Marked Man

by William Lashner

  “I don’t know. You tell this to my mother?”

  “About the threat, yeah, I did. About Ralph, I didn’t need to, it was front page in all the papers.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She didn’t want me to tell you. She says she’ll take care of you.”

  “She show you her gun?”

  “Yeah, she did.”

  “Crazy old bat. She used to point that thing at my head when I acted up, scared the hell out of me.”

  “Charlie, I’m not supposed to tell you this, but the way things are going, I think I have no choice. There’s some guy in town offering a lot of money for that painting. I can’t make a deal for you, you’d have to make it yourself, but he says he could give you enough to get lost for a good long time.”

  “How much?”

  “Enough. High six figures at least. And you should also know that he’s approached a few other people about it, including Ralph before he was murdered and your old friend Joey Pride. They both seemed to think they deserved a piece of the price.”

  “High six figures, huh? You think you can get more?”

  “I know I could, but I have to advise you that the sale of stolen property is illegal.”

  “You tell my mother?”

  “No. I was afraid she’d point the gun at me.” I reached into my jacket, pulled out an envelope. “Here’s his card. Just so you know.”

  “Are you advising that I sell to this guy and lam off?”

  “I’m thinking that maybe Philadelphia isn’t the safest place for you right now.”

  “What about witness protection? I thought you was going to make a deal.”

  “That’s gotten a little complicated. I’m having a hard time making a deal with the government. The federal prosecutor I told you about, she’s still got a stick up her butt.”

  “What the hell about?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “I ain’t no proctologist.”

  “She wants you to tell her everything about how you got the painting. No immunity and no protection unless you agree. She seems to have some ulterior motive behind her demands, and I think I know what it is.”

  “What?”

  “You ever hear of a detective named Hathaway?”

  “What does that bastard have to do with anything?”

  “The fed is his daughter.”

  “Oh, jeez.”

  “How do you know Hathaway?”

  “He was sniffing around after the robbery. Asking about some girl what went missing about the time we took the painting.”

  “A girl named Chantal Adair?”

  “Who the hell remembers a name?”

  “I do,” I said, and there must have been something in my voice, because Charlie backed up a bit. I took a breath to calm myself, checked the beach once again. The kids were still laughing. A couple of overweight joggers in baseball caps had just made their way around the music pier. A family grouping had formed at the ocean’s edge, the youngest throwing handfuls of sand into the sea.

  “I’m going to show you a picture,” I said, pulling the shot of Chantal Adair from out of my jacket pocket. “Do you recognize her?”

  He glanced at it, shook his head. “It’s too dark. I can’t see.”

  “Tell me about Hathaway.”

  “I don’t know,” said Charlie. “Some girl went missing, and Hathaway, he thought it was all connected to the robbery. Somehow he connected the robbery to us.”

  “Any idea how?”

  “Who knows? But the thing was, he couldn’t finger us for either charge, no matter how hard he looked. See, we never spent nothing, we never slipped up. Our lives didn’t change one bit.”

  “No mink coats, no Cadillacs? How’d you pull that off?”

  “It was easier than you think, seeing as we never got our cuts in the first place.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We got stiffed,” said Charlie.

  I looked at Charlie’s silhouette, looked down the shoreline, trying to figure out what I was hearing. Joey had said something about the money disappearing, and now Charlie was talking about getting stiffed. The family was heading back for the boardwalk, the joggers were getting closer. Two men, one shaped like a pear, the other short and wider than a truck. Funny shapes to see in joggers. The moonlight glinted off their chains, and my head shook with the slap of recognition. Fred and Louie. Up with Hoods.

  “Crap,” I said softly. “We have company.”

  “Who?” said Charlie, his head swiveling. “What?”

  “Turn and walk slowly toward the boardwalk like nothing is wrong.”

  “What?”

  “Just do it, Charlie. Now.”

  Charlie’s swiveling head stopped in the direction of the two joggers. He coolly let out a yelp and then, suave as could be, ran the hell away, toward the little path between the fences that led to the boardwalk. He was sprinting as fast as he could, which was not fast at all, arms and legs akimbo, like a cartoon character running in midair and going nowhere.

  I caught up to Charlie Kalakos in a flash, grabbed hold of his arm, and started lugging him toward the stairway. The hoods were shouting as they ran for us, the seagulls were squawking, Charlie was whining.

  “Stop pulling me. You’re going to tear off my arm.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “Car.”

  “Where is it?”

  “You’re hurting my arm.”

  “Where’s your car?”

  “Down Seventh.”

  When we reached the stairs, I pushed him ahead of me. I glanced back quickly. The hoods were about thirty yards away, sprinting toward us, sand flying behind them. I leaped up the wooden steps, two at a time, pulled Charlie up the last. At the boardwalk we charged into the crowd and then stopped, looked around.

  “Here,” I said, grabbing Charlie and pulling him now to the right, away from Seventh. “This way.”

  “My car’s that way,” he said.

  “I know, but the crowd will be thickest in here.”

  I was pulling him toward the Turkish arches of a small amusement park, with its carousel and roller coaster and great Ferris wheel rising over the boards. On the way I saw an overweight kid with a huge tub of caramel popcorn.

  “You might not realize it,” I told the kid as I grabbed the tub smack out of his chubby hands and threw it as hard as I could, high in the air, over the crowd, toward the stairs, “but I’m doing you and your arteries a favor.”

  The kid screamed like a siren, the popcorn spun out in a cloud.

  An onslaught of seagulls descended upon the flying popcorn like a ravenous army, viciously pecking pedestrians and each other in their frantic quest for each loosed kernel. The two hoods from the beach, rushing up the stairs toward us, fell back when faced with the fluttering, vulturous cloud.

  Charlie and I plunged into Gillian’s Wonderland Pier.

  37

  The sound of the calliope puffing away, the smell of the popcorn popping, the crush of the crowd moving thick and slow in the narrow gap between two kiddie rides. We tried to force our way through but were swallowed whole and carried leisurely along by the viscous mass. Kids wiped their noses, grandfathers rubbed their backs. To our left was a balloon race. To our right a mini-NASCAR raceway.

  “They’ll come after us in here,” said Charlie.

  “It won’t be so easy to find us in the crowd.”

  “Which way?” said Charlie.

  “Down there,” I said, pointing to a ramp that led toward the rear of the park.

  We made our way, bobbing and weaving through the family groups, grandparents and grandkids, teenagers looking flushed and bored at the same time. We didn’t even glance back until we reached a fence at the entrance to Canyon River log flume. We took a moment to survey the whole of the crowd.

  “You see them?” said Charlie.

  “Not yet.”

  “Maybe they went the other way.”

&
nbsp; “Sure,” I said, “and maybe cigarettes are good exercise for the lungs.” I stopped jabbering for a moment and thought. “How do you think they found us?”

  “They didn’t follow me,” he said, and he was right about that. And being as this had been a two-man meeting, that left one dope to take the blame.

  “I didn’t spot them,” I said.

  “How long you think they been following you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and then I thought about Ralph Ciulla and I felt a great gaping dread.

  They had been following me from the start, the sons of bitches, waiting for me to lead them to their targets. And like the stupid pisspot I was, I did exactly that. When Ralph and Joey found me, they found them, and, putting it together, Fred probably took a picture and sent it to Allentown so that the killer would know exactly whom to ask his bloody questions and with whom to leave his bloody message. Son of a bitch. So first I had led them to Ralph, and now I had led them to Charlie.

  “We have to get out of here,” I said.

  “No kidding.”

  For a second I looked at Charlie, short and heavy, sweating with effort and fear, still haunted by his mother, as threatening as a koala bear. Charlie was as unlikely a hood as ever I saw, and it got me to wondering.

  “Joey Pride was telling me about that time in the bar that Teddy Pravitz first brought up the idea of hitting the Randolph Trust.”

  “Yeah, I remember it. Teddy promised the whole thing would make men of us, change our lives forever.”

  “Did it?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Look at me now.”

  “But here’s my question. Teddy obviously had the plan to do the Randolph heist before he ever walked into that bar. So why did he need you guys?”

  “Manpower.”

  “He could have latched onto professional hoods if he wanted.”

  “He didn’t want hoods, he wanted guys he could trust. And besides, it wasn’t like the four of us, we didn’t have skills.”

  “Skills, huh? Like what?”

  “Well, Joey Pride was a genius with engines and electricity. Whatever alarm system the place had, he could disarm it, and take care of the lights and the phones, too. And Ralphie Meat, besides being huge and strong, was a metal guy. Could bend anything, solder anything, melt anything.”

  “Like the golden chains and statues?”

  “Sure.”

  “And Hugo?”

  “Hugo had his own little skill. He used to sit in the back of the room and imitate all the teachers to a tee, crack us all the hell up. He did my mother better than she did. ‘Charles, I need you now. You come here this instant.’ He could become anyone he wanted.”

  “And what about you, Charlie?”

  “Well, you know I worked with my dad at the time.”

  “And what did he do?”

  “Dad was a locksmith,” said Charlie. “Wasn’t a lock made that he couldn’t open in a heartbeat. And he taught me what he knew.”

  “Locks, huh?”

  “And safes. Later, with the Warricks, safes became my specialty.”

  “Must have come in handy up in Newport. Let me show you the picture of that little girl again now that the light’s better.”

  “I don’t want to see the picture.”

  “Sure you do.” I took the photograph of Chantal Adair out of my pocket, showed it to him again. “You recognize her?”

  He glanced at it and pulled back. It was a small movement, as quick as an inhale, but there it was.

  “Never seen her before,” he said.

  “You’re lying to me.”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “I have to represent you, Charlie, but I don’t have to trust you. Oh, crap.”

  “What?”

  “They’re here, or at least one of them.”

  Just at the edge of the arcade, with his white baseball cap and a retro Celtics jersey, chains glistening, stood Fred, the older, pear-shaped hood who had roughed me up outside my office. He had a phone to his ear. He stepped forward, peered into the crowd, scanned our direction without registering our presence.

  “What do we do?”

  “Let’s get to the rear exit,” I said. “But slowly. You see the little guy?”

  “What little guy?”

  “He’ll be in the same outfit, just a different jersey. He’s shorter than you, wider than a Buick. My guess is he’s on the phone, too.”

  “You mean that guy?” said Charlie.

  “Yikes.”

  Louie was standing right at the exit. He was also on the phone, standing on tiptoe, trying to see over the shoulders of a pack of tweens. It didn’t look like he had spotted us yet.

  “This way,” I said, pulling Charlie away from Louie toward a narrow ramp that led up and to the right. As we ascended, I glanced back at the entrance. Fred was staring right at us, talking into his phone.

  There were younger kids now on the ramp, strollers, grandparents moving slowly, mothers shouting. We pushed our way past as many as we could until we reached the upper level, and then we made a beeline as far from the ramp as possible, past the tykes’ jungle gym and the Glass House, past the little roller coaster and the Safari Adventure. At the far end was a set of stairs that led right back to the lower level, where Louie waited.

  I spun around in frustration. The rides on the deck were all for toddlers, there was no place for us to hide. I could see the head of Fred bobbing up the ramp. Louie was coming for us from the other direction. There was no place to go. Except maybe…

  “We need three tickets,” I said.

  “I don’t got no tickets,” said Charlie.

  I ran up to a father with a big block of tickets. He was watching his kids on the spinning teacups. I grabbed my wallet, took out a ten. “Ten dollars for three tickets,” I said.

  He looked up at me, down at the waving ten-dollar bill, back up at me. “They’re only seventy-five cents a ticket.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “There’s a booth right at the bottom of the ramp.”

  “I don’t care. Ten bucks for three tickets. Now.”

  “I could give you change.”

  “No change, no nothing. Please.”

  He looked at me strangely, took three tickets off his block. “Just take them,” he said.

  I wasn’t going to argue. I grabbed the tickets, grabbed Charlie, headed back to the middle of the Fun Deck where stood the Glass House, a strange maze of smudged glass panels. I gave the tickets to the lady, pushed Charlie inside.

  “Go to the back, turn away from the crowd, and wait,” I said.

  “But—”

  “Just go, and keep your hands in front of you.”

  Charlie swiveled his head, spotted something that spooked him, and charged inside. He banged into one of the panels, turned and banged into another, and then, with his hands in front of him, made his way through to the rear of the maze.

  I ran toward the ramp until Fred spotted me. I did a little pump with my elbows and then charged away from him, past the Glass House without a glance, toward the rear stairs and down, right smack into Louie, who grabbed me by the belt and held me close.

  “Hello, boysy,” he said.

  I WON’T GO into a blow-by-blow description of our encounter after the two hoods dragged me outside the park. Fred asked the questions. I made snarky, nonresponsive comments. Louie drilled me in the stomach with his fists. I fell to my knees and dry-heaved. All rather unpleasant. And it might have gone far worse if a cop hadn’t turned the corner just as I was struggling back up to my feet for the second time. The cop was young, his hat was tilted low over his eyes.

  “Oh, look,” I said, standing a little straighter. “A nice policeman. Why don’t you boys ask him to help you find Charlie?”

  “Don’t even try,” said Fred.

  Louie grabbed the collar of my shirt and pulled me down to his level. “Don’t even try, boysy.”

  “Should I call the nice policeman over?
”

  Fred looked behind him, did a double take, then tapped Louie on the shoulder. Louie turned, went wide-eyed. Without taking his eyes off the cop, he let go of my collar and started smoothing it out with his hand.

  As the cop approached, giving us a nod, Fred injected a false heartiness into his voice. “It was nice talking to you, Victor. What about your friend Charlie? We’d like to say hello to him, too.”

  I thought about grabbing the cop as he passed by, but if I did, I’d have to tell him the story, and that meant telling him about Charlie, which might be as much trouble for Charlie as were these goons. So I let him pass with a nod and a smile and then said, “Really, guys, it was nice chatting, but I have to go.”

  Yet even as I said it, I glanced at the giant Ferris wheel turning slowly in the middle of the park.

  Fred caught my glance, followed its line to the high, spinning ride.

  “We’re not finished with you yet,” he said, looking once more at the cop’s back before starting toward the Ferris wheel, nodding at Louie to follow. Fred took a few steps and then stopped, came back, leaned close so he was whispering in my ear.

  “If we don’t find him, you should give Charlie this advice. Tell your pal to take the cash and run, or both of you are dead, understand?”

  “What do you mean, take the cash?”

  “You heard me,” he said. “Remember, our friend from Allentown has your picture too.” And then he was gone, along with Louie, headed for a ride on the Ferris wheel.

  I waited a bit until they were out of my sight, and then I hurried back into the park, back to the right, and up the stairs to the Fun Deck. I expected to see a toddler-shaped figure shaking with fear in the rear of the Glass House, but there were only a couple of kids and a father comforting his daughter who had banged her head.

  I looked around for Charlie: nothing. I went to the rear of the deck. There was a low fence surrounding the whole of the upper level and, on the ground below, a number of small spruce trees. One of the trees was strangely bent, its tip hanging limp. I looked at it for a moment and then turned my gaze to the street, following it south. In the distance I could see a squat figure in plaid shorts running, not moving very fast, but running, running away, running for his life.

  He had been running for fifteen years. It was time for me to bring him home. But first I had to learn exactly what he was running from, and then I had to figure out why figures as disparate as the high-priced lawyer for the Randolph Trust and the two knuckleheads of Up with Hoods all seemed ever so determined to make sure that I failed.