Backflash p-18

by Richard Stark

  “I think so,” George said.

  “We both think so, George,” the big man said. “Go ahead, take a shot.”

  George did. He had so much trouble keeping his right hand steady that he held it with the left hand so he could fit the inhaler into his mouth, lips closed over it, and direct the spray at the back of his throat. He did this twice, and while he did the big man said to the other one, “There’s a lot of asthma around these days, you know? Worse than ever. It comes from mold, a lot of times, and I read someplace, you can get it from cockroach dander. Can you believe it? You try to keep yourself in shape and some fucking cockroach is out to bring you down. You set, George?” George put the inhaler back in his pocket. “Yes.” Hunkered beside him, applying the duct tape, the big man in a friendly manner said, “What I think you should do, now that the working day is done, you got time on your hands, I think you should spend it working on what you’re gonna say to the TV news reporters.”

  “And now, in sports”

  Hilliard Cathman sighed in exasperation; mostly with himself. He knew he should turn off this “news-radio” station, which was in truth mostly a sports-score-and-advertising radio station, and go to sleep, but lately he was having even more trouble than usual dropping off, and he had this need to know,to know when they did it. He had to know.

  It would be a weekend, that much was certain, when the ship would be the most full of gamblers, when the most money would be lost. A Friday or a Saturday night, and soon. Possibly even tonight.

  Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Tonight. Get it over with, get this tension behind him at last.

  He knew the risk he was taking, the danger he was in. Sitting up in bed past midnight, lights on in half the house, the nightstand radio eagerly rattling off the endless results of games he cared nothing about, Cathman reminded himself he’d known from the beginning the perils in this idea, but had decided the goal was worth it. And it was, and it still was, though these days all Cathman could really see was the expression in that man Parker’s eyes. Which was no expression at all.

  Marshall Howell had been different, easier to work with, easier to believe one could win out against. He’d been a tough man, and a criminal, but with some humanity in him. This one, Parker

  It will happen, that’s all, and I don’t need to know about it the instant it does. When it happens, I’ll know soon enough, and then one of three things will happen. Parker will come bring me my ten percent, which is the least likely, and I’ll deal with him in the way I’m ready to deal with him. Or he and the rest of them will fade away, and I have his telephone number, and from that I have found his house, and I have seen his wife, none of which he knows, and I can finish it the other way. Or they will get caught, which would be the best thing, and I will be ready for that as well.

  “The time is twelve fifty-two. In tomorrow’s weather”

  Oh, enough. Cathman reached out and switched off the radio, but left the lights on. He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, and for a long time he didn’t sleep.

  Only Ruth was still at her station at the counter, dealing with vacuum canisters as they came down from the cashier’s cage upstairs. George could see the others, Pete and Helen and Sam and Susan Cahill, all seated like him on the floor, backs against the wall, duct-taped into silence and immobility. A degree of background panic gave his own breathing a level of fibrillation that scared him some, but he knew it was under control, that unless something else happened he’d be able to go on breathing through to the end of this.

  What was coming down now, from the cashier’s cage, at nearly one o’clock in the morning, was mostly chips being cashed in, and very rarely a purchase of more chips by some diehard loser up above. There wasn’t much activity at all at this point, and it really would be sensible for the robbers to get out of here now, before they lost part of their loot to customers upstairs cashing in, which they seemed to realize. George watched them give one another little looks and nods and hand signals, and then the one who’d slapped Susan Cahill went over and opened the door, the door they’d come through that was never opened and how much better if it never had been opened and headed up the stairs.

  George knew there was a guard on duty up there, though he’d never seen him, seated at a desk on the landing in front of the door at the top of the stairs. That guard would have seen this robber with Susan Cahill when they came down, he wouldn’t suspect a thing, somebody coming up the stairs like that, he’d been hired to keep people from going downthose stairs.

  Yes. Here he came, a beefy young man in a tan uniform, looking bewildered and angry and scared, hands knitted on top of his uniform hat on his head, holster at his right side hanging empty, the robber now holding two guns, one in each hand, shutting the door with his heel as he came in.

  The big one, the one who’d taped George, went smiling over to the guard, saying “Welcome aboard, Jack. You are Jack, aren’t you?”

  The guard stared at all the trussed people. He stared at the big man. He burst out, ‘Jesus, you’re not supposed to dothis!”

  The big man laughed. “Oh, I know,” he said. “We’re just regular scamps. Put your hands behind your back, Jack.” Then he laughed again and said to the one with the two guns in his hands, “Back Jack; how do you like that?” To the guard he said, “I’m so glad your name isn’t Tim I’m not even gonna punch you in the belly for not having your hands behind your back. Not yet, I’m not.”

  The guard quickly moved his arms, like a panicky drowner lunging toward the surface, and when his hands were behind his back the big man duct-taped them, then his mouth, then helped him sit, then did his ankles.

  During which George watched the man who’d claimed to be an assemblyman, but who now seemed much more believable as an armed robber, take a small screwdriver from his pocket and use it to open the control box next to the outer door, the door in the hull through which George and the others would exit at the end of their shift, through which the money would be carried into the armored car, and George saw that what he was doing was dismantling the alarm system in there. Supposedly, if this door were to be opened while the ship was in motion, an alarm would ring up on the bridge; but not now.

  Surprised, George thought, why, they’ve planned it all out.

  Carlow pushed Noelle’s wheelchair into the elevator. The four other people in the car smiled at her, and she smiled wanly back, and the tiredness she showed was probably real. Carlow felt the same way; this was the longest night of all.

  When the elevator doors opened, one level down, the other four people dispersed themselves into the restrooms, the couple who’d been waiting here boarded the elevator after a smile at wan Noelle and Carlow pushed the wheelchair over to the door that led to the stairs down to the money room. It was a discreet door, painted to blend with the wall around it. Carlow turned the wheelchair around to face out, then rapped the door once with his heel.

  The door opened inward. Carlow heard the click, and immediately went down to one knee. He grasped the handle of the box beneath the seat and pulled out a very different box from the one in the other wheelchair. This one was deeper and wider and much longer, and contained no bowl, empty or full. Carlow slid the box backward, looking down, and saw Parker’s hand grab it. Carlow stood, and the door behind him clicked shut.

  They stood there for three minutes. A few people passed, and all smiled at Noelle, but all kept going. Everybody was tired, and they knew she must be tired, too, so they left her alone.

  A knock sounded on the door behind him. Two couples, yawning together, waited for the elevator. He watched them, and then the elevator came, empty this time, and they boarded, and its doors shut.

  Then Carlow rapped the door with his heel again, and went to one knee, and the box was slid out to him. It was much heavier now, filled with white plastic bags. Carlow slid it into place, stood, pushed the wheelchair over to the elevator, boarded it the next time it arrived.

  The money usually went into heavy canvas sacks to be
carried off the ship, and the robbers had thoughtfully cut air holes into these sacks before putting them over everybody’s head, but had then made sure the airholes weren’t placed so the people could see through them.

  What don’t they want us to see, George wondered. There was a faint smell inside the money sack, not of money, but of something like a cabin in the woods or a thatched hut. The smell made George fearful again of his ability to breathe, but he kept himself from giving way to panic, and he breathed slowly and steadily through his nose, and he told himself he was going to survive, he was going to survive.

  It wasn’t the TV news reporters’ questions he was thinking about now, it was the questions the police would ask. He’d be able to give full descriptions of the robbers, and he’d be able to describe just about everything they did and said.

  And now there was the question of what the robbers didn’t want them to see. All he had left now was his ears, and he listened as hard as he could. He heard shuffling noises, and then he heard a click of some kind, and wondered what that was. There was something familiar about that click, and yet there wasn’t. Inside the canvas sack, George frowned deeply, breathing automatically, not even thinking about his breath now, and tried to think what that click could be, what it reminded him of, where he’d heard it before.

  He almost got it, he was seconds from understanding, when another sound distracted him. A whoosh and a foamy rush, and a sudden sense of cool damp air, a breeze wafting over him.

  They’d opened the outer door. Thatmust be what they didn’t want him and the others to see; what sort of transportation awaited them outside.

  George strained to hear, leaning forward, staring at the canvas a half inch from his eyes. He heard murmuring, vague movement, and then not even that. And then a slam, as the outer door was shut again.

  They’ve gone, he thought, and never did remember that click any more, and so didn’t come to the memory that would have told him that the click was the sound of the inner door closing. And so he never did get to tell the police the one thing they would have been interested to hear: that before the robbers left, one of them went upstairs.

  Greg Hanzen trailed the big gleaming ship for several miles, and at every second he wanted to veer off, run for his life. But he was afraid to leave them stranded there, afraid they’d escape anyway somehow and come after him. They would surely come after him.

  They might anyway.

  The door in the side of the ship, up ahead of him, opened inward, showing a vertical oval of light. Immediately, not permitting himself to think, Hanzen drove forward, in close to the ship’s flank, up along the side of that open doorway, where Parker stood in the light, empty-handed.

  Hanzen tossed him the line, and Parker handed it on to a much bigger man, who stood grinning down at Hanzen as he held Hanzen’s little boat firm against the Spirit of the Hudsonwhile Parker and a third man jumped in. Then the big man grabbed the outer handle of the door and jumped across into the boat, slamming the door behind him. That would be, Hanzen guessed, so that there wouldn’t be an unexpected light in the hull of the boat for the next hour, to maybe draw attention from shore.

  “Okay,” Parker said.

  But something was wrong. Hanzen looked at the three of them. “Where’s the money?”

  Parker said, “That’s going a different way.”

  Oh, Christ. Oh, what a fuckup. Hanzen had an instant of even worse despair than usual, and then, afraid Parker might see something on his face, he turned away to the wheel and said, “Well, let’s get us out of here.”

  He put on speed and veered away from the ship into the darkness, as they opened the duffel bag Parker had given him earlier to bring along on the boat. Here were the clothes they would change into, to become fishermen out at night, while the suits and ties and white shirts, into the duffel bag with a rock, would soon be resting on the river bottom.

  Hanzen gritted his teeth and chewed his lower lip. Had he given himself away? He snuck a look at Parker, and the man was frowning at him, thinking it over.

  Oh, Jesus, I did! He saw it! He knows already. Oh, Christ, everybody’sgot a reason to be down on poor Greg Hanzen, and I never wanted anyof it. Low man on the totem pole again. Whydidn’t I cut and run when I could?

  Whoever survives this night, Hanzen told himself, if anybody does, it won’t be me.

  9

  One-fifteen. It wasn’t necessary for Noelle to pitch her faint for another fifteen or twenty minutes, but she was ready to do it now. She really did feel queasy as hell, and it wasn’t because she was on a ship; the motion of the Spirit of the Hudsonas it coursed upstream was barely noticeable.

  No, and it wasn’t the money under her that had her queasy, either. She understood about that, and agreed with the thinking behind it, and had no trouble with it. She’d been the girl distraction more than once in her life, either carrying the dangerous stuff herself or fronting for the one who did, though she’d never done it as an invalid before. But the idea here was a good one; she was an established presence on the ship. The robbers would have left through the door in the hull, and why wouldn’t they have taken the money with them?

  Of course, the reason they hadn’t taken the money with them was because they would be half an hour or more in that small boat on the river before they reached the safety of the cabin. Nobody knew how soon the alarm would be raised, but when it was, there would be police boats out. They might be suspicious of four night fishermen, but on that boat they wouldn’t find any guns, any dress clothes, and most importantly, no money.

  Would the police have any reason to think the money was still on the ship? None. Why would they believe that three men would go through such an elaborate con job and robbery and then not take the money with them?

  So Noelle wasn’t worried about being caught sitting on several hundred thousand dollars. What had her shaky and nauseous was something much simpler; she was dehydrated. Having to sit for over six hours every night in this damn wheelchair or the other wheelchair, actually, up till tonight without any opportunity to leave it for any reason at all, meant she’d been avoiding liquids as much as possible the last eight days.

  Six hours without a bathroom isn’t easy, if you stay with a normal intake of liquids, so Noelle had been cutting back, and finding it a little chancy anyway, and by tonight the drying-out had begun to affect her. She knew it already in the van driving up to Albany, but she didn’t dare do anything about it then, with the whole night in front of her, so she’d been hanging in there, feeling sicker and sicker, until by now what she was most afraid of was dry heaves; and dry they’d be.

  Apart from the physical discomfort, though, she was having no trouble with this job. Since she and Tommy had split up, it had been harder to find strings to attach to, so money had often been a problem, which tonight should go a long way to solve.

  And another good thing about this crowd was, none of them felt he had to hit on her. Parker had his woman Claire, and the other three all seemed to understand that she was simply another member of the crew, and it would screw things up entirely if they got out of line. Also, they probably knew she could be difficult if annoyed; they might even have heard about the guy she’d kneecapped in St. Louis.

  It would probably be better all around if she found some other guy on the bend to hook up with, but she’d gotten along before Tommy and she’d get along now, and if another guy appeared, fine. It would certainly be easier, though, if Uncle Ray were still alive.

  It was her father’s older brother, Ray Braselle, a heister from way back, who’d brought her into the game, over her pharmacist father’s objections. Ray Braselle had been around for so long that once, in describing the first bank job he was ever on, he’d said, “And I stood on the running board,” and then he’d had to explain what a running board was.

  Uncle Ray was all right, though old as the goddam hills. But the people he ran with were more like Parker; tough, but not just smash-and-grab, always with a plan, a contingency, ways
in and ways out. For guys like that, a good-looking girl could frequently be part of the plan, and if she was a pro herself, steady and reliable, not a hooker and not a junkie, who knew how to handle a gun, an alarm system or a cop, so much the better.

  Uncle Ray liked to spend his free time living off away by himself, in a scrubby ranch he had in Wyoming, north of Cheyenne, up in the foothills before the high mountains toward Montana, and it was there that a horse rolled on him some kind of accident, no way to be sure exactly what happened and the body wasn’t found for six days. After that, Noelle still got the occasional call from guys she and Ray had worked with, and on one of those jobs she’d met Tommy Carpenter, and they’d lived together for a few years until all of a sudden it turned out Tommy was afraid of the law, so here she was on her own. And feeling mighty sick.

  Should she ask Mike to get her a glass of water? No; the very idea made her feel even worse. What would happen if she tried to drink water and she threw it up, right here in this chair? Down to the nurse’s office, no way to avoid it; the change of clothing, the examination, the discovery of the money; ten to fifteen in a prison laundry.

  Hang in there, she told herself, and to Mike she said, “Mike, could we stay in one place for a while? I feel like shit.”

  “I thought you did,” he said. “Before you start feeling better, let’s go talk to the purser.”

  “Good.”

  They’d done this on two other nights, so the purser would be used to the idea. Half an hour or so before the ship would dock, they’d go to the purser and Mike would quietly explain that Jane Ann was feeling kind of bad, a little worse than usual, and would it be okay if they got off first, the instant the ship was made fast? Hey, no problem. No problem twice before this, and it should be no problem tonight.

  Getting to the purser’s office meant another elevator ride; Noelle gulped a lot, and breathed through her mouth, and held tight to the wheelchair arms, and didn’t at all have to put on an act for the other people in the elevator.