Butcher's Moon p-16

by Richard Stark

  “Mr. Buenadella, I can’t—”

  “Get out of here!”

  “There isn’t any way for me to—”

  Buenadella closed in on him, following the sound of the voice. He reached out, his clutching fingers closed on a face, a working mouth. He slid his hand down, grasped the throat, squeezed. “I said get out of here,” he said. In the doctor’s presence, he was feeling stronger and stronger his own weakness seemed to have dissolved in the presence of this other man’s greater weakness. “Get out or I’ll kill you myself.”

  “You’re—you’re—” The doctor’s hands clutched at the hand holding his throat. “My God, you’re strangling me!”

  Buenadella gave him one shake, and released him. Speaking in the darkness, permitting any expression at all to cross his face because no expression could be seen, smiling broadly with his lips curling back from his teeth, he said, “Now. Get out now.”

  The doctor didn’t argue. He scurried by, bumping into Buenadella on the way, stumbling into some piece of furniture, patting the wall, then making it out into the hallway. Buenadella followed, cautious but still somewhat familiar in this house, and found the door he’d opened; he closed it, felt for a key, found none. No matter.

  He turned the other way, moved slowly across the room, hands out in front of himself at waist height, patting the air. Finally he found what he was looking for: the metal strip at the foot of the bed. As he moved along that to the left, there was another sound of a gunshot, seeming much closer than any of the others. He paused, frowning, listening, but heard nothing more.

  He rounded the foot of the bed, stopped there, fumbled in his pockets for matches. Finding some, he lit a match and saw Green lying in bed, his head propped up on two pillows, his eyes open, looking directly at Buenadella.

  “Uh!” Buenadella dropped the match and it went out. He could still feel the eyes looking at him.

  Was Green capable of movement? Was he creeping this way along the bed right now, was his bony hand reaching out from the darkness? Breathing faster and faster, Buenadella tore another match from the pack, nearly dropped all the matches, managed to light the second one, and Green was there exactly as before.

  Too exactly. Buenadella moved to the left, but the eyes didn’t shift.

  Was he dead? Buenadella watched, and slowly the eyes blinked. When they opened again, Buenadella could see that they were looking at nothing.

  “You’ll never see anything again,” Buenadella told him, and the bedroom door opened.

  He turned his head, and wasn’t surprised that it was Parker, standing in the doorway, a gun in his hand. Buenadella threw the match away from himself and took two fast steps backward, trying to hide himself in the darkness of the room. He left himself framed by the rectangle of window behind him, but he didn’t know that.

  “Goodbye, Buenadella,” Parker said, and Buenadella thrust up his splayed-out hands to stop the bullet.

  Fifty-one

  Approaching the rear of the house, Parker moved with wary caution. He knew Handy and Dan Wycza and Fred Ducasse were on his flanks, but he could neither see nor hear them. The house was dead ahead, but invisible; the closer he got to it, the less help he received from the car headlights around on the other side.

  The glow from the headlights didn’t reach all the way through the house; there were too many rooms, too many walls, between there and here. There was no definition of the windows along the rear wall, though occasionally still an upstairs window became pinpointed for an instant by the red flash of someone firing a gun at shadows. Parker was moving toward his memory of the French doors, though he was deflected at times by shrubbery. Still, it was the French doors he wanted; Calesian and Buenadella and Dulare had all been inside there, with another man.

  A sudden flurry of shots came from the right, five or six shots, and the sound of breaking glass. Parker moved forward through the grass, forcing himself not to hurry. The house was very close now. He reached out, took two more steps, and touched wood. The frame of something. His hand moved to the left, touched siding, moved to the right, found a small pane of glass. More glass—the French doors.

  They opened inward. He pressed slightly, and the door eased open without a sound. Cool air-conditioned air came out through the opening. Standing next to the frame, not to outline himself against the sky in the doorway, Parker listened to the interior of the room.

  Nothing. A door was apparently open on the other side, and through it came sounds of movement, shouting, hurrying, gunfire; but from the room itself no sound at all.

  Parker went down on hands and knees. His pistol was in his right hand, and now he held a small pencil flash in his left. He moved into the room, keeping low, patting his left hand out ahead of him onto the floor as he went. Once clear of the doorway he angled to the left, still on hands and knees.

  His probing left hand touched something: cloth, a trouser leg. He crawled up the length of the body, aware now of the odor of blood, and when he reached the face he clicked the flashlight on and off, giving himself light for a milli-second. He studied the afterglow in his mind, and recognized the face: Calesian. So it had been a good shot.

  And the rest of them had left the room. Moving without thought, leaving this entrance unguarded.

  It wouldn’t be for long. Dulare would think of it in time, and send some people back here. Parker got to his feet, crossed the room toward the space the sounds came from, and found the doorway. He stepped through and noise came from the left. Looking that way, he saw a faint blue-whiteness: headlight glow. And two bulky shapes came trotting around the corner, belated guards for the French doors.

  The shapes stopped. Parker could make them out against the pallid light, but for them he was shielded by total darkness. One of them said, huskily, “Jesus Christ, it’s dark back here. Where is this fucking den?”

  “Wait a minute. I’ve got a match.”

  Parker shot them both, before they could light a match and alter his night vision. Then he turned the other way, moving along a black hallway. In a house this size there had to be a rear staircase, and if Grofield was still alive, it was upstairs that Parker would find him.

  A doorway. From the floor on the other side, this was the kitchen. He took a step, halted, listened. Breathing? In a quiet but confident voice, Parker said, “Where are you?”

  “Huh? Over here, by the window.”Parker moved diagonally away from the voice till he saw the rectangle of window, and the darker shape within it. The shape said, “You think there’s any of them around this side?”

  “Yes,” Parker said, and shot him, then turned to the wall, felt his way along past appliances, found a swinging door with another room beyond it, ignored that, came to a wall turning, another door. This one opened inward toward the kitchen, and beyond it narrow stairs led up to the left.

  He was halfway up when a frightened, heavily breathing man started down, muttering to himself. Parker waited, and felt the bulky leather bag before he touched the man. He had put his flashlight away, and now his free hand skittered up the man’s sleeve to his throat.

  “Aaa!”

  Parker pressed the pistol against him. Quietly he said, “Where’s Green? Where’s the prisoner?”

  “I— Dear God. I don’t have anything to do with this, I’m a doctor.”

  Parker pressed him harder against the side wall hemming in the staircase. “You work on fingers?”

  The man shuddered all over, like a horse. His throat worked beneath Parker’s fingers, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Where’s Green? Fast!”

  “Upstairs! Second door on the left. You’ve got to understand the position I was in, I didn’t have any—”

  Parker held the pistol back three or four inches and fired. He let the body tumble down the stairs, and went on up.

  Blackness up here. No way to define the space, but it was probably some sort of hallway. Parker moved along the left wall past an open doorway and then to a door that was closed. He open
ed it, and saw a room lighted by a match in Buenadella’s hand. Grofield lay under blankets on a bed, either dead or unconscious.

  Buenadella saw him in the doorway and threw the match away, hiding himself in the darkness. But then he stepped backward till he was between Parker and the window, making a silhouette that was as good as sunshine.

  “Goodbye, Buenadella,” Parker said.

  Fifty-two

  The power substation went out at three twenty-two. An emergency relay system had been set up in Tyler five years before, after a summer of blackouts caused by power overloads, that would bring power in from other parts of the national grid if this substation were to go out. But the emergency system used the same distribution equipment from the same substation, and that equipment was now out of operation. It would take nearly six hours to rig up a temporary alternate distribution structure and return electric power to the west side of Tyler.

  When the electricity went off, the Police and Fire Departments in the affected area went immediately into a standard emergency procedure; stand-by men were called in, extra telephone answerers were assigned, more patrol cars were readied to be put on the street, and selected radio-equipped fire engines went out to patrol the area. Two shopping streets were within the affected zone, so the principal concentration of police and fire attention remained there. Residential sections remained mostly unpatrolled, except in response to direct telephone complaints.

  When the shooting started at the Buenadella house, the neighbors within a block radius were startled out of sleep. Nine families were awakened, and for all of them it was a terrifying and bewildering experience, with thoughts of invasion and revolution running through their heads. First there was the gunfire, and very quickly after that the discovery that the electricity wasn’t working. And when they tried to call the police, as practically all of them did, the phones weren’t working either. One man took his family and a shotgun out to the half-forgotten fallout shelter he’d installed behind the house way back in 1953; feeling an exultant sense of vindication, he bundled everybody inside, switched on the emergency generator, checked the load of his shotgun, and prepared to shoot any neighbor who tried to get in. Two other men armed themselves with rifles and stationed themselves by their front doors. Most other families sat around flashlights or kerosene lamps or the blue light of gas stoves and talked together in frightened undertones; nobody seemed to know what was the right thing to do. It was twenty-five minutes before one man finally got himself dressed and went out to his car and drove away from the neighborhood to find the police or a working phone or at least some explanation of what was going on; and by then the shooting had mostly died down.

  At the Buenadella house, Handy McKay and Dan Wycza and Fred Ducasse moved room by room through the first floor, clearing Dulare’s men as they went, making sure that nobody alive was behind them. Parker stayed upstairs in the doorway of Grofield’s room, waiting and listening. Mike Carlow and Philly Webb were out front, using their cars as shields and peppering anybody who showed in a front window. Two of the headlights had been shot out, but that left ten still shining. Nick Dalesia had joined Stan Devers on the right side of the house; in the dim light-spill from the front they made sure nobody came out any of the side windows, to get around behind the people inside. Ed Mackey and Tom Hurley were doing the same thing on the left.

  Dulare’s people were bewildered and leaderless. Half of them were dead or badly wounded, and the rest had no idea what they were supposed to be doing. Dulare and Quittner kept trying to organize a defense, but in the darkness and confusion there was no way to maintain any kind of general communication. The defenders were like steers in a pen, being shot down by men sitting around them on the fence rails.

  Six men up on the second floor clustered in the blackness of the central hallway and whispered together, trying to decide what to do. A couple of them were in favor of going down the front stairs and joining the fight, but the rest would have nothing to do with it. One suggested they try jumping out windows onto the lawn, but another one said, “There’s guys out on the sides of the house. They’ll blow your head off, you stick it out there.”

  “For Christ’s sake, how many of them are there?”

  “I think there’s a hundred.”

  They talked about it some more. They were the full complement of Dulare’s men up here now, and they didn’t like being stuck on the second floor. A couple of them suggested they simply go down the back stairs and out the kitchen door and get the hell away from here, but the others decided that wouldn’t work either; any man who ran away would sooner or later have to answer to Ernie Dulare. One said, “So we go down the back stairs and get these bastards from behind. Do the same thing to them they’re doing to us.”

  Parker, standing in Grofield’s doorway, listened to the entire conversation. If they’d decided to run away, he would have let them go, but in the end they chose to go down to the kitchen and try attacking the invaders from behind, so that was that. Parker took the flashlight from his pocket as he followed them to the stairs, waited until he was sure they were all in the narrow walled staircase, then stood in the doorway at the top, switched the light on, and began firing into them.

  Downstairs, in the main parlor off the front staircase, Dulare and Quittner sat on the floor away from the windows, and in the reflected headlight glare tried to put together some kind of sensible defense. Dulare’s man Rigno was out roaming around the house, calling in the rest of the remaining men, gathering them all here in this room. Quittner was saying, “They don’t have much time. They know they have to hit and run, before the police get here.”

  Dulare grunted. “They are hitting, goddammit,” he said. “I picked the wrong side in this fight.”

  “No,” Quittner said. “You had to side with Buenadella. So does Frank, that’s why I’m here. No matter how much destruction this man Parker causes here tonight, he’s still only a transient, he’ll come and go. The organization has to stay together.”

  “We’re goddam falling apart right now,” Dulare said.

  Across the main front hall, Fred Ducasse slowly entered the formal dining room. Everything was clear ahead of him, but he didn’t know about the man lying on the floor to his right, over by the archway to the front hall. For just a second Ducasse was framed against a window behind him and to his left; a bullet hit him in the right side of the head, knocking him into a hutch filled with pewter and memorial plates.

  More men crawled into the front parlor, staying below the level of the windows. Rigno was in last, and reported to Dulare: “That’s all there is. I shouted upstairs, but there’s nobody up there.”

  Dulare did a fast head-count, and there were seventeen men in the room, counting Quittner and himself. “We’ve got to sit tight,” he told them. “We’ll get cops here pretty soon, these people will have to take off. All we do for now is sit here and wait them out.”

  That’s when Handy McKay rolled the bomb through the doorway.

  Fifty-three

  Frank Elkins parked across the road from the hospital and switched the headlights off. Then he and Ralph Wiss waited a minute to get used to the darkness.

  Across the way, the hospital showed the only lights in the neighborhood. It was equipped with standby electric-generating equipment sufficient for operating rooms, medical machinery, refrigeration equipment, and some internal lighting, but not enough to illuminate the parking lots or other outside areas, so from here it was merely a pattern of lighted windows hanging in black space.

  Wiss said, “It looks like a Halloween pumpkin.”

  Elkins squinted. “I don’t see any face.”

  “No, a pumpkin done like a building. You know? Instead of a face.”

  Elkins frowned in the darkness, uncomprehending. “A pumpkin done like a building?”

  “Forget it,” Wiss said. “Come on, let’s go.”

  They got out of the car—the interior light was an oasis of warm yellow while the doors were open—and walked across
the road and up the driveway to the hospital building. The Emergency entrance sign was off, but they could make out the blacktop lane leading around to the side. They walked around that way, and saw the glow of low-wattage bulbs in the vicinity of the glass doors leading into Emergency. In the yellow-brown light two ambulances were parked near the doors, facing out.

  Avoiding the light, Wiss and Elkins skirted the Emergency entrance and made their way toward the rear of the building. Light-spill from windows over their heads gave a faint yellow sheen, enough for them to see what they were doing.

  Inside a fenced enclosure was the hospital’s motor pool: four more ambulances, a mobile operating unit, and two other specialty vehicles. Wiss touched the simple padlock closing the gate and it opened for him. He stood by the gate and waited while Elkins selected the ambulance he wanted, crossed the wires under the dash, and drove the vehicle out without switching on its lights. Wiss locked the gate again, got into the ambulance with Elkins, and they rode together out to the street. Elkins stopped next to their car, and Wiss said, “I’ll follow you. I don’t know the way.”

  “Right.”

  Wiss changed over to the car, Elkins switched on his headlights, and the two vehicles drove away.

  Fifty-four

  Parker held the flashlight while Handy worked on the wall safe in Buenadella’s den.

  The whole thing had taken less than half an hour. Fred Ducasse was dead. Tom Hurley had been shot in the arm, not badly, and had been taken away by Nick Dalesia; they wouldn’t be coming back. Dan Wycza and Ed Mackey and Stan Devers were upstairs strapping Grofield onto a mattress for the trip down and out of the house. Philly Webb and Mike Carlow were away getting other cars, to replace the ones that had been shot up a bit on the lawn.

  Just as Handy popped the safe, Devers walked in, preceded by his own flashlight. “The ambulance just pulled in,” he said.