They drove by. Parker turned his head to look. It was Liss.
5
Stop? Get out of the car? Go after Liss right now?
No. Too complicated to strip away Thorsen. At this point, Thorsen was Parker’s only way to find out what the law knew and what they were doing and whether or not anybody was close to Mackey and Brenda. There was time to reach out for Liss, if the law didn’t scoop him up first. Carmody might know just the one thing that would lead Parker to Liss after this was all over. In the meantime, if Liss was killing time and nothing else, strolling around in the sunlight with his cop imitation, that meant he was just as far away as Parker from the duffel bags full of money. Liss could wait.
There was excitement at the hospital. Television news vans, sprouting antennas like the whiskers on a witch’s chin, lined both sides of the curved entrance road. Police vehicles took up the rest of the space in front, and cops were a heavy presence both inside and outside the main entrance. Thorsen left the Chevy in the very full visitors’ parking lot, then talked himself and Parker into the main hospital building past any number of cops with questions, some of them local and some of them state. Everybody had to walkie-talkie to somebody else to get approval to let Thorsen through, but nobody questioned it when Thorsen vouched for Parker: Jack Orr, the insurance investigator.
In addition to Carmody, in a private room on four, there was also the kid from the gas station, Bill Trowbridge, in his own room on three. Trowbridge, having answered every question the cops could think of to ask, was now doing press and TV interviews and grinning like a goof at his mother, seated on an uncomfortable nearby chair, being firmly kept out of camera range. Among the reasons he gave for climbing the bins in the storage room and ripping his way through the roof, he did not mention his need to pee.
The hall leading from the elevator to Carmody was also full of cops. One of them, that Thorsen seemed to have met before, was a plain-clothesman named Macready, who gave Parker a hello and a handshake at Thorsen’s introduction, then said, “Lew’s on his way here with Quindero. He wants everybody else to wait.”
Thorsen said, “Not here yet?”
“The Quindero family’s lobbed a lawyer in,” Macready said. “It’s delaying things a— Oh, here they are.”
Out of an elevator and down the hall came a group of four, led by a big self-satisfied man who’d have to be Calavecci. Behind him came a skinny young scared guy with hands cuffed behind his back, and flanked by two serious-looking uniforms, each of them holding one of the cuffed guy’s elbows. Parker looked at him past Calavecci and thought the young guy was probably one of the people from that car in the stadium parking lot.
But Calavecci was the point here. He said a smooth word to Thorsen, then was introduced to Jack Orr, insurance investigator. He shook hands too hard, grinned, and said, “So you’ve been chasing our boys longer’n we have.”
“Just one,” Parker said. “George Liss.”
“A real piece of work,” Calavecci said, with a pleased shake of the head. “I’m looking forward to a discussion with him. What a rap sheet.”
“Yeah?”
“Got a record in the top ten,” Calavecci said. “With a bullet. Why don’t you and Dwayne wait in the dayroom over there, they got coffee and stuff for the nurses. We’ll just have a little conversation, Ralph and me, with his pal Tom.”
Parker saw that Ralph Quindero was trying not to cry. When he got in front of Carmody, he’d quit trying. They’d have a nice little tearfest in there, with Calavecci lapping it up, like a cat.
The dayroom was too bright, with fluorescents. A few nurses, trying to be cool but sneaking looks at the strangers, were clustered over coffee at a table in the corner. Thorsen and Parker got coffee of their own, both passing up the powdered near-milk, and carried the cardboard cups to another of the green Formica tables. They sat there in silence, waiting, the taste and smell of the coffee both a little obnoxious, and then Thorsen said, “This fella Liss.”
“Yeah?”
“Does he work with a regular bunch? Same people all the time?”
“No,” Parker said. “He isn’t in a crew. He’s too untrustworthy. He’s just as likely to turn on his partners.”
“Maybe he did this time,” Thorsen said. “Maybe he’s all any of us is looking for, at this point.”
“Anything is possible,” Parker agreed.
A few minutes later, Calavecci came in, got his own cup of coffee, and joined them at the table.
He seemed very content, as though he’d just had a good meal. “They’re forgiving each other in there now,” he said.
“That’s nice,” Thorsen said. He remained very flat and still when talking to Calavecci.
“I believe they’re about to start praying for Mary’s immortal soul,” Calavecci went on, “so I left them in there with the guards. I’ll go back in a few minutes.” He gave Parker a measuring look. “You root around in the garbage a lot,” he suggested.
“That’s where the people are,” Parker told him.
‘You been chasing Liss a long time?”
“Eight months. He was part of a bank thing in Iowa City, took a hostage, killed her.”
“What does the insurance company care?”
“They need Liss,” Parker said, improvising from what he knew of previous situations, from the other side, “to prove the bank guards weren’t incompetent. If they can prove the guards did what they were supposed to do, the company’s liability goes way down.”
Smiling pleasantly, Calavecci said, “And screw the survivors, right?”
Parker smiled back at him, just as pleasant and just as false. “That’s the job,” he said, and three shots sounded, flat and small but not far away. They could have been the sounds of somebody hitting a floor with a baseball bat, but they were not.
All three at the table knew it, and jumped to their feet. They were all moving toward the door before the first yells sounded outside. Calavecci went through the doorway, then Thorsen. Parker lagged, because he thought he knew what this was. He thought it wasn’t a coincidence he’d seen George Liss walking toward the hospital.
Yes. The hall was full of armed men and women in blue, all facing the same way, frozen. Parker came through the doorway behind Thorsen and looked down the hall and Liss was backing away down there, waving the pistol he must have taken from the missing cop. He was still in the uniform, but what was protecting him now was Ralph Quindero. He backed away down the hall with Quindero in front of him, Liss’s left arm tight around Quindero’s waist, Quindero the shield, helplessly facing all those helpless armed people as he and Liss backed steadily away. There was a stairwell door back there, at the far end.
Liss, looking at everything, suddenly saw Parker, and laughed with surprise. “Well, look at you!” he cried, and fired at Parker’s head.
6
Thorsen’s lunge drove both Parker and himself back through the doorway into the dayroom, bouncing off the floor while the bullet hit the doorframe behind them. As they untangled themselves, there were sudden shouts from the hall, and a quick flurry of gunfire, almost immediately stopped.
Parker got to his feet as the uniforms in the hall rushed forward in a body, meaning Liss had made it to the stairwell. But how much farther could he go?
Parker turned and held out his hand to help Thorsen back to his feet. He said, “I owe you one.”
Thorsen looked slightly ruffled, but then he shook himself and became completely neat again. He said, “That was Liss, wasn’t it?”
“It was.”
“Looks like he knows you’re behind him.”
“Looks that way.”
“And doesn’t like it.”
“I didn’t think he would,” Parker said, and started out of the room.
Thorsen, not moving, said, “Let the police run him down. Shouldn’t take more than five minutes.”
Over his shoulder, Parker said, “Carmody,” and walked away down the now-deserted hall. Big eyes in shocked
faces looked out from corners of cover at the nurse’s station along the way.
Carmody’s room was on the other side, just before the nurse’s station. Parker went to that doorway and looked in, and it was a mess. Carmody had been shot in the head, and was lying back on the pillow, three eyes staring upward. The two cops who’d been in here with him, mostly to keep watch on Ralph Quindero, had been shot any which way, just to take them out of play, and were alive, but both lying like flung dolls on the floor, being worked over by nurses.
For Liss, Carmody was the only person except the rest of the crew who could positively say he’d been one of the heisters. It didn’t matter if Carmody had given statements to the law, just so he wouldn’t be around later to make the positive ID. Liss could afford a lawyer who’d fend off all that crap, dependent on there being no live Tom Carmody to stand up in court and point and say, “That’s him there.”
And what Liss was counting on right now, in the hospital, was too much confusion and nobody who’d ever seen him before. A guy in a police uniform, moving fast, shooting people, who came in and went out. There might be some potential IDs of Liss, but once again, not enough for a conviction. Not if he got away clean and hired his lawyer and established his alibi in some place like San Diego, or one of the Portlands.
“Gangway! Gangway!”
Parker stepped back, and white-coated people hurried by, pushing two gurneys into the room. Working delicately but hurriedly, moving fragile creatures who could break at any second, they put the two wounded cops on the gurneys.
Parker looked down the hall. Some of the cops had followed Liss into the stairwell, while others milled around down there, barking into walkie-talkies. Some had come the other way down the hall and were just now piling into an elevator. To go which way, up or down? Liss wouldn’t be as easy to catch as these people thought.
Thorsen had also looked into Carmody’s room, and now he came over to Parker to say, “You can hold your questions.”
‘There’s nothing for me here,” Parker agreed. He was thinking, there was nothing for him around Thorsen any more, either. Get rid of him—maybe take him out of the action and borrow that little automatic of his—and then go find Mackey and Brenda. Liss was attracting too much attention right now, Parker didn’t need to be around him.
Particularly since he was supposed to be the Liss expert, the insurance guy tracking him down. Calavecci had immediately gone running off to lead the search for Liss, but sooner or later he’d be back, and he’d be full of questions, and he’d probably even want to call Jack Orr’s head office at Midwest Insurance, a company that so far as Parker knew didn’t exist.
Down the hall, the plainclothesman called Macready came out of the stairwell and walked this way. Thorsen said, “Get him?”
“Not yet,” Macready said.
Parker said, “You lost him.”
“We know he’s in the building,” Macready said. “He isn’t going anywhere.” Frowning at Parker, he said, “He does seem to have a special interest in you, though, doesn’t he?”
“We’re interested in each other,” Parker said. “He knows I don’t mean him well.”
An elevator door opened and cops came out. They looked both purposeful and confused, and they milled with the gurneys coming out of Carmody’s room. Macready went over to talk to these new cops, and Parker said, “Time to get out of their way.”
“As a matter of fact,” Thorsen said, “I was just thinking the same. Come to the hotel.”
Parker looked at him. “What hotel?”
“Archibald and the Crusade,” Thorsen explained. “We’re all supposed to leave town today, go back to Memphis, but it looks like at least some of us will be staying on. You and I can go there, phone Broad Street from time to time, find out what’s going on.”
A peaceful place. A good place to hole up until tonight; if nothing else happened, Parker could go back to that motel at eleven o’clock, see if Brenda’d been reading her compact lately. “Good idea,” he said. “Thanks for the invite.”
7
Macready rode down in the elevator with them. He had an air about him of gloomy satisfaction, as though taking pleasure in something he knew to be a sin. He said, “We got a situation here, I don’t know if you two realize this.”
Thorsen said, “A situation? What kind of situation?”
“I mean,” Macready said, “Lew Calavecci went out on a limb when he brought the Quindero kid over here, and now maybe the limb broke off.”
The elevator reached the ground floor. They stepped out to find a snag, a traffic jam of people being funneled slowly through one checkpoint at the main entrance. Everybody in and out was being closely studied.
Macready stood on line with them, and Thorsen asked him, “Out on a limb? Why?”
“What have they got Quindero on?” Macready asked. “Nothing, or next to nothing. His two pals killed the girl, his sister, but everybody acknowledges Quindero didn’t know about it till long afterward, so he isn’t a party to that crime at all. The three of them came here intending to commit a crime, but they didn’t do it. The other two they’re holding on murder one, to be shipped home, but all they have on Quindero, here or anywhere else, is obstruction of justice, because he knew the robbery at the stadium was going to take place and he didn’t inform the police. But that’s Mickey Mouse, and everybody knows it, that’s just to hold onto him a couple days. His lawyer’s going to laugh at that one. In fact, he’s already laughing at it. But now we got a different situation.”
Thorsen said, “What?”
Macready seemed to consider whether or not to go on. The line inched forward, people irritable but obedient, one at a time leaving the building, one at a time entering it. Macready said, “I don’t know if you two got much of a sense of Lew Calavecci.”
“I think we do,” Thorsen said.
“Enough to go on,” Parker said.
“Well,” Macready told them, “Lew let Quindero believe he was in a lot deeper shit than he actually is. You know, he put the screws to him a little. More for fun than to get anything out of him. And he didn’t get clearance from anybody to bring Quindero here to confront Carmody because he knew damn well nobody would give him clearance.”
“Oh,” said Thorsen.
“And now,” Macready said, “it looks like Quindero’s teamed up with our shooter.”
Thorsen said, “Teamed up? He was a hostage.”
“In the stairwell,” Macready said, “the shooter took the time to shoot the lock on Quindero’s cuffs, free him up. We found them there. Quindero must figure he’s got nothing to lose, so he’s thrown in with the shooter, and they’re somewhere together. Two instead of one.”
Parker said, “Calavecci needs Quindero back safe and sound, doesn’t he? Not a scratch on him.”
“Good luck, say I,” said Macready. Looking at Parker, he said, “I hear the shooter was the guy you’re looking for, is that right?”
“George Liss,” Parker agreed. “Looked like him.”
They were nearly to the head of the line; Macready would usher them through. Waiting, he nodded and said, “I can see where, following George Liss around, it wouldn’t be dull work.”
8
It wasn’t a manger. Carlton Tower, where William Archibald and his Christian Crusade were resting their heads while they saved local souls, was a many-tiered wedding cake, white and gleaming in the sun, with the flags of various Scottish clans dangling from horizontal poles stuck out from the facade just above the second level. (Most people had no idea what those colorful flags stood for, and the few who did know couldn’t figure out what they stood for here.)
The lobby was broad and two stories high, with a figured carpet in which the dominant color was maroon. The bank of gold-doored elevators stood discreetly around a corner on the right. Thorsen led the way across from the revolving-doored entrance, through an atmosphere of hyper but hushed activity, and Parker looked at it all with approval. He liked this kind of place when
he wasn’t working. On the job, it was no good, of course, because the byword with a place like this was constant service of the guest, which meant constant observation of the guest. On the job, Parker preferred a place where, once you paid your money and they told you where the ice machine was, you were left alone.
Archibald and his people had taken all or most of the twelfth floor. Thorsen and Parker rode up in the elevator with blushing honey-mooners, who continued on to greater heights. When Thorsen and Parker stepped out of the elevator, they found a very neat and muscular young man in dark gray suit and dark blue tie seated on the nice wing chair against the opposite wall, reading what looked like a missal. He glanced up, saw Thorsen, and said, “Morning, sir.”
“Morning. Archibald in?”
“I believe everybody’s in, sir,” the young man said, and gave Parker a flat look, merely recording him, to remember him. Parker already remembered the young man; he’d been one of the Crusade’s guards in the money room at the stadium.
Thorsen led the way down the hall, saying, “We’ll drop in, have a word with Archibald, then go on to my office. He’s an interesting fella to meet.”
“I suppose he must be,” Parker said.
They went to the end of the white-and-gold corridor, where the suites were, and Thorsen knocked on the door that instead of a number had the word Macleod on it. After a minute, this door was opened by another muscular youngster in a suit, a clone of the one at the elevator, though Parker didn’t think this one had been in the money room.
Thorsen stepped in, murmuring a word to this guy, and Parker followed. They went through a small mirrored vestibule with two doors that probably led to closets, and then entered a large six-sided room with big windows in two walls showing cityscape. Paintings hung on the rest of the walls, cream-and-green broadloom was underfoot, and the furniture was large and dark, mostly imitation antique, and placed in separate groupings, the largest cluster being the two sofas and two chairs with several tables and lamps positioned in front of the now-idle fireplace. That detail surprised Parker; he’d thought Archibald would want a fire. Maybe too distracted by the loss of his money.
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