The Black Ice Score p-1

by Richard Stark

  Jock Daask said, “It’s the woman I’m thinking about.”

  “I’m sure you are,” Bob Quilp said.

  Marten listened to the voices behind him and looked at the lights across the river.

  Jock was saying, “How do we know she isn’t in trouble with the police herself? She’s traveling with a wanted man; they could be after her, too. And here we are giving her to them.”

  Still facing New Jersey, Marten said, “Can’t be helped. We warned them to stay out of it.”

  Bob said sarcastically, “You could go on up there tomorrow and untie her if you wanted. Untie her legs, anyway.”

  Marten did look around then, frowning at Bob. “That will be enough of that,” he said.

  Bob shrugged, a sardonic smile on his face. “Just trying to be helpful.”

  Jock came walking across the room toward Marten, a pleading expression on his face. “Aaron,” he said, “what difference does it make? Why can’twe let him live? We’ll be in Africa, for heaven’s sake. He’ll have his woman back. Why kill him?”

  Marten shrugged. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder for him,” he said. “It’s as simple as that.”

  Bob said, “He must have impressed you tonight.”

  “He did.”

  Jock said, “Why? Why is it all different now? Why change the plans at all?”

  “I don’t want him alive,” Marten said, and turned his back and looked out at the river again.

  Was this the first time in his life he had actively desired the death of another man? Marten thought it was. There had been other moments when the death of this one or that one, known or anonymous, was necessary to the completion of something else that Marten wanted, but this was the first time that the death itself was the goal.

  He thought it was Parker’s eyes, or perhaps the bone structure of his face. He didn’t know what it was exactly, but talking with Parker tonight, listening to his voice, looking at his eyes, watching him move, he understood that Parker was the most dangerous man he had ever met, and that he had made himself Parker’s enemy, and that he would not sleep securely at night so long as Parker was still alive. He had had the irrational urge to pull out his pistol and kill Parker right then, almost as a nervous tic, but he had controlled it. Not until afterwards, he had thought, not until we have the diamonds. We need him alive until we have the diamonds.

  But afterwards he must die.

  Bob broke the silence behind him at last, saying, “Shouldn’t we be on our way?”

  Marten turned around again. The clock on the mantel said not quite two fifty. “Not yet,” he said. “We don’t want to be there too early.”

  “I don’t understand that,” Bob said. “We’d do better to be there ahead of them, that’s what I say.”

  Marten shook his head. “We wouldn’t. Parker was right about that. If we get there first, we’re likely to leave traces when we break in. Then Gonor and the others come along, they see marks on the door or whatever, and they don’t come in at all.”

  Bob shook his head and started to pace around the room. “I don’t trust Parker,” he said. “I don’t like doing things to hissuggestions.”

  “Why not?” Marten spread his hands, saying, “If there’s something I’m not seeing, Bob, I’m willing to listen.”

  Bob made an angry gesture and kept pacing.

  “Parker wantsto tell us the truth,” Marten said. “He wantsus to get the diamonds, because he wants his woman back. After that he may be dangerous, but not before.”

  “I don’t trust him.”

  “Bob, there’s nothing he can do to us. There’s no way he can get at us. He doesn’t know where the farm is and he doesn’t know about this apartment. He can’t find his woman without our help and he can’t find us.”

  Jock said doubtfully, watching Bob pace back and forth, “But what if he’s guessed we mean to kill him?”

  “Then he wouldn’t tell us anything. It doesn’t do him any good to send us on a wild-goose chase. Say this museum isn’twhere they’re taking the diamonds. Say we go there at five o’clock and break in and the place is empty. What good does that do him?”

  “He might have warned the police,” Bob said. “It could be a trap.”

  Marten shook his head. “What good does it do him? He wants his woman. If we don’t get the diamonds we don’t call him; we don’t tell him where she is. Believe me, he’s sitting in his hotel room right now next to the phone waiting for us to call, hoping we don’t lose out to Gonor and his people.”

  “It makes sense,” Bob said grudgingly. “It’s smooth and it’s easy and it makes sense. But I’ve just got a feeling.”

  “I hope you’re wrong.” Marten told him. “I think you are. I don’t think Parker is stupid, and it would be stupid for him to try to double-cross us. We hold all the cards.”

  Bob shrugged. “I hope you’re right,” he said.

  8

  Until he heard the explosions from inside the museum, Gonor sat quietly in the truck smoking his pipe, watching the rare automobile drive by, once watching a police car roll slowly down the block without its occupants appearing to take any interest in the truck, watching the silent and empty street, thinking about the past and the future, thinking about Major Indindu and the future of Dhaba and thinking about the future of himself.

  The first explosion, muffled but unmistakable, broke into his calm and reflective mood, making him tense and nervous, and the second explosion made him far too jittery to sit still.

  He knew he shouldn’t leave the truck. If something went wrong inside the museum, Formutesca and Manado would come out at a dead run expecting him to be in the truck ready to start the engine and get them away from there. But he couldn’t help it; he had to move. He had to get out and stand and move and walk around, even if only for a minute or two.

  He left the pipe on the dashboard and stepped out on to the sidewalk. The air was damply cold with a chill that went straight to the bone, but he didn’t mind. It was too pleasant to stretch his legs, to move around.

  He looked at the museum and noticed lights on now on the top floor. There seemed to be no signs of trouble, so he started to walk. He walked up toward Park Avenue halfway to the corner and was about to turn and go back, when he noticed the car parked across the street. Was that paleness in there a white face?

  Maybe it was Parker come back after all to be sure things were going well. But no, it couldn’t be. That wasn’t the way Parker did things.

  So who was it? Someone watching, intending to steal the diamonds once they were brought out of the building?

  It was too much of a coincidence, someone’s waiting in a car on this block at this hour in the morning. It had to be somebody involved, somebody after the diamonds. Hoskins maybe, or one of Goma’s men.

  Gonor turned away, acting as though he’d noticed nothing. He walked back toward the truck and then past it and on down to the corner. Then, hurrying, he crossed the street to the right and went down Lexington Avenue to Thirty-seventh Street and so around the block, coming at the car from behind. He moved cautiously on the dark street, his pistol in his hand now held against his side out of sight, and when he reached the car he was surprised to find it empty.

  Had he made a mistake before? Had there been no one in the car at all?

  He heard a tiny scraping sound behind him and spun, and someone standing there poked a hard finger into his stomach. He saw it was Hoskins, his face distorted with strain, and then the hard finger exploded in his stomach and he never knew anything again.

  9

  Hoskins stepped back quickly and watched Gonor fall against the side of the car and then crumple and drop to the ground. So it’s going to be bloodshed, is it? Hoskins thought, as though the decision had belonged to someone else but he had expected it. Waiting around, all this time, but knowing that sooner or later it would have to start.

  After Walker had done that strong-arm business the other night, hanging him out
the window, Hoskins had decided the time had come to play things a whole lot cagier. There were too many hard cases involved, and if Will Hoskins was going to come out of this with the boodle in hand and his head on his shoulders, it was obvious he was going to have to play a quiet and cautious game.

  Quiet and cautious, that’s the ticket. Let the hard cases flex their muscles and push each other around. Old Will Hoskins, watching it all from the background, knowing a little bit more than any one of them about what all of them were up to, would know when to move in, when to make that one effective move that would bring him home the bacon and leave the strong-arm boys with egg on their faces.

  For himself, Will Hoskins didn’t like the hard cases. Brawn instead of brains, violence instead of good planning. He didn’t like them, didn’t trust them, didn’t want to have anything to do with them. He’d avoided them all his life, and if this boodle weren’t so damned big he’d have avoided them this time as well.

  Particularly after Walker had done that hanging-out-the-window trick. Marten and his playmates had acted rough and mean, but they didn’t hold a candle to Walker.

  If that was his name, which Hoskins doubted. He was calling himself Lynch this time in town, and that was probably another flag. But whatever he called himself and whatever his real name, Hoskins wanted nothing to do with him. He was just as pleased, he told himself, that Walker wouldn’tcome in with him. He was better off playing a lone hand. He’d played a lone hand before, though never with strong-arm types involved.

  Wilfred Hoskins had worked a lot of non-violent rackets in the course of his life, everything from hustling bridge on Long Island to roping for a wire store in Houston. He’d never turned down a chance to wangle a dollar in his life, and when that spade Gonor showed up with his burglary night-school idea, Hoskins immediately saw there was a way in there to promote for himself the sweetest piece of cake of his lifetime. And he still thought so.

  He’d been keeping track of Walker since the window episode, keeping well out of Walker’s sight but keeping pretty close tabs on him just the same, and when he and Gonor spent almost an hour in that African museum this afternoon he’d told himself it had to mean something. They weren’t in that place for fun. When Walker and Gonor split after the museum, it was Walker that Hoskins followed back to his hotel. And then nothing happened for so long that Hoskins was about ready to call it a night, when there was Walker again, coming out of the elevator, coat on, Aaron Marten at his side.

  It was nine o’clock. Hoskins watched the two of them, followed them from the hotel, saw them walk a block and a half and then go into a German restaurant on Forty-sixth Street, saw them sit down to dinner together, and then he knew all he needed to know.

  First, Walker hadn’t wanted to throw in with Hoskins because he’d already thrown in with Marten and that crowd. Birds of a feather, of course. And no doubt Walker, a violent man himself, had been impressed by the tough manner of Marten and his friends.

  But second, the more important, if Walker and Marten were meeting like this it could only mean one thing: that the robbery was set for tonight. And if the robbery was going to be tonight, after Walker and Gonor had spent this afternoon at that museum, then the museum was where the robbery would take place. That had to be where the Kasempa brothers were hiding out.

  It all tied together. The only question was, what was Hoskins going to do about it?

  In a way, he knew that what he should do about it was nothing. He should clear out of this affair right now; it wasn’t where he belonged. Walker, Marten, Gonor, the Kasempas they were all of them men of violence, and he was a man of reason. And they were all banded into groups; he was the only lone agent. If he were sensible, he’d go straight back to Los Angeles tonight.

  But he couldn’t do it. There was too much money at stake; it was too great an opportunity. If he could bring it off he’d be on easy street the rest of his life.

  He didn’t stick around the restaurant once Walker and Marten had settled themselves. He hurried to Sixth Avenue where his rented Ford was waiting in a parking garage, got it out, and drove down to East Thirty-eighth Street. He drove down that block once, slowly, and there were lights in the top-floor windows of the museum. So he’d been right.

  He went around the block, came back, and parked near the corner of Park Avenue and on the opposite side of the street from the museum. He cut the engine, adjusted himself comfortably, and waited to see what would happen.

  For a long while nothing at all happened, and when the truck parked across the street, in front of the museum, Hoskins at first thought that meant nothing, too. But he kept watching the truck and he saw that it had turned out its lights and there was no more puff of white exhaust at the back, and yet no one had gotten out of it. He didn’t understand what that meant, but he was sure it had something to do with Walker and Gonor and the diamonds, and when eventually he saw Gonor’s two young partners crawl out of the back of the truck and carry a lot of stuff into the building next door to the museum he’d known his hunch had paid off.

  Nothing happened then for a long while until he heard a muffled sound like thum. It was more concussion than sound, and if he hadn’t had his window open a little to let out the cigarette smoke he wouldn’t have heard it at all. He frowned out through the windshield, wondering what it meant or if it had anything to do with the robbery, and then he saw the top floor of the museum starting to light up again, lights first in one window, then in two, then in all. And another thum.

  Should he move now? Something was happening over there. Should he make his move or should he go on waiting and watching? Move here, or follow the truck and see where the diamonds went next?

  Before he’d decided, the curb-side door of the truck opened. He couldn’t see it from where he was, but he saw through the window on the near side that the interior light had lit. He waited and watched, and the light went out, meaning the door had shut over there, and a few seconds later he saw Gonor walking on the sidewalk.

  Strolling along up toward Park Avenue as though just out for an evening’s walk, taking the air, nothing on his mind at all. With those yellow lights gleaming in the top floor of the museum.

  Hoskins watched, and he knew when Gonor saw him. He’d hoped it was dark enough in the car here, but Gonor’s halted posture was unmistakable. He saw that break in the stride, then saw Gonor try to pick it up again, try to act as though he hadn’t seen a thing. But Hoskins was sensitive to nuances where his own safety was concerned, and he knew he’d been seen.

  He watched Gonor walk back toward the truck, and he wondered what he should do now. Maybe start the engine, leave the lights off, make a sudden dash for it. Wait till the light down at the corner there had been green for a while, just before it was ready to change.

  But Gonor didn’t stop at the truck. What was he up to? Hoskins watched him walk all the way down to the corner, then cut across and disappear down Lexington Avenue, and he thought: Oh-ho, circling my flank. He got out of the rented car at once and walked up to the side entrance of the church on the corner and stood in the darkness there, and in a little while he saw Gonor walk by and go down and look in the car.

  Hoskins followed him, walking directly up behind him, his own gun in his hand, and he didn’t plan what he was going to do or think about what he was going to do. He just moved forward. And when Gonor spun around and stared at him it was the most natural thing in the world to push the gun forward and pull the trigger.

  So it was all going to work out after all. Gonor was lying on the curb beside the car, so Hoskins rolled him into the gutter and then shoved him partway under the car where he would be less likely to be seen. Then he went down to the truck, saw that it was indeed empty, and got into it himself. Those other black boys would be getting a surprise when they came out.

  But it was a longer wait than he’d anticipated, nearly twenty minutes, and now that he’d actually done something this inactivity was hard to take, which is why he made his error. He saw the museu
m door open and then shut, he saw the two black figures hurry down the walk and open the gate and start across the sidewalk toward him, and he fired about three seconds too soon.

  Not too soon to hit; he shot twice, and the one he’d aimed at flipped backwards and didn’t move after he landed. But the other one had time to dive for cover, and the cover of the iron fence was close enough, and he managed to leap over it before Hoskins could get a good bead on him. Hoskins fired anyway, and the shot pinged away in a ricochet.

  Damn! Hoskins shoved the truck door open, knowing he had to get over there and finish that one off before he could get himself organized, and he jumped out on to the sidewalk, took two steps, and a voice called, “Hoskins!”

  He turned his head, and to the left along the sidewalk was Parker running toward him. In a panic of haste, Hoskins tried to turn around, or point the gun at Parker, or run away, or keeping going the way he’d been moving, all the contradictory impulses slowing him long enough for Parker to stop running and raise his arm.

  Hoskins tried to duck the bullet.

  Four

  1

  Parker was in a bind. He had too much to do and too little time to do it in. And fools like Hoskins didn’t help.

  Formutesca came out from behind the fence. He looked bewildered. He said, “What happened?”

  “That’s the question,” Parker said. “Where’s Gonor?”

  “He’s supposed to be in the truck.”

  “Look in the back,” Parker said. He himself went down on one knee beside Hoskins. He was dead.

  Parker got to his feet and looked up and down the street. Formutesca said, “Not in there.”

  “Come on,” Parker said. There was a car parked across the street and up a ways, and Parker went over there and looked inside, but there was nothing in there. Then Formutesca said, “Underneath,” and that was where they found Gonor.

  Parker dragged the body on to the sidewalk, and Formutesca said, “Is he hurt bad?”

  “He’s dead. Take his feet.”

  “What?”