker told him.

  'You been chasing Liss a long time?"

  "Eight months. He was part of a bank thing in Iowa City, took a hostage, killed her."

  "What does the insurance company care?"

  "They need Liss," Parker said, improvising from what he knew of previous situations, from the other side, "to prove the bank guards weren't incompetent. If they can prove the guards did what they were supposed to do, the company's liability goes way down."

  Smiling pleasantly, Calavecci said, "And screw the survivors, right?"

  Parker smiled back at him, just as pleasant and just as false. "That's the job," he said, and three shots sounded, flat and small but not far away. They could have been the sounds of somebody hitting a floor with a baseball bat, but they were not.

  All three at the table knew it, and jumped to their feet. They were all moving toward the door before the first yells sounded outside. Calavecci went through the doorway, then Thorsen. Parker lagged, because he thought he knew what this was. He thought it wasn't a coincidence he'd seen George Liss walking toward the hospital.

  Yes. The hall was full of armed men and women in blue, all facing the same way, frozen. Parker came through the doorway behind Thorsen and looked down the hall and Liss was backing away down there, waving the pistol he must have taken from the missing cop. He was still in the uniform, but what was protecting him now was Ralph Quindero. He backed away down the hall with Quindero in front of him, Liss's left arm tight around Quindero's waist, Quindero the shield, helplessly facing all those helpless armed people as he and Liss backed steadily away. There was a stairwell door back there, at the far end.

  Liss, looking at everything, suddenly saw Parker, and laughed with surprise. "Well, look at you!" he cried, and fired at Parker's head.

  6

  Thorsen's lunge drove both Parker and himself back through the doorway into the dayroom, bouncing off the floor while the bullet hit the doorframe behind them. As they untangled themselves, there were sudden shouts from the hall, and a quick flurry of gunfire, almost immediately stopped.

  Parker got to his feet as the uniforms in the hall rushed forward in a body, meaning Liss had made it to the stairwell. But how much farther could he go?

  Parker turned and held out his hand to help Thorsen back to his feet. He said, "I owe you one."

  Thorsen looked slightly ruffled, but then he shook himself and became completely neat again. He said, "That was Liss, wasn't it?"

  "It was."

  "Looks like he knows you're behind him."

  "Looks that way."

  "And doesn't like it."

  "I didn't think he would," Parker said, and started out of the room.

  Thorsen, not moving, said, "Let the police run him down. Shouldn't take more than five minutes."

  Over his shoulder, Parker said, "Carmody," and walked away down the now-deserted hall. Big eyes in shocked faces looked out from corners of cover at the nurse's station along the way.

  Carmody's room was on the other side, just before the nurse's station. Parker went to that doorway and looked in, and it was a mess. Carmody had been shot in the head, and was lying back on the pillow, three eyes staring upward. The two cops who'd been in here with him, mostly to keep watch on Ralph Quindero, had been shot any which way, just to take them out of play, and were alive, but both lying like flung dolls on the floor, being worked over by nurses.

  For Liss, Carmody was the only person except the rest of the crew who could positively say he'd been one of the heisters. It didn't matter if Carmody had given statements to the law, just so he wouldn't be around later to make the positive ID. Liss could afford a lawyer who'd fend off all that crap, dependent on there being no live Tom Carmody to stand up in court and point and say, "That's him there."

  And what Liss was counting on right now, in the hospital, was too much confusion and nobody who'd ever seen him before. A guy in a police uniform, moving fast, shooting people, who came in and went out. There might be some potential IDs of Liss, but once again, not enough for a conviction. Not if he got away clean and hired his lawyer and established his alibi in some place like San Diego, or one of the Portlands.

  "Gangway! Gangway!"

  Parker stepped back, and white-coated people hurried by, pushing two gurneys into the room. Working delicately but hurriedly, moving fragile creatures who could break at any second, they put the two wounded cops on the gurneys.

  Parker looked down the hall. Some of the cops had followed Liss into the stairwell, while others milled around down there, barking into walkie-talkies. Some had come the other way down the hall and were just now piling into an elevator. To go which way, up or down? Liss wouldn't be as easy to catch as these people thought.

  Thorsen had also looked into Carmody's room, and now he came over to Parker to say, "You can hold your questions."

  'There's nothing for me here," Parker agreed. He was thinking, there was nothing for him around Thorsen any more, either. Get rid of him—maybe take him out of the action and borrow that little automatic of his—and then go find Mackey and Brenda. Liss was attracting too much attention right now, Parker didn't need to be around him.

  Particularly since he was supposed to be the Liss expert, the insurance guy tracking him down. Calavecci had immediately gone running off to lead the search for Liss, but sooner or later he'd be back, and he'd be full of questions, and he'd probably even want to call Jack Orr's head office at Midwest Insurance, a company that so far as Parker knew didn't exist.

  Down the hall, the plainclothesman called Macready came out of the stairwell and walked this way. Thorsen said, "Get him?"

  "Not yet," Macready said.

  Parker said, "You lost him."

  "We know he's in the building," Macready said. "He isn't going anywhere." Frowning at Parker, he said, "He does seem to have a special interest in you, though, doesn't he?"

  "We're interested in each other," Parker said. "He knows I don't mean him well."

  An elevator door opened and cops came out. They looked both purposeful and confused, and they milled with the gurneys coming out of Carmody's room. Macready went over to talk to these new cops, and Parker said, "Time to get out of their way."

  "As a matter of fact," Thorsen said, "I was just thinking the same. Come to the hotel."

  Parker looked at him. "What hotel?"

  "Archibald and the Crusade," Thorsen explained. "We're all supposed to leave town today, go back to Memphis, but it looks like at least some of us will be staying on. You and I can go there, phone Broad Street from time to time, find out what's going on."

  A peaceful place. A good place to hole up until tonight; if nothing else happened, Parker could go back to that motel at eleven o'clock, see if Brenda'd been reading her compact lately. "Good idea," he said. "Thanks for the invite."

  7

  Macready rode down in the elevator with them. He had an air about him of gloomy satisfaction, as though taking pleasure in something he knew to be a sin. He said, "We got a situation here, I don't know if you two realize this."

  Thorsen said, "A situation? What kind of situation?"

  "I mean," Macready said, "Lew Calavecci went out on a limb when he brought the Quindero kid over here, and now maybe the limb broke off."

  The elevator reached the ground floor. They stepped out to find a snag, a traffic jam of people being funneled slowly through one checkpoint at the main entrance. Everybody in and out was being closely studied.

  Macready stood on line with them, and Thorsen asked him, "Out on a limb? Why?"

  "What have they got Quindero on?" Macready asked. "Nothing, or next to nothing. His two pals killed the girl, his sister, but everybody acknowledges Quindero didn't know about it till long afterward, so he isn't a party to that crime at all. The three of them came here intending to commit a crime, but they didn't do it. The other two they're holding on murder one, to be shipped home, but all they have on Quindero, here or anywhere else, is obstruction of jus
tice, because he knew the robbery at the stadium was going to take place and he didn't inform the police. But that's Mickey Mouse, and everybody knows it, that's just to hold onto him a couple days. His lawyer's going to laugh at that one. In fact, he's already laughing at it. But now we got a different situation."

  Thorsen said, "What?"

  Macready seemed to consider whether or not to go on. The line inched forward, people irritable but obedient, one at a time leaving the building, one at a time entering it. Macready said, "I don't know if you two got much of a sense of Lew Calavecci."

  "I think we do," Thorsen said.

  "Enough to go on," Parker said.

  "Well," Macready told them, "Lew let Quindero believe he was in a lot deeper shit than he actually is. You know, he put the screws to him a little. More for fun than to get anything out of him. And he didn't get clearance from anybody to bring Quindero here to confront Carmody because he knew damn well nobody would give him clearance."

  "Oh," said Thorsen.

  "And now," Macready said, "it looks like Quindero's teamed up with our shooter."

  Thorsen said, "Teamed up? He was a hostage."

  "In the stairwell," Macready said, "the shooter took the time to shoot the lock on Quindero's cuffs, free him up. We found them there. Quindero must figure he's got nothing to lose, so he's thrown in with the shooter, and they're somewhere together. Two instead of one."

  Parker said, "Calavecci needs Quindero back safe and sound, doesn't he? Not a scratch on him."

  "Good luck, say I," said Macready. Looking at Parker, he said, "I hear the shooter was the guy you're looking for, is that right?"

  "George Liss," Parker agreed. "Looked like him."

  They were nearly to the head of the line; Macready would usher them through. Waiting, he nodded and said, "I can see where, following George Liss around, it wouldn't be dull work."

  8

  It wasn't a manger. Carlton Tower, where William Archibald and his Christian Crusade were resting their heads while they saved local souls, was a many-tiered wedding cake, white and gleaming in the sun, with the flags of various Scottish clans dangling from horizontal poles stuck out from the facade just above the second level. (Most people had no idea what those colorful flags stood for, and the few who did know couldn't figure out what they stood for here.)

  The lobby was broad and two stories high, with a figured carpet in which the dominant color was maroon. The bank of gold-doored elevators stood discreetly around a corner on the right. Thorsen led the way across from the revolving-doored entrance, through an atmosphere of hyper but hushed activity, and Parker looked at it all with approval. He liked this kind of place when he wasn't working. On the job, it was no good, of course, because the byword with a place like this was constant service of the guest, which meant constant observation of the guest. On the job, Parker preferred a place where, once you paid your money and they told you where the ice machine was, you were left alone.

  Archibald and his people had taken all or most of the twelfth floor. Thorsen and Parker rode up in the elevator with blushing honey-mooners, who continued on to greater heights. When Thorsen and Parker stepped out of the elevator, they found a very neat and muscular young man in dark gray suit and dark blue tie seated on the nice wing chair against the opposite wall, reading what looked like a missal. He glanced up, saw Thorsen, and said, "Morning, sir."

  "Morning. Archibald in?"

  "I believe everybody's in, sir," the young man said, and gave Parker a flat look, merely recording him, to remember him. Parker already remembered the young man; he'd been one of the Crusade's guards in the money room at the stadium.

  Thorsen led the way down the hall, saying, "We'll drop in, have a word with Archibald, then go on to my office. He's an interesting fella to meet."

  "I suppose he must be," Parker said.

  They went to the end of the white-and-gold corridor, where the suites were, and Thorsen knocked on the door that instead of a number had the word Macleod on it. After a minute, this door was opened by another muscular youngster in a suit, a clone of the one at the elevator, though Parker didn't think this one had been in the money room.

  Thorsen stepped in, murmuring a word to this guy, and Parker followed. They went through a small mirrored vestibule with two doors that probably led to closets, and then entered a large six-sided room with big windows in two walls showing cityscape. Paintings hung on the rest of the walls, cream-and-green broadloom was underfoot, and the furniture was large and dark, mostly imitation antique, and placed in separate groupings, the largest cluster being the two sofas and two chairs with several tables and lamps positioned in front of the now-idle fireplace. That detail surprised Parker; he'd thought Archibald would want a fire. Maybe too distracted by the loss of his money.

  The remembered plummy voice from the night of the robbery oiled the room, coming from the man himself, seated at a small desk in front of the view, talking on the telephone. He gestured at Thorsen that he wouldn't be long, and went on with his conversation. Parker listened, and Archibald seemed to be on the line with his head office back in Memphis, arranging alterations in the television schedule created by the disruption that had happened here.

  "Better coffee in this place," Thorsen said, and went over to the bar—from the doorway, it was fireplace to the left, bar to the right, Archibald on the phone straight ahead—where he filled two hotel china mugs with coffee from a glass pot on a warmer there. Parker joined him, hiking one hip onto a stool in front of the bar while Thorsen stood behind it, leaning against the back counter. The coffee was in fact much better than the stuff at the hospital.

  Parker looked around. "Nice duty," he said.

  Thorsen offered a thin smile. "Depends what you like."

  When Archibald got off the phone, everybody moved, Archibald rising and turning his smile toward the room as though it contained multitudes, Parker getting to his feet and standing there with the coffee mug in his left hand, Thorsen coming around the end of the bar to make the introductions. "Reverend William Archibald," he said, as the three moved toward one another, "may I present Mr. John Orr, an undercover insurance investigator from Midwest Insurance."

  Archibald's handshake was firm but not aggressive. "Mr. Orr," he said, in greeting. "Here concerning our unfortunate loss?"

  "Not exactly," Parker said.

  Thorsen said, "Mr. Orr was on another case. He was already in pursuit of one of the fellas robbed us, for something else he did."

  Archibald smiled, with ruefulness in it. "In that case, Mr. Orr," he said, "I can only regret that you didn't catch up with him last week."

  "I feel the same way," Parker told him.

  "But now you're here," Archibald said, "I presume you've taken our misfortune under your wing as well."

  "That would be a different insurance company," Parker said.

  Thorsen said, "Mr. Orr's got a full plate, Will. This fella he's after is a very bad man. Just caused a ruckus down at Memorial Hospital." His voice lowered, becoming as funereal as his boss, as he said, "I'm afraid Tom Carmody's dead."

  That startled Archibald. "Why, that's terrible!" Looking at Parker, he said, "Tom was one of my failures, Mr. Orr. I'm not going to get over this."

  "Uh huh," Parker said.

  "But at least," Archibald said, brightening, "he expressed sorrow for his wayward ways. Toward the end, Dwayne, didn't he? You were there."

  "He was sorry, all right," Thorsen said.

  "We'll remember him in our prayers," Archibald decided.

  A blonde woman came into the room, then, from somewhere deeper in the suite, and attracted everybody's attention; which is what she would do in any room she entered. Ripe to overflowing, she was almost a parody of the sexpot, but kept under strict control, her yellow hair in a tight bun, lush body completely covered in a sexless gray suit and high-necked white blouse, and dark horn-rim glasses worn to distract from the bee-stung mouth.

  Archibald's smile when he turned to greet her contai
ned the avarice of ownership; not much question who this woman was. "Ah, Tina," the Reverend said. "Come meet Mr. Orr. He leads a very exciting life."

  When she came forward, Parker could see her rein herself in, deliberately hold herself within tight bounds. Her smile was small, almost prissy, and she didn't quite meet his eye as she murmured, "Does he? How nice."

  "Mr. John Orr," Archibald said, presenting his proudest possession, "Ms. Christine Mackenzie, conductor of our Angel Choir."

  "How do you do?"

  Her hand was soft, with toughness within. Holding Parker's a second too long, she said, "What about your life makes it so exciting, Mr. Orr?"

  "Not much," Parker told her.

  Archibald said, "Mr. Orr's an undercover detective, working for an insurance company."

  "Are you?" The smile opened a bit more, showed a gleam of teeth. "You must have some stories to tell."

  "Mostly, I keep them to myself," Parker said.

  He'd been aware of the transformation of Thorsen since Christine Mackenzie had come into the room. The man reacted with barely concealed rage and revulsion, covering panic; the sexuality of this woman was clearly far more than Thorsen could take. He wanted out of here, and now, gruffly, without looking at the woman, he said, "Will, Mr. Orr and I are going to my office, call Broad Street, find out if there's any developments."

  "Broad Street." Archibald frowned slightly. "That's what they call their police headquarters here?"

  "They better not ever move it," Christine Mackenzie said, and giggled, and showed Parker her tongue.

  Thorsen turned away, his hands clenched into fists. "Come on, Jack," he said.

  "Nice to meet you," Parker told Archibald, and nodded to Mackenzie. "Both of you."

  But Archibald said, "Dwayne, you go ahead. Let me have a little word with Mr. Orr, if I might. I'll send him right along."

  "Fine," Thorsen said. To Parker he said, "I'm down on the right, 1237."

  "Got it."