Breakout p-21

by Richard Stark

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Okay. Then if this whole thing is on its side with that corridor out there on the bottom, then where we are is the row of half dollars, and the lawyers’ room next to it is the row of quarters, and the library is the row of dimes, and the hallway you want to know about is the row of nickels. Okay?’

  ‘Right,’ Parker said.

  ‘Near the top of the dimes, the library,’ Mackey said, ‘back where the law books are kept, there’s a side door to the hallway, the row of nickels.’

  ‘That’s what I hoped.’

  ‘It’s kept locked, and the lawyer doesn’t have the key. In fact, there is no key. When he wants out, he phones, and the guard at the far end of the hallway, top of the nickels, buzzes him out. Same going in, buzzes him in.’

  ‘What’s beyond the guard at the far end of the hallway?’

  ‘Above the nickels and the dimes is a couple offices and the guards’ locker room, where they change for work. And a side door to the guards’ separate parking lot.’

  ‘Good. What else?’

  ‘Above the lawyers, and you see the corner of this room where the door is that I come in, above all that is the hall down from the front entrance at the very top of the building. The rest up there is offices and johns.’

  ‘So the best route out,’ Parker said, ‘looks as though it’s into the library, into that side hallway, in the guards’ locker room, into the guards’ parking area. Is the parking area kept guarded and locked?’

  ‘You know it is.’

  ‘So I need,’ Parker said, ‘people coming in while I’m coming out.’

  ‘I can talk to Marcantoni’s pal,’ Mackey said.

  ‘And Williams’ sister, and her friend?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll mention many details to them,’ Mackey said.

  12

  Walter Jelinek was a man, but he looked like a car, the kind of old junker car that had been in some bad accidents so that now the frame is bent, the wheels don’t line up any more, the whole vehicle sags to one side and pulls to that side, and the brakes are oatmeal. Half the original body is gone, the paint job is some amateur brushwork, and there’s duct tape over the tail-lights. That was Walter Jelinek, who Mackey had told Parker not to talk to, since he had a reputation for carrying tales to teacher, but now Jelinek on his own wanted to talk to Parker.

  It was the fourteenth day, two weeks in this hard world, progress but slow, and Parker was on his way to join Marcantoni and Williams over by the weights in the exercise yard when all at once Jelinek was beside him, gimping along with him, trying to keep in step. His left shoulder was low, his left knee had a ding in it that made it click outward when he walked, and his jaw hadn’t been rewired very well, so that he always showed some spaces and some teeth. His hands were big but bunchy, and when he talked he sounded as though something was knotted too tight around his neck. He said, ‘Kasper, you and me, we never talk somehow.’

  Parker stopped, to look at him. Guards always kept their eyes on Jelinek, because he was like a garden to them, something always ripening. Aware that guards now watched him talk to Jelinek, Parker said, ‘We never talk because we got nothing to say to one another.’

  ‘Couple old lags like us?’ Jelinek’s left eye closed when he tried for a smile. ‘Long-term guys, gonna be in a longtime? Why, you and me, we could spend the first ten years just gettin caught up on the old days.’

  ‘The past doesn’t interest me,’ Parker said, and moved on.

  Jelinek hopped along with him. ‘I bet the present interests you,’ he said. ‘I bet the future’s what you talk about with Marcantoni and the schvug all the time.’

  Parker stopped. He looked at Jelinek. ‘What do you think you know?’

  ‘I think I know you stopped,’ Jelinek told him. ‘That’s one thing I think I know.’

  ‘Tell me another thing.’

  ‘They want you in Cal,’ Jelinek said. ‘Es-cap-ing. Killing a guard.’ He grinned, and the eye shut. ‘They hate it when you kill a guard.’

  ‘They don’t mind when we kill each other,’ Parker told him.

  ‘Oh, some of us, they do,’ Jelinek said. He was pleased with himself. ‘Some of us,’ he said, ‘they like to see alive, moving here and there.’

  Parker said, ‘Is there a point to this?’

  ‘You and those boys,’ Jelinek said, ‘have travel plans.’ He waited for Parker to comment, but Parker merely looked at him, giving him nothing, so Jelinek shrugged and said, ‘You got plans, and why not? All three of you are looking at heavy time. I don’t have to know what the plans are, I just have to know you got ‘em.’

  ‘Think what you want to think.’

  ‘I do.’ Jelinek looked around, then pretended he was being confidential. ‘Me, I wanna travel, too,’ he said. ‘I been livin this life too long, I wanna settle down. You believe I got a daughter?’

  ‘If you say so,’ Parker said.

  ‘Well, I do. She’s forty-one years of age, runs a nursing home in Montana. My own daughter. Would I be happy there?’

  ‘Probably so,’ Parker said.

  ‘Need help getting there, that’s the thing,’ Jelinek explained. ‘Hitch a ride on a bus with somebody.’

  Parker waited. Jelinek squinted at him. ‘You boys got a bus,’ he said. ‘I don’t have to know what it is, when it is, where it is, all I got to know is, you boys got a bus. And here’s what I think. When you fire up that bus, I’m on it. I’m riding along with you.’

  Again, Jelinek waited, and again Parker simply stood and looked at him. Jelinek didn’t like the lack of feedback. ‘Not gonna argue with me?’ he demanded. ‘Not gonna go all innocent, you don’t have any bus, you and them other two? Not gonna go all tough guy, warn me keep my mouth shut or you’re gonna do all kindsa shit, and how’d I like that?’

  ‘You’ve heard all that before,’ Parker said.

  ‘Yes, I have,’ Jelinek agreed. ‘There isn’t a goddam thing I haven’t heard before, Ronnie Kasper. When that bus of yours is ready to roll, be sure to give me the word, because someword is going somewhere.Either I’m on that bus, or that bus doesn’t roll.’

  13

  ‘We have to kill him,’ Marcantoni said. He was lifting the hand weights again, but bunching his arms more, because he was mad.

  ‘Not now,’ Parker said. He stood by Williams’ head, where Williams lay on his back on the bench, lifting and lowering the weighted bar, resting it between times on the vertical metal posts.

  ‘The longer he’s alive,’ Marcantoni said, ‘the more sure it is he’ll rat us out.’

  ‘He doesn’t know anything yet,’ Parker said. ‘And the guards saw him talk to me today. If he dies now, it draws attention right at us.’

  Williams rested the bar on the posts. ‘But Tom’s right,’ he said. ‘He saw us together. That’s what he does, he prowls around like that, looks for something he can deal in. He might not wait until he’s got everything in a package.’

  Parker said, ‘What does he give them? At this point, what’s he got to sell?’

  ‘You listened to him,’ Marcantoni said. ‘That means you got something to protect.’

  Parker nodded. ‘He made the same point. But if I duck away from him, that’s even worse, because then I don’t know how much he’s got. The reason he braced me is because he’s already got his eye on us. That doesn’t change. But what does he know? He knows we’re long-termers and we’re together, and it isn’t natural for us to be together.’

  ‘Damn it,’ Williams said.

  ‘So,’ Parker said, ‘he asks me questions, and I give him nothing. He’ll keep watching us, try to see what we do, where we go, try to figure out what our idea is. While he’s doing that, he won’t talk to the guards because he doesn’t have anything to give them yet.’

  Williams said, ‘You think there’s any chance he really does want to come along?’

  ‘None,’ Parker said.

  ‘Jelinek doesn’t want life on the run,’ Marcantoni
said. ‘All he wants is to build up some merit badges, make his time on the inside easier.’

  Parker said, ‘That’s right. He doesn’t want to be on the outside. He’s got everything he wants right in here.’

  ‘Or the place he gets sent, after his trial,’ Marcantoni said. ‘And he’s angling for that place to be a nice retirement village.’

  ‘On our backs,’ Williams said.

  ‘You got it.’

  Williams hefted the weight again, put it back. ‘But what we do now is nothing.’

  Parker said, ‘And watch him watching us.’

  ‘But the last thing I do before I leave this place,’ Marcantoni said, ‘I put him down.’

  14

  When the loudspeaker said, ‘Kasper,’ next morning, the fifteenth day here, it was too early for visitors. Parker and Williams exchanged a glance, and then Parker dropped down from his bunk and walked down to the end of the line of cages, where a second guard waited. ‘I’m Kasper,’ Parker said.

  No conversation. The first guard buzzed the gate open, and the second one led the way, down the clanging stairs, through the locked door into the corridor with the white line painted down the center of the floor, through the next locked door into the main building, and there the guard said, ‘Wait.’

  Parker waited. The guard turned to his left, to that first door, the one nobody ever noticed, the one that was supposed to lead to a hall down past the library and the volunteer lawyer’s exit. The guard pressed a button on the wall, then spoke into a grid beside the door, and the door buzzed open. The guard gestured for Parker to go first.

  This was the route. This was what he’d been wanting to see, and now that he was looking at it he realized he’d already seen it once before, from the other direction, when they’d first brought him in. At that time, he’d been concentrating too much on too many other things, hadn’t paid attention to the route coming into this place because he hadn’t expected he’d ever go out the same way.

  But this was the way. The locked and guarded parking area was just outside this wall to the left, not only for the guards’ personal cars but also for delivering fresh fish. The hall was a little narrower than the other one, with no windows, nothing on the left but a yellow-painted concrete block wall, and the same wall on the right with a gray-blue metal door in it, down toward the far end. The volunteer lawyer’s door; had to be.

  Parker was now completely alert, not to where he was going, but to where he was. This was the route he’d been trying to dope out, and now they were handing it to him, giving him a guided tour. He didn’t know yet why, but he would remember every bit of it.

  At the far end was another barred door, which another guard buzzed them through once he’d eyeballed them, and past that door was a square foyer with a jumble of exits. The metal door to the left would lead out to the parking area. Beyond the barred door to the right stretched a normal office hallway. And straight ahead, the open doorway on the left showed the guards’ locker room while the shut gray metal door on the right was marked, in black block letters, CONFERENCE.

  That last was the door Parker’s escorting guard knocked on. Another buzz sounded, and the guard pulled open the door with one hand while he gestured Parker inside with the other.

  Inspector Turley. Same office, same man, a small bulky red-haired middleweight. He sat at the same desk and the same steno sat at the same small table in the corner.

  Turley looked at Parker without expression. He said, ‘Come in, Kasper. Sit down.’

  Parker entered, the guard following, shutting the door, leaning against it. Parker sat in the same chair as before. Turley looked at him, waiting, and then said, ‘You do remember me, don’t you?’

  ‘Two weeks ago,’ Parker said. ‘In here.’

  ‘I told you your friend Armiston would talk if you didn’t,’ Turley said. ‘Remember that?’

  ‘Game theory,’ Parker said.

  Turley started to smile, proud of his student, then frowned instead, realizing the student wasn’t a student. He said, ‘Armiston’s coming around, I have to tell you that.’

  Parker nodded. ‘Nothing to say?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘All right,’ Turley said. ‘I’ll tell you what the situation is, so you don’t think I’m trying to play off one fella against another fella.’ He cocked his head, bright-eyed. ‘All right?’

  ‘Fine,’ Parker said, because some sort of statement was required.

  ‘So here’s the situation,’ Turley said. ‘Armiston’s beginning to make noises like he’d maybe come around, but so far, it’s just negotiation, you know what I mean? Jerking off, in other words.’

  Parker didn’t really care what Armiston did, because it wouldn’t affect what he himself was going to do. It would be better for Armiston, maybe, to make a deal with these people, tell them whatever he knew about the guys with the plane, the customer, and then the customer’s customer; though Parker doubted Armiston knew enough to be really useful.

  Still, it seemed to him Armiston wasn’t the sort to plot out a break for himself, particularly from a place filled with loners like this one. He was more of a team player and a follower. Also, he was probably facing nothing more than the warehouse breakin; no California, no extradition, no murder one.

  In fact, now that Turley had made him think about the situation, it made sense to Parker that Armiston had already made his deal, whatever it was going to be. He’d had two weeks for it, and nothing he did or said could make things worse for Parker, so why not?

  Which meant this meeting was for a different reason. Turley had something else in mind. Parker sat there and waited for it.

  Turley let him wait awhile, half-smiling, and then said, ‘No? Still don’t wanna get involved in game theory?’

  ‘Not right now,’ Parker said.

  Turley sat back, toying with a pencil on his desk. ‘You’ve settled in pretty good here,’ he said.

  It’s coming now, Parker thought. He said, ‘You don’t settle in here. This is a bus depot.’

  ‘Granted,’ Turley said. ‘That’s perfectly true. In fact, most people in here never really make connections with one another at all.’

  This is it, Parker thought. It’s Jelinekwho’s started the negotiation, ‘beginning to make noises like he’d maybe come around,’ as Turley had said of Armiston. It was Jelinek who’d passed on his observations to the authorities here, so naturally they were hoping to cut out the middleman, get the story without Jelinek’s help.

  ‘But you,’ Turley was going on, ‘you surprised me, Kasper.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘Yes, you did. I figured you for the silent type, not the gregarious hail-fellow sort, not the kind of fella who makes friends that easy.’

  Parker shrugged at that; what else?

  ‘But here you are,’ Turley said, ‘you got a couple buddies already.’

  ‘I do?’

  Turley consulted a sheet of paper on the desk in front of himself, the sheet of paper he’d been rolling that pencil on, though the consultation was clearly just a part of the play-act. Turley knew what names he was looking for. ‘Thomas Marcantoni,’ he read; or said. ‘Brandon Williams.’

  ‘Williams is my cellmate,’ Parker said. ‘Why be rude to a cellmate?’

  ‘Very wise,’ Turley agreed. ‘And you play checkers with Marcantoni.’

  ‘It makes the time pass.’

  ‘And the three of you do weights together.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Parker said. ‘You can get out of shape in here, just sit around, wait for your trial to come along. I’m still waiting on my arraignment.’

  With a down-turning smile, Turley said, ‘I think your lawyer’s mostly the cause of that. I see, by the way, you weren’t happy with the lawyer the court provided.’

  Parker said, ‘Mr Sherman? He looks to me like he was overextended. I didn’t want to take up a lot of his time.’

  Turley laughed, and it sounded real. He said, ‘What are you and Marcantoni and
Williams up to?’

  ‘Staying in shape,’ Parker said. ‘Passing the time.’

  ‘I hope you don’t have anything else in mind,’ Turley said. He gave Parker his bright-bird look, then said, ‘Did you know this place was built seven years ago? Would you believe that? Seven years, and already look how it’s crowded.’

  ‘Too many bad people around,’ Parker suggested.

  ‘That must be it,’ Turley agreed. ‘But even with this overcrowding, this situation here being less than ideal, do you know how many escapes there’ve been from Stoneveldt since it opened?’

  ‘Escapes? No. Why would I want to know about escapes?’

  ‘Zero,’ Turley said. He nodded to the guard. ‘Take Mr Kasper back to his cell,’ he said.

  15

  ‘We’ve got to do it soon,’ Parker said. ‘They’ll give us a few days, just a few, but if they don’t figure anything out, they’ll move us, put us on three different floors.’

  Marcantoni looked up from the checkerboard. ‘I told you, Jelinek has to die.’

  ‘On our way out,’ Parker said. ‘Otherwise, he’ll see us move, and start to talk.’

  ‘That, too,’ Marcantoni said.

  16

  ‘Looks like Thursday,’ Parker said. ‘Five P.M.’

  Mackey nodded. ‘I was wondering when you’d get around to it,’ he said.

  Thursdays, the third tier worked on its cases late in the day, starting at two-fifteen, finishing at four forty-five. At any time before four-fifteen you could decide to go down to the library, get a little work in on your case.

  Jelinek didn’t work on his case, not in the same way the bozos did. Thursday afternoon, just a little before four, he was almost alone in the game room, spread on his back on a couch in the corner, reading Car & Driver.On the wall to the left of his head was a set of shelves where the games were kept.

  He looked up when he saw Parker cross the room toward him, and would have gotten to his feet except that Parker made a down-patting motion in the air; stay there, no big deal, I just want to talk with you a minute. So Jelinek put the magazine down, looked expectant, and reacted just a bit late when he saw Marcantoni moving in from the other side, not hurrying but striding, diagonally across the room toward Jelinek’s feet.