Comeback

by Richard Stark

  Parker went on hands and knees back to the head of the stairs. He heard scuffling sounds from down below, but couldn’t see Liss. He slid forward, and went slowly down the stairs head first, keeping his descent under control with his elbows on the steps. At the bottom, he looked over at the windows, but Liss wasn’t there. He looked the other way, still saw nothing, and slid from the stairs down to the floor.

  He had just started to rise, getting hands and knees under himself again, when Liss’s head and arm and pistol appeared just above the stairs down to the next level. He’d been standing down there, just out of sight. He fired one shot, but Parker had dropped back to the floor when he heard the first sound of Liss’s movement. The bullet hit the wall behind him, and lying there he twisted around to fire at Liss’s retreating face, but missed.

  He rolled away to his left, came upright, and Liss popped up again, aiming, firing.

  They both heard the click.

  Liss made a small strangled sound and dropped out of sight. Parker got to his feet and ran across the room and could just make out Liss’s retreating shape at the foot of the stairs. He fired, but didn’t hit anything, and Liss scurried away.

  Parker went rapidly down the stairs. This level was the little maze of bedrooms and bathrooms, and the closet where they’d held him for a while. Standing at the foot of the stairs, Thorsen’s automatic in his hand, he listened. Sooner or later, he’d have to hear Liss’s breathing.

  “Parker.”

  Liss was off to the right, sounding as though he’d taken cover inside one of the rooms off this central hall. Parker turned in that direction, and waited.

  “Parker, I’m hurt.”

  Parker moved two quick quiet steps forward while Liss spoke, then stopped.

  “I just want out of here. Parker? Take the car, do what you want. Call it quits. We can only mess each other up even more. Call it off.”

  Parker moved when Liss spoke, stopped when he was silent. He’d reached the doorway now. Liss would be in the darkness just inside this room.

  “Parker, why should we—? You son of a bitch, you’re right here!”

  There must have been some light behind Parker, that he’d now blocked with his body. Liss suddenly leaped at him, punching, kicking, trying to get past him. Parker pushed him off, to get a good shot, but Liss bounded away into the hall, and Parker fired after him, at all the noise he was making.

  They both heard the click.

  Silence. Parker reversed the automatic, gripping it by the barrel. What would Liss do now?

  “Parker? Parker, listen, we’re done, we’re both done. Quit it. Neither of us has anything any more. Forget it, it’s over.”

  Parker had moved forward while Liss talked, and now he swung the butt of the automatic at the spot where the voice had come from. He hit something, something solid that recoiled away. Liss yelled and retreated, and suddenly he went thundering down the final flight of stairs, down to the first owner’s study.

  Parker stood at the head of the stairs, listening to Liss gasp and curse down there. Bottom of the house. No way out.

  Time to go down there and end it.

  13

  The moon was higher now, and only one narrow band of its light reached into the study, a stripe of silver-gray along the floor next to the windows. In that stripe Liss stood, panting, hunched, his right arm across his torso, protecting wounds.

  Parker came down the stairs and stopped, still in darkness. Liss couldn’t see him, but he looked across to where he knew Parker must be, and said, “I’m all done, Parker. Leave me here.”

  “I’m going to,” Parker said, and moved toward him.

  Liss waved his left hand back and forth, as though to stop him. His breath was heavier and more ragged, his body hunched in tighter. “Let it go!” he cried. “You’ll get the money, you’ll get everything. Let it go.”

  “If I leave you here,” Parker said, “you’ll rat me out, for a plea bargain.”

  “Then take me along. Not to the money, just to get away from here.”

  “I don’t need you,” Parker said, and reached for him, and Liss came around hard with the knife he’d been concealing under his right hand and arm, pressed to his torso. A switchblade, with four inches of knife.

  Parker jumped back, and the knife sliced shirt and skin just under his heart, scraping on bone. Parker kicked Liss’s knee, but then had to retreat again as Liss swung the knife once more.

  Parker still held the automatic by the barrel, but it wouldn’t be any good as a club against that knife. He’d have to be in too close, and Liss could cut him up from farther out.

  They moved in little jerks and pauses, back into the darkness, away from the band of light beneath the windows. The knife was a faint gleam, moving like a dowsing rod in Liss’s hand, dowsing for blood.

  Parker paused, and Liss lunged. Parker chopped the butt of the automatic at Liss’s wrist, but only hit it a glancing blow, and then had to skip backward again.

  They circled one another in the large room, slowly, with sudden dashes by Liss, trying to get that knife in among Parker’s ribs. Parker dodged a dozen lunges, but Liss cut him twice more, and then again.

  Parker’s back was to the windows. There was nothing useful down here, no trash on the floor, nothing he could turn into a weapon. And Liss was crowding him closer, trying to get him into the corner of the room, the windows to his right, the solid wall to his left.

  He couldn’t let that happen, he couldn’t let Liss corner him. He was still a few feet from the windows, there was still time. He feinted left, and then right, and then threw the automatic at Liss’s head. He jumped in when Liss ducked, grabbed a double handful of shirtfront, and then rolled himself backward down onto the floor. His feet went up as he went down and back, his ankles catching Liss in the groin, lifting him up, the double grip on his shirtfront pulling him inexorably up and over, Liss swinging desperately back and forth with the knife, slicing Parker’s forearms as Parker heaved him up into the air and over in a midair somersault, and through the window behind him with a great shout of smashing glass.

  Parker rolled quickly away from descending dishes of jagged glass. A scream rolled back into the window from the cool outer air, cut short.

  Parker sat up. His chest and forearms stung where the knife had drawn its lines, and his body was sore all over, but he had no serious wounds. The dizziness he felt right now would soon pass.

  Leaning forward, he put his watch into the moonlight, and forced his eyes to focus. Almost quarter past ten. Just time enough to make the meet with Brenda and Mackey.

  Slowly he got to his feet, and looked around, at the ruined house and the gaping hole in the window. Then he went up the stairs.

  CLICK

  “I’m getting bored,” Brenda said.

  Ed kept on looking at the TV: CNN, multi-vehicle collision in fog on an interstate in California, blonde-haired woman solemn over her mike with ambulances in the background. He was waiting for the TV to tell him something new about events in this town right here, far from California and its fog. Outside this motel room, halfway around town from their first motel, the late afternoon sky was clear, visibility perfect. Inside, nobody on television, not local or network or cable, wanted to tell him what was happening here.

  Brenda said, “Ed? When are we getting out of here?”

  “Late tonight,” Ed told her, pretending to be patient. “You know why. You saw the TV.”

  “California,” she said, and gave the television set a look of scorn.

  “Come on, Brenda. Before.”

  She knew, of course, he meant the business about Liss shooting up the local hospital, then taking off with some goon called Quindero that the cops wanted back unharmed for some reason. The law had been irritated already with just the robbery, but then you throw in Liss killing a guy the cops have under guard, right in front of them, and you could expect the locals were truly itching by now to get their hands on somebody. Anybody at all.

 
Which was the point Ed wanted to make. “They’re all over this town like a bad smell,” he said. “We did enough running around here today. When it turns dark, I get us a nice little car, not flashy, nothing you look at twice, and then we clear out of here.”

  They’d each been out of this room once since they’d checked in at this motel, Ed paying cash and using a driver’s license for ID that had no history on it at all. First Ed had taken the most recent borrowed car back to the parking garage, to make their trail loop back on itself, and then he’d walked from there to a luggage store, where he’d bought three suitcases from a matched set and cabbed them back here, so they’d no longer be people with duffel bags. And then, a little after noon, Brenda had said, “The hell with it, I want my stuff,” and over Ed’s objections she’d cabbed back across town to their old motel.

  She hadn’t been completely careless, not at all. She’d left the cab two blocks from the motel, walked around the area, studied it, was very patient, and only when she was sure nobody had the place staked out did she go boldly back to their old room, where she packed up all her goods plus Ed’s shaving kit and change of underwear. On her way out she noticed the woman in the office eyeballing her, so she went over there and checked out. “The people in the room next to you,” the woman said, half-whispering, afraid the cockroaches might hear and pass it on, “they had something to do with that big robbery.” v

  Brenda widened her eyes. “They did?”

  “Might have killed us all in our sleep,” the woman said.

  “That’s not much of a recommendation for your motel,” Brenda pointed out.

  The woman lowered her eyebrows and hunched down over her counter. “You can’t be too careful,” she said.

  “Words to live by,” Brenda agreed, and took another cab back to the new motel, where Ed hadn’t moved, and CNN was showing distant explosions on a green mountainside. “Piece of cake,” she said.

  Ed kept his eyes on the screen. “Everybody else,” he said, “has a woman constantly nagging: ‘Be careful, be careful.’ I got a woman, I’m the one says be careful.”

  “I was careful,” Brenda assured him. “I didn’t want you to see me on that TV.”

  “Be nice to see something, though,” Ed said.

  They saw something, at six o’clock, on the local news. They saw ambulances and stretchers and hundreds of official people, all in front of some big hotel downtown, behind an excited reporter yelling into his microphone about how one of the stadium robbers had posed as an insurance investigator until Reverend William Archibald’s head of security unmasked him, when the robber damaged a whole lot of people and escaped. “Huh,” Ed said. “Parker’s a woolly

  “And all I did,” Brenda reminded him, “was go back to the motel.”

  “Well, Parker’s far from here by now, anyway,” Ed suggested.

  “And I wish I was,” Brenda told him.

  “Patience. Later. Patience.”

  * * *

  The guy in the motel office had said there was a good Italian restaurant two blocks down to the left, so that’s where they’d go, around eight o’clock, and pick up a car on the way back, and be on the road by ten. At quarter to eight, Brenda went into the bathroom to freshen up her makeup for the journey to the restaurant, and two minutes later she came out with a scrunched-up expression on her face and an open compact in her left palm. “Ed,” she said. “Take a look at this.”

  He looked. “It’s dirty,” he said. “The mirror’s all streaked.”

  “It’s a message. Come here in the light.”

  So he went back into the bathroom with her, where the light was brighter, and she said, “Eleven p.m. See it?”

  “Shit,” Ed said.

  “He wants us to pick him up.”

  Ed looked shifty. She could tell he didn’t like this idea. “He doesn’t say where.”

  “Come on, Ed. Back at the motel.”

  “Not a chance,” Ed decided. “You ready? Let’s go eat.”

  They fought about it through dinner, leaning toward one another over their plates, Brenda hissing while Ed muttered. The waiters thought it was a lovers’ quarrel, and gave them space.

  Ed had all the arguments, and all Brenda had was persistence. He said, “We don’t know who wrote that, even. It could have been George, and we walk right back into shit.”

  “It’s Parker, and you know it,” Brenda said. “And he expects us.”

  “If it was the other way around, he wouldn’t come back for me, you can bet on it. And I wouldn’t expect it.”

  “It isn’t the other way around,” Brenda said. ‘You aren’t him, you’re you, and he knows we’ll come back for him.”

  “Then it’s you he’s counting on, not me.”

  Brenda shrugged. “Okay.”

  “Brenda, he’s got the whole fucking state looking for him, they’ve probably even got him by now. And, if they pick him up anywhere near that motel, they’ll figure he was making a meet with us, and they’ll wait, and we’ll drive right into it.”

  “He won’t get caught,” Brenda said. “He’ll be there at eleven, and so will we.”

  “He can’t be sure we even got the message,” Ed insisted. “That’s a pretty weird delivery system.”

  “I checked out of the room,” Brenda reminded him. “He can find that out, and then he’ll know I got my stuff.”

  “We’re not copping his goddam money,

  Brenda,” Ed told her. “We’ll call him in a week or two, make a meet, give him his half.”

  “He wants to meet tonight,” Brenda said. “So we’ll be there.”

  “Why, dammit? Why do a risk when we don’t have to do a risk?”

  “Because,” Brenda said, “you’ll meet him again. You’ll work with him again. And he’ll look at you, and what will he say? That’s the stand-up guy came back for me? Or does he say, That’s a guy I don’t trust so much any more? What do you want him to say, Ed, next time you see each other?”

  Ed leaned back, muttering to himself. After a minute, he shrugged, shook his head, and waved for the check.

  The staff didn’t think there was much hope for the relationship.

  “I’ll drive around the block twice,” Ed told her, as they neared the neighborhood, “and if he doesn’t show up, that’s it.”

  “He doesn’t know the car, Ed.”

  This was true. The car they had now was a black Honda from a side street near the restaurant where they’d had dinner. But Ed wasn’t going to stop, and no argument. “I’m not gonna be a sitting duck,” he said.

  ‘There’s a church, the next block, behind the motel,” Brenda told him. “Drop me there, drive somewhere else, come back in five minutes.”

  Ed clearly didn’t like it, but Brenda wasn’t going to change her mind, so he said, “All right, five minutes. But if he isn’t there, we go. We don’t wait.”

  “Naturally,” Brenda said. “He put down eleven o’clock. He isn’t there at eleven o’clock, we did our part, we go away.”

  “Sense at last,” Ed said, and stopped in front of the church.

  The quick way to the main road and the motel was through the small graveyard beside the church. Brenda went the long way around the block, and slowed as she approached the long brick motel building, with half a dozen cars parked at intervals in front of it. Traffic moved on the avenue, but she was the only pedestrian, and there were no cars parked along the curb. Come on, Parker, she thought, don’t make me a dunce. I go back to Ed without you, he’ll crow all the way to Baltimore.

  She went past the motel office, walking slowly, just walking her dog, but without the dog, on this main traffic road where nobody walked. The office door opened and closed behind her, and she thought, hell. Dammit, goddamit, Ed, will you drive by now, please?

  The voice behind her was smooth and non-threatening: “Miss? Just a second. Miss?”

  She turned, and the guy facing her was in plainclothes, but he was a cop, all right. Big and burly, with an open raincoat
and that arrogant smile. She said, “Yes?”

  “Detective Lew Calavecci,” the burly man said, and flashed a badge from a leather folder. “City police.”

  Be polite, be a civilian, be not afraid. “Yes?”

  “Could I see some ID, Miss?”

  Be a civilian, know your rights. Polite but firm, she said, “Why?”

  He grinned, suddenly changing, as though he’d just remembered a dirty joke. “Come on now,” he said. “I showed you mine, you show me yours.”

  “Of course I could,” she said, wondering if a civilian would get indignant now, or scared, or what, “but I don’t see—”

  “Yeah, you’re it,” Detective Lew Calavecci said, and grinned all over his face.

  Ed, where are you? Drive by, Ed. She said, “It? What do you mean, it?”

  “Three men and a woman,” Calavecci said. “When we finally listened to those other clowns. And the woman came back here and checked out. Nobody expected that. You play a tough game.”

  Indignant: “I don’t know what you—”

  Calavecci brought handcuffs out of his raincoat pocket. “Let’s just see your wrists,” he said.

  “But— I don’t—”

  “You could turn and run,” Calavecci told her, “and I’d wing you. I’d like that, relieve my feelings a little. Because I’m alone here, nobody could say it was excess force.”

  “Detective, please, I don’t—”

  “I need you,” he said, with sudden passion. “They relieved me, sent me home, but I can still make it all right. I’ve had a tough day, I lost some … But this makes up for it, I was right, I knew they’d come back. You’d come back. Put out your goddam wrists.”

  “Lew!”

  They both turned, and somebody was getting out of one of the cars parked nose-in along the front of the motel. “Lew, let me talk to you,” he said, and straightened, and strode this way, and it was Parker.