Backflash p-18

by Richard Stark

  “If I’d ever met you,” Wycza promised her, “I’d remember. Trust me.”

  All at once her brow cleared: “You’re a wrestler! That’s where I saw you!”

  Wycza gazed at her like he couldn’t believe it. “You’re a fan?”

  “I went with a guy a few times,” she said. “I kind of loved it.”

  Speaking confidentially, he said, “It’s all fake, you know. I’m not really getting beat up by those clowns.”

  “I know! That’s what’s so great about it! I look at you, and I see you could open those guys like pistachios, and you just goof around instead. Wait. Strongarm! You’re Jack Strongarm.”

  “Miss Braselle,” Wycza said, “you got a convert.”

  “Well, if that isn’t something else,” she said, and shook her head at Wycza, and grinned. “Nice to meet you.”

  “And you. Believe me.”

  She turned to Parker to say, “You were gonna show me what I’m doing. Or should I get rid of my pack first? Which room is mine? What’s with the wheelchair?”

  “You’re gonna be in it,” Parker told her.

  “I am.”

  “Every night, starting tomorrow, after we get you the right clothes, Mike’s gonna be in his chauffeur suit, pushing you in the wheelchair, and you’re gonna be the brave but broken debutante. You’ll be six hours on the ship, Albany to Albany. You’ll gamble a little, you’ll watch a little, you’ll do little brave smiles here and there.”

  ‘Jesus, I despise myself,” she said. ‘What am I playing this poor little rich girl for?”

  Parker slid open the box under the seat, with the white plastic bowl in it. “See this?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Don’t tell me, let me guess.”

  “This is a wheelchair for people who don’t get out of it for anything.”

  “I get the concept,” she said.

  “Security’s tight on that ship,” Parker told her. “When you board, they’ll look in there.”

  “So what?”

  “It won’t be empty. You’ll see to that.”

  She made a disgusted face and said, “Parker, what are you doing to me? That’s going to be under me all night?”

  “Six hours. It’s airtight, no smell, nothing. But they’ll look in it when you come aboard, and they may look in it when you go ashore. And they may the next night, and they may the night after that.”

  She began to smile. “And one of these nights they won’t,” she said, “because they knowwhat’s in there.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So that’s how the guns get on.”

  “No,” he said, “we’re getting them on another way, that’s what Lou’s working on now. What you’re doing is, you’re taking the cash off.”

  She looked around, and pointed, and said, “That’s what the other wheelchair’s for.”

  Wycza said, “We’re adapting it a little, the seat on that one’s gonna be higher, so that night you hunker down some.”

  “I can do that,” she said. She looked around at the three men and the two wheelchairs and the old-fashioned cottage and said, “A new experience. I never hatched money before.”

  7

  Parker rode the Spirit of the Hudsonjust once before the night. Since, when it all went down, he’d be in disguise, this time he went open, alone, in jacket and tie. He bought some chips, and he noticed that most of the other people buying chips were using hundred-dollar bills. That was a good sign.

  Because this was a new operation, nobody knew yet what the take would be. The ship was medium to small, holding just over eight hundred paying passengers, and if they on average dropped a hundred dollars apiece, including the twelve-dollar fare to come aboard, that would mean eighty thousand dollars in the money room by the end of the night. If the average loss was five hundred dollars, which some area newspapers had estimated, that would be four hundred thousand waiting for them. It was an acceptable range, and from what Parker was seeing, the result would most likely be toward the higher end.

  It wasn’t true that no credit cards at all were in use on the Spirit of the Hudson.Chips you could only buy with cash, but you could pay for your dinner or souvenirs with credit cards. The little bit of cash that came in from those sources didn’t go to the casino money room, so Parker didn’t think about it.

  The casino ship took two runs a day, from noon till six P.M. and from eight P.M. till two in the morning. Every trip began and ended in Albany, with one midway stop at Poughkeepsie, where a few passengers would board or depart and more supplies would be taken on. The money only left the ship, though, at Albany.

  Parker chose a Friday night trip, the same as the night they’d be taking it down, to get a feel for the place. The ship was full, action in the casino was heavy, and the people having dinner in the glass-walled dining rooms to both sides of the casino as it sailed past the little river towns were dressed up and making an occasion of it. The sense was, and it was palpable through the ship, this was a fun way to spend money. Good.

  From time to time, Parker saw Carlow and Noelle in the distance, but made sure to steer clear of them. Noelle, with a little pale makeup and dark gray filmy clothing that made her seem even more slender than she was, looked mostly like a vampire’s victim. Car-low, pushing the wheelchair in his dark blue chauffeur’s uniform and cap, leaning on the handles when it was at rest, looked wiry and tough, as though he were as much bodyguard as chauffeur.

  People smiled at Noelle, who smiled wanly back. People touched her for luck, or asked her to blow on their dice, and whenever she played a little blackjack or shot craps for a while she was surrounded by people cheering her on.

  Noelle and Carlow had been at this game for four nights now, and the security people still looked in the bowl every night coming aboard, not going ashore but Noelle was making sure they had a good variety to look at and they were beginning to get embarrassed, and also to recognize her, and to ease up. Parker figured by the middle of next week they’d just be waving her aboard.

  He had studied the space and blueprints of the Spirit of the Hudson,and knew the ship well, at least in theory, but reality is never exactly the same as the space. He wandered the ship, getting to understand it in this new way, covering every part of it that was open to the passengers.

  There were three public decks. The top one was an open promenade, a long oval around the bridge with a lot of deck chairs that probably got more action on the daytime run. The deck below that was wider, another promenade, this one glassed-in, because upstate New York doesn’t get that much good weather year-round. This public oval surrounded an interior space of offices, a gift shop, a massage room, a game room with pinball machines, and a tiny joke of a library. The lifeboats were suspended just outside and below this promenade, not to spoil the view; if anybody ever had to actually board those lifeboats, the glass panels in front of them could be slid out of the way.

  The third deck down was the important one, the casino, taking up the entire interior of the ship, with no windows, and no doors that opened directly to the outside. It could be reached only through vestibules fore and aft. Everywhere on the ship you were always aware of the humming vibration of the engines and the thrust of them through the water, but in the casino you could very quickly forget that you were afloat.

  Flanking the casino were two dining rooms, of different types. The one on the port side was more upscale, with cloth napkins and expensive entrees and an eight-page wine list, while the one to starboard was a sandwich joint. Both were long and narrow, their outer walls all glass. Both, Parker knew from the specs, were served by the same kitchen, directly below the casino, with escalators for the waiters to bring the platters up. And in the center of that kitchen was a round metal post, inside which were the pneumatic tubes that moved money; upward to the casino cashier, in the middle of the casino, in an elaborate cage, and downward to the money room.

  There was one bit of public access below the casino; restrooms, fore and aft. Broad carpeted stair
cases led down from both vestibules outside the casino, to wide hushed low ceilinged areas that looked like hotel lobbies, scattered with low sofas and armchairs, with the men’s and women’s rooms off that.

  In the aft lobby, near the stairs, an unmarked and locked door led to a simpler staircase that went down to the corridor that led to the money room. A guard would be on duty at all times, the other side of that door, to keep people from coming in. He wouldn’t worry, until too late, about keeping people from coming out.

  The aft section also contained a small elevator from casino vestibule down to restroom lobby, for people who’d have trouble with the stairs. Once every evening, Noelle and Carlow would take that elevator down and, while Noelle waited outside, Car-low would take the bowl into the men’s room and tip the attendant there very well to clean it out.

  In the course of the evening, Parker ate small meals in both restaurants, when he could get window tables. He also walked the glassed-in promenade, and the top deck open-air promenade, where he was completely alone. Although the ship produced a lot of light, with a creamy nimbus around it on the disturbed water, it was very hard to see in close at the side of the ship. From above, the view was outward, not down. If Hanzen came up from behind, and stayed close to the flank as he approached the open door, no one would see him.

  When the ship docked at Albany at two in the morning, Parker was among the first off. He stepped back on the pier, out of the way of the others debarking, and watched that door open in the side of the hull. An armored car was already parked there, facing away from the ship, and once that doorway gaped black the armored car backed up to it until it was snug against the metal side of the ship.

  Parker watched Noelle and Carlow go by, both looking solemn, as though what they’d just come out of was church. Neither looked in his direction, but Noelle waggled two fingers as they went by. She was having fun.

  8

  The man who had the guns was named Fox. Maurice Fox,it said on the window of the store, Plumbing Equipment,on a backwater side street in the former downtown of New Brunswick, New Jersey. This wasn’t the kind of business to move out to the mall with all his former neighbors, so here he stayed, now with a storefront revivalist church on one side and a candle-and-incense shop on the other.

  Parker left the Subaru in the loading zone in front of the store and went from the sunny outside to the dim interior, where the store was long and narrow and dark. Dusty toilets were lined up in one row, porcelain sinks in another, and bins full of pipe joints and faucets lined one wall.

  A short balding man in a rumpled gray suit and bent eyeglasses came down the aisle between the rows of toilets and sinks. “Yes? Oh, Mr. Flynn, I didn’t recognize you, it’s been a while.”

  “I phoned you.”

  “Yes, sure, of course. You don’t go through Mr. Lawson anymore.” James Lawson was a private detective in Jersey City who fronted for people like Fox, on the bend.

  Parker said, “Why should I? We already know each other.”

  With a sad smile, Fox said, “Cut out the middleman, that’s what everybody does. In my business, most of the time, I’mthe middleman, why should I love this philosophy? I think I got what you want, come look.”

  There was a way to talk to this man on the telephone about plumbing equipment and wind up with guns, but when you have to be so careful about listening ears, sometimes it’s hard to get the exact details right. But, as Fox turned away to lead Parker deeper into the store, he said, “What I heard, you want two revolvers, concealment weapons such as plainclothes police might carry, and the shoulder holsters to go with them.”

  “That’s right.”

  At the back of the shop, Fox led them through a doorway, which he shut behind them, and down a flight of stairs with just steps and no risers to a plaster-walled basement. At the bottom, Fox clicked a light switch on a beam, and to the left a bare bulb came on.

  Now he led the way across the concrete floor, mounds of supplies in the darkness around them, to a wooden partition with a heavy wooden door. He took a ring full of keys from his pocket, chose one, and unlocked the door. They went inside, and Fox hit another light switch that turned on another bare bulb dangling from the ceiling. He closed this door, too, when they were inside.

  The room was small and made smaller by the cases lining it on all four sides. The floor was wooden slats over concrete, except for one two-foot square in the middle, where there was no wood over the drain. Along the back wall the crates were crowded together onto wooden shelves, and Fox went directly over to them and took out a white cardboard box. The label pasted on the end claimed, with an illustration, that the box contained a bathroom sink faucet set.

  A square dark table, paint-stained, stood in one corner. Fox carried the cardboard box to it, opened it, and inside, nestled in white tissue paper, was a nickel-plated .357 Magnum revolver, the S&W Model 27. This was the kind of gun developed for the police back in the thirties, when the mobsters first took to wearing body armor and driving around in cars with bulletproof glass, making the normal .38 almost useless. The .357 Magnum had so much more power it could go through a car from the rear and still have enough strength to kill the driver. One .357 slug could put out a car engine.

  While Parker looked it over, Fox went away to his shelves and came back this time with a box claiming to contain a toilet floatball; inside was another S&W 27. “And holsters, one minute,” he said, and went away again.

  When he came back, with two cartons of “icemaker tubing,” Parker held up the second of the revolvers and said, “The serial number’s off this one. Acid, looks like.”

  Fox looked faintly surprised. “Isn’t that better?”

  “It’s got to be shown like a lawman would show it, hand it over and take it back. Maybe they’re sharp-eyed, maybe they’re not.”

  “Ah. A problem.” Fox brooded at his wall of boxes. “For the same reason,” he said, “you’d probably like them both the same.”

  “That would be good.”

  “I got an almost,” Fox decided. “The Colt Python. Looks the same, same size, same caliber. Could you use that?”

  “Let me see it.”

  Another bathroom sink set. The Python was as Fox had described, and looked a close relative of the 27. “I’ll take it,” Parker decided.

  “You’ll want to check them?”

  Parker knew how that worked with Fox. Under the drain plate in the middle of the room was loose dirt. To test-fire Fox’s merchandise, you stood above the drain and shot a bullet into the dirt. It made a hell of a racket here in this enclosed room, but Fox claimed the boxes absorbed all that noise and none of it was heard outside.

  There were times when you expected to use a gun, and then you’d try it first, but this time, with what they planned on the ship, if they had to use one of these guns, the situation would already be a mess. The revolvers were both clean and well oiled, with crisp-feeling mechanisms; let it go at that. “No need,” Parker said. “I’ll take them as they are. Let me see the holsters.”

  They were identical, stiff leather holsters without a strap across the chest. They fit the 27 and the Python, and they were comfortable to wear. “Fine,” Parker said.

  “The whole thing is three hundred,” Fox said, “and when you’re done with them, if they haven’t been used, you know, you understand what I mean”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we done business before,” Fox said. “So, if you just use them for show, afterwards I’ll be happy to buy them back at half price.”

  Afterwards, no matter what happened, these guns would be at the bottom of the Hudson. “I’ll think about it,” Parker said.

  9

  CONTINENTAL PATRIOT PRINTING said the old-fashioned shield-shaped sign hanging over the entry door. The shop was one of several in a long one-story fake-Colonial commercial building in a faded suburb of Pittsburgh, built not long after the Second World War and long since overwhelmed by the more modern malls. A few of the shops were vacant and f
or rent, and several of the remainder continued the Colonial theme: Paul Revere Video Rental down at the corner, Valley Forge Pizza next to the print shop. The plate-glass display window of the print shop was crammed with multicolored posters describing the services available within: “Wedding Invitations Business Cards Yearbooks Letterheads Newsletters Announcements.” The one thing not mentioned was the service that had brought Parker here.

  There was angled parking in front of the shops. Parker left the Subaru in front of Valley Forge Pizza and went into Continental Patriot Printing, where a bell rang when he opened the door, and rang again when he shut it.

  The interior of this shop had been truncated, cut to a stub of a room by a hastily constructed cheap panel wall with an unpainted hollow-core door in it. The remaining space was divided by a chest-high counter facing the front door, again quickly made, and with cheap materials. The paneling across the front of the counter and the paneling of the partition itself were heavy with more posters promoting the services available here, with examples of the work that could be done. The general air was of a competent craftsman with too few customers.

  The inner door opened, in response to that double bell, and an Asian man came out, in work shirt and jeans and black apron. He was around forty years of age, short and narrow-shouldered, with a heavy forward-thrusting head, and eyes that squinted with deep suspicion and skepticism through round glasses. His name; Parker knew, was Kim Toe Kwai, and he was Korean.

  He and Parker met at the counter, where Kim said, “Yes? May I help you?” But beneath that professional courtesy was an undisguisable skepticism, the belief that this new person could not possibly help because nobody could.

  “A fellow named Pete Rudd told me I should get in touch with you,” Parker said.

  The suspicious eyes grew narrower, the mouth became a slit. “I do not know such a man,” he said.

  “That’s okay,” Parker told him. “I’ll tell you what I need, and after I leave you can look in your address book or wherever and see do you know a Pete Rudd and call him and ask him if you should do business with Mr. Lynch. You see what I mean?”