The Seventh

by Richard Stark

“Why don't you fight like a man!”

  Parker shot him in the back of the head.

  3

  There was law all over the car.

  Parker stood there, just within the cover of the pine trees, looking out at the gray Ford. He saw Dougherty there, and another plainclothesman, and three or four cops in uniform.

  After he'd finished with Negli he'd worked his way back here along the path he and the other two had beaten out. He'd gathered up his topcoat from where he'd thrown it and put it back on, and when he worked his way up out of the thick underbrush and the birch and maple trees and in under the cool, dim spaciousness of the pine trees he took time out to brush himself off, rub away the dirt marks and the grass stains, get himself looking a little more sensible and civilized. He buried the two pistols under some loose dirt and pine needles because he wouldn't be needing them any more and went on through the pines and almost stepped out into the open before he saw the law all over the car.

  He'd taken too long. If it had just been the amateur everything would have been all right, but with the extra time it had taken to deal with Negli he'd stretched beyond the limit.

  Five minutes sooner and he'd have been free and clear, with wheels and the whole boodle.

  But there was no chance for it now. As he stood in among the trees and watched, Dougherty and the other plainclothesman reached into the Ford and took out one of the suitcases and set it down on the ground next to the car. They looked at one another, and then both crouched down in front of the suitcase and loosened the snaps. The other plainclothesman lifted the lid.

  The money was stacked in there like heads of lettuce.

  Both cops stood up again and put their hands on their hips and looked down at the open suitcase. Then Dougherty turned his head and looked at the woods in the general direction of Parker. He said something to the other cop, but Parker was too far away to hear the words. The other cop looked at the woods too and shook his head. Dougherty shrugged.

  Parker waited a minute longer even though there wasn't any point to it. He watched the cops take out a second suitcase, not one of the right ones, and open it up to find it full of laundry. Then they reached in again and this time brought out the right suitcase, and then they had both suitcases and all the money, and it was all over.

  Never had such a sweet operation turned so completely sour.

  Of the seven in on the job, all but one were dead or in the hands of the law. The take was in the hands of the law. There was nothing left.

  Parker turned away and started back through the forest again.

  The only thing to do now was get clear. The job was so completely sour, it was a kind of victory just to get himself out and clear.

  The best way was the way the amateur had tried. Through the forest and out past that building under construction and along whatever street or road there was on the other side of it. Not back into town at all after that, but the other way, farther out of the city.

  He had a little money on him, not much. Enough to carry him away from here.

  He paused for a second where he'd buried the guns. But he'd be better off without them. From here on, what he had to do was keep out of sight. Gun battles with the law were for idiots.

  He moved on, following the same trail as last time. But this time there was no one ahead of him and no one coming along behind him.

  Back in the other direction, the sun crept down behind the pine trees. Darkness was slowly edging in from all sides, but there was still enough light to see the trail.

  4

  The amateur was gone.

  Parker stopped at the edge of the woods, peering, at first refusing to believe it, telling himself he was being tricked by perspective, by the long forest shadows that stretched now like witch fingers out across the dead plain toward the building, by the bad light of late afternoon.

  But it was no trick. Where the amateur had fallen, where the dust had billowed up and then settled on him again, there was now no one. No one and nothing.

  The second bullet hadn't done the job, then. It had seemed like a good hit, but it had only wounded him. And he'd lain out there, either lying doggo or unconscious, and after a while he'd crawled or walked away.

  Which way? Back into the relative safety of the woods? Or forward, on toward that building bulking out there?

  Forward. There was no subtlety in the amateur, nothing in him but direct action. He would keep going forward no matter what.

  But there were still questions. It all depended how badly he was hit. From the way he'd flopped out there, from how long he'd stayed lying there, the hit had to be fairly good, anyway. It was no flesh wound, no grazing of his shoulder or leg. But just how bad was it? Bad enough to have him dead now, up closer to the building? Or not quite that bad, but bad enough to force him to hole up in the building itself and not try to go any farther? Or was it so slight after all that he'd just walked away and was now lost forever?

  Standing there at the edge of the woods, Parker regretted not having dug the guns up again. But there'd been no way to guess back there that he'd be needing a gun again so soon.

  He faded back into the woods, hunted around, and found the body of Negli lying sprawled all over a thick and thorny bush. The little Beretta was on the ground near his hand.

  Parker picked it up and broke the clip out of the butt. It was a six-shot .25-caliber automatic, and Negli had already used up five of the cartridges in this clip.

  Parker slid the clip back in place, put the Beretta in his pocket, and dragged Negli clear of the thornbush. He went through Negli's clothing, but the little man hadn't been carrying an extra clip.

  The damn fool!

  Parker got to his feet and looked out again across the plain at the building over there. It was over twenty stories high already, and from the confusion of cranes and pulleys atop the building—looking like unruly hair on the head of a Mongoloid idiot—it was apparently going to be even taller before they were done. The last rays of sunlight glinted like icicles from the windows on the first seven or eight floors; above that the windowpanes hadn't been put in place yet.

  The amateur might be in there. He might be anywhere inside that pile of brick and glass, or he might be gone from this area entirely.

  Parker wanted him. He wanted that bastard the way Negli had wanted Parker. Not because there was any sense in it anymore, but only because the amateur, alive, was a loose end.

  It was the amateur who had soured the sweet job, bringing in his own extraneous problems, killing for no sensible reason, taking money that should have been safe, running around wild and causing trouble with everybody, attracting the attention of the law.

  There was no profit in killing him, but Parker was going to kill him anyway. He was going to kill him because he couldn't possibly just walk away and leave the bastard alive.

  But that didn't mean he had to get like Negli, stupid and careless.

  It would be full night soon, and that was bad. Night was the amateur's ally, covering his blunders, obstructing Parker's movements. If the thing was to be done, it should be done now.

  He moved out across the dead plain, moving light and fast on the balls of his feet, watching the building, ready to jump in any direction. If the amateur was in there, and watching, and waiting for a good shot, that was all right. Parker would give him one shot to find out exacdy where he was. He could count on the bastard to miss the first time.

  But there was no shot. He came all the way across the plain and up to the building itself and there was no sound, no movement.

  This was the back of the building. Windows stretched away to left and right, reflecting with distortions the plain and the forest and the red circle of the sun beginning now to sink behind the western horizon. A few gray metal doors were snugly in place here and there along the rear wall, implying basements, furnaces, all the utilities needed for a bulging building like this one.

  No sound, no movement.

  But over to the right a window was smashed i
n. These were all permanent windows, fixed in place without any way to open them, meaning the building would be centrally air-conditioned. Over to the right, one of these windows had been smashed in, and every last piece of glass knocked out of the aluminum frame.

  So a man could crawl through without cutting himself.

  A sound, a tiny scratch, made him look up.

  Glinting like a phantom airship, slender, square, fast and murderous, a sheet of plate glass knifed down through the air at him, whistling. Highlights sparkled from the edges like reflections of ice.

  Parker jumped away. With a sound like dry wood breaking, only much much louder, the sheet of glass destroyed itself into the ground, spraying shards and slivers in all directions. Silver triangles tinkled against the ground floor windows. Tiny pyramids of glass embedded themselves in Parker's shin and cheek and the back of his right hand.

  He looked up; the wall loomed up featureless and blank, the glass blood-red in the windows on the lower floors, reflecting the sun. The yellow bricks of the wall were tinged with rose color.

  The amateur was up there, on a high story, above the levels where the glass had already been fixed in place.

  As Parker looked, a dusky shimmer extruded from high up the wall like the phantom of a slender tongue. It bent, it arched, it broke free of the wall and sliced downward; another heavy sheet of glass, three feet wide and four feet long and half an inch thick, slicing through the air like an invisible sword.

  Parker dove through the hole in the building where the amateur had already smashed a window in. Behind him, the second glass torpedo sprayed itself into oblivion, musically.

  He was in what would be a basement storage room, the interior walls made of concrete block and painted a dull blue-gray. A metal door stood open onto a concrete block corridor.

  Parker moved cautiously, the Beretta insignificant in his hand. The corridor led him to the left to gaping holes in the wall where some day the elevators would hang. Opposite, another metal door led him to a stairway, the rough plaster walls painted an unfortunate yellow. He took the stairs up to the first floor.

  He was now in what would be a lobby or entrance hall of some kind, a broad, dim, white-painted echoing cavern with a low-hung free-form ceiling, shaped like a swimming-pool Light fixtures sprouted all over this ceiling like the faceted eyes of flies.

  From here on, every part of the building was incomplete. A metal staircase, without the walls that would enclose it, stood off to the left, leading upward. Parker went that way, sliding his feet noiselessly across a floor that seemed to be, but was not, marble.

  Beside the staircase a white bag fell and exploded, puffing whiteness out everywhere. A bag of cement, dropped too early.

  Parker ran through it, a white mist like a smokescreen in wartime, and started up the stairs. The stairs went forward to a landing, backward to the second floor. Forward again to another landing, backward to the third floor. And so on, and so on. And between the stairway halves was an empty space running down the middle of the stairwell, down which, like down some madman's oubliette, the amateur hurled whatever he could get his hands on. Long warped one-by-twelve planks went bumping and thumping by, bouncing from metal railing to metal railing. More cement bags dropped by like torsos to make soft white explosions on the lobby floor. Hammers and wrenches fell by, ratding and clanking.

  Parker kept to the far edge of the stairs, and kept moving upward. The windows had been glassed in completely up to the eighth floor. More than two or three floors above that there probably wasn't even any glass in readiness yet, lying around to be used as weapons. On floor nine, then, or floor ten or floor eleven he would find the amateur.

  As he passed the sixth-floor level the rain of stupidity stopped from above. The amateur had been throwing out of fear, out of panic, and now either his panic had abated or he had run out of things to throw.

  Why hadn't he used his gun? Was he out of bullets, or had he lost the gun somewhere, or was he just too panic-struck to remember he had it?

  The silence after the crash and clatter seemed to hum with emptiness. Parker moved more slowly, listening, listening through the silence, and wasn't surprised after a minute to hear the hurried stealthy scuffing of feet on stairs. The amateur was climbing higher.

  Parker was in no hurry. After the fifth floor, there were hardly any interior partitions up at all, and he could see there was no other way to go up or down but this stairwell. As long as he was below the amateur, and controlled the stairwell, there was no hurry.

  Except the press of darkness. Half the sun had now disappeared below the horizon, and the top half glowered winter-red, tinging glass and plaster and metal with rose and saffron.

  The sounds that came from above were like the sounds of mice in walls, but they were made by the amateur creeping up the metal stairs on hands and knees, wincing and grimacing, trying desperately and vainly to be silent. Parker could visualize him from the sounds and moved more openly himself now, not worrying so much about noise.

  At the landing between the tenth and eleventh floors, set carefully and symmetrically in the middle of the floor, there was a little mound of money.

  Parker stared at it. It was an offering, a sacrifice, like some South Sea Islander giving his virgin daughter to a volcano. The little mound of money left on the landing like an offertory on an altar.

  Parker picked it up and counted it. There were forty twenty-dollar bills and eight ten-dollar bills: eight hundred eighty dollars.

  He had some of the money!

  Parker looked upward. The bastard hadn't left all the money in the suitcases; he'd taken some of it with him, he had it on his person. And not just this much, just eight hundred eighty dollars. There'd be more of it.

  Parker stuffed the sacrifice in his pocket and went more quickly up the stairs. It was now necessary to keep the amateur from falling or jumping, to keep him in a condition where his pockets could be searched.

  And all with extreme care. There was only one bullet left in the Beretta, and that only .25 caliber and a very short-barreled gun.

  The amateur might jump, if he was terrified enough. Or fall, because of stupidity.

  Noises again, six or seven flights up. Parker, at the fourteenth story, stopped to listen. Scrapings, thumpings, heavy sounds. But nothing coming down the stairwell, nothing immediate.

  The noises went on and on as Parker kept climbing, and stopped as he was rounding the landing above the eighteenth story. He went two more flights and saw above him what the amateur had done.

  A barricade. Strips of metal, bundles of wire, planks of wood, tools of all kinds, even a wheelbarrow, all piled and jumbled together at the head of the stairs to keep him down.

  And was the barricade defended? Was this where the amateur would make his last stand?

  No. Waiting on the landing below, just out of range if the amateur were armed and manning the barricade, Parker listened and once again heard the mouse noises farther up. The amateur was still running.

  Parker went on up and brushed through the barricade with impatient arms. Tools and planks and bundles went crashing away, some clattering down the stairs, and up above the amateur cried out at the noise.

  Above the twenty-first floor, there weren't even external walls any more, only the flat white outlines of the poured concrete foundation. Floor and ceiling were rudimentary here: a thick flat slab of concrete swarming underneath with rods and cables and wires and other projections growing out like hair. Going forward from floor to landing, there was nothing beyond the left edge of each stair but emptiness and the setting sun and the dead plain far below. No banister, no railing, nothing. Going the other half, from landing to floor, there was nothing to the right of each stair but that other half of staircase hanging out over emptiness.

  The amateur was only one flight away, creeping upward, trembling, making more and more noise. He was gasping for breath and groaning from a thousand terrors. Parker followed, keeping to the middle of each stair, looking on
ly at the stairs and his own feet, moving upward.

  The twenty-third floor was the top. The flooring here was planks, covering only parts of the area and leaving other parts open. Wooden forms for the concrete foundation jutted up here and there like Renaissance smoke-stacks. Olive-drab tarpaulins were thrown over mounds of material.

  Across the way, the framework of the construction elevator stood like a model of the Eiffel Tower. The elevator itself, a mesh cage, hung within it at the level of this floor. The amateur was making for it, hobbling, running crouched like a wounded bear. He wore a dirty cream-colored raincoat, the back all stained and darkened by blood. He was torso-hit, just above the waist on the left side of the back.

  Exerting himself the way he was, hit like that with the bullet certainly still in him, he was done anyway. He was big and strong—Parker remembered how the sword had been thrust entirely through Ellie and into the wall behind—and if he'd had only a normal share of strength he'd be finished already. The end was coming soon. If it weren't for the money, Parker could just go away and leave him up here to rot.

  But there was the money. Parker walked across the echoing planks.

  The amateur wrenched open the two gates and stumbled into the elevator. Turning, he saw Parker and cried out again as he had before. He pushed the gates shut and tried to work the lever to send the elevator down to the ground, but of course there wasn't any power. The construction company people had sent the elevator to the top of the shaft before leaving so stray kids wouldn't damage it and then had turned the power off and gone away.

  The amateur had caged himself.

  Parker walked across the planks toward him.

  The amateur wrenched open the two gates.

  The amateur shouted, “Don't shoot at me! Please don't shoot at me!”

  There was an open space at the top of the double gate across the front of the elevator. The amateur with a sudden motion threw something over this, something that landed hard on the planks, and bounced: a stubby black pistol.

  “I lost the other one!” he shouted. Parker was close to him now, but he kept shouting anyway, as though he thought there was some sort of wall between himself and Parker. “I'm not armed now!” he shouted. “There's my gun! There's my gun!”