Quittner had gotten to his feet and was over by the French doors, looking out at the floodlit shrubbery and lawn. Being casual, not knowing what he would say but only that he had to start with some sort of try, Calesian stood up and strolled over next to him. “One thing’s for sure,” he said, also looking out toward the lawn. “He won’t get in here, anyway.”
“He’ll come for his friend,” Quittner said.
Calesian looked sharply at him, surprised by the calm assurance of the man. How could he be so positive what Parker would do?
“I think he’ll call,” Calesian said. “Sometime tomorrow. The way he worked it with Al Lozini.”
”He’ll come for his friend.”
Despite the situation he was in, Calesian felt irritation and couldn’t help showing it. “What makes you so sure?”
Quittner glanced at Calesian. His eyes were pale blue, they almost looked blind. Without expression, he said, “You shouldn’t have sent him that finger. He wasn’t the right man for that.”
It wasn’t smart to try defending himself, but Calesian couldn’t hold back. “That’s easier to see now,” he said. “At the time, it seemed the right thing to do.”
“He wasn’t the right man for that. He never was.”
Quittner turned his head again, looking out at the lawn. Calesian tried to find something else to say in his own defense, but was distracted by the sound of the den door opening. It was Buenadella.
He looked terrible. It was amazing how much he’d changed, just overnight. Inside his big frame he looked shriveled and stooped. His face was fixed in downward curving lines, like the unhappy side of a comedy-tragedy mask. He had sent his family out of the city and he should have gone with them, but he’d insisted on sticking around. Not that he could do any good; he’d become an old woman, fretful and frightened.
Dulare was just hanging up the phone. Looking up, he said, “How’s it going, Dutch?”
“Any news? Did they find him?” A faint whining note had come into Buenadella’s voice; it was the worst of the new characteristics, weak and grating.
“Nothing yet,” Dulare said. “How’s life upstairs?”
“The doctor says Green was awake for a while.”
“No shit,” Dulare said.
Quittner turned away from the window, his attention caught. Calesian kept watching Quittner.
“Just for a few minutes,” Buenadella said.
Quittner, walking over to the desk, said, “Did anybody talk to him?”
“He wasn’t awake that way, to have a conversation. It’s just his eyes were open for a little while.”
“If he really wakes up,” Quittner said to Dulare, “we want to talk to him.”
Calesian, having stayed over by the French doors, touched his palm to one of the glass panes. It was warm, warmer than the air in the room, so it must still be hot outside, even though the glare of floodlights made the greenery out there look cool.
Buenadella said, petulantly, “I don’t see why we don’t kill him. That’s the only reason Parker’s coming here, isn’t it? Kill him, leave him on a street downtown, the way Parker left Shevelly.”
Dulare, speaking with controlled impatience, said, “He’s a playing card. So long as we have him, Parker can still be ready to deal.”
“What if he tries to break in here?”
“Good,” Dulare said. “I’d love it.”
Calesian turned and looked out the window again. Buenadella was saying something else, that whine still sounding in his voice, but Calesian didn’t listen. He was trying to think of how to square himself with Quittner.
Did somebody move there? Out toward the end of the lawn, amid the individual clumps of bushes.
No. It was just nerves. Calesian squeezed his eyes shut and looked out again at the glare of light. Nothing. He would let Quittner know just how much clout he had in the police force, how many men owed him favors. Then the lights went out.
Forty-nine
Wiss carried the bomb, one he’d made in an empty soft-drink bottle out of materials from his safe-cracking bag. Elkins did the driving, and when they reached the electric company substation he merely slowed down, looping up onto the sidewalk while Wiss leaned out of the car window and tossed the bottle underhand. It arched up over the fence as Elkins accelerated away, landing in the middle of the high-voltage relay equipment, and exploding on contact. It wasn’t a very big explosion, nor very loud, but it cut off all electric service in that section of the city. Driving along in a world suddenly without streetlights or traffic lights, with utter darkness on all sides of them, Wiss and Elkins headed back again toward the center of the city; they had one more job to do tonight.
When the lights went out, the darkness was more complete than city dwellers ever know. High thin stars defined the moonless sky, but the earth was black wool, across which men stumbled, blinking, moving their arms out in front of them like ant feelers. The defenders in the Buenadella house stared out windows at nothingness, clutching guns, squinting, trying to see with their ears but hearing nothing more than their own breathing and faint creaking noises from the man at the next window. “Shut up!” they whispered at one another. “I think I hear something.” A couple of them, seeing light flecks before their eyes, fired aimlessly into the dark, the muzzle flashes a quick red light that they didn’t know to look away from, making them more blind than ever.
The two men inside the TV repair truck across the street, surveillance specialists from the state CID, didn’t know at first there was anything wrong. They had their own electric power inside the truck, and the camera through which they looked at the world outside was equipped with infrared. But then, just as they were realizing something had happened, the rear doors of the truck opened, a flashlight shone in at them, and a voice said, “Don’t reach for any guns.”
They might have reached for guns anyway, despite the fact that they couldn’t see past the hard brightness of the flashlight, if they hadn’t simultaneously heard the sound of shooting flare up over at the Buenadella house, reminding them that they were after all only technicians. Bewildered, but understanding instinctively that this wasn’t a mess they wanted to involve themselves in, they both raised their hands.
Tom Hurley held the flashlight, while Ed Mackey with his hood over his face climbed into the truck, disarmed the two men, and tied them together back to back with their belts and shoelaces. Hurley said, “Make sure that camera isn’t working.”
Mackey looked at the camera, then hit it three times with a gun butt. “It isn’t working,” he said, and he and Hurley left the truck and went over to the house.
Stan Devers had gone up a telephone pole half a block away shortly before the lights went out. He was equipped with insulated gloves and a pair of heavy wire cutters, and while there was still light to see by, he made sure he had the group of lines leading to the area of the Buenadella house. When the lights went out he worked by feel, scissoring through the lines, hearing the musical notes when they snapped. Finished, he dropped the wire cutters into the oceanic darkness below him, and went slowly backward down the pole, feeling for the metal rails. He had no sense of height in this blackness, and it soon seemed to him it was taking too long to get down the pole. Leg down, hand down, leg down, hand down; surely he should have reached the ground by now. A stupid panic tried to rise up in his chest, and he felt the idiotic urge to just jump out from the pole into the black, drop the rest of the distance, however long it was, get this damn thing over with. And still he kept inching and inching and inching his way down the rough wood surface; and when his foot did finally thud against the ground, it came as a surprise.
The three drivers, Mike Carlow and Philly Webb and Nick Dalesia, had been waiting in three cars parked a block away. When the darkness hit, they drove forward, using parking lights only. Ahead of them they saw the spot of light where Mackey and Hurley were dealing with the men in the TV repair truck. They drove on by that, and made the turn onto Buenadella’s property; as they
turned, they switched on their headlights, high beams, four bright lights per car.
Men upstairs in the front windows had seen the faint outline of automobiles coming, defined by the yellow glow of parking lights, the dim red luster of taillights. They’d readied themselves to fire, but the sudden blinding glare of headlights left them with no targets to shoot at.
The three cars ignored the circular driveway. Spreading out across the lawn, evading the crooked sundial, they came to a stop about twenty feet from the house, in a widely separated row, all pointed directly at the front door. In all the surrounding blackness, the facade of the Buenadella house showed up like a painted bas-relief on a velvet wall.
The three drivers got out of their cars and moved quickly around behind them. They had pistols in their hands, and they used the cars as shields as they scanned the front windows of the house. Anyone intending to shoot out the headlights would have to show himself in a window; at the first sign of any movement in one of those windows, all three drivers would open fire. The headlights would stay on.
At the rear of the house, Parker and Handy McKay and Dan Wycza and Fred Ducasse had waited for the darkness, crouching in the shrubbery at the far end of the lawn. In the lighted windows inside the house they could see men moving back and forth, in conversation together or watching, and each of them chose an indoor target. Parker, on one knee with his gun hand supported on the other knee, sighted on the figure in the French doors in Buenadella’s den. That was Calesian there, and it was right to kill him this way, with their roles reversed.
When the lights went out, Parker squeezed off two shots. He heard the other three around him firing, and when they stopped, there was a ragged response of gunfire from the house. “Wait it out,” he said, speaking into the darkness.
Dan Wycza’s voice sounded from his left, saying, “I wonder did I get mine.”
That was all any of them said until they saw the sudden blare of headlights from the other side of the house. The house was silhouetted by the lights; it was like an eclipse of the moon.
Parker got to his feet. “All right,” he said, and he and the three others walked forward across the lawn to the house.
Fifty
When the lights went out, Buenadella knew he was a dead man. A small wailing cry came out of his mouth and he wasn’t even aware of it; his eyes were wide open, staring into the darkness, trying to see the thing that was coming to run him down.
He heard the shooting, and the sound of broken glass, and he heard somebody say, “Uhh.” Who was that? Calesian?
Ernie Dulare was cursing: quietly, methodically, in a cold rage, like a man counting to ten. Quittner, his voice soft but his words fast, said, “Stay down. They’re shooting through the windows.”
“Oh, God.” Buenadella felt trapped. He couldn’t be indoors now, he had to be outside. The darkness made the walls and ceiling close in on him, press against him. Moving with unconscious familiarity across the room, he headed toward the French doors, ignoring what Quittner had said about the men outside shooting through the windows. Behind him he could hear Dulare punching vainly at the telephone. “Hello. Hello,” Dulare said, angrily, then he was heard slamming the receiver down. “They’ve cut the line.”
Of course. Buenadella had already known that. He neared the French doors, and someone grasped his arm. Someone breathing noisily through his mouth, as though he had severe sinus trouble.
Buenadella could be no more afraid. He accepted this with the calm of paralysis, saying, “Yes? Yes?”
”Dutch.” It was Calesian, his voice sounding clogged “Dutch. It’s—” The hand tugged at his arm; Calesian wanted him closer, apparently wanted to whisper to him.
Buenadella leaned forward, dazzled by the darkness, having no idea what any of this was about. He felt Calesian’s warm breath on his cheek, and turned his head, and blood gushed warmly from Calesian’s mouth. It smelled acrid and stinking; Buenadella recoiled from it, his mind filled with confused images of vomiting and slaughterhouses, and his sudden movement destroyed Calesian’s balance. Calesian fell against Buenadella’s side, nearly knocking him over. Buenadella braced himself, flailing backward with one arm for a wall or the desk or anything, and Calesian slid down Buenadella’s body and fell away onto the floor.
Dulare was saying something. Buenadella knew he should be listening, but all his attention was centered on the fact that some soft part of Calesian was still pressed against his ankle and foot.
A hand—again—on his arm; this one rougher, more urgent, shaking him. Dulare’s loud voice: “Dutch? Goddammit, man, is that you?”
“What? What?”
“Listen to me, for Christ’s sake.”
“Calesian,” Buenadella said. He was feeling around with his free hand for Dulare’s position. “He’s shot. Don’t, don’t step on him, he’s down by—”
“Screw Calesian. Do you have an emergency generator in this house, or don’t you?”
“Generator?”
“Electric generator, goddammit.”
Quittner was over by the door somehow, had apparently opened it; the sound of firing was louder from that direction now. Quittner said, as softly as ever, “Something’s happening up front.”
Buenadella tried to concentrate on the question. “Generator. No, we never needed one.”
“We do now,” Dulare said. “Do you have a flashlight in here?”
“Uh—no. In the kitchen there’s one, in a drawer there.”
”Well, if we can’t see,” Dulare said, “neither can they.”
Quittner said, “There’s light up front.”
Dulare said, “There is? Come on, Dutch.”
“Calesian,” Buenadella said helplessly. “He’s on my foot.”
“Oh, for—” There were kicking sounds, sliding sounds, and the pressure left Buenadella’s foot. Dulare’s hand felt for him, grasped his upper arm. “Come on,” he said.
Buenadella went with him. In the hall there was a faint light, they could see the doorway leading to the dining room. Dulare said, “What the hell is that?”
Quittner said, “We’d better go see.”
The three men moved cautiously down the hall, and just as they got to the dining-room doorway a man came through from the other direction: Rigno, one of Dulare’s men. “Mr. Dulare,” he said. “Is that you?” He sounded tense, and a little out of breath.
“What’s going on up there?”
“They got cars,” Rigno said. “They spread them out on the lawn, facing the house, with their headlights on. We stick an arm out the window, they shoot it off.”
Dulare, his frown evident in his voice, said, “What the hell is that for?”
Quittner said, “Because they’re coming from the back.”
Dulare, sounding unconvinced, said, “You mean a diversion?”
“No,” Quittner said. “The only light source is in front. They’ll come in from the back. We’ll be between them and the light, so they’ll be able to see us, but we won’t be able to see them.”
“Son of a bitch,” Dulare said. “We’ve got to put out those fucking headlights.”
“Mr. Dulare,” Rigno said, out of breath and apologetic, “you couldn’t stick a mouse out one of them windows without it getting its head shot off.”
“Come on,” Dulare said. He and Quittner and Rigno hurried away together, toward the front of the house.
Buenadella had come this far only because Dulare had dragged him along. Now Dulare had been distracted by a more urgent problem, and Buenadella was left on his own. For half a minute or so he simply stood where he was, looking at the darkness, listening to the sounds around him: sporadic gunfire, men running, men calling to one another.
Gradually it came in on him what was happening here. This was his home, the home of a legitimate businessman. It was full of armed men, and shooting, and the bitter stink of death. Calesian’s blood was on his shirt and the side of his neck, caking there, itching, still smelling sick. His family had b
een driven from the house, he himself was being destroyed.
By two men. Parker and Green. Parker, and Green.
He looked up toward the ceiling, up where Green was. They should have killed him right away, yesterday afternoon. All of this business; he should be dead now.
Buenadella turned and shambled toward the stairs. There were silences around him, then little flurries of sound: shooting or voices. Then silence again. He ignored it all. made his way to the second floor, and moved down the corridor toward the guest room, where Green was lying. His big frame had always before this given an impression of controlled strength, but now his movements were loose and shuffling, as though his brain were no longer fully in contact with his body.
He reached the closed door of the guest room. This was a dark area of the house, far from front windows. He touched his palms to the door for a moment, feeling the coolness of it, then slowly turned the knob and pushed the door open.
All he could see was the rectangle of the window. He stepped in, then a figure moved in front of that lighter rectangle, and he stopped, suddenly bone-cold with fear.
A voice spoke at him from across the room: “Who is it?”
He wasn’t going to say anything, would pretend there was no one here; then he recognized the speaker. Dr. Beiny. Sagging with relief, leaning his shoulder against the doorpost, Buenadella said, “It’s me. Doctor.”
The doctor, his fright showing through an attempt at waspishness, said, “I shouldn’t be here. This isn’t fair, Mr. Buenadella, I’m not a party to this, I shouldn’t be here at all.”
“You can go,” Buenadella told him. “You can get out of here any time you want.”
“How can I leave, with all this shooting?”
Buenadella moved into the room from the doorway. “Go on now,” he said. He felt a sudden savage pleasure, a need to hurt someone. “Just explain to everybody you’re a noncombatant,” he said. “Tell them you’re a medic.”
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