Breakout

by Richard Stark

  One-twenty-seven Further Lane was a bungalow, a one-story mansarded stucco house with porch, on a winding block of mostly larger and newer houses. Darlene Johnson-Ross had spent for the best neighborhood she could afford, not the best house.

  The Saab drove by, slowly, seeing no lights, not in that house or any other house nearby. The dashboard clock read 5:27, and this wasn’t a suburb that rose early to deliver the milk. They’d seen one patrolling police car, half a mile or so back, but no other moving vehicles, no pedestrians.

  Most of the houses here had attached garages. The bungalow had a garage beside it, in the same style as the house, but not attached. Blacktop led up to it, then a concrete walk crossed in front of the modest plantings to the porch stoop. A black Infiniti stood on the blacktop, nose against the garage door.

  As they went by, Parker said, “Go around the block, cut the lights when you’re coming back down here, turn in, stop next to the other car."”

  “And then straight in?”

  “Straight in.”

  They made the circuit without seeing any people, traffic, or house lights. Mackey slid the Saab up next to the Infiniti, half on blacktop and half on lawn, then the three moved fast out of the car and over to the front door, which Parker kicked in with one flat stomp from the bottom of his foot, the heel hitting next to the knob, the wood of the inside jamb splintering as the lock mechanism tore through.

  They didn’t have to search for Johnson-Ross; their entrance had been heard. As they came in, Williams paused to push the door as closed as it would go, and a light switched on toward the rear of the house, showing that they’d entered a living room, with a hall leading back from it. Light spilled from the right side of the hall, most of the way back.

  They moved toward the hall, and ahead of them a male voice sounded, high and terrified: “Muriel! Oh, my God, it’s Muriel!”

  Then a female voice, more angry than frightened: “Henry? What are you talking about?”

  Just entering the hall, Parker stopped and gestured to the other two. Everybody wait. It would be useful to listen to this.

  The man’s voice went on, with a broken sound. He was crying. “It’s the detectives, I knew we’d never get away with it, you couldn’t be alone tonight, not after—How could I have been so stupid, she called Jerome, she knows I’m here, all those lies—”

  “Henry, stop! Muriel doesn’t know anything because Muriel doesn’t want to know anything! What was that crash?”

  “Private detectives, I knew she’d—”

  “Henry, get up and see what that was!”

  Now the three moved again, down the hall and into the bedroom, where the couple, both naked, sat up in the bed, he babbling and sobbing, she enraged. They both stopped short when Parker and Mackey and Williams walked in and stood like their worst dream at the foot of the bed.

  Parker said, “Henry, do we look like private detectives?”

  The woman slumped back against the headboard, color drained from her face. “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

  Henry, not knowing what was going on if this was some nightmare other than the nightmare he’d been expecting, picked fretfully at the blanket over his knees as though trying to gather lint. “What do you—” he started, and ran out of air, and tried again: “What do you want?”

  Parker looked at the woman. “You recognize us, don’t you?”

  “On the news,” she whispered, still staring, still too pale, but recovering. “You”—and her eyes slid toward Williams—“and you.”

  Now Henry caught up: “Oh, you’re them,” he cried, and for a second didn’t seem as scared as before. But then he realized he still had reasons to be scared, and shrank back next to the woman. “What are you going to do?”

  This was Mackey’s game; Parker said to him, “Tell Henry what we’re going to do.”

  “We’re going to have a conversation,” Mackey told them. “We’re going to talk about poor little innocent Brenda Fawcett, pining away in a jail cell while you two roll around in your—adulterous, isn’t it?—adulterous bed.”

  5

  I knew she was part of the gang!” the woman cried, forgetting her own fear as she pointed at Mackey in triumph.

  “But she wasn’t,” Mackey said. He was being very gentle, very calm, in a way that told the two on the bed he was holding some beast down inside himself that they wouldn’t want him to let go.

  The woman blinked. “Of course she was,” she said. “She was casing the place.”

  “Casing the dance studio?” Mackey grinned at her, in a way that seemed all teeth. “Come on, Darlene,” he said. “You know why she was there.”

  “She’s with you people.”

  “She’s with me,’” Mackey said. “Not doing anything, not working, you see what I mean? Just along for the ride.” He gestured at Henry seated there now with mouth sagging open, like somebody really caught up in an exciting movie. “Probably like Muriel,” Mackey explained, and Henry’s mouth snapped shut, and Mackey said to him, “Right, Henry? Muriel’s just along for the ride, not part of what you’re doing, am I right? ̶

  Henry shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Then you’re just not thinking, Henry,” Mackey told him. In creating this dialogue, rolling it out, taking his time, Parker knew, Mackey was both easing their fears and keeping the pressure on. They were all in a civilized conversation now, so their survival seemed to them more likely, so they would gradually find it easier to go along with the program, and eventually to do what Mackey wanted them to do.

  Rolling it out, Mackey said, “You’re part of the bunch fixed up the Armory, right?”

  Henry looked frightened again, as though this were a trick question. “Yes, I suppose so,” he said.

  “You got your father in there with his jewelry business.”

  Henry’s lips curved down. “Yes, you’d know about that,” he said.

  Parker said, “We know about everything, Henry.”

  “You put Darlene here in the dance studio,” Mackey went on, “and every once in a while you come around and dance. So there you are, captain of industry, putting together deals, making it happen. Muriel around for much of that, Henry?”

  “What do you mean, around?”V Henry’s incomprehension was making him desperate. “I’m married to her.”

  “Sure, but was she at the meetings? When you and the guys were putting together the Armory deal, when you made the deal with your father, when you made the deal with Darlene here. Muriel in on any of that, Henry?”

  “No, of course not,” he said.

  Mackey spread his hands: case proved. To Darlene, he said, “You get my point? I’m here, I’m working, my friend’s along. She isn’t working, she’s just along, like Muriel. She gets bored, she takes a few classes over at your place. She can’t give you real information about herself, because maybe something might go wrong with what I’m doing here, but she’s paying you in cash, so it doesn’t matter what she says. But then you decide, ’Hey, this woman is lying to me, I can’t have that, I can’t have some woman come into my dance studio and lie to me, I’m gonna find out what she’s up to, and if I can make some trouble for her, I’ll make some trouble for her.’ Just like Muriel might get a little pissed off at you, Darlene, and if she could make some trouble for you, and I bet she could, what do you think? You think you can run a dance studio and have an alienation of affection suit going on at the same time, all in public, all over the cheap crap the press has turned itself into? And no help from Henry, you know, Muriel would be keeping him occupied, too.”

  “Oh, God,” Henry said, and covered his eyes with one hand, head bowed.

  There was a chair against the side wall, with some of Henry’s clothing on it. Saying, “This is gonna take a while, these people are slow,” Williams walked over to the chair, dumped the clothing off it, and sat on it.

  Henry lowered his hand to gape at his clothes on the floor. Darlene said, “Even if—”

  Mackey
looked at her with polite interest. “Yeah?”

  “Even if you’re telling the truth,” Darlene said, “even if she wasn’t a part of it, she was here with you, she’s still an accomplice.”

  Mackey said, “Is Muriel an accomplice? They still have those old blue laws on the books in this state, did you know that? Who knows how many different felonies you two already committed in that bed there, but the point is, is Muriel your accomplice?”

  “That’s absurd,” she said.

  “You’re right,” Mackey agreed. “And Brenda’s my accomplice the same way.”

  She frowned, trying to find some way around this comparison, then impatiently shrugged and said, “It isn’t up to me, it’s up to the police. If whatever-her-name-is was more than just ’being around,’ they’ll find out.”

  “Oh, but that’s the problem, Darlene," Mackey said. "It isn’t the police that make trouble for Brenda, it’s you.”

  “It’s up to them now,” she insisted. “If she wasn’t doing anything wrong, they’ll let her go.”

  “But they don’t want to let her go, do they, Darlene?” Mackey asked her. “They told you themselves, they don’t have a single thing to hold her on, but they don’t want to let her go because they’re suspicious of her because they can’t find out who she is, so that’s why they want you to go back tomorrow morning and sign a complaint against her.”

  Henry jerked to a crouch, hands clasped together, staring at Mackey as though he were some kind of evil wizard. “How did you know that?”

  Parker said, “I told you, Henry. We know everything.”

  Darlene said, “They asked me to cooperate.”

  Mackey said, “To sign a complaint that she made false statements on a credit application.”

  “Well, they were false,” she said.

  Mackey shook his head. “It wasn’t a credit application.”

  She started to snap something, angry and impatient, but then stopped herself, as though she hadn’t realized till that second what the law had asked her to do. Maybe she hadn’t. She shook her head, rallied: “They were false statements.”

  “Not on a credit application. Not a crime.”

  Until now, Darlene and Henry had not looked at each other even once, both being too involved with the three men who’d broken into their room, but now they did turn to gaze at each other, a quick searching look—will you be any help?—and then faced Mackey again. Her voice lower, less pugnacious, she said, “I already said I’d do it.”

  Parker said, “What time you supposed to go in there, in the morning?”

  “Nine o’clock.”

  “So we got three and a half hours,” he told her, “to figure out what you’re gonna to.”

  Mackey said, “Brenda’s never been in jail before. She’s never been fingerprinted before, that’s why the cops can’t get a handle on who she really is. You put an innocent woman in the lockup.”

  Trying for scorn, not quite making it, Darlene said, “An innocent woman!”

  “More innocent than you two,” Mackey told her.

  “Give them a few minutes,” Parker said.

  Mackey turned to him. “You mean, leave them alone awhile, let them get dressed, talk it over?”

  “That’s the best way,” Parker said.

  Mackey looked around the room. “But what if they decide to use that phone there? “

  Parker said, “Then Muriel’s got a problem she can’t ignore,” and the two on the bed gave each other startled looks.

  Mackey said, “Yeah, but what if they aren’t as smart as they look?”

  “No problem,” Williams said. He stood, went over to the bed—both people in it flinched, which he didn’t seem to notice—and stooped to unplug the phone. “I’ll take it with me,” he said.

  Mackey kept looking around the room. “What if they decide to go out the window?”

  Williams, carrying the phone, went to the room’s one window. “It’s locked,” he said. “But it’s just the thing you turn, they could unlock it.”

  A dresser stood between the window and the chair Williams had been sitting in. Parker said, “We’ll move the dresser in front of the window. If they move it to get out, we’ll hear them from the hall.”

  Mackey said, “Let me see what’s what in the bathroom.”

  While Mackey went into the adjoining bathroom, Parker and Williams slid the heavy dresser over in front of the window, where it reached halfway up the lower pane. Then Williams stooped to pick up Henry’s trousers, go through the pockets, remove the wallet and keys. The couple on the bed watched, tense, together but not together.

  Mackey came back to the bedroom and said, “It’s okay. No phone in there, and the window’s high and small, looks like it’s painted shut.”

  The three moved toward the door, Williams carrying the wallet and the keys and the phone. Parker turned back to say, “You got one chance to get out from under. We’ll open the door in fifteen minutes.”

  6

  In the darkness of the hall, with only faint distant streetlight illumination to define the space, Williams put the phone on the floor, and they moved down closer to the living room to have a quiet talk. Mackey said, “What do you think?”

  “I think she’s smart,” Parker said. “She’ll figure it out.”

  “That’s the thing,” Mackey said. “It’s got to come from her.”

  Williams said, “I think it will.”

  “If we just scare her,” Mackey said, talking out his tension, "and we send her out scared when she talks to the cops, afraid maybe we’re back here roasting Henry for lunch, they’ll smell it on her. They won’t believe the conversation."

  Williams said, “It’ll be a tough sell anyway.”

  “She’s tough enough to do it,” Parker said. “He couldn’t do it, but she could.”

  Mackey said, “But it has to come from her. Her decision, how to make everything okay again.”

  Williams said, “You gonna stay here while she’s doing it?”

  Mackey shrugged. “No place else I can think of. And we’ll need to keep track of Henry.”

  “This place could be chancy,” Williams said.

  Parker said, “I know what you mean. No matter how good she is, they’ll think maybe there’s something wrong. They’ll send somebody here.”

  “Not with a warrant,” Mackey said. “No time, and no excuse.”

  Parker said, “No, just to eyeball it, while they’ve still got her there.” He nodded toward the front door. “So we’ll have to fix that, make it work again. If the beat cop comes around, looks in the windows, tries the doors, everything’s okay, then that’s it. But if a door’s unlocked, that’s suspicion, that’s probable cause, he’ll come right in.”

  Williams said, “I’m gonna leave it all to you guys. You don’t need me any more, and I’m taking Henry’s car.”

  Mackey laughed. “A step up from the Honda.”

  “This time,” Williams said, “I’m getting out of this state.”

  Parker said, “Switch all the cars around. Put ours in the garage, hers outside, then take off with his. That way, in the morning, she drives off, there’s no red Saab sitting there that nobody ever saw before.”

  Williams nodded, grinning. “There’s always another detail, huh?”

  “Sooner or later,” Parker said, “you get to them all. “

  7

  I don’t think I can do it,” she said.

  They were in the kitchen now, seated around the Formica table, because lights at the rear of the house wouldn’t draw as much attention. Henry, unshaven, brow creased with worry, wore a pale blue dress shirt, the trousers to a dark blue pinstripe suit, and black oxfords. Darlene was in a high-necked plain white blouse and severe long black skirt; apparently, what she intended to wear to the meeting this morning, a meeting that had now become something else, leaving her uncertain and afraid. She said, “How can I tell them I just changed my mind?”

  “People do it all the time,” Mackey
assured her.

  Parker said, “You were hot, you were angry, but now you’re cooled off, now you don’t want to make trouble for somebody if she really didn’t do anything.”

  “Which she didn’t,” Mackey said.

  “But they’re going to look at me,” Darlene said. “They’re going to want to know why I changed my mind, and all I’ll be able to think about is you two back here, threatening Henry.”

  Mackey turned to Henry. “Do you feel threatened?”

  “Yes,” Henry said. He sounded surprised.

  Mackey gave him his full attention. “Then let me ask you this,” he said. “What do you want Darlene to do?”

  “I don’t want anyone to be hurt,” Henry said. “I don’t want anybody to be… ruined.”

  “Henry,” Mackey said, “you’re a braver guy than you know you are. You risk ruin all the time, I know you do, and why? Because you love Darlene. You got your father the jewelry guy to cover for you tonight, because Darlene didn’t want to be alone after what happened to her dance studio. That was tough to ask him that, wasn’t it?”

  Henry nodded. He looked miserable. “Yes,” he said.

  “I was hysterical,” Darlene said. She was apologizing.

  “Sure you were,” Mackey told her, and said to Henry, “But you did it. You risk everything because you love Darlene, and that’s what I’m doing with Brenda. So I’ll ask you, what do you want Darlene to do?”

  Henry was already shaking his head halfway through the question. “I can’t put that on—”

  “Yes, you can, Henry,” Mackey said. “She’s gonna leave here at eight-thirty”—glance at kitchen clock—“less than three hours from now. We’re gonna let her walk out the door, get in the car, drive away. Do you want her to go tell the cops she changed her mind, she doesn’t think that was Brenda parked there late at night after all, she doesn’t want to file a complaint she knows is a lie? Or do you want her to say there’s two armed and desperate criminals in her house, and they’re holding her lover, you, holding him hostage there? Because then there’s a big standoff, a shootout, and a lot of things happen, maybe even the house burns down—”