Abel Baker Charley

by John R. Maxim

  Baker nodded. “Give me twenty minutes or so. I'll stay around until I know you and Tanner are clear. Is your car still downstairs?”

  “It should be. A blue Oldsmobile just west of the Park Lane Hotel. Bend the windshield wipers forward if it's safe to use.” The elevator hummed to a stop and the doors slid open. Harrigan placed a hand against them. “You're going to see Sonnenberg, I take it. It must be damned important to you if you're trusting both your daughter and Tanner Burke to a soulless bastard like myself.”

  Baker lowered his head and stared at his shoes. “I'm sorry about that,” he said. “What you said about learning to live with it...I haven't found the way yet.”

  “And you think Sonnenberg might have some ideas? He won't let you go, Baker. He didn't go to all this trouble just to shake hands and wish you godspeed.”

  “I'm not going to give him a choice.”

  Harrigan stared at Baker appraisingly, his hand still on the rubber, reluctant to see Baker leave with so much unanswered. What could Baker say to Sonnenberg? Threaten him? With what? There was only violence or exposure. Sonnenberg didn't seem a man easily frightened. As for exposure, even assuming Baker knew what there was to expose, Sonnenberg would simply go underground. Well, he thought, one thing at a time. Let's see if Jared Baker can even reach the street before we start planning the rest of his day.

  “Peck figures to have men in the lobby,” he told Baker.

  “They'll be watching for fifteen to light up. You might have more of an edge if you start from another floor.”

  Baker did not respond except that his eyes glazed over ever so briefly. Harrigan saw that and shrugged. Baker knew damn well who was where. “The stairs are clean?” Harrigan asked.

  “At the moment.” Baker tapped Harrigan's staying hand and stepped into the car. “But keep Tanner behind you when you use them.”

  Even as the elevator doors closed on Jared Baker, Harrigan thought he could see his body begin to stiffen.

  Carter Merrick watched the indicator as it stopped on fifteen and stayed there. Too long, he thought. It could have been a bellhop loading someone's luggage. Maybe. Or maybe Baker and Harrigan trying to haul Hackett out in a trunk. Whatever. The indicator began to move. Merrick glanced back at Peterson and cocked his head toward the flashing light. Peterson nodded and unbuttoned his jacket.

  The elevator stopped at eight. Someone getting on, Merrick hoped. Not Baker or Harrigan getting off. No, they wouldn't get off on eight. If you'd walk eight flights, you'd walk fifteen. And if they did, they'd have to come out in the lobby anyway. Merrick had already jammed the downstairs fire doors. Nor could they ride to the lower level as long as Merrick kept the down buttons lit up.

  The red lights were moving again. Get ready. Look relaxed. Look bored. Damn! The screamer with the purse was on her feet and standing too close behind him. And the jerk with the street map was moving into Peterson's line of fire. Merrick shifted his position and the woman moved with him. The indicator light passed three. The hell with it. He'd knock her on her ass if he had to. Merrick dropped his eyes to the elevator threshold and kept them there.

  The doors opened abruptly, almost making him jump. Two sets of legs. Don't look up yet, Merrick. Don't look at their faces. Let them go past you. First man's middle-aged. Skinny. Gray hair. Not Harrigan. No woman in the car. The gray-haired man was already stepping by him. Now the second man. No, he's not moving. Merrick raised his eyes, indifferently he hoped, toward the man who hung back. Younger. Taller. Yes. Yes, it's Baker—

  Merrick's mouth fell open. The face he saw was the face in Burleson's photographs except—Jesus! He clawed at the pistol in his open briefcase, stepping backward at the same time. But he hit something. The woman, damn her, was in his way. More than that, she was resisting him, leaning into him. Her hand, oh goddamn it, was reaching under his arm and covering his gun butt.

  Merrick never saw the hand that snaked to his throat. He saw only the face. The green wolf eyes behind tinted glasses and the terrible grin beneath them. He felt his body floating toward the face as his cheeks and temples swelled, and he felt his shoe tips stuttering across the carpet. Oh God, the barred glass doors were sliding closed behind him. Merrick wanted to scream but could not. He could only kick and twist and slap against the arm that was holding him, hanging him, a full foot off the floor. The face grinned wider at his efforts. The breath coming from its mouth blew at him in short, panting bursts, and the temples pulsated from a heartbeat that was impossibly fast. The face faded behind a burst of light and Merrick remembered nothing more.

  In the lobby, the tanned woman turned as if bewildered at the sound of Merrick's partner running toward her from the revolving door. She saw shock on Peterson's face, but she saw also that her own face meant nothing to him. She saw him hesitate, as if unsure of what he'd seen, and then she saw him back away, slowly at first, then at a run toward the doors facing Central Park. Melanie Laver relaxed. She allowed a small automatic to fall from her fingers and closed her Gucci purse over it. The indicator light read L for lower level. Melanie nodded almost imperceptibly to the tourist in the safari jacket. Roger Hershey folded his street map, shouldered his rucksack, and headed calmly toward the revolving door. Melanie took the next elevator down.

  She found Merrick easily. Melanie followed the trail of his briefcase and an odd-looking pistol toward a passageway leading to a Trader Vic's restaurant. Inside the passageway, near the fire door Merrick had jammed earlier, he had simply been thrown aside. The agent was alive, convulsing, his face in the spilled contents of a cigarette urn. The fire door was partly open, torn from its lower hinge and hanging at a slant. Sonnenberg was quite right, Melanie decided. One cannot expect this one to pick up after himself.

  Setting her purse on the floor, Melanie Laver grasped the semiconscious agent by his lapels and dragged him to the stairway inside the fire door. There, she stripped him of his identification, his keys, and his handcuffs, manacling him with the latter to a cast iron radiator. Eyeing his kneecap, she hefted the dart pistol by its barrel, considering whether to disable the agent further. No need, she decided. He would not be useful for several days. Surely not by tonight. After that it would make no difference. Instead, she stripped away his necktie and gagged him.

  Next, Melanie returned to her purse and to the overturned urn, which she straightened as best she could, leaving Merrick's weapons and the contents of his pockets in the hollow base. Then, pausing to examine a nail she'd broken on Mer-rick's lapel, she made her way to the nearest exit that Jared Baker could have taken.

  “Who was the woman, Charley?” Baker was on Fifty-eighth Street, walking slowly toward the rear entrance of the Park Lane, a few doors west of the Plaza.

  ”a friend. ”

  “What friend? I have no friends here”

  ”i don 't know, she said something, she said abel makes messes and doesn 't clean up. abel says never mind that, abel says bring him out and leave him out until we're away from here, abel says you wait too long and we'll all die, even when you don't want us to all die.”

  “Does Abel remember my promise? ”

  “abel remembers, i remember, you'll let them kill us all if abel doesn't let you be you and if you can't have tina. abel says he will be good, but you shouldn 't get us killed not on purpose and—” Charley stopped as if he'd been interrupted.

  Baker couldn't hear, but he felt Charley's surprise at what was being said. Charley giggled, “abel says please,” Charley told him. Charley giggled again like a schoolchild at a classmate's humiliation, “please please please.”

  Baker nodded to himself. Abel was right, he knew, about him taking too long. He'd held Abel right on the edge and sent him back when the man got on at the eighth floor. The man kept glancing at him. He almost wasn't ready when the doors opened to the lobby. If the woman hadn't blocked Peck's man . . .

  “Abel.” Baker paused by a glass-framed poster near the marquee of the Park Lane. “Abel, if I let you out, you must walk ve
ry slowly. Do you understand that, Abel?”

  “slowly, yes.”

  “You must not look at the people you pass. Your eyes will frighten them. You must look down all the time and you must keep your hand across your mouth. If someone is in your path, you must walk around him, Abel. If someone bumps into you, you must say ‘Sorry’ and slowly walk away. You cannot bump them back or grab their throats or do anything but walk away slowly. If there is a chair or a table in your way, you cannot kick it aside or step on it. You must walk around things and people. Do you understand that, Abel?”

  “slowly, look down, don yt grab, don 't kick. yes. call me, baker, please.”

  Baker waited for one cruising cab to pass and then stepped into the doorway of a clam bar, where he pretended to study the luncheon menu. Two businessmen left the Park Lane and proceeded at a half-trot toward Fifth Avenue. Baker listened. Whatever their thoughts were, they were not of him. But farther in that direction he could hear the one named Biaggi, thinking Baker's name and cursing the woman who would not stop asking him for the way to the Empire State Building. The woman again. And through the doors of the Park Lane and on the side facing Central Park, he could hear the one called Burleson. Baker drew his tinted glasses from his pocket and fixed them securely over his ears.

  “Abel,” he said aloud. “Come out now, Abel.”

  Scotty McGuire was in his twenty-sixth year as a bellman at the Park Lane. He'd been promoted once, back in 1989, for climbing down three elevator shafts to help guests who were stranded because of the blackout that hit Manhattan that year. The promotion didn't last long, not that he cared. Scotty never wanted to be a bell captain anyway. Boring job. Carrying bags in and out of the storeroom all day and never talking to no one except to tell them where's the airport limo. Never alone upstairs with some of the big stars and ballplayers that stayed here. Never a chance to get autographs because they're coming and going too fast and definitely no chance to pass the time of day with them. Scotty had over four hundred autographs in his collection. Maybe fifty on photographs. Some with him in them. Orson Welles wrote practically a speech on his. Hell of a guy.

  The guy with the yellow glasses might be someone, he thought at first. Not that he was familiar. Just that there was something different about him. Mostly the way he walks. His eyes down on the carpet like his neck is stuck while the rest of his body moves in a kind of jerky slow motion like what you see with fighters when they're moving through the crowd toward the ring. He could be a fighter. Kind of old for it, but whatever he is, he's a mean-looking son of a bitch.

  Scotty decided that the guy wasn't anybody. He had just about dismissed him from his mind when the guy glanced at him with a look that said he thought Scotty McGuire wasn't nothing either. And that right there was pissing McGuire off. Keep moving, buddy. He had an odd thought that the man could hear him. Just keep moving. You try anything in my hotel, I'll bust a chair over your head.

  Abel forced his mind from the little man in the red coat who'd been staring at him. The little man did not matter. What mattered was the bigger man who stood just inside the glass doors of the main entrance. No. Two men now. The one called Peterson was coming in. Frightened. Too loud. Burleson quieted him and brought a metal thing to his lips. Wait, Abel. Wait and soon there will be three.

  Slowly.

  ”i hear you, baker, slowly”

  Abel dropped his hand from his mouth and eased closer, hugging the wall where he could do so, just on the edge of their line of sight. He saw the one called Burleson snap his fingers toward a man outside and turn his palm down in a calming gesture. Only twenty feet now, Abel thought. Slowly. Wait for the new man to come in. Wait until they all come together and they lean close and talk about Baker.

  Biaggi pushed through the door. Abel knew him. The one who slinked through wet grass. The one he could have hurt last night but did not so that Biaggi could tell what he had seen Abel do. But now he had told and now Abel could hurt him. He could hurt them all so that they could not use their darts and guns. He would squeeze their necks with his hands the same way Biaggi squeezed the neck of Harrigan's friend with his wire thing. Abel coiled his body.

  “Something I can do for you, buddy?” A hand touched his arm.

  “No, please,” Abel whispered, his wolf eyes locked on Burleson. He began to move away from the smaller man, McGuire's fingers tapped insolently against his back.

  “Don't,” Abel hissed. “Thank you, please” His right hand reached back against the bellhop's chest and pressed him an arm's length away as he stepped toward Burleson.

  ”A wise guy, huh?” McGuire stepped inside the outstretched arm and bent it into a hammerlock against the small of Abel's back. It was a powerful arm, he knew at once, and he felt a stutter in it much too fast to be a heartbeat. But the arm did not resist him. The arm ignored him. The man continued to move away, indifferent to McGuire's grip. McGuire dug in a heel.

  “This way, buddy,” he said quietly. “Security officer wants to talk to you.” He tried steering Abel toward a door to his right.

  “don't hurt him, abel. do not attract attention.”

  ”I can crush his hand, Baker. He'll be in shock. He won 't scream until I'm gone.”

  “no. there's a room there, the luggage room, take him there and see if there's a way to make him stay there.

  ”Abel saw the door that Baker must have meant. There were suitcases there. And a luggage dolly. It was near the other door that the little man wanted him to enter. Abel turned in that direction, glancing around the lobby. No one had noticed them.

  “What if there's nothing to make him stayf Baker? What if there's another man in there?”

  “then hit them in their stomachs, nothing more, that will give you time.”

  “Your way will kill us one day, Baker.”

  A step away from the security officer's door, Abel rotated the hand that McGuire thought he was holding fast and swung the small man fully around so that he was tucked under Abel's arm. “Hey!” the startled bellhop gasped. Abel squeezed an arm under his rib cage and made him quiet. McGuire tried to make other sounds but he had no air for them. In another stride, Abel was through the luggage room door, snapping the lock as he entered.

  They were alone. No one was following. It was a small room without windows. Wire racks filled with luggage covered three walls. On the near end was a table laid out with materials for packing.

  “the tape, abel. use the tape.”

  Abel tore a length of plastic packing tape from its dispenser and pressed it in a single motion against the mouth of Scotty McGuire. Then, snatching the roll, he pressed McGuire face down upon the table and, like a frenzied spider, began wrapping McGuire's chest and arms. McGuire was kicking now, suddenly terrified by the knowledge that a human being could do this to him. Abel seized one kicking leg by its knee and pressed his fingertips at the edges of the floating kneecap, looking all the while into McGuire's eyes. McGuire saw the look and made himself relax, even under the pain of Abel's grip. The man's eyes told him that the kneecap would be torn from its joint if the leg kicked again. Abel quickly wrapped both legs at the knees and ankles, and then, slowing himself at Baker's order, he stepped once more into the lobby.

  The men were gone. A young couple stood saying goodbye in the space they'd filled. Abel growled in disgust.

  “go to the oldsmobile, abel now”

  ”I would have had them all, Baker. They're gone because you let them go ”

  “the oldsmobile, abel. another of them will be there, you can hurt that one.”

  “You pick and choose, Baker. You stay away from fights. You try not to hurt. But all of these men will hurt you. None of them would let you go. You let them go and they come again. It's stupid, Baker.”

  “the oldsmobile, abel. then you can look for the others.”

  Baker knew where the others were. They were walking, almost running, toward the Plaza. Their hands were on the butts of guns that fired bullets. Baker listened for the man in
the Oldsmobile whom he'd heard earlier. There was nothing. He could still be sitting there, he thought, with a mind gone blank or even napping, although Baker doubted it. If he'd left the car and was watching it, he'd still be thinking Baker. But Baker heard nothing. The man must be far away.

  Abel waited inside the glass doors until a cluster of pedestrians passed heading west. He slipped onto the sidewalk and fell behind them, his face down, his hand again covering his mouth. Even so, a woman waking the other way looked at him and shuddered, but she kept on without glancing back. Abel passed Harrigan's Oldsmobile and then two more cars before stepping quickly into the street and doubling back toward the driver's seat. Burleson's man was there. Not in the front seat but in the back, crouched low. The window nearest him was open three inches from the top.

  Abel moved quickly. In one stride from the bumper of the Oldsmobile, Abel pulled the cuff of Baker's jacket over the palm of his right hand. In the second stride, he closed that hand over the partly opened window and snapped it inward, his other hand following the spray of glass and clamping across the agent's throat. His body jerked toward Abel and lifted an inch or more, but there was no resistance. The man did not react.

  “never mind, abel. he's dead, look near his ear.”

  Abel saw it now. A small neat hole near the hairline. And there was blood from his nose, its coagulation interrupted by the pressure of Abel's grip. Abel pulled the head toward him for a closer look, then flung the body down so it sprawled across the footwell.

  “let's go, abel. i'm coming back out”

  Abel stiffened. “There are others. Burleson. Biaggi. More. Finish them now, Baker, and they`re finished always. Finish them and we'll be safe. Tanner Burke too, Baker” he added almost desperately. “Tanner Burke will be safe and you can be happy. And Tina, Baker. Tina will be safe.”

  “come off it, abel. charley, where’s tanner?”

  “coming, safe”

  “baker's coming too, abel. i'm going to leave this car for tanner, that's how she will be safe, you and i are going to talk to sonnenberg.”