Breakout

by Richard Stark

  Williams said, “Do they search the whole building?”

  “No,” Parker said. “They’ve got too much to do. This is a big place, a lot of cars, and pretty soon they’ll be thinking about the jewelry place”

  Mackey laughed. “Pretty soon they’ll have a lot to think about,” he said.

  Williams said, “But they’ve at least got to look around in here”

  “Sure,” Parker agreed. "They ask the cashier if any car went out since four o’clock, he says no. They make a pass up to the top and back down. We duck down below window level while they go by. There’s no car alarms going off, nothing looks wrong, that’s it."

  “But,” Williams said,“they leave somebody at the exit”

  “Both exits,” Mackey said.“Car, and pedestrian”

  “They probably will,” Parker said.“They’re looking for three guys. When traffic starts, around six o’clock, I’ll get in the trunk, Williams lies on the floor here in back, it’s just one guy in the car”

  “Or maybe,” Williams said, “I just walk down and out, meet you two around the corner”

  Parker said, “You got any useful ID on you?”

  Williams grinned and shook his head. “I see what you mean. I’ll lie down there on the floor.“

  “Wait,” Mackey said. “I hear something”

  “That was fast,” Williams said.“Suppose somebody saw me turn in here?”

  “Let’s hope not,” Mackey said.“Because then they’d search every car”

  Parker said, “Could you be hearing a civilian?”

  “I don’t think so” Mackey leaned leftward, listening at his open window, then shook his head.“I think it’s two cars. They’re just easing along, coming slow up the ramp, taking their time. They’re searching”

  They all listened. Parker could now hear it, too, the low grumble of two cars throttled back, spiraling very slowly up the ramp.

  Williams said, “This job was fucked up from the beginning, wasn’t it?”

  “It felt wrong,” Parker agreed, “but we were stuck in it.”

  “Stuck in the job or stuck in the jail.” Williams grinned back at Parker. “Some choice.”

  “They stopped,” Mackey said. “So they’re at the Rover. I’m closing the window now.” And he did.

  Parker said, “If they do like we thought at first, loop up, turn around, loop back down, we’re all right. If they go up and they don’t come back down, that means they’re searching everything.”

  Mackey said, “Do we have a Plan B?”

  Parker shrugged. “Only leave the car, go down the stairs, see how hard it is to get through whatever they’ve got to guard the exit.”

  “And be on foot,” Williams added.

  “I like Plan A better,” Mackey said.

  Parker looked out his window to the right. Being in the backseat, he had the better view of the ramp curling up from below. It was gray concrete, flanked by the rears of cars. He kept watching it.

  They had nothing left to say, and with the window closed nothing to hear. They stayed in silence, Parker watching the ramp, the other two watching Parker, and then the black-and-white cruiser nosed around the curve and Parker said, “Down.”

  They all ducked low, Williams folding himself into the footwell, Mackey doing a kind of slow-motion limbo, squeezing himself under the steering wheel. In back, Parker lay on the floor, looking now upward and out of the left window, where he could see the double row of car roofs coiling away and up. After a minute, he saw the black roof of the cruiser move among the other roofs, gliding up and out of sight. He watched, and then said, “Only one went up.”

  “Other one with the Rover,” Mackey said. “Calling in.” He sounded compressed.

  They waited, two minutes, three minutes, and here came the cruiser again, angling back down the ramp, moving at the same slow pace. “Coming back,” Parker said. “Just looking it over.”

  “Good,” Williams said.

  The cruiser left Parker’s angle of vision. He waited, then turned around to look down the ramp. “It’s gone,” he said.

  Everyone climbed back into the seats. “Been a while since I breathed,” Mackey said. “I’m gonna open this window again.”

  “All I want,” Williams said, “is to be in a place I’m not trying to get out of.”

  8

  After a while they heard the tow truck arrive, a deeper sound with more snarl in it. A while later, it went away again. Now there was nothing to do but wait for the world to wake up and start moving around.

  They all napped from time to time, not getting much out of it, but they were all awake when they heard the first car engine start, probably two levels below them. Mackey looked at his watch: “’Ten to six.”

  “We’ll wait awhile,” Parker said.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  By 6:15, they’d heard half a dozen cars start up and drive away, none of them from this far up the ramp. Then Mackey said, “I think we could try it now.”

  “Fine,” Parker said, and got out of the Honda, pausing with the door open to say, “Leave me in the trunk until we get there.”

  Climbing out of the passenger seat in front, Williams said, “And I’ll stay on the floor.”

  “Close me in,” Parker said to him. Going to the back of the Honda, he drew the Terrier from its holster, to have ready in his hand in case anything went wrong, and opened the trunk.

  As Parker climbed over the rear bumper, Williams grinned at him and said, “I know why you want you in there and me on the floor in back.”

  Parker looked at him. “You’re darker.”

  “Right. You set?”

  Parker lay curled on his side. The trunk was a little messy, but mostly empty, and not too uncomfortable. He had to keep his knees bent. With his head cushioned on his folded left arm, right arm resting across his waist, weight of the Terrier on the floor, he was in a position he could maintain for a while. “Set,” he said.

  “See you there,” Williams said, and shut the trunk.

  Now he had only his ears to tell him what was happening. In the blackness, he felt the car dip when Williams got aboard, then heard the engine fire up, then felt a jolt as Mackey backed out of the slot.

  The experience was different, done this way. Braking and accelerating seemed more exaggerated, turns more abrupt. Parker was more aware of the Honda going down a fairly steep slope than he would have been if seated in the normal way in the car. He felt the change when they leveled out at the bottom, and gripped the Terrier tighter, waiting for something to go wrong.

  If Mackey was challenged, they’d quickly find Williams in back. They’d know they were looking for three men, so would they open the trunk right away? If they did, he’d do what he could. If they impounded the car before searching it, took it away to their pound, he’d try to find the best moment to get out of here.

  The car stopped. Was Mackey paying the cashier now, or answering questions? The car started again. It jounced heavily down to street level, turned hard, drove straight, jolted to a stop. Red light. They were out of there.

  It was a twenty-minute drive, with red lights and turnings. At the end, the Honda stopped, the door slammed, there was a pause, the door slammed, the Honda jerked forward again, and again it stopped. The door slammed, and then a second door slammed, and the trunk lid lifted. Parker saw Williams raising the lid, Mackey behind him closing the overhead door. They were back at the beer distributor’s.

  Parker got out, stiff in a lot of his body, and put the Terrier away, as Mackey came back from the closed door, looking at his watch. “Still too early to call Brenda,” he said, “with that block on her calls, so we can’t get out of here yet.”

  “We need sleep,” Parker said. “We’ll stay here now, leave this afternoon.”

  Mackey nodded. “That’s probably a good idea.”

  Williams said, “I’m taking off. I’m too itchy, man, I wanna get out of here.”

  Mackey said, “’You got a place to go?”
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  “Out of this state,” Williams told him, “then south, then I don’t know.”

  Parker said, “You don’t have the money you thought you’d have.”

  “I’ll promote some.”

  Mackey said, “You want to take the Honda?”

  Williams raised an eyebrow at him. “Yeah?”

  “If it belonged to anybody,” Mackey s aid, “it belonged to those other guys. Brenda’s got wheels and Parker’s gonna ride with us.”

  “Then I’ll do it,” Williams said. “Thanks.”

  Mackey said, “’You sure you don’t want to get some sleep first?”

  “The other side of the state line,” Williams told him, “I’ll sleep like a baby.”

  “Then go for it,” Mackey said.

  Mackey opened the overhead door again, and Williams backed the Honda out into early dawn. He waved at them through the windshield, and Mackey slid the door shut.

  Upstairs, in the former offices, is where they’d set up temporary housing for themselves, with cots, each of the six of them with his own room. Parker and Mackey went up there now, and Parker took off only his shoes before he lay down, Terrier under pillow, and went immediately to sleep. He woke reaching for the Terrier, but it was Mackey who’d come into the room, saying, “They arrested Brenda.”

  FOUR

  1

  Give me a minute,” Parker said.

  The functioning men’s room was upstairs. Parker washed face and hands, then looked at his watch. Not quite nine-thirty; he’d been asleep less than three hours.

  When he went downstairs, Williams was back, and so was the Honda. Williams and Mackey sat at the conference table with containers of coffee and a bag of doughnuts; Parker sat with them. “I thought you were gone,” he said to Williams.

  “I thought so, too,” Williams said.

  “He heard it on the radio,” Mackey explained. “So he turned around and came back.”

  Williams’ smile was weak. “I was almost to the state line,” he said.

  Parker looked at him. “Why didn’t you keep going?”

  “If it wasn’t for you people,” Williams said, “I’d still be in Stoneveldt, and then someplace worse after that, the rest of my life. That’s one. You said, ‘Take the Honda, we don’t need it,’ that’s two. You two make no difference between me and each other, that’s three.”

  “Three’s all we need,” Mackey told him. “Tell Parker what you heard on the radio.”

  “I had it tuned in to a news station,” Williams said, “to help me know what to watch for. They described everything in the Armory—they had our route pretty good—and they said they were pretty sure it was you and me, escaped from prison, that was part of the gang, because Tom Marcantoni was one of the guys they found dead.”

  “All three dead,” Mackey said. “Like we thought.”

  “Then they came on,” Williams said, “they said they had an arrest, I thought it was gonna be you two, but then they said it was a woman. Then I thought, it’s Maryenne, it’s my sister they’re after because I called her that one time, but it isn’t. They describe a white woman, and say the only name they have is an alias, Brenda Fawcett.”

  Parker shook his head. “What are they doing with Brenda? She was asleep in her hotel with a do not disturb.”

  “That’s the bitch of it,” Mackey said. “She wasn’t. She pulled that trick again, that thing she does, where she hangs around near me in case I need help.”

  Parker said, “She was out there?”

  “Most of the night,” Mackey said. “Maybe a block away. If we could have reached her, she could have come right over in a minute.”

  “You told her,” Parker said, “she was gonna make trouble for herself doing that one of these days.”

  “And when she went back to the hotel,” Mackey said, “after we busted out and set off that siren, somebody saw her go in. But that isn’t what did it.”

  Williams said, “Somebody else turned her in. The woman that runs the dance studio.”

  “I’m sorry now,” Mackey said, “we didn’t bust her goddam mirror.”

  Parker said, “The woman in the dance studio? What’s she got to do with anything? And what’ve they got on Brenda that they’re gonna pull her in?”

  Williams said, “What they said on the radio, Brenda went to this dance studio a few times, took lessons, paid cash, gave a phony name, used phony ID.”

  “Now they’re saying,” Mackey said, “she was casing the joint. For us.”

  Williams said, "So this woman runs the dance studio, Darlene Something, one of those two-name things, she followed Brenda one time, see where she really lives, so when the cops call her this morning, tell her the dance studio’s all messed up, or where we come through, she says,‘’It’s Brenda Fawcett, she’s part of it’ And they go pick her up.”

  “And find,” Mackey said, “a lot of fake ID I gave her a while back, just like to goof with.”

  “So now she’s the brains of the gang,” Williams said, “and they want her to tell them where the rest of us are.”

  “Parker,” Mackey said, “I gotta get her out of there.”

  “I know that,” Parker said.

  “The radio says,” Williams told them, “they’re holding her at the Fifth Street station, until they find out who she really is and what she knows about the rest of us.”

  Mackey asked him, “Do you know this Fifth Street station?”

  Williams grinned. “I put up there a couple times,” he said. “It isn’t the city jail, it’s more of a holding tank kind of place. Connected to a precinct. You’re there, and then they move you on to some place real, once they decide where you should go.”

  Mackey said, “Any place else would be tougher.”

  “Fifth Street isn’t easy,’9 Williams assured him.

  “But you know the place,” Mackey said. “You can give us the layout.” Turning to Parker, he said, “We gotta get her out of there today. She isn’t gonna like that place.”

  Parker didn’t say anything. Mackey was about to turn back to Williams, but then he frowned at Parker. “Are you saying you aren’t in this?”

  Parker didn’t want to be in it, he wanted to get away from this place, get back east, spend some time with Claire, decide what to do next. He’d been nailed to the floor here too long. He didn’t have that feeling of obligation that had sent Mackey to give him a hand when he needed to get out of Stoneveldt, or that had made Williams turn around at the state line and come back into the pit he’d spent all this time crawling out of.

  Parker didn’t live by debts accumulated and paid off; but there were times when you had to do things you didn’t want, be places you didn’t want. He could stand up now and walk out of here and head east, and there’d be no problem, not now. Neither of these people would shoot him in the back as he got to the door. But somewhere down the line, Mackey would think about him again, and he’d have a different kind of IOU in his mind. Parker didn’t collect the IOUs, neither the good ones nor the bad ones, but he knew he had to live among people with those tote boards in their minds.

  “I didn’t say anything at all yet,” he answered Mackey. “I was thinking, we got to get hold of that lawyer Claire found me.”

  Mackey beamed. “’You’re right! Jonathan Li. He’s the guy.”

  “I’ve still got his card, up with my stuff,” Parker said, and got to his feet. “But we need to get us inside there, too. I don’t know how yet.”

  He went upstairs to his room. In the few days they’d been out, they’d accumulated a small amount of possessions; some clothing, toilet articles. Parker’s things were in the drawers of an abandoned wooden desk. He found the card and looked at it again, the many partner names in fine blue letters against ivory, the name Jonathan Li in gold at the bottom right. He carried the card downstairs, put it on the table, and said, "The problem is, none of us can go to him."

  “I can phone him,” Mackey said. “I’m not an escaped felon, where he might h
ave to tell the law about me, I’m just somebody the cops want to talk to about people who are escaped felons.”

  “There’s a payphone—” Williams started to say.

  “No, I don’t need that,” Mackey told him. “Tom had a cellphone, it should be upstairs with his stuff. I’ll be right back.”

  He left, and Williams looked at Parker, considering him. “You don’t like this,” he said.

  “None of us likes it.”

  “Yeah, I know” Williams nodded. “But Mackey feels like he owes Brenda, and I feel like I owe you and Mackey, but you don’t feel like you owe anybody anything. Tell you the truth, I wish I could be like that.”

  “If you were like that,” Parker told him, “you wouldn’t have phoned your sister.”

  “Meaning,” Williams said, “one of these days I’m gonna do something like that, because I feel like I owe somebody something, and I’m gonna put my head right in the noose.”

  “Maybe not,” Parker said, and Mackey came back downstairs with the cellphone.

  “I don’t know,” he said, hefting the phone. “Is he in the office yet? I can’t leave a callback number.”

  “Try,” Williams said.

  So Mackey sat at the table and punched out the number, then listened, the cellphone a small black beetle against the side of his blunt head.

  “Jonathan Li, please. Would you tell him it’s a guy, he’s so happy about how Mr. Li dealt with the Ronald Kasper problem, now he wants to hire Mr. Li on the Brenda Fawcett problem. Sure.”

  Mackey put his other hand over the mouthpiece and said, “He isn’t in the office, but they can patch in to him. In his car, I guess, or wherever.”

  Then he bent to the phone again. “Mr. Li? Yes, this is Ed, you remember me.” Shrugging, he said to the others in the room, “He’s laughing.” Then, into the phone: “’Yeah, you’re probably right. Yeah, that’s what they said on the radio, Fifth Street station.”

  Raising his eyebrows at Parker, he said into the phone, “Sure, I think you can get a retainer from Claire again, same as last time. Probably easiest.”