Backflash p-18

by Richard Stark

  Parker stopped. The cold metal closed on his wrists again, and he heard the double snap. The guy tugged once on the cuffs to be sure they were locked in place, then said, “Okay, let’s go.”

  “The bedroom.”

  “Fine, fine.”

  Parker went first, and in the bedroom he said, “I need those papers you dropped on the floor. Don’t tell me to pick them up, all right?”

  The guy laughed. “I’ll help you out,” he said. “Go stand on the other side of the bed.” Too far away to kick him in the face, in other words.

  “Sure,” Parker said, and walked over there, and through the open bathroom doorway he could see the mound of yellow and green striped cloth huddled between sink and toilet, like the laundry waiting for the maid. Well, you made a lot of trouble, Cathman, Parker thought, but tomorrow people will still pay money to see the next card.

  The guy picked up Cathman’s four-page fantasy and put it in his own left side trouser pocket. He said, “Anything else?”

  “Drawers. Dresser, bedside table. Anything paper.”

  “I know, I know, toss it on the bed. You stay over there.”

  “Naturally.”

  While the guy was opening and closing drawers, Parker carefully shifted the paperclip to a more secure position, inside his curled fingers. The search was indifferent, but complete, and produced very little paper. Theater tickets, a medical prescription, a crossword puzzle magazine. Parker looked at it all, scattered on the bed, and thought at least some of this stuff would give this guy’s fingerprints to the law; the shiny magazine cover, for instance. He had to know it himself, so he had to already be in too deep shit to worry about such things. Which meant he wasn’t exactly careless in fact, he was very careful but he was reckless. So he’d be a little more hair-triggered and dangerous, but also possibly more readily confused and manipulated.

  “Okay,” Parker said. “I’m ready.”

  11

  Then the next problem was the vehicle. They’d come downstairs, Parker being careful to rub along the wall, not wanting to lose his balance without hands to protect him in a fall, and the guy said, “My truck’s a block from here. You just walk a little ahead of me.”

  “You’ll want to take my car,” Parker told him. “It’s about a block and a half that way.”

  “Leave it, you can come back for it,” the guy said. “We’ll take my truck.”

  “You want the car,” Parker insisted. He knew the guy was thinking about that shotgun in the truck, and wanted it with him, but Parker was thinking about the sixty-seven thousand dollars in the window well of the car.

  The guy gave him an irritated look. “What’s your problem? You think the car’s more comfortable, because you’re cuffed? I don’t care about that. We’ll take the truck.”

  “The point is,” Parker told him, “when we drive in there, if we’re in the car, they won’t shoot us.”

  The guy frowned at him, trying to work out if that was true.

  Parker said, “We just pulled a major job last night, everybody’s tense. We killed the guy owned that shack, we know the kind of people he hung out with. Some truck shows up, they won’t think twice.”

  “I don’t know about this,” the guy said.

  “Whatever you need out of the truck, get it and throw it in the car.” And all the time, he had to be careful to say “truck” and not “pickup,” because the guy hadn’t called it a pickup and he wasn’t supposed to know Parker had ever seen it.

  Many things, though, were making him suspicious and antsy. He said, “What do you mean, what I need out of the truck?”

  “Suitcase, whatever you’ve got,” Parker explained. “You aren’t carrying anything onyou.”

  “What is this car?”

  “Lexus. A block and a half that way. The keys are in my right side pocket here.”

  “Keys.” The guy didn’t even like that, having to come close enough to get hold of the keys.

  Parker knew they both knew what he might try at that point; the lunge, the kick, get the guy down and use the feet on him, hoping to get at the key for the cuffs later. But Parker wouldn’t do it that way; there was too much chance the .38 could go off, and nobody could know for sure where the bullet would go.

  Nothing to do but wait. Words of reassurance would not reassure, they’d merely make him more spooked than ever. Parker stood there, patient, and the guy slowly worked it through, and then he said, “Face to the wall. Put your forehead on the wall. Don’t move anything.” Absolutely a cop.

  Again the cool gun barrel touched the back of his neck. The hand burrowed into his pocket like a small animal, and withdrew, and then the barrel also withdrew.

  “All right.”

  Parker turned around, and the guy had retreated to the middle of the living room. The keys to the Lexus were in his left hand, the .38 in his right. “Nowwe go,” he said. “I’ll open the front door and step to the side. You go out, I follow. You stay just ahead of me and we walk to your car.”

  “A block and a half, in cuffs? What if somebody sees them?”

  “Maybe I’m arresting you.”

  “And what if the somebody’s a patrol car? This is a middle-class neighborhood, no crime but a lot of voters. This is where the cops like to patrol.”

  The guy started to sneer, as though about to defend cops, but then must have realized how stupid that would be. Instead, he looked around, saw the shut closet door over near the front door, and went over to open it. He rummaged around and brought out a raincoat. “You’ll wear this,” he said. “Over your shoulders. Stand still.”

  Parker stood still. The guy brought the raincoat to him, draped it on his shoulders, and stepped back to consider him. “Works fine,” he decided.

  It probably did, though too short. “Okay,” Parker said. “Now what?”

  “Now we walk,” the guy said, and opened the door.

  The gray day was still gray, the neighborhood still mostly empty, people now off to their jobs or schools. Parker, with the guy to his left and one pace behind him, walked down the street, crossed to the other side after they’d passed where the pickup was parked over there, and stopped at the Lexus.

  “Is it locked?”

  “Of course.”

  The guy unlocked it, and said, “Get in.”

  “Two things,” Parker said. “Could you take this coat off me? Throw it in the back seat or on the ground or whatever you want. And just give me a hand on the elbow to help me in.”

  “I’m your goddam nurse,” the guy said, and yanked the coat off him, and let it drop to the curb. “Get in the car, I’ll help if you need it.”

  He needed it; balance was impossible, to shift from standing outside the car to sitting inside it. As he was about to topple, the guy grabbed his right elbow with his left hand, his right hand staying in his pocket with the .38. He pulled back, helped Parker get into position, seated there against his own arms pulled back behind him, and said, “Don’t move.” He reached across him to strap him in with the seat belt.

  Parker said, “Safety first?”

  “Mysafety first,” the guy said. Then he shut the door, and went around to get behind the wheel.

  Parker said, “Where’s your truck?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I thought you wanted things from it.”

  The guy started the engine. “Where to?” he said.

  12

  The question was gasoline. It had been a while since the Lexus had been refueled. Parker had planned to do that after he finished with Cathman and got his day’s sleep, and as he remembered, the last he’d looked at the gas gauge it had shown just under a quarter tank. It was hard to see that little arrow from this angle, in the passenger seat, and he didn’t want to be obvious about it.

  He was trying now to go through the trips he’d taken with Mike Carlow, when they were looking for a place to stay, when they’d wound up at Tooler’s cottages. Different real estate agents had shown them different things,
driven them on different back roads. It was important now to remember them right, which road led where.

  He needed a destination that would fit in with the story he’d told, in case they were still together that long. But it would be best if he could arrange the route so they arrived at the right kind of gas station when the needle was looking low. A small station, isolated, not too many customers, one guy on duty, no mechanics. So remember those places, too, and the different roads, and the different places the real estate agents had shown them.

  Tiredness kept trying to creep in on him, distract him, but the discomfort of having his arms pulled around behind him, and then the weight of his torso against his arms, kept him from getting groggy. He thought about undoing the cuffs now, but he was afraid the freedom would make him careless, permit him to move his arms a little to relieve the pressure, and alert the guy beside him. So he left the cuffs where they were.

  At first it was all major highways, across the Hudson River out of Albany and then due east toward Massachusetts. This was called the Thruway Extension and at the state line it would met up with the Massachusetts Turnpike, one hundred fifty miles due east to Boston. A little before that, there was the north-south highway called the Taconic Parkway, the oldest major highway in the state, built in the twenties so the state government people in Albany would have easy access to New York City, one hundred fifty miles to the south and screw the rest of the state, which didn’t get a big road until the thruway came in, thirty years later.

  The Taconic was the road Parker and the others had been using between the Tooler cottages and Albany, but not today. Some miles before that turnoff was State Route 9, also north-south. “We take that exit,” Parker said.

  The guy was suspicious of everything. “Isn’t there a bigger road up ahead?”

  “Out of our way, too far east,” Parker told him. “We crossed the river, remember? Now we gotta go south, and then back west to the river. This is the turn.”

  The guy frowned, but took it, and they drove southward through low hills covered with trees wearing their bright green new spring leaves, and here and there a little town with one intersection and a traffic light. And a gas station, usually, but not the kind Parker wanted.

  Time to get off this road. “You’ll take the next right,” he said. “There’s a dark brown church at the corner, little graveyard.”

  But there wasn’t; a different intersection appeared, with a farm stand on the corner, all its display shelves empty, not yet open for the season, nothing yet grown ripe enough to sell.

  The guy pulled to a stop in front of the empty stand and said, “All right, what’s the story?” He was driving with the .38 tucked into his belt, just behind the buckle, and now his right hand rested on the butt.

  “It must be the next one,” Parker said.

  “Where we headed? Just tell me where we’re going, and I’ll go there.”

  “I can’t tell you that,” Parker said. “This isn’t my neighborhood, I just came here a few weeks ago to do the ship. I don’t know the names of things and route numbers and all that, I just know how to get from one place to another. I forgot about this intersection, that’s all, it’ll be the next one.”

  “If it isn’t,” the guy said, “we’ll try a different idea.”

  “Fine. It’s the next one.”

  The guy started the Lexus forward, and three miles farther on they came to the intersection with the old brown church. “See?” Parker said. “I’m not an old-time native here, that’s all. But I know where I’m going. You take this right, and it comes to a T, and then you take the right off that.”

  “The right? That sends me north again.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Parker said. “These roads twist all over the place, because of the hills, and because they laid out the farms before they laid out the roads. We won’t go north any more, don’t worry about it.”

  But they would. The second right would send them north, to a different road that would send them west again, if they went that far. Parker was grateful for the cloud cover; if the sun was out, it would be a lot harder to move this guy around into the right position.

  Before they reached the T, Parker glanced over at the dashboard to see the fuel-low warning light gleaming red. “How long’s that been on?”

  The guy didn’t look down from the twisty road. “What?”

  “Low on gas, the light’s on.”

  The guy gave it a quick look. “We’re all right,” he said. “It isn’t far now, is it?”

  “In and back out? I don’t know. How long’s the light been on?”

  “Not long,” the guy said, but out of irritation, not conviction.

  “You’re in charge,” Parker said, “but if I was driving, and I come across a gas station, I’d put in a few bucks.”

  “We’re fine,” the guy said.

  As they’d been driving, to ease the tendency to cramp in his shoulders and upper arms, Parker had been rolling his shoulders, exercising them from time to time, keeping them limber. The guy hadn’t liked it the first time he’d done it, but then he’d realized the reason, and hadn’t minded after that. Now, as they approached that T, Parker rolled his shoulders, and this time he hunched his butt forward just a little on the seat, which increased the pain and pressure on his arms at the same time that it gave his hands some room between his body and the seatback. The fingers of his left hand plucked the paperclip out of his right palm. Both hands worked at straightening one end of the clip. Then the fingers of his left hand found the lock in the middle of the cuffs and bent it up so that it gouged into his flesh, but the fingers of his right hand could insert the end of the clip, holding fast to the part that was still bent.

  He’d done this before; it would be painful for a while now, but not impossible. He probed with the end of the clip, feeling the resistance, feeling where it gave. There.

  “The T will be coming up in a couple minutes,” he said, the words covering the faint click, already muffled by the seat and his body, as the lock released on the right cuff.

  That was enough. He could undo the left cuff later, and in the meantime it could be useful.

  They reached the T, and turned right. Parker rolled his shoulders, clenched and released his hands. His arms stung as the blood moved sluggishly through them.

  “We turn left up ahead,” he said. “There’s an intersection with a Getty station and a convenience store.”

  “If it’s there,” the guy said.

  “No, it’s there. I got the church off by one, but this is right. You see the sign? There it is.”

  The red and white Getty gas station sign was the only thing out ahead of them that wasn’t green. It was a small place, two pumps, a small modular plastic shop behind it that had been built in an afternoon. There were fishermen’s landings nearby, and a few small manufacturing businesses tucked away discreetly in the hills, not to offend the weekenders with the sight of commerce, so there was enough business to keep this gas station open, but rarely was it busy.

  It was empty now. The guy slowed for the intersection, and Parker kept quiet. Push him, and he’d push the other way. And if this place didn’t work, there was one cabin that had been shown to them by one of the real estate agents that they hadn’t liked because there was no easy way to get down to the river you were supposed to admire the view, not enter it but that would do very well now, if necessary. Be better if it hadn’t been rented to anybody, but Parker would take what came.

  “Maybe I will stop.”

  Parker nodded, but didn’t say anything. The guy angled in toward the pumps. “I also gotta take a leak,” he said. Parker had been counting on that. Almost always, people want to take a leak before they go into something dangerous or intensive or important to them. This guy didn’t want to face five armed people that he meant to rob, and be thinking about his bladder.

  “I could do the same,” Parker said.

  “You can wait,” the guy told him. “Encourage you to get us there quicker.�
�� He pulled his shirttail out, so it would cover the gun in his belt, and climbed out of the Lexus, shutting the door.

  Parker sat facing front while the guy pumped gas, and then watched to see if he’d pay first or go to the men’s room first, and he headed around the side to the men’s room.

  The second he was out of sight, Parker unhooked the seat belt and got out of the car. The cuffs dangled from his left wrist. He put his fingers through the right cuff, and held it like brass knuckles, as he strode across the asphalt and around to the side of the building, where the two doors stood side by side, MEN and WOMEN, with a broad concrete step in front of both.

  Scrubland back here led to woods and nothing else. There was no one around. Parker stood to the left of the door marked MEN, facing the building, left arm cocked at his chest. He held the ballpoint pen in his right fist, gripped for stabbing. He waited, and the doorknob made a noisy turn, and the door opened outward, and as the guy appeared, in profile, Parker drove the metaled left fist across his chest on a line directly into that bandaged ear.

  The guy screamed. He threw both hands up, and Parker stabbed for his right eye with the pen, but one of the guy’s flailing arms deflected it, and the pen sank into his cheek instead, high up, through the flesh, then scraping leftward over teeth and gums.

  The guy was trying to shout something, but Parker was too busy to listen. His left fist, inside the handcuff, chopped at the cheek and the pen jutting out of it while his right hand reached inside the shirt and yanked out the .38.

  The guy staggered backward, wide-eyed, blood running down from under the bandage covering that ear, more blood running down his cheek, spilling out of his mouth. He slammed into the sink behind him, but he was scrabbling for his left hip pocket, so that’s where Parker’s Python would be.

  Parker stepped into the room, pulling the door shut behind himself. The guy’s hand was in that pocket, closing around something, when Parker shot him just above the belt buckle.

  The bullet went through the guy and cracked the sink behind him, and he sagged back, staring, just beginning to feel the shock. Parker stepped forward, shifting the .38 to his left hand where the cuffs dangled downward again, blood-streaked now, while he reached around and got the Python out of the left hip pocket. Then he put the Python away, because it would be much louder than the .38, switched the .38 to his right hand, and then collected from another pocket Cathman’s four-page dream. He stashed that inside his shirt, then reached around the guy to find and collect his wallet. Then he stepped back, .38 in right hand, wallet in left, and the guy folded both hands over his stomach where the bullet had gone in. He stared at Parker with dulled and unbelieving eyes.