Backflash p-18

by Richard Stark

  Cathman is a danger and an irritation and a lunatic, but he has to be talked to, for just a little while, to make sure all of the danger and all of the lunacy is known about. What else are Cathman and his idle hands up to?

  Parker folded the four pages, folded them again, put them in his left hip pocket. Then he picked up the Python from the desk and walked down the hall and stopped in the bedroom doorway.

  Cathman lay on his back now, pajama’d arms over the covers, still frowning as he stared at the ceiling. He didn’t notice Parker right away, and when the excited news announcer began the story of last night’s robbery all he did was close his eyes, as though the effort to make that robbery happen had merely left him exhausted.

  “Turn it off,” Parker said.

  Cathman’s eyes snapped open. He stared at Parker in terror. He didn’t move.

  Parker pointed the Python at the radio. “Turn it off or I shoot it off.”

  Cathman blinked at the gun, at Parker’s face, at the radio. At last he hunched himself up onto his left elbow and reached over to shut it off. Then he moved upward in the bed so he could slump with his back against the headboard. He looked dull, weary, as though his sleep had not been restful. He said, “I didn’t know you’d come here. I didn’t think you’d actually give me the money.”

  Parker almost laughed at him. “Give you the money? I just read your confession.”

  “My con? Oh. That’s not a confession.”

  “The cops will think it is.”

  Cathman sat up straighter, smoothing the covers with his hands, looking at Parker more carefully. He had finally realized his survival was at issue here. He said, “You don’t think I intend to mail that, do you?”

  “With copies to the media.”

  “Certainly not,” Cathman said. He was a bureaucrat, he lied effortlessly. He said, “It occurred to me, there was a remote possibility you people might get caught, and then, what if you implicated me?In that case, I had that letter to show, the letter I would have said I was just about to mail.”

  “What else” Parker said, and too late he saw Cathman’s eyes shift, and something solid shut down his brain.

  9

  Voices, far away, down a yellow tunnel, then rushing forward:

  “All I want is the money.”

  “Why would I know where any”

  “You ranthis thing! It’s yourrob!”

  “I never did! I’m not a thief!”

  “He’s here.Look, look at him, he’s here.”

  Handcuffs, behind back. Pain, in small mean lightning bolts, in the back of the head.

  “I didn’t know he was coming here, I never thought he”

  “I’ve been watching. You think you can lie to me? I’ve watched this house. He was here before, dressed like from the electric company, he spent hourshere”

  “I never expectedhim to”

  “I’m thinking, who is this guy? He’s not from the electric company, breaking in, staying hours.”

  “He wasn’t supposed to”

  “You came home. You talked with him.”

  “He was in my”

  “You drank wine withhim!”

  Lying on the floor. Legs free. That idiot Cathman silent now. This one isn’t connected to Cathman after all, he was following him, watching him. Why?

  “I didn’t hear everything you said, I came over after you came home, I listened at the side window. You called him Parker and he said he needed police ID and there was something about an assemblyman and you asked him when he was going to commit the robbery and he wouldn’t tell you.”

  This one has been here all along, bird-dogging, waiting for it to happen. Who the hell is he? Where did he come from?

  Cathman finally had his voice back: “You’ve still got it wrong. I’m afraid of that gun of yours, I won’t pretend I’m not, but you’re still wrong. I don’t know where the money is. You’ll have to ask him,if you didn’t kill him.”

  “I didn’t kill him, but let’s wake him up. Go get a glass of water from the bathroom.”

  “I’m awake.”

  Parker rolled over onto his back, as much as he could with his hands cuffed behind him, and tried not to wince. When he moved, the pain in his head gave an extra little kick. He opened his eyes and squinted upward.

  The guy was youngish, pudgy, thick-necked, in wrinkled chinos and a pale blue dress shirt; Parker had never seen him before in his life. His right ear was covered by a bulky makeshift bandage, what looked like a length of duct tape over several thicknesses of toilet paper. A red scar pointed to the bandage along his right cheekbone.

  The biker back at the cottages had come very close, almost close enough. The .45 automatic slug does a lot of damage even on the near misses, and that’s what this had been. The bullet scraped facial bone, took out an ear, and kept going.

  Parker nodded at the bandage. “You got any ear left down in there?”

  The guy looked surprised, and almost glad. “Are you wising off with me?”

  “Tell him, Mr. Parker,” Cathman said. “Tell him I have nothing to do with it.”

  The guy laughed. He enjoyed being in charge. “Oh, now he’s mister,is he?” He held a little .38 revolver in his right hand, which he pointed at Parker as he said, “I bet, if I shoot you in the ankle, and then ask a question, you’ll answer it. Whadaya think?”

  “I think this is the wrong neighborhood for gunshots,” Parker said. “I think it’ll fill up with cops, and I don’t think anybody in this room wants that. If you’d like to think with your brain instead of your gun, reach in my left hip pocket and read Cathman’s confession.”

  That threw the guy off-stride. “His what?”

  Cathman babbled, “It was a letter, I was never going to send it, I needed a”

  “Read it,” Parker said. With difficulty, he rolled the other way. “Then we can talk.”

  The guy was cautious, and not completely an amateur. He came the long way around Parker, staying away from his feet, crouching down behind him, touched the barrel of the revolver to the back of his neck, and held it there while he pulled the folded pages out of his pocket. Then he stood and backed away to the doorway, where Parker could see him again.

  Cathman said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  The guy was struggling to unfold the pages while not letting go of the gun or looking away from Parker. Distracted, he said, “Go on, go on.”

  Cathman, looking like a large sad child in his yellow and green striped pajamas, got out of the bed and padded barefoot into the connecting bathroom, while the guy got the pages open at last and started to read.

  Parker rolled again and managed to sit up, then moved backward until he could lean against the foot of the bed. He looked around on the floor and didn’t see the Python, so it was probably in the guy’s pocket. He watched him read, and thought about how to deal with this situation.

  ‘Jesus Christ.” The guy had finished. He dropped the pages on the floor and looked at Parker and said, “He’s a fucking lunatic.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “He set you up to do it, so he could turn you in. That isn’t even entrapment, I don’t know what the fuck that is.”

  “Stupidity.”

  “All right.” The guy was more relaxed now, as though Cathman being an amateur and an idiot had created a bond between the two of them. He said, “So if you didn’t come here to divvy up the money, or anything like that, why did you come?”

  “To kill him.”

  “Hah. No loose ends.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I wish I’d done it that way myself, years ago,” the guy said. “All right, Mr. Parker, I want in. I’ve got you, but I don’t want you, I want money. Are your partners dead, too?”

  “No. We know each other, we work together.”

  “So they’re waiting for you to come back, mission accomplished, the loose cannon dealt with.”

  “Right. And we divvy the money and go our ways.”

 
“So if I kill you,” the guy said, “I can’t find them, and I can’t get any money. But if I let you live, I’ve got to have money. I need money, that’s what it comes down to.”

  “I could see that.”

  “So what’s your offer?”

  “We got over four hundred thousand,” Parker said.

  The guy frowned. “The radio said three and a half.”

  “I don’t know about that. Usually they estimate high. All I know is, we got over four.” Because, to make his story work, there had to seem to be enough for everybody. “There’s five of us, so that’s eighty apiece, a little more than eighty. You help me in two ways, and”

  “Like letting you live.”

  Parker shook his head. “You aren’t gonna kill me, because I’m not a threat to you like this, and I’m no use to you dead. Don’t talk as though we’re both ignorant.”

  “Well, fuck me,” the guy said, with a surprised laugh. “You talk pretty tough for somebody sitting under my gun. You think I never killed anybody?”

  “I think you never killed anybody when you didn’t have a reason for it,” Parker said. “Do you want to listen to my proposition?”

  The guy shrugged. “Help you two ways, you said.”

  “First, kill Cathman. I need him dead. I can’t do it myself laced up like this, so either you do it or unhook me so I can do it myself.”

  “We’ll work on that,” the guy said. “What’s the other?”

  “For that, I do need to be unhooked,” Parker said.

  “I don’t think so. For what?”

  “I’ve got to search in here and in the office. I’ve got to see what else he put on paper that could make trouble for me.”

  “I’ll search for you. You tell me what you’re looking for.”

  “No.”

  The guy looked at him, and waited, and then said, “No? That’s it, no?”

  “That’s it. No. Do you want to hear what your side is?”

  “This should be good.”

  “Why not? If you kill Cathman, or let me do it, and let me run my search in here, that makes you a partner. I won’t have trouble with the others, so neither will you. We’ll each be getting a little over eighty. So we take twelve out of each of us, that still gives us almost seventy apiece, which is still good, and sixty for you. Is sixty enough for you?”

  Clearly, the guy would try to figure out how to get it all, how not to have any partners at the end of the day, but just as clearly he’d also try to figure out how to make it look as though he was content with a piece. Should he pretend to think sixty was enough? Parker watched him think it through, and at last the guy grinned a little and said, “If things’d worked out the way I wanted, I’d have it all. Tell me why didn’t you come back to the cabins.”

  “Youwere there?” Parker said. “Did you by any chance run into some bikers?”

  The guy’s hand moved toward his wounded ear, but then lowered again. He said, “You know about them.”

  “We had a guy with a boat,” Parker told him, “for when we left the ship. He sold us out to those people, but when we got in his boat it didn’t feel right, so we made him tell us what he’d done.”

  “So where did you go instead?”

  “His landing. He’s got a place upstream from the cottages, we went there. He had a whole operation up there, a shack by the water, he grows marijuana in peat moss bags suspended on the water. That’s his link with the bikers, he’s the farmer, they’re the processors.”

  “A shack on the water,” the guy said. “I’ve heard about that peat moss business, it’s been tried before. Is that where your partners are, the shack?”

  “Yes.”

  “Telephone there?”

  “Of course not.”

  “And where’s the boat guy?”

  “In the river.”

  The guy thought it over. Parker let him have a minute, but then figured it was time to distract him: “Cathman’s been gone quite a while.”

  “What?” Startled, the guy called, “Cathman!” When there was no answer, he strode over to the shut door and hit it twice with the gun butt. Then he pulled open the door and took one step in, and stopped.

  Parker said, “Pills?”

  The guy stepped back from the doorway. “Well, there’s one from your wish list. Or almost. The color of his face, the sounds in his throat, if we called nine one one right now and got the EMT over here on the double, they just might save him. What do you think?”

  “I think,” Parker said, “we should respect his wishes.”

  10

  Parker thought he was probably a cop. The way he handled himself, some of the things he’d said, turns of phrase. And the shotgun in the truck being from a police department. And that he just happened to be traveling with handcuffs.

  Some kind of rogue cop, running away from trouble he’d made for himself, needing a bankroll to start over. Somehow, he’d heard about the ship heist, decided to deal himself in. Wound up at the cottages, same as the three bikers, so all they did was screw up each other’s ambush.

  The question was, where was his road in? It seemed as though it had to be one of the other four people in the job, but none of them looked right for the part. It hadn’t been Cathman, who’d had a different agenda, it wasn’t Parker, so who else could it be?

  Dan Wycza; Lou Sternberg; Mike Carlow; Noelle Braselle. He couldn’t see this mangled cop cozying up with any of them.

  Anyway, if it was one of them, wouldn’t this guy know more than he does? But what else could it be?

  Maybe, a little later, he’d get a chance to ask that question. But for now, they still had to negotiate their way through this matter of the search. Parker needed to make that search, because the alternative was to uproot Claire and start all over again somewhere else, and if he did that this time he’d be doing it again, and Claire wouldn’t be happy on the constant go. Claire liked a nest.

  “In here,” Parker said, meaning in the bedroom, “you can do it for me. Open drawers, take out anything that’s paper, throw it on the bed, let me look at it, and we take away what I want. In the office down the hall there, we could do it this way. I go first, and stop in the doorway. You undo the cuffs, and I walk forward to the desk, so you’re always behind me. You stay in the doorway with the gun on me. I do my search. Then I walk backward to the door with my wrists behind my back, you cuff me again. Or you could just cuff me in front, then I could”

  The guy laughed at him. “Sure,” he said. “Cuff you in front. I could ask you to hold my gun for me, too.”

  “Then the other way. You’re behind me, you’re armed, if I try to do something you don’t have to kill me, just wound me. What am I gonna do about you at the desk? Throw a pen at you?”

  “I’ll have to search it first,” the guy said. “Maybe you happen to know there’s a gun in one of those drawers.”

  “Cathman, with a gun? Search away. You want to help me to my feet?”

  “No,” the guy said, and backed into the hall. “I don’t need to be that close to you, you’ll work it out.”

  Of course he would. Well, it had been worth a try. Using the foot of the bed to push against, Parker turned himself partway around, got one leg under his torso, and pushed upward against the bed until he was on one knee. From there it was easier, except for one second when he wasn’t sure he’d keep his balance. But he did, again by leaning on the bed, and there he was, standing.

  “I knew you could do it,” the guy said. “Come on out, lead the way. We’ll do this office first.”

  They went down the hall and into the office, and the guy had Parker stand in the corner between the two windowed walls, facing the wall, while he did a quick open-slam of all the drawers in the desk. Then he said, “Okay, good. A lotta shit in here, you ask me. Back up to the door.”

  Parker did, and felt the vibrations of metal scraping on metal as the key moved around the lock.

  “Stand still, I’m doing this one-handed.”

  �
��Right.”

  The cuffs came off. “Walk.”

  Parker walked. His head still ached, and now his wrists were sore. He rubbed them as he walked across the room, giving himself a fireman’s grip and kneading the wrists, and then sat at the desk.

  A lot of shit in the drawers, as the guy had said, but not all of it useless. He palmed a paper clip, one of the larger thicker ones, and when he bent to open the bottom drawer he clipped it to the front of his shirt, below desk level. There were also ballpoint pens, simple plain ones that didn’t retract. He held one up, showing it to the guy in the doorway, saying, “I could use a pen. Okay?”

  The guy snickered at him. “To throw at me?”

  “Sure.”

  “You want it, keep it.”

  Parker dropped the pen in his shirt pocket, and kept searching, and at the end he had two pages from this year’s weekly memo book, one with Marshall Howell’s name and his own written there (the name “Parker” was followed by a question mark), and one with that phone number of his that Howell had given away. He had also smeared his palms over everything he’d touched. There was nothing else here either of danger or of use.

  He held up the two torn-off pieces of paper and said, “I want to pocket these.”

  The guy shrugged. His carelessness meant it didn’t matter what Parker did to avoid the law, he was dead meat anyway. He said, “Go ahead, you aren’t armed.”

  Heisters don’t say armed,they say carryingor heavy,because a gun will be heavy in the pocket. Cops are armed.They don’t carry their guns in a pocket.

  “I’m done,” Parker said, the two papers stowed away.

  “Show me your hands.”

  “Sure.” Parker held up empty hands, turned them to show the palms and the backs, fingers splayed out.

  “Okay. Now do like we said. Stand up, turn around, back over to me.”

  Parker stood, and as he turned he slid the paperclip into his right hand, held between the ball of the palm and the side of the thumb. The fingers of both hands were curled slightly. He backed across the room, seeing the guy indistinctly in the window ahead of him and to the right, and the guy backed across the hall. Very careful, very anxious.

  “Okay, stop there.”