Backflash p-18

by Richard Stark

  Now, just after seven in the evening on a Friday in late May, the sky still bright, late afternoon sunlight making long sharp black shadows that pointed at him through the woods, Ray Becker was back. As he drove along the dirt road toward the cabins, he visualized Marshall Howell as he’d been, the dying man in the wrecked Cadillac, and he grimaced yet again, feeling once more that quick twinge of embarrassment and shame.

  He’d almost screwed it up but good that time. He’d known the man in the Cadillac was hurt and vulnerable, but he hadn’t had any idea at all that he was in such bad shape, that he was dying.

  Well, no, not dying, probably not dying. But killable, as it turned out, very easily killable.

  Becker was in such a hurry at that instant. He was the only lawman on the scene, but that couldn’t last. Others had heard the same radio calls, would be coming to the same location, while the Feds continued in pursuit of the other vehicle. Ray Becker, understanding at once what it meant, had raced here at top speed when the radio call came in, because there was supposed to be a hundred forty thousand dollars in this car, and a hundred forty thousand dollars could save Ray Becker’s ass. A hundred forty thousand dollars and his patrol car and he could be away and safe forever before they even noticed he was gone.

  He’d already been thinking about it when the radio started squawking, thinking how the investigation was getting closer, how the detectives knewthere must have been a local cop involved in that hijacking two months back, they just didn’t know which one. But Ray Becker’s reputation wasn’t very good anyway, so they were focusing on him, and sooner or later they’d nail him, which was why he needed to get awayfrom here, with a lot of money for a cushion. A hundred forty thousand dollars, say.

  He almost broke his neck racing down that steep tumbled hillside through the freshly broken branches and crushed shrubs and scarred boulders to the crumpled wreck of the Cadillac, and when he got there the hundred forty thousand was gone. One perp left, crushed inside the car, bleeding and sweating but conscious. Capable of speech.

  “We don’t have much time,” Becker told the son of a bitch, with his hand closing on the man’s throat. “Where’s the money?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Lying, he had to be lying, he had to know where his partners were headed. Becker leaned on him, he did things to make the pain increase, and Howell moaned, and tears leaked from his eyes, but his story stayed the same. He didn’t know where his partners were going, he didn’t know where the money was.

  “You got to give me something,” Becker told him, and all the rage he felt against the bastards that had double-crossed him and put him in this spot and cheated him out of his share of that other money, all of that rage made him bear down on this one, who finally broke and said, “Some thing else.”

  “What? Another robbery? More money?”

  “Yes.”

  “Quick.”

  “All knee. New. York. Cath

  “

  “What?”

  “Cath man. Wan ted me.”

  “For a heist. What heist? Quick!”

  Howell’s mouth opened again, but this time a great sack of blood came out, and burst down the front of the man, dark red and reeking, the heat of it making Becker recoil.

  He hadn’t known the man was that close to death. He hadn’t intended to kill him, and certainly not before he got all his answers, which made him feel stupid and inadequate and a failure then, and still did now. But then, as the man in the Cadillac’s last breath came out full of blood, here came the Federals, leaping and sliding down the hill in their dark blue vinyl coats with the big yellow letters on the back, grabbing for holds one-handed, their machine pistols aimed upward at the sky.

  Becker stepped back from the Cadillac. He called up to them, “Take your time. They’re gone. And so is this one.”

  But Howell had come through after all, hadn’t he? Becker had seen no choice but to follow through on Howell’s lead, because he didn’t have anything else, and it had all worked out. Hilliard Cathman. Then the one called Parker. Then the rest of them. Then the big white boat on the water, full of money, which hadto be what they were here for.

  It would be dark when they got back with the cash, so no need to hide the pickup. He left it between two of the cabins that weren’t in use, then walked into the one they’d occupied. There was no locking these places, and they hadn’t bothered to try, so Becker just opened the door and walked in.

  Plenty of time. He walked through the place, saw they’d left nothing personal at all, saw they’d taken all the guns but left a few of the maps. He went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and there was beer in there, but he wouldn’t be drinking anything until after. He’d need to be at his best tonight.

  Gatorade, a big bottle of it, pale green. That was probably the big one. Kill him first. Kill the girl last.

  Becker carried the Gatorade and a glass into the living room, turned on the television set, sat down. He looked at the picture when it came up, and abruptly laughed. The damn thing was black and white.

  2

  The reason Susan Cahill was so good at handling VIPs was that she understood the question of sex. With female VIPs you were discreetly hot tamales together under the skin, each acknowledging and admiring the allure of the other, becoming confidants and co-conspirators in the ongoing war of women to carve out a place for themselves in a male-dominated world, armed with nothing more than nerve and sex appeal. It worked; with the baggiest old crone, it still worked.

  As for the male VIPs, they were even simpler. You turned on a little sex, a few smiles, a sidelong look or two, some body stretching. Enough to keep their minds focused, but not enough that anybody would lose their dignity. It was a nice tightrope to walk, and by now Susan could do it blindfolded.

  She’d started, twelve years ago, as a flight attendant, where the most important skill you could learn, or be born with, was the non-aggressive manipulation of other human beings. She’d been very good at the job, keeping everybody happy at thirty-one thousand feet, and she’d also been very good-looking, and soon she was assigned to one of the choice transatlantic routes, Chicago-Milan. Her love affairs were with pilots or with amusing Italian businessmen. She made decent money, she had a nice high-rise apartment in the Loop overlooking Lake Michigan, she was having a good time, and then she made the one mistake. She’d seen others do it, and knew they were wrong, and knew it was stupid, and yet she did it herself. She fell in love with a passenger.

  A banker, named Culver, based in Chicago. She fell in love with him, and took vacations with him, and said yes when he asked her to marry him, and quit the airline to spend more time with him, and then he said they’d be getting together forever just as soon as his divorce came through, which was the first she’d heard there already was a Mrs. Culver. Of course there would never be a divorce, and of course he would be prepared to keep her set up in a much better apartment in the same building, and of course there was a hiring freeze at the airline when she asked for her old job back.

  Well, we learn from our mistakes. Susan had had this current job, customer relations with Avenue Resorts, for three years now, and she firmly understood that her job was notto have relations with the customers, so she didn’t. She knew that Avenue Resorts, even though its management was clean enough to pass any state gaming commission inspection, was mobbed up in some deep echelon of its command, but the fact of the mob didn’t have anything to do with her work and didn’t impinge on her in any way. The people of Avenue appreciated her, and she appreciated them, and that was that.

  For three years she’d enjoyed her nice little house along the canal outside Biloxi, and she was sure she’d enjoy the nice house she’d just bought along the river south of Saratoga Springs, home of the famous racecourse, less than an hour commute from the boat. Mr. Culver the banker had tried to clip the airline attendant’s wings, but it hadn’t worked. And it wasn’t going to work, ever again.

  Take Assemblyman Kotkind. At
first, he’d tried to be grumpy, insisting on being met on the pier and escorted aboard, defiantly announcing the presence of his armed “aides,” two state cops in civvies, all muscle and gun, no brain. She’d rolled with the initial punches, turned up the sex just a little bit, and in no time at all Assemblyman Kotkind was giving her sidelong looks of his own and having a little trouble concentrating on the job at hand.

  Which was, she knew, what the politicians call repositioning. When a question is still undecided, a politician can have any opinion at all on the subject, but once the matter is settled, there’s only one place for a politician to be: with the majority. Whatever Assemblyman Kotkind might personally think about legal gambling, he’d been publicly opposed to it, probably because that played well in his district, but now legal gambling was a fact, and the sky had not fallen, and it was time for Assemblyman Kotkind to be retroactively judicious.

  On the other side, it was very much in Avenue’s interests to butter up this assemblyman, to help him in his effort to switch horses in midstream without getting wet. As it says in the Bible, there’s more joy when we get one to switch over to us than there is for the ninety-nine we’ve already got in our pocket. Therefore, “I am yours to command,” Susan told the assemblyman, with her most professional smile.

  “I just want to see for myself what the attraction is here,” the assemblyman said, looking at the front of her blouse. He was short enough to do that without being really obvious about it.

  She took a deep breath, and turned slightly into profile, also not really being obvious about it. “That’s what we’re here for,” she assured him. “You look us over as much as you want. Avenue Resorts wants you to see everything on this ship.”

  “Good,” the assemblyman said, and blinked.

  “And you’ll findthis way, Mister Assemblyman our first consideration is always safety.”

  He gave her a different kind of look, considerably more jaundiced. “Not money?”

  She laughed lightly. “That’s our second consideration,” she said. “Safety first, profit second. We’ll take this elevator up to the sundeck, you’ll get a better idea of what’s happening.”

  It was a fairly tight squeeze in the elevator, but everybody managed to keep some distance between bodies, even the assemblyman. Riding up, Susan explained the nomenclature of the three decks: sundeck on top, open to the air; boat deck below that, the enclosed promenade with the lifeboats suspended outside; main deck below that, with the restaurants on the outside and the casino within.

  At this point, they had the sundeck to themselves. The views up here were terrific, both up and down the river and westward toward Albany, the old and new buildings pressed to the steep slope upward, making a kind of elaborate necklace around the big old stone pile of the statehouse.

  “Home sweet home,” Susan suggested, with a gesture toward that massive stone building.

  “I’ve seen it before,” the assemblyman told her, being gruff again. “Tell me what’s happening now.”

  “Come to the rail.”

  She and the assemblyman stood at the rail, with the two state cops on the assemblyman’s other side. The ship was still tied up at the dock, and would remain there for another five or ten minutes. “First we have our safety drill, then the cruise begins,” she explained. “The Spirit of the Hudsonhas never sunk, and never will, but we want to be sure everybody’s prepared just in case the unthinkable ever does happen. You see the lifeboats directly below us.”

  The assemblyman agreed, he did see them there.

  “You see the crew opening the glass doors along the promenade. Every passenger’s ticket contains a code giving the location of the lifeboat that passenger should go to in case of emergency. The crew members down there are explaining lifeboat procedures now, and showing them the compartments on the inner wall containing life jackets. We don’t ask the passengers to try on the jackets, but crew members down there do demonstrate how it’s done.”

  “If this unthinkable of yours does happen,” the assemblyman said, “and this unsinkable tub sinks, which is ourlifeboat?”

  Well, she could see she was going to have to do a whole lot of tinkling laughter with this little bastard before the day was done. “Why, Assemblyman Kotkind,” she said, “naturally you andI would be on the captain’s launch.”

  “Ah, naturally,” he said. “And speaking of the captain”

  “He wants you to join him for dinner,” she said hastily, knowing that the last thing Captain Andersen wanted while setting sail was some bad-tempered politician underfoot. “You and your aides, of course,” she added.

  “Of course,” the assemblyman said, while the “aides” continued to stand around looking blank-faced and correct. Poor guys, she thought, giving them some of her attention for the first time. If six hours with this gnome is going to be tough for me, what must it be like for them?

  3

  Dan Wycza thought this woman Susan Cahill would be therapeutic. She looked like somebody who liked sex without getting all bent out of shape over it, somebody who knew what it was for and all about its limitations. Look how she was giving Lou Sternberg those flashing eyes and teeth, those tiny bumps and grinds, not as a come-on but as a method of control, like the bullfighter’s red cape. Wycza knew Sternberg would be enjoying the show and at the same time he’d enjoy pretending to be taken in by the show. The bluffer bluffed.

  Meanwhile, from the sidelines, Wycza could watch Susan Cahill strut her stuff and think to himself that she would certainly be therapeutic. A good healthy roll in the hay.

  Health was extremely important to Dan Wycza. It was, as the man said, all we’ve got. His body was important to him the way Mike Carlow considered those race cars of his important. Take care of it, keep it finely tuned, and it will do the job for you. The way a car nut likes to tinker with the engine, the fuel mixture, the tire pressure, all those details, that’s the way Dan Wycza took care of himself. His diet was specific and controlled, his exercise lengthy and carefully planned. He traveled with so many pills, so many minerals and herbs and dietary supplements, that he seemed like either a hypochondriac or the healthiest-looking invalid in history, but it was all just to keep the machine well tuned.

  And sex was a part of it. Simple uncomplicated sex was good for both the body and the mind. There was nothing like rolling around with a good willing woman to keep the blood flowing and the mental attitude perked up. A woman like this Susan Cahill, for instance.

  Pity it wasn’t going to happen. This woman would never fuck anything but power, or at least her idea of power. At the moment, to her, Dan Wycza, aka Trooper Helsing, was just a spear carrier, part of the furniture, a nothing. Later, he’d be something, all right, but it wasn’t likely to be something she’d find a turn-on. Not likely.

  For the moment, he and Parker were just doing their dumb-fuck thing, trailing along behind Lou Sternberg while the Cahill woman showed him a little of this and a little of that. Wycza remembered this ship from when he’d been a sucker aboard her, that one time, down in Biloxi. (The healthy woman he was with at the time liked to gamble.) It looked exactly the same, the carpets, the colors of the walls, the shapes of the doors, the edgings around the windows. The only difference was the uniform on the various crew members who worked in public; the pursers, dealers, hostesses, managers. When the ship was the Spirit of Biloxi,the uniforms were tan with dark red; sort of the colors of Mississippi dirt. Now that she was the Spirit of the Hudson,operating in the Empire State, the uniforms were royal blue with gold. But some of the people inside those uniforms were the same, he was sure of it.

  Once the joke of a safety drill was done down on the boat deck, and the ship at last eased away from the dock to start its leisurely amble downstream, Cahill became a little less flirty and more matter-of-fact. “Of course I willbe taking you around for a complete tour of the ship,” she said, “but first I know Captain Andersen wants to greet you. He wasn’t able to before this, of course. Departure and arrival are his rea
lly busy times.”

  “I’ll be happy to meet him,” Sternberg told her, and as she set off across the boat deck toward the bridge, the others following her, he asked, “Was he the captain before? When it was down South?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, sounding delighted by the fact that it was the same captain. “Captain Andersen’s been with the company for seven years. Longer than I have!” And she did that girlish laugh thing of hers again.

  The bridge was amidships, up one steep metal stairway from the sun deck. Everything up here was metal, thickly painted white. The bridge itself was two long narrow rooms, the one in front featuring an oval wall of glass to give a full hundred-eighty-degree view of everything ahead of the ship and to both sides. The helm was here, and the computers and communications links that made the function of captain almost unnecessary these days. Tell the machine where you want to go, and get out of its way.

  The rear room, also full of windows but without the oval, was a kind of office and rest area; two gray vinyl sofas sat among the desks and maps and computer screens. This is where the stairway led, and this is where Captain Andersen stood, splendid in his navy blue uniform with the gold stripes and his white officer’s hat with the black brim, as though he were about to lead this ship on a perilous journey around the world, pole to pole, instead of merely a pokey stroll to nowhere; Albany, New York, to Albany, New York, in six hours.

  His back was to the open doorway, and he was conferring with three others, two dressed as officers, one as crew. He turned at their entrance, and he was a Scandinavian, or he wanted you to think he was. Tall and pale-haired, he had pale eyebrows and pale blue eyes and a large narrow pale nose. He wore the least possible beard; a narrow amber line down and forward from both ears to define his jaw, and no mustache. In his left hand he held a gnarled old dark-wood pipe.