Backflash p-18

by Richard Stark

  “And went there first,” Parker said.

  Lou Sternberg had been silent all this time, seated on the bottom of the boat because his balance wasn’t good enough to permit him to stand when it was running through the water. But now he said, “Parker, why are you still talking to this clown? This is a deep enough river, isn’t it?”

  “We couldn’t find his landing on our own,” Parker said.

  Hanzen said, “That’s right, and we all know it. I’ll take you to my place you probably want my car.”

  “Naturally.”

  “So there it is,” Hanzen said. “I’ll take you there, you’ll go ashore, you’ll kill me, you’ll take my car, my problems’ll be all over and yours’ll still be goin on.”

  “Maybe not,” Parker said. “You’re cooperating, and you didn’t tell them till they made you.”

  “Don’t try to give me hope,” Hanzen said, “it’s a waste of time.”

  Which was probably true, too, so Parker didn’t lie to him anymore.

  “Leaned on him,” Wycza said, scoffing. “They leaned on him. Made faces and said boo.”

  “That’s right,” Hanzen said, “they did that, too. They also kicked me in the nuts a couple times, kicked me in the shins so I got some red scars you could look at, twisted my arms around till I thought they broke ‘em, closed a couple hands down on my windpipe till I passed out.” He turned away from the wheel, though still holding on to it, and looked Wycza up and down. “You’re a big guy,” he said, “so you figure it don’t happen to you. The day it does, big man, when you got seven or eight comin at you, not to kill you but just to make you hurt, you remember Greg Hanzen.”

  “I’ll do that,” Wycza promised.

  “And remember I told you this. They got wonderful powers of concentration, those boys, they never forget what they’re doing. They don’t stop. They won’t stop, no matter how long it takes, until you say what they want you to say.”

  “I’ll remember that, too,” Wycza said.

  “Good.” Hanzen turned back to the wheel. “We’re coming in now,” he said, and angled them toward shore.

  It was still possible that Hanzen had some other scheme in mind, so Parker kept both guns in his hands and peered at the black and featureless shore as the boat slowed and the river grew wider behind them. How could these river rats find their way around in the dark like this? And yet they could.

  “I’ll run it on up on the shore,” Hanzen said. “Make it easier for you all to get out.”

  “Good,” Parker said.

  Hanzen said, “I hope you take them, and not the other way around. Them’s the bunch I got a grudge against.”

  “We’ll do what we can,” Parker said.

  Now the shore was close, very close. There was a little moon, not much, just enough to glint off glass in there; probably the windshield of Hanzen’s car. Parker said, “Where are the car keys?”

  “In my pocket. Wait’ll we stop.”

  “Fine.”

  “Brace yourselves now.”

  Hanzen switched off the engine. There was a sudden tingling floating silence, and then the keel of the boat scraped pebbles in the mud, angled up, ran partway up onto the bank, and jolted to a stop. Hanzen reached into his pocket, came out with a small ring of keys, and extended them toward Parker, who took them. “It pulls to the left,” Hanzen said.

  Wycza stepped over the side first onto the bank, then helped Lou Sternberg over. Parker jumped over the side, and Hanzen jumped after him. Then Hanzen stood there, just waiting.

  Wycza took Hanzen by the elbow, walked him farther from the water’s edge, into the oval clearing, very dark now. They stopped, and Wycza stepped to one side. He said, “Greg.”

  Hanzen turned his head, and Wycza clipped him across the jaw with a straight right. Hanzen dropped like a puppet when you cut the strings; straight down.

  Wycza turned to the others. “Okay, let’s go,” he said. “I see it’s another goddam tiny car. Lou, you’re in back.”

  Sternberg said, “Dan, he isn’t dead.”

  “Oh, what the fuck,” Wycza said. “By the time he wakes up, whatever we’re doing, it’s all over and done with. He’s just some dumb poor clown. He helped us one way, and he hurt us another. Listenin to him, out there on the water, I kind of felt for him. Okay?”

  Parker and Sternberg looked at one another. To be betrayed, to be set up, to be led into an ambush, and then not deal with the guy that did it? On the other hand, it was certainly true that Hanzen wasn’t a threat to them any more, and for whatever reason the ambush hadn’t worked, and in fact killing was never a good idea unless there were no other ideas.

  “And now,” Wycza said, “he’s got a broken jaw, so it’s not like he’s singin and dancin.”

  Parker shrugged, and so did Sternberg. “Well, Hanzen was wrong about one thing,” Parker said, as he walked toward the little Hyundai, the car keys in his hand. “His problems aren’t over.”

  2

  Parker drove. He was probably taking a long way around, going out to the main state road and then north, but he didn’t know all the back ways around here, particularly at night. Still, the main point was to get to the cottages before Mike and Noelle did, because they wouldn’t know they were riding into an ambush. But they couldn’t reach there from the ship until close to three, and even going the long way around Parker could make it by two-thirty.

  They were silent most of the way up, but as they neared the dirt road that led in to the cottages Parker said to Sternberg, in the back seat, “Lou, here’s the gun I took off that guard.”

  “You’ve still got your other one? Fine.”

  “My idea is,” Parker said, “Dan and me go in on foot, see what’s what. You and the car stay out by the turnoff, watch for Mike and Noelle.”

  “Okay. If I hear anything

  “

  “You do what seems best.”

  “Right.”

  The landmark for the turnoff at night was the Agway just to the north of it. They kept lights on up there, in the yard and inside the main store building. Everything else for a few miles around was in darkness at this hour, so when they saw those white and red lights, they knew where they were.

  There was no traffic at all; they hadn’t seen another car in motion in ten minutes. Parker switched down from headlights to running lights as he made the turn, then switched the lights off entirely before he stopped, with the Hyundai maybe four car lengths in from the blacktop, squarely in the middle of the dirt road. All three got out, and Sternberg, holding the guard’s gun loosely at his side, said, “I’ll sit against a tree over here.”

  Wycza said, “Let’s hope Mike don’t take the turn too fast.”

  Sternberg said, “Parker, now he’s worried about Hanzen’s car.You sure this guy’s one of us?”

  “Promise you won’t tell,” Wycza said, and he and Parker walked on down the road.

  There was enough moonlight and starlight to make the paler swath of the road stand out from the darker woods all around it. They walked side by side, guns in their hands, Parker near the left edge of the road, Wycza near the right. After a while, their night vision improved, and they could see a little ways into the woods on both sides. Except for the quiet crunch of their shoes on the dirt, there was no sound. And though the air was cool, there was no breeze.

  Light up ahead. They moved more slowly, and saw the lights still on in their cottage. In the cleared space in front stood the three motorcycles, near Wycza’s Lexus and Parker’s Subaru. There was no sound, no movement.

  Wycza reached across and tapped Parker’s arm, then pointed. The lit-up cottage was second from the left. Between the two cottages on the right a pickup truck was parked. It was a convention here.

  There was no way to move to the left past the cottages, which is what Parker had wanted to do. But if you went that way you’d be picked up in the light-spill, so he moved to the right instead and followed Wycza around the edge of the clearing to the farthest right-ha
nd cottage and around it into the deeper darkness there.

  In that darkness they paused for a whispered discussion. Wycza said, “Who’s the truck?”

  “Wild card.”

  “There’s somebody somewhere. Down at the landing?”

  “If they still think we’re coming from there. I’ll look.”

  “I’ll see what’s in the cottage.”

  “Fine,” Parker said, and went first, around the riverside end of the first cottage and straight out to the drop-off, then left to the wooden stairs down to the river, which were just beyond the range of illumination from the house.

  The sound here was river against shore, river against support posts; faint whispers of wavelets, not much louder than Parker and Wycza had been, a minute ago.

  Parker went silently down the uneven steps. There was no comfortable place for somebody to sit and wait on the steep slope to either side, and there was nobody on the dock. The river reflected moonlight and made a heavy steady sweeping movement from right to left.

  Parker went back up the stairs, and at the top he stood and waited and listened. At first he heard and saw nothing, but then he caught the movement as the outside door to the screened porch of their cottage pushed inward, the screen of the door reflecting light differently as it moved. He looked lower, and could just make out Wycza crawling through the doorway, flat on his belly. The screen door eased shut.

  Parker moved to his left, to get to the rear of the last cottage, where they’d split up, so he could follow Wycza’s route. He turned at that cottage, moved along its screened-in porch, and beyond it saw to his left the pickup, parked facing this way, as though the driver hadn’t considered the possibility he might want to leave in a hurry.

  As Parker crossed the open space to the next cottage, there were two sudden shots. He dove to the ground, pressed against the stone foundation of the cottage, and lay prone, Python held in both hands on the ground in front of him.

  The shots had come from out ahead, probably their cottage. And the two shots had been different, the first one lighter, more of a clap, the second one heavier, a full-throated bark. The kind of sound this Python might make, or Wycza’s 27.

  Parker waited for some sort of follow-up, but nothing else happened, so he snaked forward along the ground, pulling himself on with his elbows, arms crossed in front of his jaw, Python pointed at the screened porch beside him.

  At the corner, he was where the light began. He looked across at the yellow windows, and waited. After a minute, he heard movement, walking; somebody who wasn’t trying to conceal himself. Then the front door opened and slammed shut, and a few seconds later Wycza appeared around the corner down there, 27 in his hand but casually, pointed downward. He looked this way and that, but not warily, along the ground, like somebody who’s lost a cufflink. He stopped to look at the window to the bedroom off the kitchen, fingering the screen there. Then he came on, and Parker could hear he was singing, not loud, not soft: “Be down to getcha in a taxi, honey, better be ready bout half past eight.”

  Wycza was not somebody who sang. As he rounded the corner and walked openly past the doorway he’d crawled through just a couple of minutes ago, Parker reversed himself and got crouching to his feet, and hurried bent low back the way he’d come, to the last cottage, and around it to the front, where he saw Wycza just moving out of the range of the light toward the road. He didn’t seem to care that he was exposed.

  Keeping to the darkness, being sure he couldn’t be seen, Parker followed.

  3

  Down the dirt road, where you couldn’t see the light from the cottage any more, Wycza stood waiting. Parker joined him and said, “What’s up?”

  “The three bikers, like you said, in three rooms. Set up for an ambush, but gunned down. Two dead, one not. Not then.”

  “Wounded? Took a shot at you.”

  “The young one. Been hit high on the chest, right side, lying in the living room behind the sofa. Lookeddead. I found the other two first, one in a bedroom, shot in the back of the head, one in the kitchen, shot in the chest. One shot each.”

  “Economical.”

  “I was keepin down, movin slow.” Wycza shook his head, remembering. “All of a sudden, this son of a bitch in the living room rolls over, he’s got a .22 in his hand. You know as well as I do, you can’t hit your own pocket with one of those.”

  “They’re not for work,” Parker agreed. “For noise, and for show.”

  “So he shot at me, hit the ceiling or some fucking thing, and I put him down.”

  “Okay.”

  “The thing is,” Wycza said, “he startled me, so I come upright, and I did him, and I’m standin there, and all at once I realize, I got windows on three sides of me. You know that living room, it’s all across the front.”

  “But nobody killed you,” Parker said.

  “Hell of a way to find out,” Wycza said. “So where’s the guy from the pickup? Those three in the cottage didn’t shoot each other, and the pickup’s still there, but nobody’s shooting at me. Is he hurt? Or is he just waiting? Did somebody maybe put a bullet into the pickup guy?”

  “Not with a .22,” Parker said.

  “The one in the kitchen,” Wycza said, “carried a .45 auto, been fired once tonight.”

  “That’s different,” Parker said.

  “So I figure,” Wycza said, “long as nobody’s shooting at me anyway, why not just waltz around, have a look?”

  “I watched you,” Parker told him.

  “You weren’t the only one, I’m pretty sure,” Wycza said. “So you saw me stop at the bedroom window.”

  “You were interested in that screen.”

  “Three fresh holes in it, two pushing in, one pushing out. The way it looks to me,” Wycza said, “those three were scattered in the house for the ambush. Our pickup guy came over, shot the one in the bedroom. The other one ran over through the kitchen, got to the doorway, saw the pickup guy in the window, took a shot at him, the pickup guy shot him back. Or the other way around. Anyway, the biker dead, the pickup guy wounded. Some blood drops on the wall, like it sprayed when he was hit.”

  “But he went on after the third one.”

  “Well, he had to,” Wycza said. “In a hurry, hurt, got him in the living room through the side window there, another hole in the screen. But he didn’t feel healthy enough to go in and finish the job. Went to hide, hope to feel better, wait for us. But from what I could see, it’s only the one guy.”

  Parker turned and looked back toward the cottages. “So he’s there, probably in the cottage between ours and his truck”

  “That’s where I’d put him,” Wycza agreed. “Where he can watch, but where he can also feel like he’s got a way out if he needs it.”

  “And he’s wounded, or maybe he’s dead now,” Parker said. “Wounded bad, or just scraped.”

  “He didn’t take a shot at me,” Wycza pointed out.

  “Waiting for the money,” Parker said. “If he’s alive, that’s what he’s doing.”

  Wycza nodded. “That’s what I’d do, I was him. And alive.”

  “If we burn him out,” Parker said, “the flames’ll bring every volunteer fireman in a hundred miles. If we just go in to get him, he’s got too many chances to get us first.”

  “Fuck him, leave him there,” Wycza said.

  “I can’t do that,” Parker said. “Come on, let’s go talk to Lou.”

  4

  Before they reached the main road, they saw headlights turn in, then go black. “The money’s here,” Wycza said.

  They continued on, and found the van stopped behind the Hyundai, its sliding side door open, spilling light onto the road. Mike Carlow, without his chauffeur’s cap and coat, stood beside the van listening to Lou Sternberg explain the situation, while Noelle sat in the van doorway, feet flat on the ground as she leaned against the side wall to her right. She was still in her invalid filmy white, and she looked like a ghost.

  “Here they are now,”
Sternberg said.

  Wycza said, “Noelle? You okay?”

  “Not yet,” she told him, “but I will be.”

  “She got dried out,” Carlow explained. “What’s the situation back there?”

  “Three dead bikers,” Parker said. “The one that got them’s holed up in another cabin, waiting for the money. He’s wounded, we don’t know how bad.”

  Sternberg said, “They fought each other even before they got the goods?”

  “No, it’s somebody else. No idea who.”

  Carlow said, “He gunned down three bikers by himself, and now he’s in there waiting to take usdown?”

  Wycza said, “He’s ambitious, we know that much.”

  Sternberg said, “We’re here, the money’s here. Let him stay and rot, we’ll go somewhere else.”

  Parker said, “I need to know who he is.”

  “Idon’t,” Sternberg said.

  Parker said, “But who is this guy? Where’d he come from? Is he going to be behind me some day?”

  “He won’t be behind me,”Sternberg said. “I’ll be home in London.”

  “What I’m thinking about,” Parker said, “is Cathman. I’ve been waiting for something from him, and I’m wondering is this it.”

  Wycza said, “Cathman? Parker, from the way you describe that guy Cathman, that isn’t him back there.”

  “No, but he could be fromhim.”

  “Parker,” Sternberg said, “you understand the situation. You’ve got a link with this Cathman, the rest of us don’t. He may know your name and your phone number, but he doesn’t know a damn thing about me. You got a guy laying in ambush down in there? Fine, let him lay, I’m going home. We did good work tonight, and I’m ready to see the money, put it in my pocket, call British Air in the morning.”

  “I’ve got to go along with Lou,” Noelle said. “I’m tired, and I feel like shit, and all I want to do is sleep and eat and drink. I don’t want to fight anymore.”

  “Okay, you’re right,” Parker said. “Whoever this guy is, he’s my problem, not any of yours. Mike, can you get the van around this car or do I need to move it out of the way?”