Comeback

by Richard Stark

  Quindero could, too, though he didn’t want to. Watching the young fool’s profile, Dwayne saw him struggle with it, shaking his head, half-saying words, taking them back, finally saying, as though it were all just nothing but a joke in bad taste, “No, come on.” And then again, asking for mercy, decency, humanity, something, “No, come on, no.”

  “You know who it is,” Calavecci told him, almost crooning now. “Spit it out, Ralph. Tell me the name.”

  Quindero’s mouth hung open. His big eyes filled with tears. He couldn’t seem to move or breathe or blink; certainly he couldn’t talk. Calavecci studied him with mock sympathy, and then said, “Ralph? You really don’t get it? Come on, boy, you’re smarter than that.”

  Dwayne got to his feet, surprising everybody, breaking the moment. Ignoring the punk, he went over to the desk and nodded at Calavecci. “You’re having too good a time,” he said. “I’ll be going off on my own now. That was the Seven Oaks Professional Building? Where you picked these people up?”

  Calavecci didn’t like being interrupted. Irritated, he said, “What do you mean, off on your own?”

  Dwayne turned away, finished with Calavecci, and looked at Quindero’s tear-stained face. “Shut up, kid,” he said, “until you see a lawyer.” And he left.

  Sending them out on patrol was a lot cleaner.

  10

  When Bill Trowbridge woke up, he had to pee real bad. Also, he’d finished the magazines those crooks had let him bring into the locked storage room with him, when they’d taken over the service station. He’d slept for a while, curled up on the hard floor, but now he was awake, and he had to do something, soon.

  He’d figured out who those people had to be. The news of the robbery at the stadium had been all over TV and radio yesterday afternoon, before he’d come to work. They’d said it was three men that had done the job, but they must have gotten that part wrong; it was two men and one woman. And they were hiding from the cops here.

  What to do? They were tough and mean, no question about that. They’d beat up one guy at the stadium so bad he was in the hospital. They were, like the radio and TV said, armed and dangerous. He was lucky all they’d done was lock him in here with the batteries and fan belts.

  On the other hand, he did have to pee. And he didn’t have any more magazines to distract his mind. And who knew how long they meant to keep him in here, or even if they’d remember to let him out before they left. Or if they even intended to let him out. So, for all those reasons, Bill Trowbridge was climbing the walls.

  Literally. The room was deep and narrow, crowded with deep high wooden bins and shelves on both sides, all the way to the top, full of auto parts of various kinds. Fourteen feet up was the ceiling, obscured in darkness, far above the hanging light. Bill climbed up the shelves and bins, finding it easy, using the construction on both sides, and when he got to the top the ceiling was Sheetrock. He punched a hole in it with a length of tailpipe from one of the bins, yanked Sheetrock down and out of the way, dumping the pieces as quietly as possible into nearby empty bins—all the bins above the ten-foot level were empty, dusty, dry—and found two-by-six beams up there, sixteen inches apart. The roof, resting on those beams, was made of planks.

  The storage room had plenty of tools. All Bill had to do was be careful about noise. Using screwdrivers, pliers, a flat-sided tire iron and a wrench, he gouged away sections of plank, exposing the tar paper and then the gravelly tar of the surface of the roof itself.

  The more he worked, the easier it got, because the more room he had to work in. When he first broke through a section of tar paper and tar to the outer air, the sky was still black, but as he worked it began to lighten out there, and when he finally squeezed himself up between two of the support beams and out onto the rough-surfaced roof it was morning. Real early morning, but morning.

  The first thing Bill did was go to the edge of the roof at the back of the building, where it overlooked a narrow stretch of scrubland with bushes and skinny little plane trees on it, and pee over the side, trying to hit branches that wouldn’t make too much noise. Then he looked around, wondering how best to get himself down off this roof, and saw the police car!

  Oh, boy; talk about luck. The police car was even coming here. Bill moved as quickly and silently as he could across the roof, seeing the cop get out of his car over there by the pumps and then walk this way, toward the building.

  Standing at the front edge of the roof, just above the office door, Bill waved his arms over his head to attract the cop’s attention. “Hey!” he called.

  The cop looked up.

  11

  The police were stretched thin, having so many places to search, so many routes to guard, so many barricades to man, so many possibilities to think about. That was why they were doing one-man patrols in what they considered the safest places, and how it was that Liss found a cop all alone in his patrol car, half asleep, parked next to a ramp for a narrow rusty iron bridge over old freight yards. There were a few bars and diners in this neighborhood, a few junkyards and machine shops and auto-repair places, but no homes, and no commercial places open at this hour. Liss circled around into the grassy steep slope above the freight yards, where an old chain-link fence was half broken-down, bent out of the way, rusted and useless. Along there, he found a two-foot length of the metal pipe that had originally been part of the frame of the fence, and held it close along his right leg as he came loping down the empty street toward the patrol car, clutching his upper right arm with his left hand as though he’d been wounded and yelling, “Help! Help!”

  The cop, startled out of a moony doze, saw this wounded man running forward, scrambled rapidly and awkwardly out to the pavement, and took the metal pipe directly across the face. He fell backward, half in and half against his car, dazed but trying to reach his holstered pistol, and Liss slammed the open door into him, pinning him there while he swung the pipe three more times at that head.

  When Liss pulled the door open, the cop slid to the ground. Liss quickly stripped the uniform off him, not wanting blood on it, and stuffed the body into the trunk, noting the shotguns on racks in there, the first-aid equipment, even a small red-handled ax. Couldn’t be better.

  The uniform fit fairly well; good enough. Sitting behind the wheel, engine and heater on, uniform cap on his head, police radio giving him the ebb and flow of movement through the night, Liss waited. No rush any more.

  * * *

  He’d had to rush earlier, hurrying out of the old man’s house across from the stadium when Brenda showed up in the station wagon. As they’d loaded the duffel bags over there, Liss had looked around frantically for a car to steal, but there wasn’t time, and in any case, with so little traffic at this hour, how could he follow them in a car without being spotted?

  So he’d had to do it a different way. It was hard, there were times he thought he was going to fail, but he kept going. Out of necessity, he trailed them on foot.

  What made it a little easier, they were driving slowly, carefully, obeying the law, calling no attention to themselves, stopping at every stop sign, waiting at every traffic light. They parked at the curb for quite a while when the construction trailer blew up and the streets filled with fire trucks and police cars and ambulances and all the rest of it, and he could take a breather then, hidden beside an exterior staircase to an old tenement building.

  After that, when they moved he ran; when they stopped he walked. Sometimes their lights were just faint red dots far away, and once when they made a turn he thought he’d lost them completely. But he managed to keep up, and to see what their idea was at the gas station, and he admired the move. Indoors, safe, warm. They wouldn’t leave till morning, and by then he’d be ready.

  In the meantime, he dozed in the warm comfort of the police car, the crackly snarl of the radio’s infrequent reports keeping him from the mistake of a deeper sleep, and at first light he got out of the car, stretched, went down the slope to relieve himself, got back into the poli
ce car, and drove over to the gas station to get rid of Parker and Mackey and Brenda and get, at last, the goddam money.

  Would they be awake or asleep? It was still very early. They wouldn’t expect trouble after so many peaceful hours hidden away. They didn’t know anyone had any idea they were here. And what would they see when he first showed himself to them? A cop.

  He parked at the gas pumps, like a regular customer, and walked toward the station building, getting the cop’s handgun out of its holster. Advertising posters and grease-pencil announcements obscured much of the office windows, but as he came nearer he saw there was somebody in there, seated at the desk. Parker? Staring at him?

  Did they still have the shotguns?

  Liss was deciding to shoot through the plate glass, get it over with, when movement suddenly made him look up. There was something on the roof! Nothing but a silhouette against the gray morning sky, looming over him, a black figure like something out of horror stories, waving its arms and yelling. Without any thought at all, in quick panic, Liss raised the pistol and squeezed off a wild shot.

  And then all hell broke loose.

  PART THREE

  1

  Parker looked past the notices taped to the gas station window and watched Liss come this way across the blacktop, that handgun sliding out of the holster. Parker’s hands splayed on the metal tabletop in front of him, and he looked down, remembering the shotguns, seeing only the wrench they’d taken away from the kid. He reached for it, even though it was useless, even though he knew Liss was smart enough to shoot him through the window, not bother to come inside. Why should he?

  Parker picked up the wrench, and heard a shot. He stared out at Liss, almost a silhouette against the flat gray morning light out there, and the silhouette was arched backward, the arm with the pistol aimed upward. Liss had fired at what? Something on the roof?

  Parker heaved the wrench through the plate glass and launched himself out of the chair toward the open doorway to the service area. Would the racket wake Brenda? Would she know to get that station wagon moving?

  The answer was yes, but she was even faster than Parker hoped. As he dove through the doorway, meaning to roll, to come up beside the wagon and yank open its rear door, the engine was already kicking over. Before he was on his feet, it was moving, and he came up to see the garage door splinter as the station wagon roared through it. Brenda hunched and grim over the wheel, Mackey just opening his eyes, his mouth a big astonished O, the car screamed through the wreckage it made of the door, spinning and sliding rightward over smashed plywood, bent metal, crushed glass.

  Parker dropped to the concrete floor as the station wagon’s rear wheels rifled broken pieces back into the garage, peppering the walls and tools with chunks of wood, metal and glass. He lay there, listening, hands and feet poised under him, trying to figure what was the best route now. What’s the way out of this now?

  A burglar alarm high on the front of the building began to scream, and Parker wriggled hurriedly backward, toward the office. If Liss came in here …

  The doorway. He climbed it, trying to be invisible on both sides, and when he leaned leftward for a quick look out the office’s smashed window he saw Liss running for the police car, the pistol waving in his hand.

  Sure. Whether or not he knew Parker was still in here, and still alive, it was the money Liss wanted, the money he couldn’t lose sight of.

  Parker watched, because whichever way Liss went, that’s where the money had gone. Liss jumped into the police car, kicked the engine on, spun the wheel, made a sharp U-turn around the pumps, and headed away to the left. Away from that interstate over there. Toward town.

  Some ricocheted something had sliced Parker’s left arm, not deep, but enough to sting. Rubbing it, he went out of the building through the opening where the garage door used to be, and above the insistent wail of the burglar alarm he heard a voice, some voice yelling. He looked around and saw nothing, but then remembered that Liss had fired upward, so he stepped farther from the building to look up, and the kid was up there, sitting on the roof. The kid they’d locked away in the storeroom was up on the roof, sitting there, both hands pressed to his left leg because that’s where Liss had shot him.

  He saw Parker down below, and yelled some more: “Help! Help!”

  “Everybody needs help,” Parker said, and turned away, and went loping toward town.

  2

  Parker walked two blocks. In the second, two police cars raced by him, shrieking, on their way to the burglar alarm at the gas station. At the far end of that block was a diner, just open for the morning’s business. Parker went in there, where a dozen delivery men and salesmen yawned over coffee in their separate spaces. He found a stool at the counter with empty stools on both sides of it, ordered breakfast, and in the mirror on the back wall he watched the street behind him, where an ambulance screamed past, toward the gas station. The waitress brought his ham and eggs and toast and coffee and the ambulance screamed back the other way. Carrying the kid.

  Parker ate, and looked at his own reflection in the mirror, and except for the stained cut on his left sleeve where he’d been nicked he looked all right. Like this is where he would eat breakfast.

  Time to think. He knew the people. Did he know them well enough to find them?

  Liss was the newcomer, but he was the easiest to peg. It was the dead side of his face that told the truth. A competitor, he’d never team up with anybody, not for long. If he had to go in with others to get what he wanted—like the money in those duffel bags—he’d take the absolute first chance that came along to get rid of his partners, and to get rid of them in a way that wouldn’t leave anybody spreading complaints. Single-minded, he’d only look forward; never back. He wouldn’t care if Parker was coming, because in his mind it would simply be somebody else trying for the same thing, the money. It wouldn’t occur to him that for Parker that wasn’t enough, that he wanted more than the money. That he needed Liss dead.

  As for Mackey, he was a mechanic, like Parker. If Parker knew himself, he knew Mackey. He knew he wouldn’t ever bother to cheat Mackey, because they were useful to each other and there’d always be enough for both of them. And he also knew he’d never go out of his way to give Mackey an assist, because Mackey was supposed to be a grown-up who could take care of himself. So that’s the way Mackey would feel.

  Which meant, at this point, Mackey would just keep moving, straight ahead. He wouldn’t even consider the idea he could circle back and find Parker. Why should he? He couldn’t even be sure Parker was still alive, back at the gas station. So Mackey would keep on, and Liss would keep on, right behind him, and if that’s all there was to it, Parker would be the lame third, already out of sight and out of mind.

  But that wasn’t all. Brenda was also in the mix, and Brenda was the only one of them who thought about the future. She would want everything settled, now, today, before they all left this town. She would never want anything out of the past to come catch up with her, farther down the road. She was fast, and she was smart, and she was decisive—look how she tore that station wagon out of there—and Mackey deferred to her, because he’d learned long ago that when he followed Brenda’s advice things worked out okay. So Brenda was the key.

  Liss was following Mackey. Mackey would follow Brenda. Where would Brenda lead?

  The station wagon was marked up now, it had to be. They couldn’t keep it for long. Brenda would lose Liss, she was that good, but then she couldn’t just drive around all day because very soon the cops would be on the lookout for the station wagon that had ripped through that garage door. And the kid would have already told them about the duffel bags in the station wagon, so the law would know it was the heisters from the stadium inside that car.

  Brenda would lose Liss. They change cars, somewhere, somehow. Now there are three possibilities. They make a run for it, try to get out of town without being stopped by the law or Liss or anybody else. Or, the second choice, they hole up at the empty
house where they’d all originally meant to wait out the police search. Or, third, they go back to the motel they’d been in before the heist.

  If it was just Mackey, he’d choose to run. But Brenda’s too smart and too careful. Does she go to the house? She knows Liss will be waiting for her someplace. And Liss will figure her to go to the house, right? Because that was the original plan for after the heist, and because, as far as Liss is concerned, the motel is used up. And Brenda will know that’s what Liss is thinking.

  What did Brenda say in the car, about the motel? “I’ll be leaving a whole lot of cosmetics back in that room.”

  They’ll have a different car. They already have a civilian cover in that motel. Brenda will believe that Liss will look for them in the house.

  Parker paid for his breakfast, and left.

  3

  The Midway Motel occupied a wide shallow parcel of land on Western Avenue, across the street from the Seven Oaks Professional Building. The motel, red aluminum siding over concrete block, with metal room doors painted to look like wood, presented its long face to the street, with blacktop across the front for guests’ cars to park, nose in. At seven-thirty that morning, cars and pickups stood in front of eleven of the twenty units, but not in front of either 16 or 17.

  Parker walked down the other side of Western Avenue and climbed the concrete steps to the squat brick professional building. He stood in the little lobby, looking at the directory, aware of what was happening in the street. A few cars went by; nothing else.

  “Can I help you?”

  It was a caretaker, looking nosy. Parker said, “No.”

  “Well…” The guy was miffed. “I’ll be over here,” he said, and went away.