Flashfire p-19

by Richard Stark

  The amplifiers under their white tablecloths she didn’t even notice.

  10

  The Voyager’s dashboard clock read 7:21when Lesley steered into the visitors’ parking area outside the Elmer Neuman Memorial Hospital in Snake River. Perfect timing.

  In her three previous visits to Daniel here, Lesley had learned what she needed to know about the hospital routine. Was this what criminals called ‘casing the joint’? She knew, for instance, that visiting hours ended at eight P.M., to accommodate visitors who had day jobs. She also knew that down the hall from Daniel lay an old woman named Emily Studworth, who seemed to be permanently unconscious and never to receive visitors. And she further knew that the clerical staff at the hospital changed shift at six P.M.

  Lesley shut off the Voyager’s engine and looked in the rearview mirror at Loretta. ‘Okay, Loretta,’ she said. ‘We just go and do it and come right back out.’

  Loretta was already in the wheelchair that Lesley had rented from a place in Riviera Beach called Benson’s Sick Room and Party Supplies. Her mulish pouting expression fit the wheelchair very well; she was great in the part.

  Lesley got out of the Voyager, slid open its side door, pulled out the ramp, and carefully backed Loretta and the wheelchair down to the blacktop. Then she shut and locked the car, and pushed the wheelchair across the parking lot and up the handicap-access ramp to the hospital’s front door.

  Since this was the first time she was arriving at the hospital after six P.M., the receptionist who checked the visitors in had never seen her before, and had no way to know that before this she’d always visited a patient named Daniel Parmitt. ‘Emily Studworth,’ Lesley told her.

  The receptionist nodded and wrote that on her sheet. ‘You’re relatives?’

  ‘We’re her grandnieces. Loretta really wanted to see her auntie Emily just once more.’

  ‘You don’t have much time,’ the receptionist warned her. ‘Visiting hours end at eight.’

  ‘That’s all right, we just want to be with her for a few minutes.’

  Lesley wheeled Loretta down the hall to the elevators and up to the third floor. The people at the nurses’ station gave them a brief incurious look as they came out of the elevator. Lesley smiled at them and pushed the wheelchair down the hall to Daniel’s room, which was in semi-darkness, only one small light gleaming yellow on the wall over the bed. They entered, and she pushed the door mostly closed behind her.

  He was asleep, but as she entered the room he was suddenly awake, his eyes glinting in the yellow light. She pushed the wheelchair over beside the bed and whispered, ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Help me, Loretta.’

  Obediently, Loretta stood up from the wheelchair and removed the long coat and big-brimmed straw hat. She put them on the bed along with her purse, which had been concealed in the wheelchair. Then she and Lesley helped Daniel get out of bed.

  He was stronger each day, but still very weak. The muscles in the sides of his jaw bunched and moved with his determination. He got his legs over the side of the bed, and then, with one of them on either side of him, he made it to his feet.

  Lesley said, ‘Can you stand alone?’

  ‘Yes.’ It was whispered through gritted teeth.

  He stood unmoving, like a tree. They helped him put on the long coat, over the hospital gown that was all he wore, then helped him ease down into the wheelchair. He folded his hands in his lap, not to be noticeable, and Lesley fixed the straw hat on his head.

  Meantime, Loretta had sat on the bed to remove her fake-fur shin-high brown boots. She had soft pumps in her purse that she now slipped on instead.

  The boots had been too big for Loretta; they were the right size for Daniel. The hat, the long coat, and the boots covered him completely. As long as he kept his head down and his hands in his lap, he would look exactly like the person Lesley had wheeled in here.

  Loretta stood up from the bed, wearing the blue pumps. She had on a shapeless blue-and-white-print dress. ‘Do I go out now?’ she asked.

  Lesley considered her. ‘Don’t forget your glasses.’

  ‘Oh!’ Loretta took her blackframed glasses from her purse and put them on, becoming again the owlish, gawky person Lesley knew.

  Lesley said, ‘You just walk out. We’ll be along in a minute.’

  ‘All right.’ Now that they were doing it, and nothing bad was happening, Loretta’s mood had unproved considerably. She very nearly smiled at Lesley, and when she looked at Daniel in the wheelchair her expression became concerned. ‘He should stay here,’ she said.

  ‘He has his reasons,’ Lesley assured her. ‘We’ll be along.’

  Loretta left, and Lesley looked in the closet, expecting to find his clothes, surprised to see nothing in there at all. ‘Where’s your things?’

  ‘Cops kept.’

  ‘Oh. Well, let’s get you out of here.’

  The return journey was simple, and outside, there was Loretta, waiting for them, standing over there beside the Voyager. As she pushed him across the parking lot, Lesley said, ‘I don’t know what you expect to do tomorrow night.’

  ‘Kill some people,’ he whispered.

  11

  Jack Young really did care for his new (old) wife, Alice, felt affection for her, enjoyed more about her than her money, though of course the money had come first. In fact, it had been just a joke at the beginning, when he’d met Alice Prester Habib up in New Jersey, where he’d worked for Utica Mutual as a claims examiner, and where, when he first became aware that this particular insured had the hots for him, it was nothing more than the subject of gags around the office.

  It was Maureen, an older woman with the firm, computer processor, who’d put the bee in his bonnet. ‘You could do worse,’ she’d said, and when Jack thought about it, he coulddo worse, couldn’t he? He’d almost doneworse, two or three times.

  It had been almost a year, at that time, since he’d broken up with his last serious girlfriend, or, more accurately, since she’d broken up with him. His life was a little boring, a little same-old same-old, and the idea of shaking it up in this really different and outrageous way came to appeal to him more and more. And don’t forget the money.

  But the fact is, Alice was okay. God knows she was older than his mother, almost older than his grandmother, but she kept herself in shape like an NFL quarterback, and she was of an age where she had no timidity left in bed at all. So that part wasn’t so bad, and for the rest the knowledge that people laughed at him behind his back, the term ‘boy toy,’ which seemed to hover in the air around him like midges fuck ‘em if they couldn’t take a joke.

  Because you can take the boy out of the actuarial business but you can’t take the actuarial business out of the boy, and Jack was fully aware that he was (a) Alice’s only heir, attested to in the prenuptial agreement, and (b) likely to outlive her by forty to fifty years. Forty to fifty richyears.

  So all he had to do was pay attention, in and out of bed, and otherwise be discreet. For instance, when he and Alice walked into the big ballroom at the Breakers Thursday evening for the pre-auction ball, with the tall gleaming mirrors reflecting the posh crowd, and the radiant chandeliers, and the band’s swing oldies echoing in the high-ceilinged space, and the swirl of revelers in their sprays of bright colors and gleaming gold and winking silver and sparkling jewels, the very firstperson he saw was Kim Metcalf, and he barely gave her a smile of recognition. She, too, with her shrewd blue eyes under the cloud of fluffy yellow hair, returned only the briefest of impersonal nods, including Alice as much as himself, before she moved on, holding to the arm of her husband, Howard, a retired tax lawyer she’d met as a stew on a first-class flight New York to Chicago. (She was still so much a stew in her heart that to this day she preferred the label ‘flight attendant.’)

  As the Metcalfs moved on, Jack turned his eyes firmly away from Kim’s twitching creased behind within the shimmering pale blue satin, but his mind said: Saturday. T
he apartment Alice would never know about, down among the condos, where he and Kim managed to meet once or twice every week, came surging into his memory. Kim’s body was softer than Alice’s, which was also nice, but by now, for the both of them, the main point was to be able to have a conversation with somebody whose memory bank had not become full before you were born.

  Turning to Alice and away from all temptation, Jack said, ‘Do you want to dance, darling, or meet people first?’

  ‘We’ll dance, darling,’ she decided. ‘We can always meet people.’

  True enough.

  The new red paint on the fire engine doors was dry, and the doors no longer read

  CRYSTAL CITY F.D.

  ENG#1

  It’s a good thing Crystal City, a sparsely populated area down near Homestead, had an Eng #2 as well, or the good folks there would be shit out of luck if a fire were to start up anywhere around town in the next couple of days. It was a volunteer fire department, like so many in the sticks, so there was never anybody around the small brick fire house except for fires and meetings, so it had been very easy, at five this morning, to bypass the alarm system and ease into the fire house and come roaring out with old Eng #1. By the time anybody started looking for it, Melander and Carlson and Ross would have finished with it.

  At nine P.M., with the pre-auction ball in full swing up at the Breakers, Ross stood beside the driver’s door of Eng #1, an open quart of gold enamel paint in his left hand and an M. Grumbacher fine-line brush #5 in his right, with Melander just behind him to hold the flashlight. The fire engine now stood on the lawn at the right side of the house, out of sight from anywhere off the property. Ross, who had learned to be a passable sign painter during the first of his two stretches inside, leaned close to the door and drew the first vertical, then the U-shape to the right:

  P

  Farley’s wife had learned to sleep through the late-night phone calls, and Farley had trained himself to wake right up at the beginning of the first ring, his hand snaking out from under the covers toward the phone before his eyes had completely focused on the bedside clock: 1:14. There’d been worse.

  ‘Farley.’

  ‘Higgins here, Sarge,’ being one of the deputies on night shift at the office. ‘We got a report of a missing man out to the hospital.’

  ‘Parmitt,’ Farley said.

  ‘That’s right, Daniel Parmitt. The night administrator just called. They did their usual late-night check on the patients, and that one’s gone.’

  How? He didn’t walk out, Parmitt, he wasn’t up to it. Somebody helped him. The real estate woman? Farley said, ‘You sent somebody over there?’

  ‘Jackson and Reese.’

  ‘Call them, tell them I’m on my way.’ There wouldn’t be anything there; still, he’d have a look.

  Damn; should’ve taken those prints yesterday.

  He drove into Snake River at two in the morning in the rented Buick Regal. He’d be done here in an hour, then drive back to Miami International, have breakfast, take the morning flight west, be swimming in his own pool by mid-afternoon.

  The woman who gave him his assignments, once or twice a year, was a lawyer in Chicago. They spoke guardedly on the phone, almost never met face-to-face, and unless he was on assignment he lived a quiet life indeed, writing occasional album reviews for music magazines. On assignment, he had a different name, different identification, different credit card, different everything. Different personality. He didn’t even listen to music, driving south and west from Miami.

  The lawyer in Chicago had told him this wasn’t a rush job, but what was the point in dragging it out? Fly in, do it, fly away. ‘Just so it’s certain,’ the lawyer had said, and he had said, ‘It’s certain,’ because when you hired him, you hired the best. It had been certain every single time for the last twelve years.

  Apparently, the client, whoever he was, had gone bargain basement the first time, brought in people who’d messed the job up, left the target alive but hospitalized. And the client really and positively wanted this target worse than sick; he wanted this target a fading memory.

  He had never before had a target stationary in a hospital. And no guards on him round the clock, no steady police presence. It was almost too easy, as though he shouldn’t take his full fee for the job. Though he would. Still, it hardly seemed like work for a grown man, and he had to talk to himself as he parked the Regal on a side street three blocks from the hospital to walk the rest of the way. He had to remind himself that allassignments are serious, even if this one seemed like shooting ducks in a rain barrel. He had to remind himself that every mistake was serious and that overconfidence is the cause of more mistakes than anything else. He had to remind himself to treat this assignment just as though there might be some danger in it.

  He approached the hospital catty-corner, through the parking lots. He was a tall lean man dressed all in black. One Beretta was in a holster in the small of his back, just above the belt, and the other was in his left boot. The right boot contained the throwing knife. Other than that, and his knowledge of several martial arts, he was unarmed; he never carried more weaponry than needed when on assignment.

  The hospital’s main entrance and the emergency entrance around on the left side were both well lit, but the service entrance on the right was dark except for one small illuminated globe mounted on the wall above the door. He found the door unlocked he’d have picked it if necessary went in, and climbed one flight of concrete stairs before stepping through into a hallway. What he needed first was an operating room.

  He avoided the lit-up nurse’s stations, moved through the halls, and soon found what he was looking for. And in the scrub-up room next door were several clean sets of green O.R. coats and pants. He took the largest set and put them on over his clothing; then he’d be able to move more freely along the halls, though still keeping out of other people’s way.

  There had been no way to find out ahead of time what room the target was in, so all he could do was walk the halls and look at the patient names stuck into the labels outside the doors. How long could it take? Half an hour?

  Less. Fifteen minutes after he entered the hospital, he came to the third-floor door labeled ‘Parmitt,’ and without breaking stride or looking around he walked right in. Never pause and look indecisive, it attracts attention.

  The target should be asleep; the knife would probably do. He crossed the dim room to the bed, starting to reach down toward his right boot, then realized the bed was empty.

  Bathroom? Not away to therapy or anything like that, not at this hour. He looked around, saw the closed bathroom door, and walked around the bed.

  He was almost to the bathroom when someone entered the room behind him, saying, ‘Doctor, we’d rather nobody touched anything in what the hell, we can turn the light on.’

  He spun around as the overhead fluorescents flickered on, and saw the rangy man in tan sheriff’s uniform in the doorway, and thought, I can be a doctor. Thirty seconds and I’m out of here.

  ‘Whatever you say, Sheriff,’ he said with an easy smile, and started toward the door.

  But the sheriff was suddenly frowning. ‘What’s that under your scrubs?’

  He wasn’t prepared for in-close observation. ‘Just my shirt, Sheriff,’ he said, already stooping toward the boot with the Beretta in it, as he casually talked on, saying, ‘I get chilly at night.’

  ‘Stop,’ the sheriff said, and all at once had his side arm out and aimed, in the classic two-handed bent-kneed stance. ‘Straighten up with your hands empty,’ he said.

  He didn’t dare bend any more, but he didn’t straighten either. ‘Sheriff? What the heck are you doing?’

  ‘I always hit what I aim at,’ the sheriff told him. ‘And with you, what I’ll aim at is your knee.’ Then he raised his voice, shouting toward the doorway behind him: ‘Reese! Jackson!’

  He heard the rumble of running footsteps as he said, ‘Sheriff? I don’t know what your problem’

 
; Two uniformed deputies appeared in the doorway, trying not to look excited, one of them black, the other one white. The black, staring, said, ‘Sarge? Who’s this?’

  ‘Exhibit one,’ the sheriff said. His hands holding that automatic were as solid as a rock. ‘You two search him, see what armament he’s got on him.’

  He thought: Can I go through the window? Thick plate glass, I’d either bounce off or get cut to pieces on the way out. Third floor. Three of them; what to do?

  The deputies approached him, keeping out of their sergeant’s line of fire. The sergeant said, ‘If it happens you do have to shoot the son of a bitch, take out his legs. Thisone we’re gonna keep alive.’

  12

  After lunch, Lesley went shopping for Daniel, using the list he’d given her of his sizes. He had nothing, so she bought two sets of everything from the skin out, plus one pair of black loafers, and a small canvas bag to put it all in. It stretched her credit card, but he had given her a bank to call in San Antonio and a PIN, and the man there had confirmed that ten thousand dollars would be shifted to the real estate agency’s escrow account by noon tomorrow, where she’d be able to withdraw it without trouble.

  Be nice to have a banker in San Antonio who’d wire you ten thousand dollars whenever you felt like it. Be nice to understand Daniel Parmitt, too, but she doubted she ever would.

  Done shopping and with the canvas bag in the trunk of her car, she next showed seven condos to a couple from Branson, Missouri, who didn’t like any of them, and when she got back to the office Sergeant Farley was there, the sheriff from Snake River.

  She’d been expecting this, she having been Daniel’s only visitor in the hospital, but it still frightened her when she saw the man standing beside her desk in his crisp tan uniform. It made her tense up, suddenly unsure of her ability to deceive him.