Breakout

by Richard Stark

  Williams said, “He’ll have a monitor shows him the garage.”

  “If we don’t take a car,” Parker said, “if we just walk out, walk along the side wall and out, we won’t give him a reason to get excited. But first we’ve gotta get down there.”

  “Somebody switch on the lights in here,” Mackey said, “I got an idea.”

  Parker had the flashlight. He shone it across the room, found the light switch by the opposite door, and crossed to turn it on. Two lamps on side tables made a warm glow, showing walls filled with prints of various kinds of dancers, in performance.

  Mackey went to the desk, sat at it, lit a lamp there, and looked in drawers until he found a phone book. He leafed through it, read, and gave the open page a satisfied slap. “That’s what we like,” he said. “Twenty-four-hour service.”

  Parker and Williams sat in comfortable chairs in front of the desk while Mackey pulled the phone toward himself, dialed a number, waited, and then said, ’Yeah, you still delivering? Great. The name’s O’Toole, I’m in the Armory Apartments, apartment C-3. I want a pepperoni pizza. Oh, the eight-inch. And a liter of Diet Pepsi, you got that? Great. How long, do you figure? Twenty minutes, that’s perfect.”

  He hung up and grinned at them. “By the time they work it out, we’re in the stairwell, and this goddam place’s history.”

  It was twenty-five minutes. They had the office lights switched off again, and took turns watching through the narrow crack of the open door, and at last they heard the building’s front doorbell ring and heard the sound of the chair as the doorman got to his feet.

  The delays were grinding them down. They had to get out of here before it was morning and the world was awake and in motion, but every time they moved they were forced to stop again. Stop and wait. All three of them had nerves jumping, held in check.

  Five seconds since the doorbell rang. They stepped out of the office, single file, moving on the balls of their feet. They angled across the dim lobby and through the door into the stairwell.

  Where the stairs only went up.

  4

  Parker said, “It’s the goddam security in this place. They don’t want anybody in or out except past that doorman.”

  “Well,” Mackey said, “that’s what people want nowadays, that sense of safety.”

  Williams said, “Bullshit. There’s no such thing as safety.”

  “You’re right,” Mackey told him. “But they don’t know that.”

  Parker said, “That can’t be the only way in or out, because garbage has to go out, and they’re not gonna send it out the front door. And deliveries have to come in.”

  Mackey said, “It seems that way.”

  “The fire code,” Williams said. “They can’t have a building this big, full of people living here, and only one staircase.”

  Parker said, “So there has to be service stairs, leading to a service entrance. We go up one flight here, we look in the halls, we find that other way.”

  Williams said, “What if there’s video cameras in the halls, too?”

  “Can’t be,” Mackey said. “It’s too big a building, and one lone doorman. He can’t look at fifty monitors.”

  “We’ll check it out,” Parker said, and started up the stairs.

  This first flight was double in length, with three landings, to bring them higher than the ceiling of the former parade field next door. When they reached the first door, it had a brass 2 on it.

  Stepping past Parker, Williams said, “Let me look for cameras.”

  They waited, while Williams cautiously pulled the door open and looked out, moving his head from side to side rather than stretch out into the hall. Then he opened it wider, leaned out, looking, and shook his head back at Parker and Mackey. “Nothing.”

  “Like I said,” Mackey reminded them.

  They went out to a crossing of hallways, all quietly illuminated. The elevator bank was to their right, a hall extended to their left, and another hall ran both forward and back. A plaque on the wall facing the elevators read RENTAL OFFICE, with a bent arrow to show the office would be at the end of the hall to the front.

  Without speaking, they went the other way, because the service stairs, if they existed, would be at the rear of the building. They moved silently, on pale-green carpeting, past apartment doors with identifying numbers and peepholes.

  The door at the end of the hall had neither; instead, in small black letters, it said EMERGENCY EXIT. They went through into a barer, more utilitarian stairwell, all concrete and iron. At the bottom was a concrete landing with a broad metal door beside another of those tall narrow windows. The door had a bar across its middle to push it open, but the bar was bright red, with its message in block white letters: WARNING. WHEN DOOR OPENED, ALARM WILL SOUND.

  Williams said, “Well? Do we push and run?”

  Parker shook his head. “With no place to go to ground? Look out there, that street’s empty.”

  Williams frowned out at the late-night emptiness, the closed stores across the street, this being a narrower street than the one in front. “Everywhere we go,” he said, “there’s something to stop us.”

  They were all silent a minute, looking out at the empty dark street, then Mackey, sounding reluctant, said, “What if I call Brenda?”

  Parker said, “To come pick us up, you mean.”

  “I don’t like her in these things,” Mackey told them, “but maybe this time we gotta. She drives over, we see the car, go out, let the alarm do what it wants to do, Brenda drives us away from here.”

  Williams said, “I can’t think of any other way.”

  “Neither can I,” Mackey said.

  Parker looked out. No traffic. “Then that’s what we’ll do,” he said.

  5

  Parker hated going back, but there was no choice. Turn around, go up the stairs, the other way along that hall, toward the rental office. Instead of getting out of the maze, turn around and go back into the maze. And less time than ever.

  The rental office door was locked, but not seriously. They went through it, and found a suite of offices illuminated by a few pale narrow strips of light. The tall thin windows continued up here, though not in the apartments farther up, and these windows were just above the level of the streetlights outside. It was their glow, coming through the deep-set narrow windows, that made the stripes of light across ceiling and desks and walls.

  Mackey sat at the nearest desk, just outside a band of light, and opened drawers until he found the local phone book, then called the place where Brenda was staying. He spoke with the clerk there, then hung up, shook his head, and said, “She’s got a no-disturb until her wake-up call at eight.”

  “We need a car,” Parker said. “We need somebody with a car.”

  “Shit,” Williams said.

  They looked at him. Mackey said, “You got something?”

  “I hate to think I do,” Williams said. “I called my sister, you know, I went—”

  “No,” Parker said. “We didn’t know.”

  “It wasn’t dangerous,” Williams promised him. “I left that beer company place where we were staying, late at night, I walked maybe five blocks, found a phone booth, called from there, came back. Nobody saw me, no sweat.”

  Parker said, “The law is listening to your sister’s phone.”

  “I know that,” Williams said. “I was just calling to say goodbye, because I gotta get away from here.” He looked around at the rental office. Disgusted, he said, “If I ever get away from here, I mean, then I gotta get away from this town.”

  Mackey said, “You can’t call your sister again. She would definitely bring the cops down on us. Not meaning to; they’d just come along.”

  “No, I wouldn’t do that,” Williams told him. “I wouldn’t do a thing to mess up her life. But the thing is, when I called her, she told me, there’s this guy we both know, his name is Goody, or everybody calls him Goody, he already been in touch with her, soon as he heard I busted out, said
to her she couldn’t help me because of the cops but he could, give me money, whatever, I should call him, he’d help out.”

  Mackey said, “This is a good guy? Friend of yours?”

  Williams shook his head. “This is a scumbag,” he said. “He’s a dealer, street dealer, works for some big-deal drug guy.”

  Parker said, “So he told your sister, have Brandon get in touch with me, I wanna help him, but what he means is, he’ll turn you in.”

  “Sure,” Williams said. “I knew that from the first second. I wasn’t gonna call Goody at all. But now, maybe so.”

  Mackey said, “If you call this guy, tell him where we are, he just calls the cops, tells them where we are, goes back to bed, goes downtown tomorrow to collect the reward.”

  Williams said, “Well, I’m the only local guy in this room, and he’s all I got.”

  Parker said, “Then we’ll work with him.”

  Williams looked at him. “How?”

  “You’ll tell him a story.”

  “What story?” Williams spread his hands. “Soon as I tell him to come here, he knows I’m here.”

  “You don’t tell him to come here,” Parker said.

  Mackey said, “Then what good is he?”

  “Just wait,” Parker told him. To Williams, he said, “When we were looking out that back way, across the street, there were stores. There was one of them, second or third in from the corner, a camera shop, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Williams said. “Yeah, I been seeing that all my life, it’s, uh, Nelson’s Lens Shop, that’s what it’s called.”

  “Okay.” Parker went over to one of the other desks, saying, “Come on over. Let’s write this down.”

  Williams sat at the desk, found a pen and a sheet of letterhead stationery, and Parker said, “You call this Goody. You tell him you’re hiding out in Nelson’s Lens Shop, but you’ve gotta get out of there, you’ve gotta be out in—How fast could he get here, if you woke him up at home?”

  “Half an hour.”

  “Okay, good. You tell him—it’s almost three-thirty now—you tell him you’ve gotta be out of there by four. You just can’t stay after that, one way or another you’ve gotta get out of there, even if it means just walking down the street. You’ve got two thousand dollars for him, cash money, if he’ll come right now, pick you up, drive you to- What’s a place he’ll believe you want to go to, hide out?”

  Williams thought. “There’s a little town,” he said, “Stanton, about ten miles down the river, it’s all black, dying town, just some old people still living there. I got a couple relations living down there, he’d believe me if I said I was gonna go hide out with them awhile.”

  Parker said, “And he’ll believe you think you can buy him off with two grand.”

  Williams laughed. “So he thinks I’m stupid, and I think he’s stupid”

  “No,” Parker said. “He thinks you’re stupid, but you think he’s greedy. If he thinks there’s money in it from you, in cash, he’ll take you where you want to go first, and then call the law”

  Mackey said, “So we go down to that door, and what? Soon as he shows up, we run out there?”

  “No,” Parker said. To Williams he said, “You tell him, you’re hiding in the back of the store. When he gets there, he should come over and knock on the door” To Mackey, Parker said, “That way, he’s out of the car before we move. And we get to see if it’s Goody or somebody else that shows up”

  6

  When Williams hung up, his grin was both nervous and confident. “He’ll do it,”he said.

  From just listening to this side of the conversation, Parker believed Williams was right. Williams had been hushed and urgent throughout the brief call. “I’ll tell you in the car, man!” he’d exclaim, every time Goody started asking questions. “If you don’t get here, I just gotta go, I don’t know where, I just gotta get outa here!” And at last, “Good man, Goody, Maryenne says I could count on you, see you, my man” And he hung up and gave them his grin.

  Mackey said, “I know it’s more comfortable in this place, but I wanna be down by that door”

  They all did. They left the rental office, strode to the far other end of the hall, past the sleeping residents of the Armory Apartments, and trotted down the service stairs to the door with the alarmed bar. Williams leaned against the window frame, looking out that deep narrow space at the camera store across the street, and Parker and Mackey sat on the stairs to wait.

  The feeling at the bottom of this stairwell was like being in the base of a mineshaft. Even though they were at street level, the sidewalk just the other side of that door in front of them, it felt in here as though they were buried much deeper in the earth than when they’d been in the tunnel. The feeling reminded Parker of his more than two weeks in Stoneveldt. He wanted out of here.

  It was three minutes to four when Williams suddenly straightened, looking out the window. Reading his body language, Parker and Mackey both got to their feet, watching Williams as he leaned closer to the window.

  “It’s him,” Williams said. His voice was hushed, as though he was afraid the man out there could hear him. Then he shook his head. “ Get out the car, Goody!”

  Parker and Mackey moved in close to look out past Williams’ shoulders. A black Mercury, several years old, was stopped now across the street, in front of the camera store. Gray exhaust sputtered from the tailpipe. The driver was indistinct, but clearly alone in the car.

  Mackey said, “What’s he waiting for?”

  “He’s got to get out of the car,” Parker said.

  And then he did. The driver’s door opened, the interior light switched on, and Parker could see a skinny black man, any age from twenty to forty, jiggling in nervous fidgety motions inside there. He pushed his door open, hesitated, looked around, then abruptly jumped out of the car. Exhaust still puffed from the tailpipe. The driver closed the door, but then leaned his chest against the side of the car and stared off at something to his right, down the street.

  Mackey said, “What’s he looking at?”

  Parker took his S&W Terrier .32 from its holster in the middle of his back. “We’ll be finding out,” he said.

  The other two both brought out their pistols, as Goody finally moved across the street. Jerking like a marionette, he hurried around the front of the Mercury and ran to the inset doorway of the camera store. As he knocked on the glass over there, Parker rammed his body into the barred door. It popped open, outward to the street. A great metal scream rose up, and Parker and Mackey and Williams ran out to the street.

  Parker was already looking to his right as he came out past the door, and what was parked down there, a dozen car lengths behind the Mercury, wasn’t the law. It was a dark green Land Rover, with three burly black men boiling out of three of its doors. They were all shouting, but nobody could hear anything with the scream of that siren laid over them all.

  Already there were lights coming on in windows up above, and the three men from the Land Rover waved guns as they ran forward. The two from the front seat would be muscle, the one from the backseat brain. All three started to fire their guns as they ran, which meant the bullets went anywhere.

  Parker stopped in the street, one step beyond the curb, aimed down his right arm, dropped the brain. Mackey and Williams were also firing. Parker looked toward the Mercury, and Goody was running for it, across the sidewalk from the camera store, reaching for the passenger door. Two-handed stance, Williams shot him through both closed windows, and Goody bounced off the car, sprawled on his back on the sidewalk, shards of window glass glittering around him.

  The three from the Land Rover were all down. That was the better car. Parker ran for it, knowing Mackey and Williams had to see him, because he couldn’t shout to them under the siren. Windows were opening upstairs, people staring down at the street, where three men were fallen in twisted positions, one lay spread-eagled on his back on the sidewalk next to a black Mercury, and three men with guns in thei
r hands raced for a hulking dark Land Rover.

  Still running, Parker half-turned, pointed to Williams running behind him, pointed to the driver’s seat of the Land Rover; Williams knew this town. The three piled in, Mackey following Parker through the same door to the back seat, and Williams tore them away from there.

  As soon as the siren was behind them, Parker said, “Go to ground. Don’t drive a lot”

  “Where we put the cars,” Williams told him. “It’s just down here”

  Parker looked back. No law yet. They’d been out of the building less than a minute.

  Williams drove without lights, nothing else moving on the street, and when he got to the parking garage he stopped to get the ticket that opened the barrier, then circled upward three stories before he finally found a space to park. Cutting the engine, he turned to the two in back and said, “I think the big guy was the one Goody worked for”

  “He should have stuck to drugs,” Parker said.

  7

  What now?” Mackey asked. “Do we get the Honda and drive out of here?”

  “We move to the Honda,” Parker said. “We don’t want to be in this thing”

  “That’s right,”Williams said. “They’ll be looking for these wheels everywhere around here”

  They left the Land Rover, Williams locking it and taking the keys, and walked down the ramp to the Honda. Mackey had the keys for that; he unlocked it and took the wheel, Williams beside him, Parker in back. Putting the key in the ignition, Mackey said, “"So now what? Drive out of here?”

  “Too early,” Parker told him. “We’d be the only car on the street”

  “And with three guys in it,” William said.

  “But we should be above the Land Rover,” Parker said.

  “Right,”" Mackey said, and drove them up the ramp, past the Land Rover and one level more to an area that was no more than half full. He tucked the Honda in between two other vehicles, both larger, then opened his window, shut off the engine, and said, “What do they do after they find it, that’s the question”