Plunder Squad

by Richard Stark

  The guy had apparently decided to go ahead and continue playing salesman: “Mr. Beaghler?”

  “No.” They didn’t know one another after all, so there was no point stretching out the conversation. Maybe he was simply from a credit outfit; maybe Sharon had been pushing her charge accounts too hard.

  “How about the little lady of the house? Is Mrs. Beaghler—?”

  “No,” Parker said, interrupting him, and waited for him to go away.

  But he hadn’t yet given up. “You mean she isn’t here at the present time, or that—”

  “I already said no.” Enough was enough. Parker reached behind himself for the doorknob, and stepped backward to go into the house again.

  But as he turned away into the house, the guy suddenly said, “Parker.”

  He stopped, and looked back. He never traveled in the square-john world under that name. To be recognized was one thing; to be called by that name was something else. He said, “What did you call me?”

  “Parker.”

  “You’re making a mistake. The name is Latham.”

  The guy shrugged. “It was Parker in 1962,” he said. “You’ve gotten a new face since then, but the rest is the same.”

  Sixty-two; California; a faint memory stirred.

  Which the guy confirmed. “My name’s Kearny,” he said. “You were vagged in Bakersfield, broke out of the prison farm. A woman from Fresno gave you a ride, ended up taking you home with her for a two-day shack-up while the heat died down. You never told her you were the one they wanted, but she knew. She didn’t care. She was my wife’s sister. I stayed at the house the second night. We killed a bottle between us.”

  Parker remembered. Kearny had a private detective’s ticket, but his field was bad credit risks, not wanted convicts. Parker had allowed him to kill most of that bottle himself that night, and had left early the next morning.

  But that still didn’t explain his knowing the name. Stepping back out onto the porch, shutting the door again, he said, “I was Ronald Casper then.”

  Kearny said, “She heard you telephoning a guy in Chicago, collect. He wouldn’t accept a call from Casper, you had to use the name Parker. She told me about it afterwards, after you left. She still talks about you. I never told her she was just an easy way for you to be off the street for a couple of days.”

  Parker shrugged that off and said, “So what is it now?”

  “I’m looking for a paroled con named Howard Odum.”

  The name didn’t mean a thing. Parker said, “Odum is a friend of Beaghler’s?”

  “Was,” Kearny said. “Friend of the wife’s now. Beaghler doesn’t know.” Kearny added carefully, “This has nothing to do with anything Beaghler’s into now.”

  Was this the trouble with the wife? If Beaghler’s heist was going to break down—other than with the problem of a buyer for the statues—it would be something to do with his wife, and if it was going to happen, it might as well happen right now.

  Parker half turned, opened the door partway, and called, “Sharon.”

  It took her a while to come out; she was probably making a lot of denials in advance to her husband. When she did emerge, swinging the door wide and then closing it again, her face was as closed and sullen as a prison door.

  Parker gestured a thumb toward Kearny, saying, “He wants Odum. Tell him.”

  “Odum?” Her voice was shrill, announcing the lie. “I haven’t seen Howie since—”

  Parker made an impatient move with one hand. She gave him a defiant look, but it didn’t last. Her eyes slid away, and finally she cleared her throat and said, in a much lower voice, “Sixteen-eighty-four Galindo Street.”

  Parker glanced at Kearny, but the other man shook his head, so he turned back and said, “Try again.”

  It was impossible for her to look innocent, but she tried. “Honest,” she said, “that’s his address.”

  This was running on. Parker felt suddenly very impatient, very irritable. “Once more,” he said, and he meant it was the last time.

  “Well, uh—” She was very nervous. She said, “Maybe he means, uh, Howie’s girl friend over in Antioch.”

  This time Kearny nodded. Parker looked back at Sharon.

  Now the words poured out in a nervous stream: “He . . . stays over with her a lot. She—I don’t know her name, but her address is, ah, nineteen-oh-two Gavallo Road. It’s a like new apartment building, twelve units. Howie said—”

  “Good,” Parker said. “I’ll be right in.”

  She’d been dismissed. It took her a second to get it, and then she scrambled back into the house like a cat leaving a full bathtub.

  Parker turned to Kearny: “I’d hate to think you’d memorized those car plates to find out who rented them.”

  “What cars?” said Kearny.

  That was good enough. Kearny had shown himself a long time ago to be a man who minded his own business. Parker nodded and went back inside, where Sharon was white-faced, Beaghler red-faced, and Ducasse and Walheim both looking very uncomfortable. “It wasn’t anything,” Sharon was saying. “I swear to God, Bob, it was a mistaken identity.”

  Beaghler turned to Parker. “What was it all about?”

  “Mistaken identity,” Parker said. “He’s a skip-tracer named Kearny I met once a long time ago. He’s looking for a dead skip, a woman, and he thought she lived here. He talked to Sharon and found out he was wrong. Now, what about this overnight stuff?”

  Sharon was giving him a grateful look that would have tipped the lie if her husband had seen it. But he was glaring at Parker instead, saying, “What overnight stuff?”

  “In your all-terrain vehicle,” Parker said.

  “Oh. I thought you meant something—I don’t know what the hell I thought you meant.”

  “I’m here to talk about a robbery,” Parker said.

  “Yeah, you’re right, you’re right.” Beaghler turned away toward the table.

  Sharon suddenly said, “I think I hear the baby.” With a frightened look toward her husband, she turned and hurried from the room.

  The four men sat down at the table again, and Beaghler said, “Where was I?”

  Ducasse said, “Staying overnight in the mountains.”

  Walheim said, “You said we’d probably hit the armored car around one o’clock.”

  “Right.” Beaghler nodded. “That gives us about five hours’ usable daylight. It gets too dark in the woods after six o’clock, you could drive into a canyon and think it was just a shadow.”

  Parker said, “So we’d get into King City around noon the next day.”

  “That’s the way I figure it, yeah.”

  Parker nodded. That was good, to have a place to hole up the first night, and then finish getting out of the area the next day.

  Walheim said, “How do you know they won’t track us?”

  “Through those mountains? Hell, they won’t know where we are. They’ll figure we’re camping near the road someplace, they won’t look for us thirty miles in.”

  Ducasse said, “Thirty miles isn’t very far.”

  “Yes it is,” Beaghler said. “Thirty miles on Interstate 80 isn’t very far at all, but thirty miles of forest is one hell of a long distance.”

  Parker said, “But this vehicle of yours leaves tracks, doesn’t it?”

  “For the first five miles we’ll be on ranger trails. We can leave the trail almost anyplace and cut off into the woods. A lot of people do that and go in a mile or two, so which set of tracks do the cops follow?”

  Walheim said, “What if they bring up a helicopter?”

  “We’re under the trees,” Beaghler told him. “It’s really dense in there, man, you could hide an army in that forest, you wouldn’t see a thing from the air.”

  Parker said, “All right. I’ll want to look at this place, but for now let’s say it can be done. That still leaves the question of the buyer.”

  “I’m open to suggestions,” Beaghler said.

  Ducasse
said, “You want one of us to find the buyer?”

  “I’ll tell you the God’s honest truth,” Beaghler said, “I just don’t have that kind of contact. All I’ve ever done is drive.”

  Which meant, Parker knew, that he’d driven exclusively small-time operations. A suburban bank, a loan office in a shopping center, places where the take is eleven thousand dollars and if they catch you they’ll put you away for just as long as if you’d been after a million.

  Walheim said, “Bob, I know the same people you do.”

  Parker said, “You mean it’s up to Ducasse and me.”

  “I have the caper,” Beaghler said, “and I have the way to get the thing and get away. But I don’t have anybody to turn it into cash for me.”

  “Until you do,” Parker said, “you don’t have anything at all.”

  “I know that,” Beaghler said. “Can you help me?”

  Ducasse said, doubtfully, “I can ask around.”

  “Give us a name for these statues,” Parker said. “Something a buyer will recognize. We’ll see what we can do.”

  “I’ll have to ask my cousin. Can you guys stick around till tomorrow?”

  Parker and Ducasse looked at one another, and Parker saw his own feelings reflected in the other man’s eyes. There was a sense of this job as being too loosely assembled, not tightly enough controlled or organized; but on the other hand, there was the need to put something together and make some money. Beaghler’s plan had some crazinesses in it, but most workable plans did.

  If he’d been flush, Parker would have walked away from it right there. But he said, “I can stay over.”

  Ducasse shrugged and said, “So can I. What can we lose?”

  Four

  The knocking at the motel-room door was soft but persistent. Parker had been asleep, but he came awake all at once, his eyes opening and staring upward in darkness that was almost total.

  The faint rapping sounded again. Parker turned his head slowly, and oriented himself by the slit of light outlining the window draperies. He was in a motel room down near Fremont, the other side of Oakland from Beaghler’s suburb, and Ducasse was in the next room to the left. But there was no connecting door, and in any case, the sound came from someone outside, someone at the room entrance, which was down past the foot of the bed and to the right.

  Parker waited a few seconds, until he felt sure there was no one in the room with him, and then he slipped quickly out of the bed. He put on clothing and went over to the broad window beside the door. Peering around the edge of the draperies, he saw the dim form of a woman out there, and as he watched she looked to right and to left and then knocked again, a little more loudly and demandingly than before.

  Sharon.

  Parker grimaced in irritation. The playlet in the woman’s head was so clear and obvious he could practically see it as though on a movie screen: “I had to come thank you for covering for me today.” “That’s all right.” “No, you were really wonderful. You just don’t know how Bob—” etc. “Come on in.” “Oh, thank you. What a lovely room! Is that bed as comfortable as it looks?”

  If a thing is no good, it’s no good. There was no point sticking around until everything went absolutely to hell. Parker moved away from the window toward the door, found the light switch on the wall, and clicked it on. The tapping at the door immediately stopped.

  Packing wouldn’t take long. The attaché case was standing in the closet. Parker got his toilet kit from the bathroom and change of clothing out of the dresser drawer. Then he sat down on the bed again, picked up the phone, and asked the motel operator to connect him with the airport. It was while he was waiting for someone to answer that the knocking started at the door again. He also thought he heard her call something, in a voice that tried to be loud and soft at the same time.

  His watch said it was two-twenty-five. After a dozen rings the phone was answered by a female voice giving the name of an airline and thanking him for calling. He said, “What’s the next flight non-stop to Newark?”

  “Does it matter which airline, sir?”

  “No.”

  “Does it have to be Newark? There’s a flight leaving for Kennedy—”

  “It has to be Newark.” That was where he’d left his car, when he’d driven down from Claire’s house.

  “Yes, sir. One moment, please.”

  While he waited, there was a sudden commotion outside. First a shriek of brakes, then a woman squealing, then different kinds of shouting and contention, and finally a loud angry hammering at the door.

  The female voice came back to say that the next non-stop to Newark wasn’t until seven-ten. Nearly five hours away. “Thank you,” he said, and hung up, his expression disgusted.

  Outside, Beaghler’s voice suddenly shouted out his name: Parker, not Latham. Parker looked over at the door. He got to his feet, walked over there, opened the door, and Beaghler came bursting in, his mouth full of words. Sharon was quivering in the background, rump against the hood of Parker’s rental car, eyes glittering in the light-spill from the open door.

  Beaghler was still yelling. Parker shut the door, closed his hand into a fist, turned around, and hit Beaghler in the face. Beaghler went windmilling, his eyes wide open, and tripped over a corner of the bed to land on his butt on the floor. “Now shut up,” Parker said, and went over to the bed.

  Sitting there on the floor, Beaghler looked too surprised to think. The fist had caught him on the left cheekbone, and his left eye was already beginning to blink and water.

  Parker went to one knee beside the bed, and reached underneath. First he pulled out the revolver he had under there, a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson, a stubby defense gun similar to Kirwan’s, the one that hadn’t shot George Uhl. Parker switched this gun to his left hand and reached under the bed again, when Beaghler suddenly yelled, “Jesus Christ!” and threw himself face down on the floor, covering his head with his hands.

  Parker ignored him. Working by feel, he released the spring-clip holster from under the bed, and then got to his feet again. He put the revolver in the holster, and both in the attaché case still open on the bed.

  By this time it had occurred to Beaghler he wasn’t being killed. He moved his hands away from his head, lifted his face, and blinked open-mouthed up at Parker. He watched Parker shut the attaché case and snap the two catches. Then he said, “What are you doing?” All anger was out of him now, he was just baffled and curious.

  Parker picked up the attaché case, and paused to look down at Beaghler, who was shifting position again. He waited till Beaghler was sitting up on the floor the same as earlier, and then said, “I’m going home. I’m not interested in you or your heist. And if you ever shout my name out in a public place again, I’ll take your jaw off.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Beaghler was scrambling to his feet. “What are you going away for?”

  Parker turned toward the door.

  Beaghler called, “Will you wait? Listen, I made a mistake, that’s all. I thought there was something—”

  Parker looked back at him. “You didn’t think anything,” he said. “You don’t think at all. You’re married to a whore, Beaghler, get used to it. Either put her on the street to bring home some money, or get rid of her. But stop trying to turn her into the little woman, it won’t work.”

  “But—” Beaghler stalled, as though somebody had turned his engine off. He just stood there, his expression strained, one hand out in an explanatory gesture.

  Parker turned away and went to the door. When he opened it, Sharon was still in the same artful pose of terror against the hood of his car. He stepped out, leaving the door open, and said to her, “Move it over there.”

  “You aren’t going away?” The little-girl voice was so artificial that she gave the impression of being run by a ventriloquist.

  The next unit’s door opened and Ducasse came out, fully dressed. He said, keeping his voice down, “What the hell’s going on?”

  “Marital prob
lems,” Parker said. He took Sharon by the elbow and moved her away from his car.

  “God damn it,” Ducasse said. “I really need the money.”

  Parker said, “So do I. You want a lift to the airport?”

  Ducasse had come close enough so he could look through the open doorway at Bob Beaghler, who was now standing in there with his hands on his hips, looking both embarrassed and defiant. Ducasse glanced at Sharon, who was biting her under lip and trying to decide whether or not to get angry. Then he sighed and looked at Parker and shook his head. “I guess I’ll hang in here a little longer,” he said. “I’m living on my case money as it is. Maybe they’ll calm down now, after this.”

  “Maybe,” Parker said. “See you around.”

  “So long,” Ducasse said. He looked wistful as he watched Parker get into his car.

  The last Parker saw of them in the rear-view mirror, Sharon was running for her red Olds convertible and Ducasse was on his way through the lighted doorway to talk to Bob Beaghler.

  Five

  Parker slipped the credit card into the narrow opening at the edge of the door and slid it downward until it hit the bolt. He applied pressure slowly, the bottom edge of the card pushing against the curved face of the bolt, the card moving downward a fraction of an inch at a time, and suddenly the door popped inward and was open.

  Parker put the credit card away in his shirt pocket. It was the one he’d used in San Francisco, and while it could no longer be safely used anywhere in the country to buy or rent things, it could still open most locked doors that hadn’t been double-bolted. And in the majority of suburban houses, that meant either the kitchen door or the door to the attached garage; people devote their attention to guarding against entry through the front door or through windows, and hardly think at all about the rear entrances to their houses.

  In this case it was the door to the garage. Stepping through the dark opening, Parker could see the streetlight through the small windows in the main garage door straight ahead. But in the intervening space between himself and that door, there was no car.