Parker

by Richard Stark

  She looked out ahead, far down the straight wide road, and said with surprise, “Well, there's something you don't see every day.”

  Loretta almost looked at Leslie, or asked what it was you don't see every day, but she caught herself in time and went on being a lump.

  Leslie watched the fire engine down there, rolling north, moving very fast in the left lane, overtaking everything on the road. “It's a fire engine, Loretta,” she said. “A great big red fire engine. See it? I wonder where it's going.”

  Loretta finally did focus on the fire engine, having to turn her head to keep watching it as they passed one another. She actually started to smile, but then became aware of Leslie observing her, and quickly frowned instead.

  “I like fire engines,” Leslie said, expecting no response and getting none.

  “I like fire engines,” Hal Carlson said as they highballed north.

  Seated beside him, Jerry Ross grinned. “What I like,” he said, “is fire.”

  Seven-thirty. Mrs. Helena Stockworth Fritz was not part of the herd. She was, in fact, above the herd, as the whole world acknowledged, and that's why she did not, before each ball, pay a visit at the bank.

  The late Mr. Fritz (munitions, oil, cargo ships, warehouses, all inherited) had, many years ago, during a spate of politically inspired financier kidnappings, installed a safe room in the middle of Seascape, which Mrs. Fritz still used for her most valuable valuables. The safe room was a concrete box, twelve feet square and eight feet high, built under the building, into the water table but sealed and dry. A dedicated phone line in stainless-steel pipe ran underground from the safe room to the phone company's lines out at the road, though in fact that telephone had never once been used.

  If, however, some phalanx of Che Guevaras actually had launched an attack on Seascape back in those parlous times, Mr. and Mrs. Fritz would simply have locked themselves into the safe room, which included plumbing facilities and stored food, very like a fallout shelter from two decades before, and would have phoned the Palm Beach police to come repel the invaders.

  That had never happened, but the room was far from useless. It was impregnable and temperature-controlled, and in it Mrs. Fritz kept her furs, her jewelry, and, in the off-season, much of her best silver. Which meant she never had to join the hoi polloi crowding around the gray mirrors at the bank.

  The mirror in the safe room, before which Mrs. Fritz now stood, studying the effect she would make in this gown, with this necklace, these bracelets, this brooch, these rings, and this tiara, was not tinted a discreet gray, like the mirror at the bank. Mrs. Fritz was a realist and didn't need to squint when she gazed upon herself. (Nor would she ever stoop to buy a thirty-year-old husband.) She had lived a long time, and done much, and enjoyed herself thoroughly along the way, and if that life showed its traces on her face and body, what of it? It was an honest life, lived well. She had nothing to hide.

  Satisfied with tonight's appearance, Mrs. Fritz left and locked the safe room, then rode the stairlift up to the ground floor, where her walker awaited. Charles LeGrand was her frequent walker, a cultured homosexual probably even older than she was, neat and tidy in his blazer and ascot, smiling from within his very small goatee. Offering his elbow for her hand, “You look charmante tonight, Helena,” he said.

  “Thank you, Charles.”

  They walked through the ballroom on their way to the car. Mrs. Fritz noted with approval the ranks of rented padded chairs for the bidders, now in rows facing the auctioneer's lectern, each with its numbered paddle waiting on the seat. The platform for the musicians was in place, the side tables were covered in damask but not yet bearing their loads of plates and glasses and cutlery, the portable bar-on-wheels stood ready for tomorrow night's bartender, and all was as it was supposed to be.

  The amplifiers under their white tablecloths she didn't even notice.

  10

  The Voyager's dashboard clock read 7:21 when Leslie steered into the visitors’ parking area outside the Elmer Neuman Memorial Hospital in Snake River. Perfect timing.

  In her three previous visits to Daniel here, Leslie had learned what she needed to know about the hospital routine. Was this what criminals called “casing the joint”? She knew, for instance, that visiting hours ended at eight P.M., to accommodate visitors who had day jobs. She also knew that down the hall from Daniel lay an old woman named Emily Studworth, who seemed to be permanently unconscious and to never receive visitors. And she further knew that the clerical staff at the hospital changed shift at six P.M.

  Leslie shut off the Voyager's engine and looked in the rearview mirror at Loretta. “Okay, Loretta,” she said. “We just go and do it and come right back out.”

  Loretta was already in the wheelchair that Leslie had rented from a place in Riviera Beach called Benson's Sick Room and Party Supplies. Her mulish pouting expression fit the wheelchair very well; she was great in the part.

  Leslie got out of the Voyager, slid open its side door, pulled out the ramp, and carefully backed Loretta and the wheelchair down to the blacktop. Then she shut and locked the car, and pushed the wheelchair across the parking lot and up the handicap-access ramp to the hospital's front door.

  Since this was the first time she was arriving at the hospital after six P.M., the receptionist who checked the visitors in had never seen her before, and had no way to know that before this she'd always visited a patient named Daniel Parmitt. “Emily Studworth,” Leslie told her.

  The receptionist nodded and wrote that on her sheet. “You're relatives?”

  “We're her grandnieces. Loretta really wanted to see her auntie Emily just once more.”

  “You don't have much time,” the receptionist warned her. “Visiting hours end at eight.”

  “That's all right, we just want to be with her for a few minutes.”

  Leslie wheeled Loretta down the hall to the elevators and up to the third floor. The people at the nurses’ station gave them a brief incurious look as they came out of the elevator. Leslie smiled at them and pushed the wheelchair down the hall to Daniel's room, which was in semi-darkness, only one small light gleaming yellow on the wall over the bed. They entered, and she pushed the door mostly closed behind her.

  He was asleep, but as she entered the room he was suddenly awake, his eyes glinting in the yellow light. She pushed the wheelchair over beside the bed and whispered, “Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Help me, Loretta.”

  Obediently, Loretta stood up from the wheelchair and removed the long coat and big-brimmed straw hat. She put them on the bed along with her purse, which had been concealed in the wheelchair. Then she and Leslie helped Daniel get out of bed.

  He was stronger each day, but still very weak. The muscles in the sides of his jaw bunched and moved with his determination. He got his legs over the side of the bed, and then, with one of them on either side of him, he made it to his feet.

  Leslie said, “Can you stand alone?”

  “Yes.” It was whispered through gritted teeth.

  He stood unmoving, like a tree. They helped him put on the long coat, over the hospital gown that was all he wore, then helped him ease down into the wheelchair. He folded his hands in his lap, to not be noticeable, and Leslie fixed the straw hat on his head.

  Meantime, Loretta had sat on the bed to remove her fake-fur shin-high brown boots. She had soft pumps in her purse that she now slipped on instead.

  The boots had been too big for Loretta; they were the right size for Daniel. The hat, the long coat, and the boots covered him completely. As long as he kept his head down and his hands in his lap, he would look exactly like the person Leslie had wheeled in here.

  Loretta stood up from the bed, wearing the blue pumps. She had on a shapeless blue-and-white-print dress. “Do I go out now?” she asked.

  Leslie considered her. “Don't forget your glasses.”

  “Oh!” Loretta took her black-framed glasses from her purse and put them on, becomi
ng again the owlish, gawky person Leslie knew.

  Leslie said, “You just walk out. We'll be along in a minute.”

  “All right.” Now that they were doing it, and nothing bad was happening, Loretta's mood had improved considerably. She very nearly smiled at Leslie, and when she looked at Daniel in the wheelchair her expression became concerned. “He should stay here,” she said.

  “He has his reasons,” Leslie assured her. “We'll be along.”

  Loretta left, and Leslie looked in the closet, expecting to find his clothes, surprised to see nothing in there at all. “Where's your things?”

  “Cops kept.”

  “Oh. Well, let's get you out of here.”

  The return journey was simple, and outside, there was Loretta, waiting for them, standing over there beside the Voyager. As she pushed him across the parking lot, Leslie said, “I don't know what you expect to do tomorrow night.”

  “Kill some people,” he whispered.

  11

  Jack Young really did care for his new (old) wife, Alice, felt affection for her, enjoyed more about her than her money, though of course the money had come first. In fact, it had been just a joke at the beginning, when he'd met Alice Prester Habib up in New Jersey, where he'd worked for Utica Mutual as a claims examiner, and where, when he first became aware that this particular insured had the hots for him, it was nothing more than the subject of gags around the office.

  It was Maureen, an older woman with the firm, computer processor, who'd put the bee in his bonnet. “You could do worse,” she'd said, and when Jack thought about it, he could do worse, couldn't he? He'd almost done worse, two or three times.

  It had been almost a year, at that time, since he'd broken up with his last serious girlfriend, or, more accurately, since she'd broken up with him. His life was a little boring, a little same-old same-old, and the idea of shaking it up in this really different and outrageous way came to appeal to him more and more. And don't forget the money.

  But the fact is, Alice was okay. God knows she was older than his mother, almost older than his grandmother, but she kept herself in shape like an NFL quarterback, and she was of an age where she had no timidity left in bed at all. So that part wasn't so bad, and for the rest—the knowledge that people laughed at him behind his back, the term “boy toy,” which seemed to hover in the air around him like midges—fuck ‘em if they couldn't take a joke.

  Because you can take the boy out of the actuarial business but you can't take the actuarial business out of the boy, and Jack was fully aware that he was (a) Alice's only heir, attested to in the prenuptial agreement, and (b) likely to outlive her by forty to fifty years. Forty to fifty rich years.

  So all he had to do was pay attention, in and out of bed, and otherwise be discreet. For instance, when he and Alice walked into the big ballroom at the Breakers Thursday evening for the pre-auction ball, with the tall gleaming mirrors reflecting the posh crowd, and the radiant chandeliers, and the band's swing oldies echoing in the high-ceilinged space, and the swirl of revelers in their sprays of bright colors and gleaming gold and winking silver and sparkling jewels, the very first person he saw was Kim Metcalf, and he barely gave her a smile of recognition. She, too, with her shrewd blue eyes under the cloud of fluffy yellow hair, returned only the briefest of impersonal nods, including Alice as much as himself, before she moved on, holding to the arm of her husband, Howard, a retired tax lawyer she'd met as a stew on a first-class flight New York to Chicago. (She was still so much a stew in her heart that to this day she preferred the label “flight attendant.”)

  As the Metcalfs moved on, Jack turned his eyes firmly away from Kim's twitching creased behind within the shimmering pale blue satin, but his mind said: Saturday. The apartment Alice would never know about, down among the condos, where he and Kim managed to meet once or twice every week, came surging into his memory. Kim's body was softer than Alice's, which was also nice, but by now, for the both of them, the main point was to be able to have a conversation with somebody whose memory bank had not become full before you were born.

  Turning to Alice and away from all temptation, Jack said, “Do you want to dance, darling, or meet people first?”

  “We'll dance, darling,” she decided. “We can always meet people.”

  True enough.

  The new red paint on the fire engine doors was dry, and the doors no longer read

  CRYSTAL CITY F.D.

  ENG #1

  It's a good thing Crystal City, a sparsely populated area down near Homestead, had an Eng #2 as well, or the good folks there would be shit out of luck if a fire were to start up anywhere around town in the next couple of days. It was a volunteer fire department, like so many in the sticks, so there was never anybody around the small brick fire house except for fires and meetings, so it had been very easy, at five this morning, to bypass the alarm system and ease into the fire house and come roaring out with old Eng #1. By the time anybody started looking for it, Melander and Carlson and Ross would have finished with it.

  At nine P.M., with the pre-auction ball in full swing up at the Breakers, Ross stood beside the driver's door of Eng #1, an open quart of gold enamel paint in his left hand and an M. Grumbacher fine-line brush #5 in his right, with Melander just behind him to hold the flashlight. The fire engine now stood on the lawn at the right side of the house, out of sight from anywhere off the property. Ross, who had learned to be a passable sign painter during the first of his two stretches inside, leaned close to the door and drew the first vertical, then the U-shape to the right:

  P

  Farley's wife had learned to sleep through the late-night phone calls, and Farley had trained himself to wake right up at the beginning of the first ring, his hand snaking out from under the covers toward the phone before his eyes had completely focused on the bedside clock: 1:14. There'd been worse.

  “Farley.”

  “Higgins here, Sarge,” being one of the deputies on night shift at the office. “We got a report of a missing man out to the hospital.”

  “Parmitt,” Farley said.

  “That's right, Daniel Parmitt. The night administrator just called. They did their usual late-night check on the patients, and that one's gone.”

  How? He didn't walk out, Parmitt, he wasn't up to it. Somebody helped him. The real estate woman? Farley said, “You sent somebody over there?”

  “Jackson and Reese.”

  “Call them, tell them I'm on my way.” There wouldn't be anything there; still, he'd have a look.

  Damn; should've taken those prints yesterday.

  He drove into Snake River at two in the morning in the rented Buick Regal. He'd be done here in an hour, then drive back to Miami International, have breakfast, take the morning flight west, be swimming in his own pool by midafternoon.

  The woman who gave him his assignments, once or twice a year, was a lawyer in Chicago. They spoke guardedly on the phone, almost never met face-to-face, and unless he was on assignment he lived a quiet life indeed, writing occasional album reviews for music magazines. On assignment, he had a different name, different identification, different credit card, different everything. Different personality. He didn't even listen to music, driving south and west from Miami.

  The lawyer in Chicago had told him this wasn't a rush job, but what was the point in dragging it out? Fly in, do it, fly away. “Just so it's certain,” the lawyer had said, and he had said, “It's certain,” because when you hired him, you hired the best. It had been certain every single time for the last twelve years.

  Apparently, the client, whoever he was, had gone bargain basement the first time, brought in people who'd messed the job up, left the target alive but hospitalized. And the client really and positively wanted this target worse than sick; he wanted this target a fading memory.

  He had never before had a target stationary in a hospital. And no guards on him round the clock, no steady police presence. It was almost too easy, as though he shouldn't take his full fee for
the job. Though he would. Still, it hardly seemed like work for a grown man, and he had to talk to himself as he parked the Regal on a side street three blocks from the hospital to walk the rest of the way. He had to remind himself that all assignments are serious, even if this one seemed like shooting ducks in a rain barrel. He had to remind himself that every mistake was serious and that overconfidence is the cause of more mistakes than anything else. He had to remind himself to treat this assignment just as though there might be some danger in it.

  He approached the hospital catty-corner, through the parking lots. He was a tall lean man dressed all in black. One Beretta was in a holster in the small of his back, just above the belt, and the other was in his left boot. The right boot contained the throwing knife. Other than that, and his knowledge of several martial arts, he was unarmed; he never carried more weaponry than needed when on assignment.

  The hospital's main entrance and the emergency entrance around on the left side were both well lit, but the service entrance on the right was dark except for one small illuminated globe mounted on the wall above the door. He found the door unlocked—he'd have picked it if necessary—went in, and climbed one flight of concrete stairs before stepping through into a hallway. What he needed first was an operating room.

  He avoided the lit-up nurse's stations, moved through the halls, and soon found what he was looking for. And in the scrub-up room next door were several clean sets of green O.R. coats and pants. He took the largest set and put them on over his clothing; then he'd be able to move more freely along the halls, though still keeping out of other people's way.

  There had been no way to find out ahead of time what room the target was in, so all he could do was walk the halls and look at the patient names stuck into the labels outside the doors. How long could it take? Half an hour?