Dirty Money

by Richard Stark

  “Nick’s gun,” Parker pointed at the slashed window. “That was Nick.”

  “He was here?”

  “In and out.”

  “We heard the crash. Sandra went around back.” Crossing to the wrecked window, he said, “How come he didn’t do you?”

  “He wanted to know where my car was.”

  McWhitney laughed, first surprised and then amused. “The greedy bastard. Where’s he been keeping himself the last week?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  McWhitney leaned forward to look out the window and down, and call, “What do you see?”

  “Broken glass,” Sandra called back. “Broken wood. What happened up there?”

  “Nick went out the window.”

  “Nick?”

  “We’ll come down,” McWhitney told her.

  They went downstairs and around to the back, to find Sandra standing where Nick must have landed, frowning away to the woods behind and to the right of the house. Turning to them, she said, “What happened here?”

  “I was asleep,” Parker said, “and then Nick came in. He wanted a car.”

  “You don’t have a car,” Sandra told him.

  Parker shrugged. “We discussed it. Then I got his gun, and he went out the window.”

  “You didn’t push him out.”

  “I didn’t want him out. I wanted him in there.”

  McWhitney said, “We gotta find him now, Parker.”

  “I know.”

  “Wait a second,” Sandra said. “We’re here, we’ve got the van. Let’s pick up the money and get out of here.”

  “Sandra,” McWhitney said, “Nick has run out his string. Wherever he was holed up, he isn’t there any more. He’s on foot, he’s cut up from that window, he’s a dead duck. If the cops get their hands on him, he puts me right out of business. The bar, everything. I’m on the run the rest of my life.” To Parker he said, “You, too.”

  “Not so much.”

  “Enough. Enough to give your friend Claire some nervous moments.”

  “That’s true.”

  Sandra said, “What are you gonna do, run around in the woods? You’re not gonna find him in there. Maybe he’s bleeding to death.”

  “We can’t take the chance,” McWhitney said.

  Sandra thought about it, and realized she had to bend on this. “Five minutes.”

  Parker said, “Sandra, we’ll give it what it takes.”

  “I’ll be with the cars,” she told them. She was disgusted.

  “With your piece in your lap,” McWhitney advised.

  “Now you’re insulting me.”

  She headed off around the house and Parker walked over to where dry fallen leaves had been recently scuffed, showing streaks of wetter leaves beneath. The streaks pointed at an angle away from the right rear corner of the house.

  Parker and McWhitney, both with guns in their hands, followed the streak line’s direction, away from the house. They kept parallel to each other, but a few paces apart. Away from the house, the narrow tall scrubby second-growth trees were like an army of lancers, all upright, with daylight in vertical strips between. The ground was rocky and uneven, but trended upward, with clusters of thorny shrubs intermixed with nearly bare areas of grass and weed.

  They walked along the scrub ground for two or three minutes, watching in every direction, and then McWhitney stopped and said, “I’m not seeing anything.”

  “Neither am I.”

  Parker looked back and the house was almost completely hidden back there, just a few hints of white. “We don’t have him,” he said.

  Complaining, McWhitney said, “I’m not a tracker, I’m a bartender. This isn’t where I do my best work.”

  They turned around, headed back to the house, and Parker said, “When you get home, just in case, you gotta start building an alibi.”

  “Oh, I know. What’s that?”

  Ahead and to their left, a piece of dark gray cloth flapped, its corner stuck to the thorny lower branch of a wide-spread multiflora rose. They went over to look at it, and Parker said, “That’s the pants he was wearing.”

  “The road’s right over there.”

  “I know it. There’s blood on these thorns here.”

  “The son of a bitch is hurt,” McWhitney said, “but he won’t stop. Can we get to the road this way?”

  “If we want to bleed like Nick. Easier back around by the house.”

  They retraced their steps to the house, and when they came around the side of it Sandra got out of her Honda and said, “Give me some good news for once.”

  “We’re alive,” McWhitney told her.

  “Try again.”

  Parker looked at the van with holy redeemer choir on the doors. “Looks good.”

  Sandra said, “So why don’t we use it?”

  Parker told her, “You drive your car and the van over to the church, we’ll take one look along the road for Nick.”

  She heaved a sigh, to show how patient she was. “Done,” she said.

  They walked along the road while she shuttled the vehicles behind them. A red pickup went by, with two guys in hunting caps in it, neither of them Nick; everybody waved.

  In a ditch there was a space of tangled smears where somebody or something had slid down out of the roadside scrub, maybe fallen here, then moved on. Impossible to say which direction he had taken.

  McWhitney said, “I could take Sandra’s car, follow down this road. Or she could, while we move the boxes.”

  “Waste of time,” Parker said. “You can’t find a man on foot with a car. We just get the cash, and clear out of here.”

  As they walked back toward the church McWhitney, sounding irritated but resigned, said. “Alibi. Parker, I’m gonna have to call in every marker I got out. And just hope it turns out enough people owe me something.”

  2

  Sandra had everything ready. The van, its rear doors open, was backed against the concrete landing and steps that led to the side door McWhitney had kicked in more than a week ago. She’d moved her Honda farther forward along that side wall of the church, facing out, tucked in close enough to the church to block from the road much of the view of what would be going on between doorway and van.

  McWhitney approved: “Good work.”

  “You boys do the heavy lifting,” she said. “I’ll sit in my car and watch. If I see something I don’t like, I’ll honk twice. And then probably drive like hell.”

  Parker said, “If they’re that close, you shouldn’t run away. You should draw on us and make a citizen’s arrest.”

  “That’s right, Sandra,” McWhitney said. “You’re the upright citizen. You’ve got licenses and everything.”

  “Just what I always wanted,” she said. “Caught in the cross fire. Start: let’s get out of here.”

  They started. They had a lot of weight to carry, boxes of money and boxes of hymnals, out of the choir loft, down the stairs and into the van. To their right, Sandra sat in her Honda with the engine on, the radio playing soft rock as she read a Forbes magazine.

  The money boxes and hymnal boxes were different brands of the same kind of mover’s carton, white, rectangular, with deep-sided lids fitting over them, like the boxes seen carrying evidence into federal courtrooms. Since the hymnals had been on top upstairs, for camouflage, most of them had to be moved first and set aside so the money boxes could be loaded into the van. They developed a two-man bucket brigade system, so they wouldn’t get in each other’s way on the stairs, and within half an hour the van was two-thirds full, with more money boxes still upstairs.

  “We’ll have to leave those,” Parker said. “We need space for the other boxes in front and on top, to show at the roadblocks.”

  “I hate to leave any of it,” McWhitney said, “but you’re right.”

  There were four money boxes still upstairs. They restacked hymnal boxes on top of them, then went down to finish loading the van and, as they did, Parker saw a streak of mud on the floor th
at hadn’t been there before. It was near the closed door to the basement, a place they’d holed up in after the robbery, a one-time community room from which all the appliances had been removed.

  They each carried a carton of hymnals out to the van and Parker said, “You keep working, I got something to do.”

  McWhitney was curious, but kept working, as Parker moved forward to Sandra in the Honda and said, “I need a flashlight.”

  “Sure,” she said, and took one from a small metal box of supplies she kept bolted to the floor in front of the seat, to the right of the accelerator. “What for?”

  “Tell you when I get back.”

  The basement, as he remembered it, would be pitch-black, because it had plywood panels that slid across in front of the windows, for when they used to show movies down there. That meant he wouldn’t be able to open the door at the head of those stairs without Nick, down below, knowing he was coming down.

  Why would Nick come back here, of all the places in the world? Maybe he still thought there was some chance he could find an edge for himself. Or maybe he just didn’t have any place else to go any more. Maybe his life was a maze, and this was the far end of it, and he didn’t have any other choices.

  Parker opened the door, slid through, shut the door behind himself. As dark as he remembered. He silently went down two steps, then sat on that step and waited. Nick wouldn’t have another gun, but he might have something.

  No light down there, no sound. Parker waited, then abruptly there was a sound, and an instant later light; gray daylight. Nick was sliding back one of the plywood panels, baring a window. Maybe he thought that would level the playing field somehow.

  Parker put the unnecessary flashlight on the step behind him, stood, and took the marshal’s automatic from his pocket.

  Nick said, “Hold it, Parker. You want to see this. Take a look out there. I mean it, take a look.”

  “At what?”

  Nick backed away from the window, gesturing for Parker to help himself. “Do yourself a favor,” he said.

  Parker went down the rest of the stairs, crossed to the head-high window, and looked out at a state police patrol car, stopped in front of Sandra’s Honda, just blocking it. Two uniforms were getting out of the patrol car, shrugging their gunbelts at their waists as they moved toward Sandra, one of them a man, the other a woman, both white.

  Looking at the automatic in Parker’s hand, Nick said, “You don’t want to make any loud noises. Not now.”

  3

  Had Sandra honked twice, when she saw the patrol car, as she’d said she would? If so, Parker hadn’t heard it down here. Concrete-block walls, room mostly underground, plywood over the windows. But a shot would be something else. Cops would hear a gunshot.

  “We don’t want them looking in that window,” he said, and slid the plywood closed with his right hand as his left hand reached for Nick.

  “Hey!”

  Nick had backpedaled, but his shout told Parker which way he was moving. And then his ragged breath gave him the spot, and then Parker had his hands on him.

  This had to be fast, and then he had to find that window and slide the plywood open just far enough so he could find his way back to the stairs and collect the flashlight. Bring it back, shut out the daylight again, switch on the flash, shine it quickly around.

  There. Across the rear end of the room had been a kitchen. The appliances were long removed, making broad blank insets in the Formica counter that ran all across the back, but the sink was still there, set into the counter, with closed cabinet doors beneath. They opened outward to the left and right, with no vertical post between them.

  Parker opened the cabinet doors and saw that the pipes for the sink were under there, but nothing else. Plenty of room.

  He dragged Nick across the linoleum floor, bent him into the space under the sink, and shut the doors. Then he went back upstairs and outside, where the male cop was giving McWhitney back his license and registration and the female cop was looking at one of the hymnals from a carton in the van.

  “Hello,” Parker said, and they all looked at him. He nodded at Sandra and said. “There’s nothing down there.”

  “Good,” she said, and explained to the cops, “This is Desmond. He’s the other volunteer.”

  “I’m in recovery,” Parker said.

  The male cop said, “You were in the basement?” Nobody interrogates somebody in recovery.

  “We wanted to know if there was anything useful down there,” Parker said. “But it’s been cleaned out.” To Sandra he said, “The refrigerator’s gone, dishwasher, everything.”

  The female cop pointed at the flashlight Parker carried. “No electricity in there?”

  “No water, nothing.” He looked over his shoulder at the building. “Empty forever.”

  “Not forever,” she said, and surprisingly smiled. “I went to this church when I was a little girl.”

  Sandra, delighted by the news, said, “You did? What was it like?”

  They all had to discuss that for a while. Parker saw that Sandra had toned herself down, made herself look softer, and that both cops had bought into the idea that she was connected to some sort of religious mission on Long Island, and that he and McWhitney were rehabilitated roughneck volunteers.

  After the reminiscence about the old days at the church wound down, the male cop said, “Louise, do we have to toss this place? These people have been all through it.”

  “Maybe I’ll just peek in,” Louise said. “See what it looks like now.”

  “It looks sad,” Sandra told her. “Been empty a long time.”

  Louise frowned, then shook her head at her partner. “Maybe I don’t wanna go in.”

  “I think you’re right,” he said, and told the others, “We’ll let you people finish up here.”

  Louise said, “I’m glad the hymn books are going to a good home anyway.”

  Sandra said, “Would you want one? You know, as a reminder.”

  Louise was delighted. “Really?”

  “Sure, why not?” Sandra grinned at her. “One hymn book more or less, you know?”

  Louise hesitated, but then the male cop said, “Go ahead, Louise, take it. You can sing to me while I drive.”

  Louise laughed, and Sandra handed her a hymnal, saying, “It couldn’t go to a better person.”

  McWhitney said, “Could I ask you two a favor?”

  “Sure,” said the male cop. His partner hugged the hymnal to her breast.

  “We’re driving a little truck,” McWhitney pointed out. “Just what everybody’s looking for. If we’re gonna get stopped by all these roadblocks, we’re not gonna get back to Long Island until Tuesday. If you could get the word—”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Louise told him. “The roadblocks are stopped.”

  “They are?”

  “That’s why we’re out here,” Louise said. “We’re searching every empty building in this entire area.”

  “Not for the fugitives,” the male cop said. “For the money.”

  “It has to still be somewhere around here,” Louise explained. “So this is a change of policy. The idea is, if we find the money, we’ll find the men.”

  “That makes sense,” Sandra said. “Good luck with it.”

  “Thanks.”

  The cops moved off, Louise holding her hymnal. They got into their patrol car, waved, and drove off. McWhitney watched them go, then said, “Good thing they didn’t start that new policy yesterday.” Looking at Parker he said, “We can throw those prayerbooks out of the van now. We get to take the rest of the money after all.”

  4

  No, you don’t,” Sandra said.

  McWhitney glowered at her. “How come?”

  “You’re still two guys in a truck,” she told him. “They don’t have to have roadblocks to see you drive by and wonder what you’ve got in there.”

  “Sandra’s right,” Parker said. “And we’ve got to move. Those two are going into t
he house across the way.”

  They watched as, across the road, the two cops left the patrol car, went up on the porch, tried the door, and stepped inside.

  Sandra said, “What do they find in there?”

  Parker said, “A broken window, and your mat.”

  “I can live without the mat.”

  McWhitney said, “What if Parker drives your car? Then we’re a man and a woman in a truck.”

  “I’ll drive my car,” Sandra told him.

  Parker said, “I’ll ride with Sandra. We’ll follow you, and we’ve got to go now. They’re gonna find blood on the broken window. New blood.”

  McWhitney was fast when he had to be. He nodded, slammed the van doors, and headed for the cab of the truck. Parker and Sandra passed him on their way to the Honda, and Parker said, “Head east.”

  “Right.”

  Sandra got behind the wheel, Parker in on the other side. She started the engine, but then waited for McWhitney to drive around her and turn right, toward the bridge over the little stream. As she followed, Parker looked back at the white house. The two cops were still inside.

  “They’ll call in reinforcements,” he said. “But they won’t come from this direction.”

  “I wondered why you wanted to go east.”

  Up ahead, McWhitney jounced over the bridge, the van wallowing from all the weight it carried. The Honda took the bridge more easily, and Sandra said, “Did Nelson tell you about the guy who followed him?”

  “Guy? No.”

  “Oscar Sidd.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Nelson says he’s somebody knows about moving money overseas. Nelson talked to him about our money, but he didn’t expect Oscar to follow him.”

  “Oscar thought he’d cut himself in.”

  “That was the idea.”

  “And Nels’s idea, talking to him in the first place was, cut us out.”

  “I noticed that, too.”

  “What happened to Oscar?”

  “I popped a tire, left him in a ditch.”

  “Alive?”

  “I don’t kill people, Parker,” she said. “All I shot was his tire. He maybe got a concussion from the windshield, but that’s all.”