Butcher's Moon p-16

by Richard Stark

  “What?”

  “Your rounds. You go down here to the end. Then what do you do?”

  Snyder was having trouble thinking straight. He said, “After what?”

  Patiently the thief said, “After you finish your rounds on this floor. Where do you go next? Do you check the trucks, one of the other buildings? What do you do?”

  “Oh. I go back to . . . I go back to the shed. I do the rest of it at three o’clock. The main building on the half-hour, everything else on the hour.”

  “Fine. And do you have to punch a clock anywhere, to show you’ve really done the rounds?”

  “No, I just do them,” Snyder said. He was answering questions mechanically, trying to figure out what was happening.

  “That’s fine,” the thief said. “An honest man. There aren’t too many left like you.”

  Two years ago, when he’d been the winter watchman at Fun Island, Snyder had run afoul of some tough guys who’d for some reason broken in; now, remembering them, it suddenly occurred to him this self-declared thief was all wrong. He didn’t act or talk like a thief at all; in fact, except for the ski mask he didn’t even look like a thief.

  A joke? Snyder peered suspiciously at the eyes within the mask, trying to read comedy there. “Just what’s going on?” he said.

  “We’re going for a stroll,” the thief said. He touched Snyder’s elbow gently, suggesting that he start to walk.

  Snyder obeyed, walking slowly forward but continuing to stare at the other man’s eyes. There was humor in them, but also a glint of something else. No, this wasn’t a joke.

  Nevertheless, Snyder was no longer afraid. As they walked he said, “Where are we going?”

  “On your rounds,” the thief told him. “Right on down to the end of the corridor.”

  Snyder paused by the finance section’s door. “On my rounds,” he said, “I open these doors, check inside.”

  The thief laughed. “Go ahead,” he said. “Take a look. My partner won’t mind.”

  The idea of a surprise birthday party flashed idiotically through Snyder’s mind. But his birthday was in the spring, and there was no one in any case to do such an elaborate surprise; and besides, this wasn’t a joke. Nevertheless, he was braced for almost any lunatic possibility when he opened the door and shone the flashlight in, and it was almost a relief to see the dark figure hunched over in front of the safe in the far corner. The man turned his head over there, and he too was wearing a ski mask, a black one with green zigzag stripes. He glanced briefly toward Snyder and the light, and then turned back to his work, absorbed and unconcerned. He was doing something obscure in the area of the combination dial.

  Behind Snyder, the other man said, gently but firmly, “I think that’s long enough.”

  Snyder stepped back, shutting the door. “Now what?”

  “We walk down the hall.”

  They walked down the hall, approaching the executive offices. Snyder said, “Those checks won’t do you any good in there. They’ll all be made out to the brewery.”

  “Absolutely right,” said the thief. He didn’t seem troubled at all. “But there will be a little cash,” he said. “A few hundred, anyway.”

  “You’re going through all this for a few hundred dollars?”

  Once again the thief laughed; he seemed as easy and untroubled in his mind as if he and Snyder were just strolling along the street somewhere, not involved in grand larceny at all. “‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,’” he said, “‘than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’” He declaimed the line, just the way an actor would.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” Snyder said, “and I don’t want to know.”

  “Very intelligent.” The thief paused and opened a door. “What’s back here?”

  “That’s Mr. Kilpatrick’s office. Vice-president in charge of marketing.”

  “Fine,” the thief said. “Let’s go look.”

  Snyder stepped through the doorway, flashing the light ahead of himself, and from back down the corridor came the sound of an explosion: a sudden flat crump that sounded low and serious and authoritative.

  Snyder looked over his shoulder, startled, but the thief was directly behind him, urging him forward. Moving, walking across the secretary’s office toward the inner suite, Snyder said, “Was that the safe?”

  “Definitely. Do you ever turn the lights on in here?”

  “Sometimes.”

  They went through another door to the inner suite. The thief patted the wall, found the light switch, and a large rectangular room suddenly blossomed into existence, created by soft indirect lighting. They had entered on one of the short sides, and directly across the way green wall-to-wall draperies covered an expanse of glass giving, by day, a beautiful view of the river. A free-form desk dominated the left side of the room, with a white sofa and several overstuffed chairs forming a conversation area on the right. Down near the green draperies stood a glass-topped dining table flanked by half a dozen chrome-and-black-plastic chairs.

  “How mod-dren,” the thief said, with what sounded like mockery in his voice. “Do you suppose there’s a bathroom?”

  Snyder pointed to a flush door just past the desk. “That’s it, there. The door beyond it is to the kitchen.”

  “The bathroom will do,” the thief said. “Come along.”

  They walked across the cream carpeting, and Snyder opened the bathroom door. They stepped in and the thief turned on the lights, and a row of chrome spots gleamed down onto a long chrome counter containing two sinks. The entire wall above the sinks was mirrored.

  “Lovely,” the thief said, and took a set of handcuffs from his pocket. “Now you put your hands behind your back.”

  Fright touched Snyder again, and once more his memory of that other time came back. “You don’t have to tie me up,” he said, his voice rising. He was blinking again, and backing away.

  The thief seemed disappointed, as though Snyder had failed to give a useful performance in a simple role. “There’s nothing to it,” he said. “We just need half an hour or so lead time.”

  “I don’t want to be tied up!”

  The thief sighed. “I don’t have to show you a gun, do I? I thought we had such a good relationship going.”

  Snyder watched him mistrustfully. He couldn’t seem to stop blinking. “You aren’t going to blindfold me,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t think of it. I’ll put the cuffs on, leave you in here, pull the desk over in front of the door to slow you down a bit, and that’s the end of it. All we want is time enough to get away from here.” The thief patted Snyder’s arm and gave him a confidential smile, half obscured by the mask. “Come on, now,” he said. “Let’s not make trouble for one another.”

  Snyder reluctantly turned around, putting his hands behind his back, and felt the chilly metal bands close around his wrists. His shoulders were hunched and his head ducked down, as though he expected to be struck from behind.

  He wasn’t. The thief took him by the arms, turned him gently around, and helped him to sit down on the fuzzy-covered toilet seat. “There,” he said. “Comfy? That’s fine. Now, we have a message for you to give to Lozini.”

  Snyder frowned up at him. “What?”

  “Lozini,” the thief repeated. “Adolf Lozini.”

  Snyder shook his head. “I don’t know who you mean,” he said.

  “You never heard of Adolf Lozini?”

  “Never in my life.”

  The thief pondered that for a few seconds, then shrugged and said, “Doesn’t matter, he’ll get the idea. Been pleasant talking to you. Good night.”

  Snyder sat hunched on the toilet seat. A thing like this shouldn’t happen to a man, certainly not twice.

  The thief paused in the doorway. “I’ll leave the light on,” he said, and waved, and closed the door.

  It took Snyder twenty-five minutes to get out of the bathroom and make the phone call.

  Nine

  Parker
sat at the writing table in his hotel room, counting bills. Nine hundred from the New York Room, three hundred from the brewery. The restaurant credit-card slips and brewery checks had all been ripped up and dumped into the river. The restaurant would never recoup, but the brewery would get new payment checks from at least some of its customers—a long and expensive and irritating operation.

  The only light in the room was the table lamp at Parker’s elbow. Off to his right the Venetian blinds chittered occasionally in a slight breeze; they were angled upward, to let in air and to show the night-black sky with its thin nail-paring of moon and to block out the street-lit empty expanse of London Avenue. The bed was still made, and two dark-toned zippered jackets were lying on it. Parker counted slowly, separating and smoothing the bills with blunt fingers, organizing them into two equal stacks. His face was expressionless, as though his mind were working on other thoughts behind the mechanical process of counting.

  Grofield came out of the bathroom, stretching and yawning and scratching his cheeks. “Wool,” he said. “I don’t know how skiers stand it.”

  Parker finished counting the bills. “Four sixty-five each,” he said.

  “By God,” Grofield said. “And to think some people say crime doesn’t pay.”

  “We’ll do one more tonight,” Parker said.

  “We will? What time is it?”

  “Quarter to four.”

  ”Lozini must know by now,” Grofield said. “He’ll have his soldiers out beating the byways.”

  “They can’t watch the whole town,” Parker told him. He pulled open the writing-table drawer and took out the notes Grofield had brought back from the library.

  “Any ideas?”

  “Let’s see.”

  Parker got to his feet, and Grofield came over to take his place at the writing table. As he leafed through the notes, Parker went over to the window. He pulled the blind cord, shifting the slats till he could look down through them at the street.

  Tyler was a clean town; the breeze gusted through empty gutters. Bright sodium street-lighting glared on the wide empty thoroughfare of London Avenue, showing the storefronts across the way but leaving the upper stories of the buildings in total darkness. There was no sound out there at all, not even when a dark sedan moved slowly past from right to left. The big Farrell for Mayor banner flapped in the breeze off to the right. What was the name of Farrell’s opponent? Wain. Parker stood unmoving, looking out through the horizontal slits at the sleeping city. It made no connection with him; he’d grown up in different circumstances.

  Grofield said, “Got it.”

  Parker turned.

  “Midtown Garage,” Grofield said. “It’s a parking building, four stories high, open twenty-four hours. On a Friday night they’ll do a good business, all of it in cash and all of it still there.”

  “Where is it?”

  Grofield gestured toward the window. “Two blocks from here, on London. We could walk.”

  “We’ll drive,” Parker said. “Drive in, drive out. That’s what you do in a garage.”

  “Right.” Grofield put the notes away again in the drawer, and hesitated. “The money, too?”

  “Why not?”

  “Right.” Grofield put the two stacks of bills into the drawer on top of the notes, shut the drawer, and got to his feet.

  After they put on their jackets Parker looked around the room to be sure nothing had been left out. “Okay,” he said.

  They took the stairs down to the lobby rather than ring for the elevator. At the foot of the stairs a left turn would take them into the quiet lobby, but they turned right instead, down a short hall to a small side exit next to the hotel drugstore. They’d used this route a couple of times already tonight, not seeing any hotel employees at all along the way.

  The side exit led to a narrow business street lined with appliance stores and record shops. Down to the left was brightly lit London Avenue, but the side streets were still equipped with dimmer and more widely spaced old-fashioned lighting.

  Parker and Grofield walked a block and a half away from London Avenue and the hotel, then stopped next to a Buick Riviera, vaguely maroon in the darkness. There were night lights in the interiors of stores, but no illumination showing in any upper-story windows. No headlights anywhere to be seen, nor any pedestrians other than themselves.

  Parker took from his pocket a dozen keys on a circular metal ring and began to run them for the Buick’s door. The fifth one worked; he opened the door and slid in fast, shutting it behind him to switch off the interior light, and reached across to unlock the other door for Grofield.

  They took side streets until they were beyond the garage, so they’d be coming at it from the direction opposite the hotel. There was no other traffic at all until they finally dropped back to London Avenue, but then they saw a prowling police car almost at once, plus a couple of other slow-moving cars with two male occupants in each.

  Grofield said, “Your friend Lozini organizes himself pretty fast.”

  Parker, remembering Lozini in charge of the hoods hunting him down in the amusement park, said, “He isn’t stupid, just too impatient. He gets in a hurry and he gets mad.”

  “Then he gets stupid,” Grofield suggested.

  “Right.”

  The Midtown Garage was a tan-brick building on a corner, square and functional, with broad glassless window areas on each floor. A vertical red neon sign standing out from the second and third stories spelled out the name of the place, with the word PARKING beneath, like an underline. Under the sign, in the center of the London Avenue face of the building, was the entrance, a broad low concrete driveway bisected by a booth where tickets were picked up on the way in and money was paid on the way out.

  A slender sleepy black boy of about nineteen was on duty in the booth, keeping himself awake with bad rock music from an imperfectly tuned station on a white plastic radio. He was sitting on a stool, resting his elbows on a high counter and gazing in a befuddled way out the glass window fronting the booth at the street. He reacted slowly and awkwardly when Parker turned the Buick in at the entrance and stopped next to the booth; it took him a long time to separate one ticket from the pile, and even longer to get it punched by the time clock on the counter. Parker, waiting, kept one eye on the rear-view mirror and saw the police car go by again, in the opposite direction. It seemed to him both the faces in there had been turned this way. Watching the strangers, waiting for something else to happen.

  Beside him, Grofield was studying the wall to the right. Parker had only had a glimpse of it while turning in, but it seemed likely to contain the office; in a tile wall, a brown-metal door was flanked on one side by a bulletin board covered with required city and state notices and on the other side by a thick glass window showing a yellow-walled interior.

  “Here ya are.”

  Parker took the ticket, put the Buick in gear, and started slowly up the spiral that formed the interior of the building. There were no separate floors inside, but only a steadily upcurving ramp, leading by gentle gradations from level to level and marked with white lines for parking.

  The interior was mostly empty, with only an occasional car parked with its nose to the exterior wall or the central supporting divider. Parker followed the curve of the ramp up and around until they were out of sight of the booth, and then nosed the Buick in against the interior wall and cut the engine. The silence afterward seemed loud and echoing.

  Grofield said, “I didn’t like all that action on the street.”

  “You want to call this off?”

  “No. But we better make damn sure we give ourselves enough time at the other end.”

  “We will.”

  They got out of the car. They both carried handguns in their jacket pockets; Parker a Colt Detective Special in .32 caliber and Grofield an old Beretta Cougar in .380 caliber. They walked down the ramp with their hands in their jacket pockets, and saw the boy nodding in the booth again, facing the other way. The squawk of his
radio covered all other sound.

  There was no activity out in the street. They reached the brown-metal door to the office, and while Grofield tried the knob Parker watched the boy in the booth; he was more asleep than awake, and completely unaware of their presence.

  “Locked,” Grofield said.

  Parker took two paces forward and looked through the window next to the door. From the car, all he’d been able to see was the yellow far wall, but now he could see the two desks, the filing cabinet, the free-standing wooden closet, and the man in green work shirt and pants sitting at one of the desks, feet up, reading Playboy. He was short and heavy-set, Italian-looking, with thick dry black hair and stubby-fingered hands. He had a garage-mechanic look about him, and was about forty years old.

  Good. Old enough to be sensible, to neither panic nor be a hero.

  To the right, behind the guy at the desk, was a second window, fronting on the street. Parker looked at that, stepped back next to Grofield without having been seen by the man in the office, and said, “Take the sidewalk window. Show him your gun at my signal.”

  “Right.”

  “And let me know if anybody’s around.”

  Grofield walked briskly out to the street and around the corner, and Parker stood next to the window again, where he could look through at the man inside and the other window. He glanced over at the boy in the booth, who continued to nod to the echoing blary music, unaware of the world around himself.

  Grofield appeared outside that other window. Parker watched him look both ways, then nodded as Grofield gestured to him that they had privacy. He made one last check of the sleeping boy, then took the Colt from his pocket, stepped to the middle of the window, and tapped the gun barrel against the glass.

  He had to do it twice before the man inside looked up, and then his reaction was so huge it seemed he might be having a heart attack. His ankles had been crossed on the desk top, showing worn work boots; now his feet flew into the air, his arms shot out, the magazine went sailing across the room, and his chair teetered back and forth on the edge of falling over before finally thudding forward to land on all four legs.