The Score (Parker Novels)

by Richard Stark

  She opened the drawer, and put the phone book on the desk.

  “Good girl. Now, give me the phone number for police headquarters. Got it? Now the firehouse.”

  She looked up. “Do you really have my uncle prisoner, too?”

  “Tut, tut! Prisoner me no prisoner, nor uncle me no uncle.” Though she couldn't see it under the hood, he smiled, then said, “A paraphrase of Shakespeare. Your uncle is in good hands. Write down the number, and maybe later you can talk to him.”

  She wrote down the number.

  “Lets see. One more. The night phone at the refinery.”

  She wrote that one, too.

  “Good girl. Just leave the paper there, and rise and go to yon computer, if you would. Resume your seat there.” He sat down at the desk, put the rifle down on its top, and pointed to the phone in front of him. “Can I work this? Or do you have to do something there?”

  “You can work it.”

  “Fine.” He picked up the receiver, and dialed police headquarters.

  It was answered after one ring: “Police headquarters, Officer Nieman.” The officer's voice sounded a little thin and strained.

  “Hello, Fred, let me talk to E. The man with the machine gun.” He felt the women's eyes on his face as he said the last words, and even though he wore a hood he forced himself not to smile.

  Edgars came on the line, sounding wary. “Yeah?”

  “G here at the phone company. Everything's fine. You can reach me at 7-3060. Got that?”

  “Got it. Everything's under control here, too. You're the first call.”

  “May I be the only.”

  “Right.”

  Grofield broke the connection and called the firehouse. The shaky voice this time said only, “Hello?”

  “Hello, George. I want to talk to C.”

  “Who?”

  “The man with the rifle.”

  “Oh. Oh!”

  Chambers came on, saying, “How's it going, man?”

  “Fine. Everything under control. Let me give you the number here, in case you have to reach me.”

  “Hold on. George, give me a pencil. And a sheet of paper. Okay, go ahead.”

  Grofield gave him the number, and then hung up and got to his feet. He took the walkie-talkie off, set it on the desk next to the rifle, and hunched his shoulders to get the stiffness out of them. He looked over at Mary Deegan and said, “Mary, you got direct distance dialing here?”

  “Not yet.”

  “If anybody wants to call out of town, they've got to go through you, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” He picked up the rifle and walked across the room to her. “If anybody calls you, I want to listen in. How do we work that?”

  “You could sit there, I guess. Put that headset on, and plug that jack in there.”

  “Fine. Now we're set, aren't we?”

  “I suppose so.”

  Grofield leaned back in the chair, feeling the unfamiliar closeness of the headset against his ears. The music had a high richness to it now, and he was bringing it back from over Germany, the copilot dead in the seat beside him. They'd said daylight low-level precision bombing was impossible, but he'd helped to prove them wrong. Radio silence, radio silence. The earphones were silent on his head.

  Six years, eleven jobs. Every one of them had had the moments of high drama, complete with music and camera angles and dramatic lighting effects but they'd all had stretches like this, too, of waiting, silence, and boredom.

  Twenty thousand. Maybe more. Too late to get into summer stock now, but there was always winter stock in Florida or Texas or somewhere. This time, why not spend the money the smart way? Produce. Get into the money end of the damn racket for once.

  But you couldn't produce stock and act in it both. He'd already tried it, in Maine, three summers ago. But he liked to act and he hated paperwork, and the summer had been a disaster. So he'd do the same as always, act for peanuts in winter stock, throw away the dough on a convertible and a good apartment and good times, and by the end of the season he'd be broke again, looking around for another job. Number twelve.

  All except number one had been fine. Competent professional jobs, because he was working with the right people. The first one had been a mess. Begun as a gag, actually gone through with only because nobody wanted to be the first to quit, and successful by pure luck.

  In Pennsylvania it was. A repertory company, twelve of them on a shares basis, and the company not even earning enough to maintain itself. Four of the guys had started talking about stealing, as a gag: “If business keeps up this lousy, we'll have to knock over a gas station or two.” Then the gag got specific; a supermarket in a suburban area forty miles away.

  When it stopped being a gag and started being reality Grofield couldn't say for sure. But it became reality, as they worked out plan after plan for weeks, and then they went ahead and did it, wearing masks, carrying prop guns loaded with blanks, in an old beat-up Chevrolet with mud smeared on the license plates. They got forty-three hundred dollars, and they never were caught.

  That was number one, and afterward Grofield swore it would never happen again; you couldn't bank on dumb luck forever. But he was still in general contact with a guy he'd known in the army, and one time he mentioned the supermarket score to him—the only one he'd told about it, up till then—and the guy laughed and offered him a spot driving in a jewelry store heist. It was just driving the car, and he was broke again, summer stock being over and nothing having turned up in the city. So he did it.

  And he was still doing it. He was probably the only actor in the United States who could really afford to work at Equity minimum.

  Over on the desk, the walkie-talkie spoke, in a tin imitation of Parker's voice, saying, “Radio station taken care of. Nobody was there.”

  Wycza's voice said, “Shall we start?”

  “Wait till we get the west gate.”

  “It's almost twelve-thirty.”

  “I know.”

  Mary Deegan said, suddenly, “You're going to steal the payroll, aren't you?”

  “Ask me no questions, 111 tell you no lies. I tell you what, let's play Twenty Questions. You know how to play Twenty Questions?”

  “Wha-what?”

  “Twenty Questions. Do you know how to play it?”

  She nodded, doubtfully.

  “Good.” He looked around, saw the walkie-talkie. “I'm thinking of something mineral.”

  All at once she started to cry. She ducked her head and whispered, “I'm, I'm sorry. It's my nerves.”

  “That's all right, Mary. It's just stage fright, don't worry about it.”

  4

  Kerwin didn't take any part in wrecking the radio station equipment. For himself, he didn't even think it was necessary, but Parker and the others did, so let them do it.

  He stood in the doorway, watching the street. The prowl car was parked there, at the curb, with the station wagon behind it. There was absolute silence from the street, but from inside there were the crashes of metallic breakage.

  Kerwin liked metal. He liked machinery, liked to watch it work, liked to fiddle with it and learn about it and understand it. At home, he was a ham radio operator, and a do-it-yourselfer. He owned two prewar cars, and they both ran like watches. In one corner of his basement there was a model train layout, full of drawbridges and complex signal systems; he ran the model railroad with his neighbor, and two pipes under the driveway between their houses carried track which linked their systems.

  He liked machinery and he hated to see it destroyed. When it came to safes, he liked to use drill and screwdriver and wrench and his own hands; men who relied on nitro were just bums and amateurs, not professional safe men at all. And when it came to the kind of wreckage Parker and Littlefield and Phillips were doing in the radio station now, Kerwin wanted no part of it. He didn't approve.

  The sounds stopped. A few seconds later, they came out, all wearing their hoods, and Parker said, “Clea
r?”

  Kerwin nodded. “Clear.”

  They went out and got into the two cars, Parker and Phillips in the prowl car, Kerwin and Littlefield in the wagon. They drove back up Whittier to Raymond, turned left, and drove down to the end, to the west gate of the plant.

  This part had no effect on Kerwin at all. People were just fuses; they had to be deactivated before you could get to work. He and Littlefield waited while the patrol car nosed forward to the gate, and the guard came out of his booth, waving in a friendly way. Then the guard stopped, and raised his hands, and Kerwin saw Phillips get out of the car, walk around it, disarm the guard, and walk him back into his shack.

  Littlefield cleared his throat and said, “Think they need us?”

  “If they do, they'll motion to us.”

  “I guess so.”

  Parker had got out of the car now, too, and had gone into the shack. After a couple of minutes, Phillips came out wearing the guard's uniform. He attached a metal sign to the already closed gate, and got into the car just as Parker also came out of the shack.

  Littlefield cleared his throat again. “It's certainly running smooth,” he said.

  Kerwin glanced at him and saw how tightly he was holding the steering wheel. “Nothing to be nervous about,” he said.

  “That's right.” Littlefield coughed, and cleared his throat.

  The prowl car had backed away from the gate, and swung to the right. Littlefield put the wagon in gear, and followed the prowl car down Copper Street toward the other gate. Closed luncheonettes and bars and barber shops and tailors were on their right, and the fence on their left. Beyond the fence were the dark bulks of the plant buildings, and beyond them, in total darkness, the sheer wall of the canyon.

  Again, the station wagon hung back while the prowl car drove up to the gate. The same actions were repeated, and then Parker waved to them to come forward. Phillips had opened the gate, and was standing there looking natural and easy in the guard uniform. He gave them a mock salute as the wagon passed him, following Parker along the blacktop company street between the buildings.

  By the time Littlefield stopped in front of the main building, Kerwin had his bag of tools ready in his lap. They got out of the car, joined Parker, and the three of them went into the building.

  As far as Kerwin was concerned, defusing people was Parker's job. Kerwin's job was simply to stand there and add numerical strength. He entered the office with Parker and Littlefield, and belatedly drew the revolver from his shoulder holster. Guns were about the only machines he wasn't interested in; he held this one absentmindedly, waiting without listening while Parker talked to the frightened man awhile, and then Parker and Littlefield tied and gagged him. Once they were done, he put the revolver away again—the safety hadn't been off yet tonight—and said, “Where is it?”

  “Through here.”

  Littlefield was sitting at the desk now, clearing his throat and watching the telephone. Kerwin followed Parker through a doorway, across an office, down a hall, and through another office. He waited while Parker forced a locked door, then went into the room and looked at the safe.

  It was dark green, with yellow designs. Approximate exterior dimensions, four feet high, two and a half feet wide, three feet deep. Simple combination lock. Parker had turned on the office lights, because the windows here faced the rear of the building. Kerwin walked over and set his bag on a desk and patted the top of the safe.

  Parker said, “You all set?”

  “Mmm? Yes, of course.”

  5

  Paulus sat on the floor in the back of the truck, and fidgeted. It was pitch black in the truck, nothing to see, nothing to do. Paulus liked to be able to observe what was going on, to see symmetry in the motion around him, and to see whether or not things were going right. Sitting here in the truck, in darkness, while actions important to him were going on outside, was torture.

  From time to time, Wycza's walkie-talkie spoke out in Parker's voice, saying where they were, what they'd done. That they'd ruined the equipment in the radio station. A little later, that they'd captured the guard on the west gate. Just the bare facts, unadorned.

  It wasn't enough. Paulus wanted to be able to see. He wanted to look at the radio station equipment and know it was no longer workable. He wanted to see the guard, find out his name, watch his reactions, gauge the possible danger he might be in during the course of the night. He wanted to know precisely the situation at the telephone company, the firehouse, the police station. He wanted to see exactly where Salsa was stationed near the town line. He wanted to have a clipboard, and a list, and a pencil with which to check off completed items satisfactorily handled. He wanted to see symmetry and balance and precision.

  A match flared; Wycza lighting a stub of cigar. In the small light, Paulus again saw the plank floor and metal side of the truck, saw Wycza and Wiss and Elkins sitting, like himself, on the floor, saw his own sturdy suitcase full of tools and the weatherbeaten black bag—like a doctor's bag—in which Wiss kept his equipment. He looked at his watch, but he wasn't fast enough; Wycza blew out the match.

  He shook his head in annoyance. It was important to know the time, know whether or not they were keeping to the schedule. He reached for his own matches.

  But a clinging self-consciousness wouldn't let him light a match just to see his watch; he didn't want the others to know he felt that strongly about knowing the time. So he got out his cigarettes, too, though he didn't particularly want a cigarette. He struck the match, lit the cigarette, and kept the match aflame till he'd read his watch.

  Twelve thirty-five.

  Not too bad. He'd be in at the bank vault well before one. He shook the match out, and sat holding the cigarette, not smoking it.

  The walkie-talkie spoke again: “Got the east gate. Going into the main office now. You can get started, W.”

  They had to use the initials because of Grofield. He was at the telephone company, with one of the walkie-talkies, and the women there could hear everything it said. It was Paulus who'd suggested the initials.

  Wycza was saying, “Okay. You gonna patrol now?”

  “After we get the main office.”

  “Check.”

  Paulus clambered to his feet, felt around in the dark, and picked up his suitcase. He moved toward the rear of the truck, and before he got there Elkins pushed the door open and jumped down to the street. Elkins reached up and took the black bag from Wiss, and Wiss clambered down more carefully. Paulus waited for Wycza, and as Wycza passed said, “You go first, I'll hand you my suitcase.”

  “Sure.”

  Being the last out, Paulus was careful to close the truck doors again. He took the suitcase back from Wycza and stepped up on the sidewalk. Wiss and Elkins had already started across the street.

  Directly ahead of Paulus was the Merchants' Bank building, with the offices of Nationwide Finance & Loan Corporation on the second floor. The building was modernistic, made mostly of glass and chrome. Even the doors were mainly glass.

  Paulus set his suitcase down near the doors and waited for Wycza to let him in. Wycza got his revolver from its shoulder holster, and used the butt to break the door glass. There were quieter, more scientific ways to do it, but they weren't worried about noise here, and the scientific ways were all slower. Wycza reached through, unlocked the doors from the inside, and pushed them open.

  Paulus followed him inside. Wycza had put his revolver away now and taken out a flashlight. The narrow beam showed wood-paneled counters with marble tops, and cream composition flooring, and a free-form copper bas-relief sprawled out on one wall. The vault door was in plain sight on the rear wall, huge and round and complex, looking like an escape hatch on a spaceship or the entrance to a torpedo tube in a submarine.

  After the front door, there were no more obstacles to the vault, no doors to unlock or gates to jimmy. They lifted a flap at the end of the counter, walked through the loan department, took a left around a railing, and there was the vault door
in front of them. Desks and railings and countertops hid them almost completely from the street.

  While Wycza held the flashlight, Paulus studied the vault door. He nodded in recognition of the type, walked back and forth to consider it from various angles, and rubbed the knuckles of his hands together as he thought it out. Drill four holes, load, blast. He pursed his lips, and nodded. Now he was absorbed, completely absorbed.

  Wycza said, “Any problems?”

  “I don't think so. Shine the light here a minute.”