Flashfire p-19

by Richard Stark

  They got back to the estate in Palm Beach at almost midnight and went through switching on lights, echoing through the empty rooms, all of them looking for signs of Parker’s presence, but none of them saying so. They met again in the kitchen and Ross said, ‘No change.’

  ‘Exactly like we left it,’ Carlson said.

  Melander opened the refrigerator and got out three beers. ‘Well, wherever he is,’ he said, ‘at least he hasn’t been here.’

  2

  The funny thing is, she showed that condo two days later, the place where Daniel Parmitt as if that was his name told her about the three men who’d cheated him and who were going to steal Mrs Miriam Hope Clendon’s jewels. And the funnier thing is, Mr and Mrs Hochstein from Trenton, New Jersey, loved the condo, didn’t want to haggle at all, didn’t want to look at a thousand other places, loved the Bromwich, wanted to close right this second. The first place she showed them, and they were hooked, they were hers, which has never happened in the entire history of real estate. It was a sign.

  Lord knows she needed a sign. Lesley hadn’t heard from Parmitt since their discussion at the condo, and she would dearly love to know what was going on, but knew better than to call him and ask. He was a very private person, Mr Daniel Parmitt. He would let you know how close you could get, and woe betide you if you crossed the line. She thought she understood Parmitt now, and how to deal with him. In a nutshell, he was everything that Gerry Mackenzie, her brain-dead ex, was supposed to have been but, it turned out, was not.

  Gerry Mackenzie had been young Lesley Simons’s first attempt to break out of the third-rate life she’d been dealt, growing up poor in West Palm, right next door to the ultra-rich, but never being quite poor enough just to throw in the towel. No; all the time she was growing up, her mother’s favorite word had been ‘appearances.’ They had to keep up appearances, God knows why. They had to spend money for show, not for necessities. With a divorced mom who worked as a supermarket cashier and a slightly retarded older sister who was never going to be useful for anything and was never going to marry and become somebody else’s burden, this meant for the young Lesley Simons an endless life of dreary pretense.

  Gerry Mackenzie, a wholesale salesman for a big computer company, a glad-handing upbeat guy full of talk about the latest advances in the ‘industry,’ full of expertise and inside dirt, as though he himself were just on the verge of becoming the next software billionaire, had seemed just precisely the right prince to rescue Lesley Simons from the dungeon of her life. Only after she’d married him had she discovered that her mother had been an amateurwhen it came to keeping up appearances; Gerry was the pro. It was all sparkle and flash with him, all salesman’s hype, all toothy grins and pay-you-back-next-week. It all came clear to her, one day in the second year of the marriage, when she’d heard two of Gerry’s fellow salesmen talking about him, and one said, ‘He comes on so great, but you know? He just can’t close.’

  She understood there were salesmen like that, failed salesmen. (Not her, though; in real estate, she was a shark for closing.) As a talker, Gerry Mackenzie was a winner; as an earner, he was a flop. She got her real estate agent’s license during the marriage because somebody had to put food on the table, and after a while she realized all she was getting out of this deal was the opportunity to listen to Gerry gasbag all the time. Home wasn’t that great an alternative, but, until something else came along, it was better than Gerry. At least, she got to keep more of her earnings.

  Was Daniel Parmitt the something else? Not to marry, God knows, or even to sleep with, but to make it possible for her to get outof here. On her own, this time. Far away from Palm Beach, far away from Florida entirely. Maybe the U.S. Virgin Islands, where she could kick back in her own little place and let the world go screw itself. On her own, strictly on her own.

  Which had been the other thing she’d learned from marriage to Gerry Mackenzie: she didn’t much like sex. She never had, in the few times she’d tried it with other people before Gerry, but then she’d always assumed it was because she and the guy didn’t know each other well enough or weren’t compatible or whatever. With Gerry, they got to know each other very well, and Gerry certainly knew how to turn his salesman’s charm to the question of sex, so that was one area in which she couldn’t find him at fault.

  No, it was her. She didn’t think she was a lesbian, she’d never had any interest in that direction, either. She thought it was just that she didn’t particularly need sex, so why go through with it? Messy, disorganized, and frequently embarrassing; the hell with it.

  That was one of the good things about Daniel Parmitt; he didn’t mistake her interest for a sexual one, and he was too focused on his own plans to have time for irrelevancies like sex with his local girl guide. There were moments when she thought it might be interesting to go to bed with him just once, just to see what it was like, but then she’d remember how cold his eyes had been the time he’d made her strip so he could be sure she wasn’t tape-recording their conversation, and she knew that wasn’t the look of somebody interested in her body. Even today, Gerry Mackenzie would give her a better time than that, if that’s what she wanted.

  It still surprised her that she’d been bold enough to go after Parmitt, before she’d known enough about him to know it was the right thing to do. Desperation, maybe, an antenna out frantically in search of a sign. Whatever it was, some instinct had grabbed her, that’s all, and said, This guy will get you out of here. He’ll get you out of here, and then he’ll get out of your life. Grab him.

  Would he? Would the people he was mad at really steal Mrs Clendon’s jewels and get away with it? Would Daniel Parmitt really take the jewels away from them? And would he really share some of the profit with her?

  Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

  Did she have anything else going? Nothing. The commission on the Bromwich condo sale was very nice, but not what she needed. She’d known for a long time, you don’t change your life on commissions. You need a score. Somewhere, somehow, a score.

  Keep healthy, Daniel Parmitt, she thought. I’ve bet the farm on you.

  3

  Elvis Clagg saw the whole thing, from the beginning, right there in front of him. It was incredible. It was like a movie.

  At twenty-three, Elvis Clagg wasn’t the youngest member of the Christian Renewal Defense Force (CRDF), but he was the most recent recruit, having joined up only four months ago, bringing the CRDF’s strength up to twenty-nine, its highest enlistment in more than fifteen years. Still, not one of those guys had ever themselves seen anything as amazing, and they were the first to admit it. Even Captain Bob, in his years in Nam, had never seen the like, and Captain Bob was over fifty years of age.

  Captain Bob Hardawl himself had founded the CRDF not long after he’d come back to Florida from Nam and had seen that the blacks and Jews were about to take over everywhere from the forces of God, and that the forces of God could use some help from a fella equipped with infantryman training.

  Armageddon hadn’t struck yet, thank God, but you just knew that sooner or later it would. You could read all about it on the Internet, you could hear it in the songs of Aryan rock, you could see it in the news all around you, you could read it in all the books and magazines that Captain Bob insisted every member of the CRDF subscribe to and read.

  That was an odd thing, too. Reading had always been tough for Elvis Clagg. It had been one of the reasons he’d dropped out of school at the very first opportunity and got that job at the sugar mill that paid shit and immediately gave him a bad cough like an old car. But now that he had stuff he wantedto read, stuff he likedto read, why, turned out, he was a natural at it.

  They oughta figure that out in the schools. Quit giving the kids all that Moby Dickshit and give them The Protocols of Zion, and you’re gonna have you some heavy-duty readers.

  But the point is, with all the reading everybody’d done, and all the sights that everybody’d seen and three of the CRDF troopers had done time up at R
aiford, so you know they’re not exactly pansies still and all, nobody had ever seen anything like this.

  The entire troop of twenty-nine, Captain Bob Hardawl commanding, was deep in the Everglades on maneuvers, keeping up their tracking skills, learning jungle infiltration, when they heard the car. There was a road over there, of course, they’d just marched out on it, but you never heard a caron that road, it didn’t go anywhere. Just to some fallen-down shacks used to belong to alligator hunters or maybe even older, egret hunters, from when the fancy ladies up north liked to wear egret feathers in their hats. So why was a car coming this way?

  Billy Joe, one of the more excitable members of the group, called, ‘Captain Bob, interlopers! Suppose they’re Feds?’

  Feds! The deadly battle with government lawmen, always a possibility, always the threat out there waiting. Was it here now? Elvis searched the sky, clutching his Uzi to his chest, but he saw no black helicopters.

  ‘Easy, boys,’ Captain Bob called to his line of men, and held his Colt .45 automatic up in the air to signal they should stand where they were. The rest of them all carried Uzis adapted to fire only one shot at a time, to make them legal, which of course would be unadapted in a flat second once Armageddon started, but Captain Bob, as the leader, was the only one with a side arm.

  ‘I see it!’ Jack Ray called, and then they all saw it. A white utility vehicle, it was, looked foreign, moving along the road toward the curve where they themselves had turned off into the glades not five minutes ago.

  Captain Bob gestured downward with the .45, and they all crouched, twenty-nine men in camouflage uniforms with greasepaint and Off! on their faces. In a minute, the car would go around that curve and on out of sight.

  And then it happened, astonishingly. Instead of slowing, the car abruptly speeded up, and its right front door opened, on the side away from the CRDF, and a man fell or jumped out of it.

  The car yawed this way and that, brakes on hard, tires slipping on the muddy road, and the nearside rear door opened and anotherman came rolling out, and this one was clutching a rifle in vertical position against his chest, exactly the way Captain Bob had taught the CRDF to do, if they ever had to bail out of something big, moving fast.

  The car slewed around, the first man started to his feet as though to run off into the glades, and damn if the second man didn’t come up on one knee, aim, and shoot the first man in the back. Whang! Down he went; son of a bitch!

  And tried to get up. They could see him struggle as the man with the rifle got up and walked toward him and the white car finally came to a stop, and the driver stuck his head out to yell something to the shooter.

  Captain Bob started yelling then, too: ‘Hey! Hold on there! You men stop there!’

  But they couldn’t hear him, or they were concentrating too much to pay attention, so the whole CRDF watched the rifleman kick the man he’d shot to roll him down into the water, and then take aim to shoot him again up close.

  That was when Captain Bob fired his side arm into the air to attract their attention.

  Which it did. The driver of the car and the rifleman both turned to stare at the crouching CRDF, and then, quick as a wink, the rifleman whipped up his rifle and fired at them!

  A fella named Hoby that had bad teeth and was three guys to Elvis’s left flopped backward like a cut line of wash. Just back and down.

  The truth is, if it wasn’t for the CRDF, Elvis personally would have panicked at that point and gone running like a greyhound into the glades. But there wasthe CRDF, and he was part of it, and he stuck.

  ‘Two lines!’ called Captain Bob while the rifleman fired again and a fella named Floyd did the back-flop thing, and the remaining twenty-six troopers, with Captain Bob tall at their right end, quickly formed into two broad lines facing the foe. The front rank dropped to one knee.

  ‘Front rank!’ yelled Captain Bob as the rifleman suddenly took off running toward the car. ‘The vehicle!’

  Which meant the rear rank, which included Elvis, was to take out the rifleman. Okay. Not much leading at this distance. Hands steady as a rock.

  ‘Fire!’

  Thirteen bullets went into the driver and thirteen bullets went into the rifleman.

  The CRDF’s first military engagement. They’d taken two casualties out of a force of twenty-nine, and the opposing force was completely wiped out. As far as Elvis Clagg was concerned, the CRDF had just kicked ass.

  4

  ‘Dear,’ said Alice Prester Young, ‘do we know a Daniel Parmitt?’

  Jack Young looked up from his Wall Street Journalto smile across the breakfast table at his bride. ‘Who, dear?’

  ‘Parmitt, Daniel Parmitt. It says here he’s staying at the Breakers.’

  ‘It says where?’

  ‘In the Herald.’

  Jack Young’s smile was the soul of patience. ‘Dear,’ he said, ‘why is Mr Parmitt in the Herald?’

  ‘Because he was shot. Not expected to live.’

  ‘Shot!’ Jack’s surprise was genuine. ‘Why would we know anybody that was shot?’

  ‘Well, it says he’s staying at the Breakers, so I’m wondering if he’s here for the ball.’

  ‘Well, if he’s been shot,’ Jack said, ‘he isn’t likely to come to the ball.’

  ‘No, dear, but I was just wondering.’

  ‘If we knew him,’ Jack said.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ she said, although by now she had realized that wasn’t the actual question at all. It wasn’t did theyknow this Daniel Parmitt, it was did sheknow him. Jack wouldn’t be likely to know anybody from herpast, would he?

  This was her first season at the beach as Alice Prester Young, after having been Alice Prester Habib forever. Eleven years; hard to believe. Before that, somebody else, before that, somebody else, who even remembers anymore?

  It was very nice to bring an attractive new husband to the beach for the season, introduce him around, let the biddies turn green with envy. And it was especially nice to know that one could still look all righton the arm of such a husband. One didn’t look exactly like a girl anymore, but one certainly did look all right.

  Particularly the body. Between the doctors and the dietitians and the personal trainers, it was possible, though not easy, to keep a hard youthful body forever, to offer an attentive young husband something interesting and responsive in bed. The face could be kept smooth and attractive, but never quite exactly girlish. The softnesses and roundnesses of youth can never be recaptured on the face, so the best you can hope for in that department is angular, slightly hollow, good looks, more striking than beautiful. But who could complain? At sixty-seven, to have a striking face above the body of a twenty-year-old wasn’t bad. And a twenty-six-year-old brand-new husband.

  Whyhad she stayed so long with Habib?

  Jack broke into her thoughts by saying, ‘Somebody shot this fellow at the Breakers?’

  ‘No, dear, he’s stayingat the Breakers. They kidnapped him’

  ‘What!’

  ‘and took him into the Everglades and shot him there.’

  ‘Who? Why?’

  ‘Apparently it was a case of mistaken identity. They were professional killers, and whoever they were supposed to kill they took this man Parmitt by mistake.’

  ‘Now, that’s what I call bad luck,’ Jack said, and laughed. ‘And besides that, he doesn’t get to go to the ball.’

  ‘Oh, that reminds me, the auction,’ she said. ‘Dear, would you be a dear?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. He’d been just as attentive when he’d been an insurance company claims adjuster and they’d met after that silly automobile accident in Short Hills. Now, his bright blue eyes eager, he said, ‘What do you need, dear?’

  ‘My albums,’ she said. ‘Not last year’s, but the two years before that.’

  ‘Coming up,’ he said. He rose, smiled, folded his Journal, put it on the chair, and went off to her study, leaving her in the cool and quiet breakfast room, all pink and gold, with its view over
the sea grape at the limitless ocean.

  In a minute he was back with the two albums she’d asked for, both big thick volumes with padded pastel covers and glassine sheets within, inside which, every year, Alice inserted all photos and social-page stories involving her. Which meant, naturally, that most of the other important Beachers would also be seen in the various photos.

  ‘What I’m looking for

  ‘ Alice said, pushing her coffee cup aside and riffling through the first album, ‘what I want

  is

  yes! There, see it?’

  She had found a newspaper photo showing the three co-chairs of a charity ball from two years ago, the last year Miriam Hope Clendon had still been active in society. The three over-dressed women were lined up in a row to face the camera, Miriam in the center, of course, being the grande dame, with Helena Stockworth Fritz on her right and Alice on her left. But this time it wasn’t at herself Alice wanted to look, nor even at the rather portly and snout-faced Miriam, but at the necklace around Miriam’s neck, on which she tapped a mauve false fingernail.

  Jack leaned attentively over her shoulder, smiling vaguely at the photo. ‘What am I looking at, dear?’

  ‘The necklace, Miriam’s necklace. That’swhat I’m going to bid on. I’ve had my eye on that necklace ever since I first met Miriam, oh, some years ago.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Jack said, and in his eye was the glint, though Alice didn’t see it, of a man looking at a necklace he expects to inherit someday.

  ‘We have to do a sealed bid on somethingto get into the auction,’ she said with satisfaction, ‘and that’s what I’m after, and I believe I’ll get it.’

  ‘Won’t other people bid for it?’

  ‘Not for long,’ she said. ‘It’s extremely valuable, you know.’

  ‘Yes, it looks it.’

  ‘Mostpeople, Ibelieve,’ Alice said, ‘will just go for the baubles, because they won’t want to spend an awful lot of money this late in the season. Just so they take home some little thing. But Iwill bid on this necklace, and I’ll bid low, and because it’s so valuable it won’t come on the block until very late, when everybody else will already have their little something, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I get it for my opening bid.’