Backflash p-18

by Richard Stark

  Carlow said, “You need to move it, if I’m going in. Why am I going in?”

  ‘Just to get away from the road, so no county cop comes along while we’re splitting the take.”

  Carlow laughed and said, “Thatwould be a moment. Yeah, move it over. Noelle, honey, you wanna get in or you wanna get out?”

  For answer, she hunkered back and drew her legs up under her. Seated in the van doorway, cross-legged, slumped forward, she looked like an untrustworthy oracle.

  Parker jigged the Hyundai forward and back to the side of the road, waited while Carlow drove around him, then got out and walked with the others after the van. They were all stained red when the brake lights came on, and then it was dark again, except for the van’s interior light, gleaming on the ghostly Noelle.

  Carlow climbed from the driver’s seat into the back of the van and slid the box out from the wheelchair. It was crammed full of the white plastic bags, four of them.

  “Excuse me, Noelle,” Sternberg said, and climbed up past her into the van. The rear seats had been removed in there, to make room for the wheelchair, which was now pushed as far back as possible, leaving a gray-carpeted open area. Carlow and Sternberg and Noelle sat on the carpet in this area, facing in, and began to count the money, while Parker and Wycza stood outside, sometimes watching, sometimes looking and listening up and down the road.

  Three hundred nineteen thousand, seven hundred twenty dollars. Parker had had three thousand in expenses, that he took out first. Sternberg did the math on the rest, and said, “That’s sixty-three thousand, three hundred forty-four apiece.”

  “You each take sixty-three,” Parker said. “I’ll take the change for dealing with the guy back there.”

  “A bargain,” Carlow said.

  Noelle had a handbag that would carry her share, and the others used the white plastic bags. In Parker’s bag, there was sixty-seven thousand, seven hundred twenty dollars.

  The four of them would take the van, leaving the Hyundai, which nobody wanted. Wycza said, “Coming out, use the Lexus. The key’s in the ashtray.”

  “I will,” Parker agreed. “Lou, I’ll take back that other gun now.”

  “Right.” Sternberg handed it to him, and said, “Call me again sometime.”

  “I will.”

  Carlow drove, Wycza in the seat beside him, Sternberg and Noelle seated on the floor in back. Only the back-up lights were on as Carlow backed past the Hyundai and out to the main road. Parker stood watching, and saw the van’s headlights come on as it swung out and away, to the right.

  Darkness again. It would take a few minutes to get his night vision back. He had the Python in his left hip pocket, and held the automatic in his right hand, the bag of money in his left. He walked down the road toward the cottages, and when he could see a little better he chose a spot where there was a thick double-trunked maple just to the right of the road. He went around behind it, put the plastic bag on the ground against its trunk, and brushed some dirt and stones and decayed leaves over it.

  As he straightened, headlights came, fast, from the cottages. He stayed behind the tree, and the pickup went by, racing too hard for this road, jouncing all over the place. Whoever was at the wheel was impossible to see, and more than impossible to shoot.

  The pickup lunged by. Parker stepped out into the roadway and listened, and there was a sudden shriek of brakes when the driver came across the Hyundai.

  No crash, though; he managed to get around it. Then silence.

  Parker put the Python in his right hand, and walked on toward the cottages.

  5

  Now there were lights in two cottages, including the one where Parker and Wycza had decided the unknown shooter must be holed up. Parker was certain there was nobody left alive back here, but he was cautious anyway. He took the same route as last time, around to the right, beyond the reach of the glowing windows. Around the last cottage, then hunkered low to go past the space between cottages, where the pickup used to be parked. And then, silently but swiftly, across the screened-in porch to the cottage that was now lit up.

  When Parker had checked out all the cottages, back when they’d first moved in here, this back door had not been locked, and it still wasn’t. He stepped through into the kitchen, and it was dark, the lit rooms farther away, living room and bath.

  Parker listened. Nothing. He crossed the kitchen to the hall doorway, and stopped. Nothing. He went into the hall and looked through the bathroom doorway at a mess. Half a roll of paper towels on the sink, bloody individual paper towels in the sink and the bathtub and on the floor. Blood smears on the sink.

  The dark bedrooms he passed were empty, and showed no signs of use. In the living room, a floor lamp at one end of the sofa was lit, shining down on a dark stain on the flower-pattern slipcover. Parker crossed to look at the stain, and it was blood, some dry, some still sticky. It made an irregular pattern, just at the end of the sofa.

  Wounded. Wycza had been right about that, about the blood spatters on the outside wall next door. Headshot, it looked like, except the guy was too active for that. He’d managed, after he’d been shot, to go on and kill the third biker.

  But he hadn’t had the strength to switch the lights off. He had to know Parker and the others had gone away with the place dark, and would know something was wrong if they came back and it was all lit up. But he hadn’t had the strength to do anything about it. He’d come over here to collapse, to try to get his strength back.

  So it wasn’t that he’d let Wycza live, in order to wait for the rest to show up with the money. He had passed out over here, he’d never seen Wycza at all.

  And then came to. Patched himself one way and another, and took off, knowing the ambush was ruined, the money wouldn’t be coming here.

  Where would he go now? Who the hell was he?

  Maybe Cathman had some answers.

  6

  It was a long night, and getting longer. Parker had walked out the dirt road to get the plastic bag of money and bring it back here and now it was inside the window well of the right rear door of the Lexus. The automatic he’d taken from the guard on the ship had been flung out over the slope into the river. The two simple incendiaries had been set, one in each lit cottage. There would be no surfaces for the technicians to scan for fingerprints. There’d be plenty left here, though, to give the law things to think about.

  If he’d done the fuses right, the two fires should start three hours from now, after seven in the morning; daylight, so they could burn longer before being noticed. Yawning, forcing himself to stay awake, Parker got behind the wheel of the Lexus and steered it out to the main road, intending to head north, to deal with Cathman, one way or another. But when he saw the Hyundai, he stopped.

  He rubbed his eyes, and the grizzle on his face. Wycza had been wrong, dammit. He had the big man’s flaw of every once in a while feeling sorry for the weak.

  Greg Hanzen knew their faces, he knew a link to Parker through Pete Rudd, he could describe the getaway from the ship. He could let the law know for sure that the money had not come off with the heisters. And his car was here, next to a scene of a lot of trouble that had to be connected with the robbery, and no way for Parker to get rid of it.

  Cathman was to the north, Albany, an hour away. Hanzen was half an hour to the south, at his landing. Or, if he was conscious by now, maybe he’d made his way to a hospital somewhere, a river rat with a broken jaw on a night when a major robbery takes place on the river. Would the cops ask him questions?

  I’ve got to look, Parker told himself. If he’s there, that’s that. If he’s gone, I don’t pursue it, I let it play out as it plays.

  He turned right and drove south. Ten minutes later, he saw the first lights he’d seen, a 24-hour gas station and convenience store. He filled the tank and bought a coffee and a glazed sugar doughnut, and drove on south, finishing the coffee just before the turnoff in to Hanzen’s landing.

  He switched off his headlights as he crossed th
e railroad tracks, and ahead he saw the glow of some other light. He stopped in the clearing, got out of the Lexus, and the light came from Hanzen’s boat, still beached up onto the shore. A not-very-bright light was on in the cabin, and the cabin door was open, facing the river.

  Parker didn’t get into the boat; he was too tired to climb over the side. He held the Python in his right hand and walked down beside the boat until the water was ankle-deep, cold inside his shoes, where he could look back in at the cabin, and Hanzen was in there. He was awake and miserable, hunched over his battery lantern. He’d tied a towel under his jaw and over the top of his head, like somebody in a comic strip with a toothache. He sensed Parker, and looked at him with watery eyes. “Now what?” he said. His speech was mushy.

  Parker said, “I came to tell you, your problems are over after all.”

  7

  Driving north toward Albany on the Taconic Parkway, Parker watched both dawn and a heavy cloud cover move in from the west. He drove with the windows open, for the rush of air to keep him awake.

  One more detail, and it was over. He’d take a motel room, sleep the day and night away, not try to get back to Claire until tomorrow.

  Howell should never have given Cathman Parker’s name and phone number. When he’d done it, of course, Howell hadn’t known he’d soon be dead, unable to keep control of what was going on. Still, he shouldn’t have exposed Parker this way.

  Before Claire, it was simpler. Then, there was no phone number that would reach Parker, no “address” where you could put your hand and touch him. It was harder now to stay remote, but it could still be done. It was just more work, that’s all.

  North, and then west, over the Hudson toward Albany and the gray day. It was after six, and there was starting to be traffic, early-morning workers. Once Parker left highway to drive on city streets, there were a few school buses.

  Delmar was still mostly asleep. The supermarket where he’d left the Subaru when he’d visited Cathman at home that one time was not yet open, and the blacktop expanse of its parking lot was empty. One of the few houses in the neighborhood with lights gleaming inside the windows was Cathman’s, both upstairs and down. And in the next block, parked on the right side of the street in front of a two-family house, was the pickup truck.

  Parker drove on another half block, looking at the pickup in his rearview mirror, and there was no question. He stopped the Lexus, rolled up its windows, locked it, and walked back to the pickup.

  It had some new dents and scratches on it. There was a rental company decal just under the right headlight, like a teardrop. The guy had gone away without locking the truck, and when Parker opened the driver’s door to look inside there was a little dried blood on the seatback; not a lot, but some.

  These trucks have storage spaces behind the bench seats. Parker tilted the seatback forward, and looked at a shotgun. It too had a decal on it, like the truck, this one smaller, gold letters on black, on the side of the butt, just above the base. It read “MONROVILLE P.D.”

  Monroville? Did he know that name? And what was this guy doing with a police department shotgun?

  And how come he was visiting Cathman?

  Parker didn’t feel tired any more. He shut the pickup’s door, and walked toward Cathman’s house, number 437.

  8

  As before, shades were drawn over the windows of the enclosed porch downstairs and the front windows above. Light gleamed behind the shades, upstairs and down.

  Parker took the same route in as when he’d come here wearing the utility company jacket. This time, it was early morning, nobody around, no traffic on this residential side street, so he just walked forward as though he belonged here. With the shades drawn in the house, nobody could watch the outside without shifting a shade, making a movement that he would see.

  The kitchen door was locked again, and the lock still didn’t matter. He went through it, and then stopped to listen. Nothing; no sound anywhere.

  Slowly he moved through the house. Three lamps burned in the living room, but no one was there. Two magazines and a newspaper lay messily beside one armchair.

  Parker continued on, checked the enclosed porch, and the entire downstairs was empty. The staircase leading up was dark, but light shone around the corner up there. He held the Python across his chest and went up sideways, slowly. The stairs were carpeted, and though the carpet was worn the steps didn’t squeak.

  There was a short upstairs hall, with doorways off it, none of the doors closed. Two of the rooms showed light, and from his last time here he knew the one on the left was Cathman’s bedroom, and the one at the end was his office.

  The dark room on the right was empty, and so was its closet. Cathman himself was in his bedroom, in bed, asleep, curled up on his side, frowning. The ceiling light and a bedside lamp were both lit. Parker silently crossed the room and checked the closet, and no one was hiding there.

  No one else was upstairs at all. Parker came last to the office, and it was empty, too, and where the hell was the guy from the pickup truck? It made sense he was linked to Cathman some way, that had made sense from the time he showed up at the cottages, and it made even more sense when his pickup was parked a block from here. But Cathman is sleeping with his lights on, and there’s nobody else around, so something in the equation doesn’t make sense after all.

  The last time Parker had been in this house the office had been the neatest room in it, as though Cathman were demonstrating his professionalism to himself, convincing himself he deserved a hearing and respect and a job. This time, three or four sheets of lined paper were askew on the desk, covered with handwriting in black ink, with a lot of editing and second thoughts.

  What’s with Cathman now? Why was he afraid to sleep in the dark? What idea is he trying so hard to express?

  Standing over the desk, Python in right hand, Parker moved the sheets around with his left index finger. The writing was very neat and legible, a bureaucrat’s penmanship, but there were a lot of crossings-out and inserted additions. Numbers in circles were at the top left of each page. Parker picked up the page marked “1” and read:

  “Gambling is not only a vice itself, but is an attraction to other vice. Theft, prostitution, usury, drug dealing and more, all follow in gambling’s train.”

  Oh; it was his dead horse again, still being beaten. Parker was about to put the page back down on the desk, but something tugged at his attention, and he skimmed the page to the bottom, then went on to page 2, and began to see that this was more than just the dead horse, more than just Cathman’s usual whine. This time, he was building toward something, some point, some deal

  “Knowing the dangers, seeing those dangers ignored by the elected officials around me, believing it was my duty to expose the dangers and give the people of the State of New York the opportunity to choose for themselves what path they might take, I have, for some time, cultivated contacts with certain underworld characters. I felt very out of place among these people, but I knew it was my duty to stay with them. I was convinced that the presence of so much cash money on that gambling ship, so large and obvious and available, would have to attract criminals, as bees are attracted to the honey pot. And now we see I was right.”

  This was it, this was coming to the point at last. There’d always been something wrong about Cathman, something that didn’t ring true, and it was tied up with his fixation on gambling. And now Parker himself had made an appearance in this diatribe, along with Marshall Howell, and the others, all of them certain underworld characters. And all to what purpose?

  Parker read on. More pounding on the dead horse, more self-congratulation. Parker skimmed to the bottom, and moved on to page 3, and midway down it he read:

  “My recent contacts with career criminals have made it possible for me to be of very material assistance in capturing the gang involved in the crime and also in recovering at least part of the stolen money. In return for my assistance, which could be obtained nowhere else, and which I am off
ering freely and completely, I would expect proper publicity for my contribution to the solution of this crime. That publicity must include my reasons for having sought out these criminals in the first place, which is my conviction that gambling inevitably brings crime in its wake. I would need the opportunity to make these views widely known to the public. I would insist on at least one press conference

  “

  Insane. The son of a bitch is insane. The dead horse is riding him.He’s so determined to prove that gambling leads to crime that he’s got to rig the crime. He went out to find people to commit the crime for him; first Howell, then Parker. Point them at the ship, give them every bit of help they want, so after they do their job he can say, “See? I was right. Gambling led to the robbery, so shut down the gambling ship. And listen to me from now on, don’t shunt me off into retirement, as though I was old and useless and not valuable any more.”

  There was no way to make that fly. Was he so far gone into his own dreams, his own fantasy, that he didn’t see it couldn’t work?

  Does Cathman really believe he can tell the law he knows details about a robbery, but he won’t give them over unless he gets a press conference? If he clams up, that’s already a crime. He’ll have no choice, once he sends this goddam manifesto to whoever he’s going to send it to the governor, probably, being the megalomaniac lunatic he is he’ll have no choice but to tell the law everything he knows.

  And everything he knows is Parker.

  “at the tone seven-thirty. Expect high clouds today, seasonable temperatures

  “

  Cathman’s radio alarm clock. It went on, talking about this and that, and soon it would tell Cathman his designer robbery had come off according to plan. Time he should type up that letter neat and send it out.

  Along with what? What else would Cathman have to give? Parker’s name and phone number written down somewhere. Maybe a diary? How much of his own involvement with the heist was he figuring to admit? (They’d get the whole thing out of him in five minutes, which he wouldn’t be likely to realize.)