The Rare Coin Score p-9

by Richard Stark

  Hoffman was looking out the window at about ten before two when the power-and-light truck arrived and came to a stop almost exactly outside the window. Hoffman watched with bored interest as two men in work jumpers climbed out of the truck and set up barriers around a manhole and then took the manhole cover off. It only took them a few minutes to get set up, moving right along, but then nothing happened at all. One of the two men, the larger one, went away down the street to the right, out of Hoffman’s vision, and the other one went down to the left and sort of stood around on the sidewalk there, under the hotel marquee, as though he had nothing on earth to do.

  Union labor, Hoffman thought, and nodded to himself. He might be an employee himself, but he was down on the kind of union you read about in the papers these days; always going on strike for more money or fewer hours, but never lifting a finger to see that the members did an honest day’s work for all those wages.

  Hoffman kept watching, wondering just how long those two would dawdle around, probably getting time and a half for being on the job so late, but when the code knock came at the door at two o’clock the one under the marquee still hadn’t moved and the other one still hadn’t come back.

  Hoffman opened the door and Pat Schuyler was there, holding a small brown paper bag. They exchanged the no-trouble phrases and Schuyler handed over the paper bag, saying, “We got us a looker down in the lobby tonight.”

  “Is that right?”

  “You can see her from here.”

  Hoffman looked past Schuyler, at an angle down through the railing into the lobby, and nodded. “So she is,” he said. “Now what do you suppose she’s waiting for?”

  “No old fogies like us,” said Schuyler, “I can tell you that.”

  “You speak for yourself,” Hoffman told him, and they grinned at each other, and Hoffman shut the door.

  When he turned, George Dolnick had come in from the security room, carrying his own brown paper bag. Dolnick said, “Another exciting night, eh, Fred?”

  “I don’t think I can stand the pace,” Hoffman said.

  They went over to the small cleared table near the windows and sat down. They opened their bags and a harsh voice said, “Freeze.”

  Hoffman looked around, and a lot of masked men were coming through the wall.

  Four

  OTTO MAINZER felt good. He felt tall, strong, smart, and capable. The Colt Trooper .357 Magnum in his right hand was as small and light as a peanut, but it was his lightning-fast snake, his poison dart. He moved on the balls of his feet, coming in fast behind Parker, through the gap in the wall and through the heavy drapes, moving to the left as Parker moved to the right, seeing Lempke out of the corner of his eye, coming in third, moving along the wall after Parker.

  The two private fuzz were sitting at a table near the window, their open mouths full of food. They’d turned their heads at Parker’s barked one-word command, but after that neither of them had moved a muscle.

  The mask restricted Mainzer’s vision just slightly, cutting down his peripheral vision so that he had to move slowly, his left hand out to the side testing for tables or other obstructions. While Parker and Lempke were moving along the drapes to the front wall, Mainzer headed away at a sharp angle to the left, going down the aisle between the display tables till he came to the cross-aisle halfway down, then going across to the other side of the room and heading back toward the fuzz.

  Now he and Parker were at two points of a triangle, with the Pinks at the third, and Lempke could go in and disarm them without obscuring everybody’s line of fire at once. Mainzer stood with cocked hip, smiling inside his mask, while Lempke stripped the Pinks of their hardware, putting the guns on the table with the half-eaten sandwiches.

  Lempke then backed away toward the open door of the security room, motioning at the cops to follow him. They did, both of them looking shaky and disgusted with themselves. Mainzer followed them into the other room, while Parker stayed out in the ballroom.

  Lempke had rope and tape. As Mainzer stood guard, Lempke put the fuzz down on the floor, tied them, and taped their mouths. Then they went back outside and Lempke pulled off his mask, saying, “Hot in there.”

  Parker already had his off. “Go get Billy,” he said.

  “Right.” Lempke hurried away across the room.

  Mainzer still had his mask on. He liked the feel of it. He said, “There’s a couple suitcases in the other room.”

  “We’ll ask Billy. You want to take that off before you go outside.”

  Mainzer felt sudden embarrassment and anger, as though he’d been caught doing something dirty. He felt his face grow red inside the mask, making it impossible for him to take it off yet. “I will,” he said stiffly, trying to hide both the embarrassment and the anger. “Don’t worry about me.”

  Lempke came back through the hole with Billy, who was white with terror and stumbling over his own feet. Billy stood just inside the drape, looking around big-eyed, and whispered, “Where are they?”

  “We chopped them up,” Mainzer said, feeling a surge of contempt for this soft fool, “and put the pieces in suitcases.”

  Parker said, “Let’s get started. Billy, where’s the chart?”

  Billy had to fumble around in pockets, but he finally did come up with the chart and they went to work. Billy and Lempke packed, Parker carried the full cases through the wall to the tour office, and Mainzer brought them downstairs to Carlow, who stowed them away in the truck.

  Mainzer didn’t remove the mask until he was out of the ballroom, just before making his first trip to the street. In the darkness of the tour office he tugged the mask off and shoved it into a pocket. He could feel his face still flaming red, but in the darkness it might go unnoticed.

  He kept thinking of things he should have said to Parker, things he still could say. Every trip up and down the stairs his mind was full of cutting remarks, clever answers, tough challenges; he mouthed them as he went along, glowering.

  From time to time he would run into Parker in the tour office, the both of them arriving there simultaneously, Parker with more filled cases, Mainzer empty-handed, and every time he was on the verge of saying something, just at the edge of making an issue, but it never quite happened. He told himself it was better not to start anything now. They were working on a tight schedule, too tight for anything extraneous. Afterwards they could have it out, just the two of them. Parker was too much of a hard-nose, he was going around looking for a broken head, and, Mainzer figured, he might be just the boy to give it to him, one way or another.

  At the other end of his route was Carlow, and there too a tight-lipped truce was in effect. The truce had more violent overtones here, though, because both of them were aware of its existence. Mainzer and Carlow spoke to one another only when it was absolutely necessary, and then in the fewest possible number of syllables. Driving downtown together in the truck they hadn’t said a word to one another, and both knew they were only waiting for the job to be finished before they got down to their private disagreement.

  What the disagreement was neither of them particularly knew or cared. “They rubbed each other the wrong way, they were enemies, they were waiting for the communal task to be finished and then they would be at each other’s throats—that was all they knew and all they had to know.

  Mainzer was not entirely honoring this truce, finding small, indirect ways to irritate Carlow. Like the placement of the coin cases; it would have been just as easy, and more sensible, for him to put them on the tailgate when bringing them out to the truck, but instead he ostentatiously put them down in the street directly behind the truck, leaving the smaller and lighter Carlow the job of lifting them up and putting them inside. He did this the first three trips downstairs, but on the fourth trip Carlow was already in the truck, way back in the darkness at the end, and when Mainzer put the cases down in the street Carlow called, with heavy sarcasm, “In here, Tarzan.”

  Mainzer smiled thinly, “Sure thing, pal,” he said, picked
one of the cases up, set it on the truck bed, and gave it a hard push toward Carlow, trying to knock him off his feet with it. Carlow jumped to the side, the case thudded into the ones already stacked in place, and Carlow put his hand inside his overall pocket saying, “Send the other one that way, buster.”

  “Whatever you want, pal,” Mainzer said, but he pushed the second case in more gently than the first, and after that he put the cases inside the truck instead of outside.

  It was on his way up after his fifth trip that he ran into Parker’s bitch, also on the way in. Claire, her name was, and he had to admit she was a good-looking piece. But probably frigid.

  The educated ones with the cool good looks and the clothes right out of the fashion magazines, they were the frigid ones, nine times out of ten. The only ones that wanted it were the dumb fatties, and they were the ones that Mainzer had no taste for. Because of this, he very rarely had any sort of relations with a woman, and when he did have anything going it was always short-lived, the woman invariably turning out to be either dumb or frigid. He didn’t know why that was so, or how other men got around the problem, but on the other hand he didn’t care a hell of a lot either. They were better things to do with the male body than laying it on some woman. The big times in his life had mostly happened at night, but never in bed.

  Like stomping Carlow, for instance. He was going to enjoy that. And Parker, too. In fact, with Parker he’d enjoy it even more, because it would be tougher to work out.

  In any case, Mainzer wasn’t primarily a ladies’ man. Still, he had an image to maintain and a view of life to re-confirm, which was why he’d greeted Claire on first meeting her with a bluntly phrased suggestion, and why, on running into her again at the office building doorway now, he said, “Change your mind yet, honey?”

  She gave him a look of cool contempt—which he knew to be phony—and went on ahead of him into the building. He followed her up the stairs, watching the way her hips moved. He thought of other things he might say to her, but he kept silent. He also thought briefly of grabbing her in the hallway, giving her a quickie in payment for that look of contempt, but he put that idea out of his mind right away. He’d tried something like that once, years ago when he was younger and thought all women wanted it, thought frigidity was always a fake, thought all you had to do was climb aboard and they’d sigh, “Oh, yes, I do want it!” Instead of which, he’d suddenly found his arms full of grizzly bear. That little bitch had been the worst, dirtiest, most vicious and violent fighter he’d ever come up against in his life. She bit, clawed, scratched, kicked, gouged, butted, kneed, elbowed and generally tried to rip his skin off. He’d finally had to knock her out, in self-defense, and he never did get into her pants, though when he’d looked at her lying there on that floor unconscious he’d had half a mind to go ahead and do it anyway. The thought that she might wake up halfway through had stopped him.

  And the memory of her had stopped him on every similar occasion since then, including now. He followed Claire on into the Diablo Tours office, and when she bent to go through the hole in the wall the only desire he had was to kick her for a field goal.

  Until Claire’s arrival, things had been slow for Mainzer, with pauses after every trip while he waited for two more cases to be gotten ready, but now that Claire was helping pack it went faster, and Mainzer moved constantly back and forth between tour office and truck. In the ballroom, he knew, Lempke and Claire and Billy were all packing the coin cases, while Parker sometimes packed and sometimes carried the full cases out of the office.

  Mainzer kept track, and by ten minutes to three he had made twenty-seven round trips. With two cases each time, that meant fifty-four cases of coins already stowed in the truck. Going into the building for the twenty-eighth time, about to start up the stairs, Mainzer sensed movement in the darkness behind him, and turned. The piece of pipe glanced off the side of his head and pounded onto his shoulder, bringing blinding pain. He made a sound high in the back of his throat, sagged, weaved, and the indistinct figure in front of him swung again. This time he saw the pipe a fraction of an inch in front of his eyes, coming with the speed of fury.

  Five

  MIKE CARLOW wasn’t entirely sure which he liked least, Mainzer or this cruddy truck, but he thought it was probably the truck. He hadn’t liked it when he first saw it, covered with canvas, in the backyard of Lebatard’s house, and he’d liked it even less after he and that bastard Mainzer had taken the canvas off, and he’d begun to really despise it once he was behind the wheel and had the rotten thing in some kind of motion. He didn’t like the transmission, he didn’t like the engine, he didn’t like the springs, he didn’t like the seat or the steering wheel or the tires, and most of all he didn’t like the idea of pushing this orange lemon around the city streets with a million dollars’ worth of hot coins stowed away in the back.

  A vehicle, to Mike Carlow, was something that got you from point A to point B in one second flat, regardless of the distance between. This was the ideal, not yet attained either in Detroit or Europe, and Carlow judged everything with wheels and an engine on how close it came to reaching the ideal. And this truck Parker had given him to drive was the bottom of the barrel, was further from the ideal than anything else he could think of, with the possible exception of a power lawn mower.

  Carlow was a racing driver, and in his high-school days had pushed a lot of clunkers around a lot of stock-car tracks. While still a teenager he’d designed a racing car with a center of gravity guaranteed to be unaffected by the amount of gasoline in the gas tank, because there wasn’t any gas tank; the car was built around a frame of hollow aluminum tubing, which would hold the fuel supply. When someone he showed the idea to objected that it might be insanely dangerous to build a car in which the driver vi was completely surrounded by gasoline, he’d said, “So what?” And had lived his life from the same point of view ever since.

  If racing cars didn’t cost so damn much to design and build and care for Mike Carlow wouldn’t from time to time be reduced to driving abortions like this stinking truck. He worked on jobs like this maybe once a year, less if he could afford it, and only to raise enough cash to support his automobiles. Sure, he could sell out to one of the big companies, be in essence nothing more than a test pilot for them, trying their engineers’ bright new ideas in racing cars financed by them, owned by them, and merely driven by him, but that wasn’t his idea of racing. Any car he drove had to be his car, and his designs were still as wild as the track officials would permit. Because of this, and because he was one of the most aggressive drivers in the business, he had racked up more than his share of cars, leaving himself with marks of his occupation all over his body. More important, to his way of thinking, he’d also occasionally reduced thousands of dollars’ worth of automobile to a hundred dollars’ worth of scrap, and every time that happened he either had to dip into the kitty if there was one or hire himself out to people like Parker and Lempke again, to take them safely and quickly away from the scene of a score. Or to drive some piece of garbage like this improbable truck.

  As for Otto Mainzer, the bastard was a bastard, that was all there was to say about him. As long as Mainzer kept his rotten personality within bounds Carlow would control himself, but once this job was over if Mainzer wanted to go on being cute Carlow would be happy to bend a tire iron over his head. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d stretched out a bruiser who thought he could have it over Carlow because of the difference in their sizes, and it might not be the last, but Carlow thought it would probably be the one he’d enjoy the most.

  In the meantime, tonight’s work was mostly dull. The highlight had been watching Parker’s woman cross her legs; from then on, the night had been downhill. All he had to do was stand around behind the truck a lot, looking into the open manhole and making believe he was a power-and-light worker, and when Mainzer brought him more of the boodle he had to go into the truck and stash it.

  Only once in the last hour had he seen a police car
, and that had gone on by him without a glance. Other than that, traffic had been so light as to be almost nonexistent, and pedestrians going by on the sidewalk were as rare as dodo eggs. Occasionally Mainzer had to wait out of sight in the doorway while groups of conventioneers, most of them carrying cargoes of alcohol, straggled by and into the hotel, but these delays were never long. Carlow did his work methodically, spent most of his free time thinking about his tentative plans for the next car he wanted to build, and when at ten minutes to three the man in the topcoat and hat walked over and stood in front of him Carlow at first didn’t even see the gun in his hand. He said, “What’s up, buddy?” thinking the guy was going to ask directions or something like that.

  But the guy said, “You are. Let’s take a walk.” And motioned with the gun.

  Then Carlow saw it, and a feeling like ice water ran down the middle of his back. He looked at the guy’s face again, and he just didn’t look like law. Carlow said, “I’m easy. No need to get excited.” And moved his arms out from his sides, so he wouldn’t look as though he was reaching for anything.

  “That’s the way to be, all right,” said the other. “Let’s go inside.”

  “Sure.”

  The guy wanted him to go into the office building. Carlow left the truck and walked across the sidewalk and pushed open the door, the man with the gun coming along behind him.

  Inside, Carlow saw the dim form of Mainzer lying on the floor near the foot of the stairs. I’m going to get it, too, he thought, and then pain came curving in a bright hard flash around both sides of his head and turned the world to white darkness.

  Six

  BILLY LEBATARD felt like Judas Iscariot. He stood there in the brightly lighted bourse room, packing coins into case after case, and though in a small way he did feel the excitement and the thrill that he thought natural to a scene like this, what he mostly felt was sick and rotten and miserable and the worst kind of Benedict Arnold.