The Steel Hit
( Parker - 2 )
Richard Stark
Richard Stark
(Donald E Westlake writing as Richard Stark)
The Steel Hit (1963)
Parker has cheated the Outfit. He must act to protect his new identity. When the bandages came off, he looked in the mirror at a stranger. Only the eyes were familiar - flawed onyx, cold and hard.
PART ONE
Chapter 1.
WHEN the bandages came off, Parker looked in the mirror at a stranger. He nodded to the stranger and looked beyond at the reflection of Dr Adler.
Parker had been at the sanitarium a little over four weeks now. He had come in with a face that the New York syndicate wanted to put a bullet in, and now he was going back out with a face that meant nothing to anyone. The face had cost him nearly eighteen thousand, leaving him about nine from his last job to tide him over till he got rolling again. The syndicate trouble had been a bad time, but that was over now.
Parker stood a while longer at the mirror, studying the stranger. He had a long narrow nose, flat cheeks, a wide lipless mouth, a jutting jaw. There were tiny bunchings of flesh beneath the brows, forcing them out just a bit from the forehead, subtly changing the contours of the face. Only the eyes were familiar, flawed onyx, cold and hard.
It was a good job. Paid for in advance, it should be. Parker nodded again at his new face, turned away from the mirror, and watched the doctor drop the bandaging into a wastebasket. “When can I get out of here?”
“Any time you’re ready.”
Dr Adler was tall and bony and grey-haired. From 1931 till 1939 he had worked with the California Communist Party, setting up strike camps. After the Second World War, in which ” he had done plastic surgery in an Army hospital in Oregon, he had set up private practice in San Francisco. But in 1949 a Congressional Committee had exploded his past in his face. He wasn’t stripped of his licence, just of his livelihood. Since 1951 he had made his living as a plastic surgeon to those outside the law, operating a sanitarium front near Lincoln, Nebraska.
Dr Adler crossed the room again, going to the door, where he paused. “When you’re dressed, come down to the office. I have a letter for you.”
“From Joe Sheer?”
“I think so.”
Joe Sheer was the retired jugger who’d vouched for him with the doctor. When the doctor left, Parker opened the closet door and took out the new suit, a dark brown he’d bought on the way here and never worn. He chucked out of the white pyjamas and into his clothes, and took one last look at himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door. He was a big man, flat and squared-off, with boxy shoulders and a narrow waist. He had big hands, corrugated with veins, and long hard arms. He looked like a man who’d made money, but who’d made it without sitting behind a desk.
The new face went with the rest of him as well as the old one had. Satisfied, he picked up his suitcase and left the room and went downstairs to the office. The sanitarium was one large building, office and waiting-room and staff living quarters on the first floor, patients’ rooms on the second. There was space for twenty-three patients, and Dr Adler maintained a staff of four — two nurses, a cook, and a handyman. There was rarely more than one patient in the place, and half the time there were no patients at all. But he had state licences to worry about, and Federal taxes, so a large part of his take went for false front.
Parker went into the doctor’s office. “I left some old clothes upstairs. You can throw them away for me.”
“All right. Here.” He held out an envelope.
Parker took it and ripped it open. Inside was a brief pencil-scrawled note:
Mr Anson, I understand you might be interested in a fast-moving investment with triple level protection, guaranteed to turn over a profit of at least fifty thousand in an incredibly short length of time. The stock is automotive, of course, and I understand it’s course has been carefully plotted against future profits. If you are interested, get in touch with Mr Lasker in Cincinnati at your earliest convenience. He’s at the Warwick.
JOE
Parker read the letter, then turned the envelope over and studied the flap. Dr Adler said, “Yes, I steamed it open.”
“You did a bad job,” Parker told him. He dropped letter and envelope on the desk.
The doctor shrugged. “I get bored sometimes,” he said. “So I read other people’s mail.”
“Joe said I could trust you.”
“With your face. Not with your mail.” He smiled, thinly. “I am a doctor, Mr Anson. That is all I want to be. If circumstances had been different I’d be a doctor in San Francisco today with more reputable patients and a more lucrative practice. It doesn’t matter, I’m still a doctor. And that’s all. A doctor, not an informer, not a thief. I’ve taken all the money from you I intend to take, and once you leave here we will undoubtedly never have dealings again. Unless you recommend someone else, of course, or need yet another face. I read that letter on a whim.”
“You get whims often?”
“I never get whims that would cut off my supply of patients, Mr Anson.”
Parker considered, studying him. Joe had said he was a little off, but that it was nothing to worry about. Parker shrugged. “All right. Do you know what the letter meant?”
“I have no idea. I’d be fascinated to know, however.”
“It’s an armoured car hold-up. Three guards. The job is figured to make the grab while it’s on a highway, instead of in a city. Fifty grand is what they figure my share would be.” Parker reached down and flipped the letter closer to the doctor. “You see it there?”
The doctor read the letter, slowly, holding it in both hands. His hands were so clean they looked bleached. He nodded. “Yes, I see.”
“Can your man give me a ride to town?”
“Of course. You’ll probably find him in the kitchen.”
“Thanks. I’ll take my case.”
“Oh, yes. I forgot.” The doctor stood up, went over to the dark green safe in the corner, and twisted the combination. He opened the door and took out a light brown typewriter case. The typewriter case contained eight thousand five hundred dollars, all of Parker’s cash.
Parker took the case and picked up the suitcase. “I’ll be seeing you around.”
“I doubt it.”
When Parker left, the doctor was studying the letter again, a thin smile on his lips.
Chapter 2
DR ADLER’S handyman was punch-drunk, though he’d never been in the ring. He’d been a Party organizer in the ‘thirties, among the migrant crop harvesters, and scab-wielded two-by-fours had scrambled his brains. His former fluency with dialectic was gone; these days the driving of a hydromatic Chrysler was the most complicated exercise his brain could handle. He was fifty-four and his face was lumpy, with scar tissue around the eyes. The doctor called him “Stubbs”.
Parker found him in the kitchen, a stainless-steel room kept spotless because most of its equipment was never used. Stubbs sat on a steel table against one wall, holding a white coffee mug in both hands. The cook, a thin ex-whore named May, was reading the back of a box of Fab.
Parker said to Stubbs, “You’re supposed to drive me into Lincoln.”
Stubbs frowned at him. “We got a Chrysler.”
“Am I being kidded, friend?”
“No,” May said. To Stubbs, she said, “To the city, Stubbs. He wants you to drive him to the city.” She turned back to Parker. “Did the doctor say it’s okay?”
“Yeah.”
Stubbs got down from the table, laboriously. “I never drove a Lincoln,” he said, “I drove a Rolls once. It belonged to a sympathizer. That was down south some place, near Dago. They killed a Joe Goss
that time, blew the whole thing wide open. It would of been a good strike up to then, a deputy drove over this little girl, broke her leg. But then — the guys had to kill that Joe Goss, and it was all over.” He scratched his cheek.
I The flesh was soft, and gave like dough under his fingernails. “Where you want to go?”
May answered him. “Down into town, Stubbs. The freight yards, I guess.”
“You betcha.”
Stubbs led the way through the garbage room and out the back door. The sanitarium property, wooded, climbed up a slope back of the building. The garage was a separate brick structure to the left of the main building, with a cock weather-vane atop the peaked roof. There was room for four cars, but aside from the Chrysler there was only one other vehicle, a Volkswagen Micro-Bus.
Parker stowed his suitcase and typewriter case on the back seat of the Chrysler and climber in front next to Stubbs. Stubbs backed out, left the car long enough to pull down the garage door, and then manoeuvred in a wide U-turn and around the building and down the blacktop road to the three-lane concrete highway to the city.
They rode in silence, Parker smoking and watching the scenery. The new face was beginning to feel strange. His forehead and cheeks were tight, as though glue had dried on them.
Before they reached the city, Stubbs pulled over to the shoulder of the road and stopped. He carefully shifted to neutral and put on the emergency brake, and then turned to Parker. His face was creased in concentration, as though he was having a hard time remembering the words. “I want to talk to you,” he said. “I talk to all the patients, when they’re ready to go.”
Parker flipped his cigarette out the window, and waited.
“One time,” said Stubbs, “there was a guy came here to get a new face. Doc gave it to him, and then he figured the best thing was to kill Doc, because then nobody’d know who it was under the new face. He didn’t have to do that, because the Doc is one man you can trust with your life. But this guy wouldn’t take that, so I had to take the new face away from him again. You follow me?”
Parker smiled at him. “You think you could take this face away from me?”
“No trouble at all,” said Stubbs. “Don’t come back, mister.”
Parker studied him, but challenges were for punks. He shrugged. “A fella named Joe Sheer told me the doctor was straight. It’s his word I take.”
Stubbs’s belligerence faded. “I just wanted you to know.”
“Sure,” Parker said.
They rode the rest of the way in silence. Stubbs let him off at the railroad station, and Parker bought a ticket for Cincinnati. He had a three-hour wait, so he checked his luggage and went to a movie.
Chapter 3
THE MAN calling himself Lasker was sitting on the edge of the bed when Parker came into the room. The Warwick was a fourth-rate Transient & Permanent hotel with a dirty stone face and no marquee, and Lasker’s room was what Parker had expected, complete with green paint on plaster walls and a faded imitation Persian on the floor. The wood of the window frame was spreading along the grain, looking like eroded farmland.
The man calling himself Lasker, but whose name was really Skimm, looked up as Parker came into the room. He dropped the pint and reached under the pillow.
Parker said, “Didn’t Joe tell you about the new face?”
Skimm paused with the Colt Woodsman half out from under the pillow. He squinted and said, “Parker?”
“That’s right.”
Skimm held on to the Woodsman. “What name’d you use in Nebraska?”
“Anson.”
Skimm nodded and shoved the Woodsman back under the pillow. “They did a good job on you,” he said, “You made me drop my whisky.”
Parker went over to the window and looked out — at brick building backs and rusted black metal constructions on roofs. Down below he could see a trapezoidal concrete-covered yard, scattered with garbage cans and bits of paper. “You picked a bad neighbourhood, Skimm,” he said.
Skimm was picking up the pint. Some had spilled, soaking into the carpet. He looked over at Parker and shrugged in embarrassment. “We haven’t been bankrolled yet.” He held the pint up and squinted at the inch of whisky left in the bottom of it. “I need this job,” he said. “I admit it.”
Parker knew about that. Skimm, like most men on the bum, lived from job to job; he spent more in one year than most make in five and was always broke, dressing and looking like a bum. How he did it, where it all went, Parker didn’t know.
He worked it differently, spending the money and time between jobs living at the best resort hotels and dressing himself in the best clothes. There was no overlap between people he knew on and off the job. He owned a couple of parking lots and gas stations around the country to satisfy the curiosity of the Internal Revenue beagles, but never went near them. He let the managers siphon off the profits in return for not asking him to take an active part in the business.
He came back from the window. The room sported a green leather chair, the rip across the seat patched with masking tape. Parker settled into the chair gingerly.
“All right. Who else is in it?”
“So far, only me and Handy McKay. I’ve got the earie out for Lew Matson and Little Bob Foley. Maybe we’ll need more; it’s all how we set it up.”
“You want me to angle for the bankroll, huh?”
“You got the connections, Parker,” Skimm said. He had watery eyes, of a pale blue. They looked at Parker when Parker was talking, but when Skimm was talking they looked everywhere else — up at the ceiling and over at the window and down at the near-empty pint and over at the pillow and then the other way at the door with the hotel regulations pasted on the back.
“I’ve got the connections,” Parker agreed. “Who’s the bird dog on this one?”
“It’s a frill.” Skimm looked embarrassed. “She’s a busher,” he said, “but she’s okay.”
“If she never worked this route before,” Parker said, “where’d she get the connections?”
“Through me. I met her one time.” Skimm now looked more embarrassed than before. He was a thin stub end of a man, all bones and skin with no meat. His head was long and thin, set on I a chicken neck with knotty Adam’s apple, and his face was all nose and cheekbones. The watery eyes were set deep in the skull, the jaw small and hard. “We get along, “he said, “her and me.” He said it apologetically, as though he knew an off-the-wall like him shouldn’t be getting along with any woman. “She works in a diner. In Jersey.”
Parker dragged his Luckies out of his pocket, shook one out, and lit it. “I don’t know,” he said.
“She’s straight, Parker. I been in this business long enough.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I heard about what happened with your woman. That was a tough bit.”
Parker shrugged. “She got in a bind, that’s all. So now she’s dead.”
“Alma is okay, believe me.”
“It isn’t she’s a woman,” Parker said. “It’s she’s new, that’s what I don’t like. When a new fish does the fingering, most of the time the job goes sour.”
“Sure,” said Skimm. “I know that. Because they want their piece of the pie, but they got to be covered because they’re known. But this time it’s different. Alma’s going to take off with me after it’s over.”
“We’ll see. What’s the set-up?”
“Hold on, I’ll show you.” Skimm tilted the pint, emptied it, and set it on the night table. Then he went over to the dresser, opened the bottom drawer, and took out a manila envelope. There wasn’t any table or writing-desk in the room, so he went back and spread things out on the bed. Parker stood beside the bed and watched.
The first thing Skimm took out of the envelope was an Esso road map of New Jersey. “Here it is,” he said. He opened the map and pointed a finger to the right-hand side of it, near New York. “Here’s where it is here, where it says Perth Amboy. See it? Route 9 comes south here, see, and down her
e a couple miles below Perth Amboy it splits. See? 9 keeps on south, and 35 heads off to the east and follows the shore.”
Parker nodded. He could have seen it better if Skimm had kept his fingers out of the way, but he didn’t say anything. He wasn’t in any hurry, and every man has his own rate and style of telling a story. Try to hurry Skimm or make him talk without covering the map with his fingers and he’d just get confused.
“Okay,” Skimm was saying. “Now, two miles farther south, 34 takes off. To the east again, same as 35. Right there, see it?”
“I see it.”
“Okay. Now, about midway between those turnoffs there’s the Shore Points Diner, on the west side of the road. Right in there, see? Between where those two red lines go off to the right.”
“I’ve got it, Skimm. And that’s where this Alma’s a waitress.
“Right! Now, down here–-” His fingers moved south ward down the map. “Here’s Freehold, down here, where 9 crosses 33. Now, there’s the Dairyman’s Trust, this bank, see, it’s up here in Elizabeth, and they got a branch in Newark, and every other Monday there’s this Wells Fargo armoured car comes down from the main branch in Elizabeth down to Freehold, see? Down along route 9, here.”
“And they stop at this Shore Points Diner,” Parker said.
“That’s it! This Freehold, it ain’t much of a town, but the Dairyman’s Trust is the biggest bank, I mean with branches in Newark and Elizabeth and all, so most of the business accounts all around Freehold are in that bank, see? So when the armoured car comes down every other Monday it carries enough dough to pay off two weeks of payrolls around Freehold, and any other dough the bank needs down there. We figure maybe fifty G, maybe more.”
Parker frowned. “That’s all? The way I read the letter, fifty thousand figured to be my split.”
Skimm looked up, worried and apologetic and embarrassed. “Oh, no, Parker! I never told Joe nothing like that.”
“Okay, I read it wrong, that’s all.”
“I mean, fifty G is the minimum figure, you see? It might be seventy, eighty, who knows?”
Parker dragged on his cigarette, flicking ashes on to the whisky stain on the carpet. “That means if I’m lucky I clear ten. Maybe only eight.” He shook his head. “It isn’t worth it.”
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