The Sour Lemon Score p-12

by Richard Stark

The announcer had more to say, mostly in a daring-daylight holdup vein, all the journalistic clichés pouring out, even finishing with the authorities confident of early arrests.

  “They’d better arrest each other,” Uhl said, grinning, and as another record started he turned the radio down again.

  Weiss was gazing at the strongbox as though it had betrayed him. “Thirty-three thousand,” he said. “A crummy eight grand each.”

  “We knew it could be low,” Andrews said. “We knew it could be in the forty-thousand-dollar range.”

  “Range? You call that a range? It could’ve been in the sixty-thousand-dollar range, too! Fifteen thousand a man!”

  “Eight thousand isn’t bad,” Andrews said. “Not for one morning’s work.”

  This time Weiss wasn’t going to let him forget the time spent in preparation. “What one morning’s work? Three week’s work, dammit, and a huge risk, a goddam huge risk, and for what? Eight thousand stinking dollars.”

  “I’ll take your share, you don’t want it,” Uhl said.

  “You shut up, George,” Weiss said.

  Andrews said, “Let’s open it up. Who knows, maybe they counted wrong.”

  “They didn’t count wrong,” Weiss said, “and you know it. But go ahead, open it up. We might as well look at the damn stuff.”

  Parker opened the box with a hammer and screwdriver, and it took a while. In the meantime Uhl got cans of beer out of their portable refrigerator and opened them for everybody. Then they all sat around in the chairs and watched Parker pound the locks.

  When at last the box was opened it was only half full, lined with neatly wrapped stacks of bills. Parker stuck a hand in among them, messing up the stacks and said, “The singles and fives are all new. We’ll have to leave them.”

  Weiss said, “You got more good news? It wouldn’t be Confederate money, would it?”

  “It won’t add up to much,” Parker told him.

  “You know what kind of day this is?” Weiss said. “I’ll tell you what kind of day this is. The kind of day this is, we’ll come down off this hill a couple days from now, the government will have devalued the dollar. How much is singles and fives?”

  “Maybe a thousand,” Parker said.

  “Another two hundred fifty dollars bye-bye,” Weiss said, and Uhl shot him in the head.

  Four

  Parker dove through the window elbows first, the rotted wood and shards of glass spraying out in front of him. He ducked his head, landed hard on his right shoulder, rolled over twice, and was running before he was well on his feet. He heard shots behind him but didn’t know if they were coming at him or not. He ran for the corner of the barn, and as he went around it a bullet chunked into the wood beside his head, spitting splinters at his cheek.

  He hit the dirt, rolled some more, and wound up against the side of the barn and out of sight of the house. He reached inside his coat, and his hand closed on an empty holster.

  Where was it? There were no more shots from the house. Parker stood there a few seconds more, his hand still touching the empty holster, and then he moved up to the edge of the barn and cautiously looked around.

  A bullet whistling by made him duck back again, but not before he saw his revolver lying in plain view in the dirt outside the window. It had come out when he’d landed.

  Uhl hadn’t seen it yet — he’d had too much else to think about so far — but he would. And when he did he’d come out of that house and hunt Parker down.

  Andrews must be dead. And Weiss was definitely dead.

  Parker moved away from the corner of the barn. If he could get inside this structure, get into one of the cars, be ready to run Uhl down with it when Uhl came in, there’d be a chance. But the only window on his side was high up in the wall, too high to reach. The only ground-floor openings into the barn were on the two sides Uhl could see from the house.

  It was no good. He couldn’t fight Uhl. With all this open ground around the barn and house he couldn’t sneak up on Uhl.

  The only thing left to do was get away from here.

  On this side of the house the land fell away again into woods. There was maybe forty yards of open ground, and then the trees. Heavy woods covered the entire valley on this side.

  “Parker! You left your gun behind!”

  Parker moved away from the barn. He began to run down the hill.

  “Parker! Come back for your gun!”

  Parker bent low, and just before he reached the trees shooting started behind him. He heard the bullets snicking and scratching through the leaves over his head; like most people, Uhl was aiming too high when firing downhill.

  It was cooler, damper, dimmer in under the trees. Almost like the smell and feel of the air inside the barn. There were a lot of bushes, but it was possible to work your way through. The bushes made him hard to see, and the tree trunks made him hard to hit.

  He veered to the right as he went on. The shooting had stopped again, and after a minute he stopped too. He listened and heard nothing.

  Would Uhl come down here to get him? It would almost even the odds, the two of them in the woods. He might get behind Uhl, he might get the edge on him. Or he might even get out of the woods with Uhl still in them, get back up the slope to the house, get one of the other guns in there. If Uhl wasn’t carrying all four guns with him.

  Parker moved again. He still could hear nothing from Uhl. He headed back at a sharp angle so he’d come out far to the right of where he’d gone in. He wanted to know what Uhl was up to. He had to know what Uhl was up to. Could he afford to leave Parker alive, could he take a chance on that? Or would he think it a bigger chance to come in here after Parker? Which chance would he want to take?

  Ahead, through the trees, Parker could see the grassy slope. He moved more cautiously, bent forward, his suit and shoes the wrong clothing for this place and this kind of stalking. But he needed to leave the suit jacket on — the white shirt would be too obvious a target. And black street oxfords were still better than no shoes at all.

  He heard the car start. He went forward to the edge of the woods, looking up, and saw Uhl back his Chevy out of the barn. He left the motor running and hurried into the house, and a minute later he came out with two small cardboard suitcases. They’d had four of those, one for each of them to carry his share away in, but it had apparently taken only two to transport the entire haul.

  Uhl put the two cases in the trunk of the Chevy and then came by the side of the barn to look downslope at the woods. He didn’t see Parker, and Parker couldn’t make out the expression on his face. After a minute he turned and went back into the house.

  Go up the slope? Try to get to the car? It looked too much like a trap, left out there running with the money in it. Parker waited.

  Uhl came running back out. Why running? He suddenly seemed to be feeling much more urgency than before. He ran around the Chevy and into the barn.

  What was he up to? Parker’s hands were closed into his fists, but there was nothing he could do; he could only stand and watch and wait to see what Uhl did next.

  Smoke. Curling out the broken windows of the house.

  The son of a bitch had set the house on fire.

  Parker moved out of the woods and ran crouching to the right until the barn was between him and the house, and then he ran up the hill. He knew what Uhl was up to in the barn, and if he could get there before Uhl was set, there was still a chance.

  He couldn’t. He heard the roar of Uhl’s car before he got up as far as the barn, and as he came running around the barn he saw the Chevy bumping and slewing down the farther slope toward the dirt road.

  The house was really burning now, the old wood catching fast and burning hot. Flames stuck their tongues out all the empty windows. He could feel the heat on his face.

  The barn. He turned toward the entrance to the barn, and when the car in there blew up it knocked him flat.

  Five

  Nighttime. Parker sat in darkness, his back against a
tree. It was cold now, and even damper in the woods than it had been in daytime.

  The fire was long since out, but there was still light on top of the hill. Arc lights had been set up around the perimeter of the hilltop, all pointed inward, glaring their harsh, shadowless light on the burnt-out wreckage like the illumination of the infield during a night game. In that glare men moved back and forth like actors in the movie, and it was impossible to believe there were any rational reasons for all that activity up there. It was as though a director somewhere had told them to mill around, and that’s what they were doing, but none of them knew why.

  It had been a long wait down here, and it wasn’t over yet. When the Mercury had blown up it had spread the fire to the grass all around, and when Parker had come out of a semi-daze and staggered back to his feet it was to find both the barn and house sheets of flame and the whole hilltop running orange. He’d been standing on bare ground in the middle of it all, the heat evaporating the sweat off his face.

  He’d come leaping and jumping through the flames and down the slope into the woods again, knowing some sort of fire department would have to respond to this sooner or later before it got downslope and set the whole woods ablaze. A man dressed in a suit and white shirt and tie, carrying identification that could quickly be proved phony, should not be found here with the burned bodies of two murdered men and one blown-up car — not half an hour after a robbery in a town twelve miles away. Parker worked his way deep into the woods, the ground sloping gradually downward, till he came to a small, quick, cold, shallow stream that ran down the bottom line of the valley. He went across that and a little ways farther, and when he found a dry grassy spot he sat down to wait.

  He heard the sirens when the fire engines arrived, but he was too far away to see them or see how much work they had to do. He waited, listening, hearing nothing more, and by early afternoon he was hungry. Were there any edible berries in season now? He didn’t know. He’d been born and raised in cities; these woods were another world.

  When his watch said three o’clock he got up and stretched and moved again. He drank some water at the stream, washed his face, and moved on. He came to the edge of the woods and looked up, and both house and barn were gone; nothing left but a few blackened sticks jutting up. The grass was charred and black halfway down the slope.

  The fire engines were gone too, but they had been replaced. The hilltop was full of police cars, and as Parker watched, a white closed van arrived with blue lettering on the sides: mobile lab.

  So it was going to be a wait. But he wasn’t likely to get anywhere striking off blindly into those woods behind him. It was the road or nothing, and until the law finished up there it was going to be nothing.

  But it was taking them a while. They swarmed over the hill like ants. Cars came and went, trucks arrived, men roamed back and forth, and at one point toward twilight a roaring, fluttering helicopter even dangled down out of the sky and visited for a few minutes before being reeled up and away again like a noisy fishing lure.

  In a way, the length of time they were taking up there irritated Parker, because they were delaying him and causing him trouble; but in another way it pleased him, because it meant Uhl and the money were still at large. They were hunting here for something to tell them where to look next, and Parker knew they wouldn’t find a thing.

  Parker usually could be patient, but this was the worst kind of waiting. He was cold and stiff, the air was damp, he hadn’t eaten since this morning before the robbery plus one can of beer after, and he had no way of knowing how much longer the wait would last. It was now past midnight, and they were still there.

  From time to time he moved around at the edge of the woods only to keep limber and help the circulation. He was moving now, when light suddenly flashed past the trees all around him, and he dropped at once to the ground and lay there not moving.

  The flash wasn’t repeated. He waited and nothing more happened, and finally he raised himself up behind a tree and looked up the slope and saw that the arc lights were being taken down and stored in a truck. One of them, being moved while still lit, had happened to be pointed in his direction for a second; that’s all it had been.

  It took them ten minutes more, but finally there were no lights left but the headlights of a few cars and trucks, and then those swung away and disappeared down the farther slope and there was darkness.

  Parker cautiously came up the slope. The night was clear, with a quarter moon giving silver-blue light, enough so he could make out shapes in the darkness. Parker made it to the top, saw nothing but beaten-down emptiness and burned-down husks, and moved on.

  There was no point looking for the thin track up here. He went wading down through thick dew-wet grass until he came to the dirt road and then turned left. He walked half a mile to the highway and turned left again. He didn’t like going back to the town where they’d knocked over the bank, but it was the only one close enough to walk to.

  He saw headlights far away and got off the road and crouched behind bushes in a field. The car went by, red tailights receding, and then he got up and moved on again. Far away he could see the pale dome of light in the sky where the town was.

  Six

  Parker let the police car go by and then stepped out of the doorway and moved on around the corner. It was after midnight — cars on the streets were few, all the bars were shut, there was no one out walking.

  In the center of town there would still be some activity. The bus depot would be open, and an all-night diner. There would be plenty of action around police headquarters. But Parker was staying away from all that. He was a stranger in town; he had thirty-seven dollars in his pockets; he carried identification claiming he was Thomas Lynch from Newark, New Jersey, but one phone call would expose that as false. He wasn’t about to show himself if he could help it.

  A block away he could see a gas station, shut for the night. He’d tried two already, but neither had been any good, and the longer he walked around this town the more risk he ran. He moved quickly toward the corner.

  There were two cars parked against the fence beside the station building. That was a hopeful sign, maybe. He went over to them and checked, but neither had the keys in the ignition. He could jump the wires, but that way was messy and complicated if he had to stop for gas or something to eat. He’d prefer keys if he could get them. One of the cars, the old Ford, had a jack handle on the floor in back. Parker took that and went over to the station building. The main office door was all one sheet of glass, so he went to the overhead garage door, which was smaller panes of glass, broke one pane, and reached through to unlock the door. He slid it up, stepped inside, and shut the door again.

  The cash register was empty as he’d assumed it would be. On a pegboard on the side wall were hung two sets of keys. The first included a Ford key, so he put it back. The other included a Chrysler company key, and the second car parked outside was a Dodge Polara, about a year old.

  Parker took the Dodge key and left the others on the chain. He went out the way he’d come in, got into the Dodge, and started the engine. It turned over right away. He had no idea what sort of work it had been left here for or if the work had been done, but the engine ran and that was all that mattered. He backed out in a tight U-turn, drove out to the street, and three minutes later was out on the highway again, headed out of town.

  Twenty miles away there was an interstate road. Parker made it in sixteen minutes, seeing no traffic along the way, and went up the ramp and headed east. He drove seven hours with one side trip for gas. He crossed two state lines, and when he was over five hundred miles from the town where the hit had taken place he took an exit ramp and a blacktop road, and as the sun was coming up in his eyes he drove into a good-sized city. He left the car on a side street in a residential section and took a local bus. It carried him downtown with a lot of working people. He got off, asked directions to the railroad station, and walked there. He checked the schedules and found there was a train lea
ving for Cleveland at ten past nine, not quite two hours from now. He bought a ticket and then went and had breakfast, and then he had nine dollars left.

  He slept on the train. Going through the station in Cleveland he picked up a suitcase that was standing there. He walked to a hotel and checked in as Thomas Lynch, saying he would be staying three days. He went up to his room and slept again and came down that evening to send a wire to his woman, Claire, in New Orleans:

  DELAY. WIRE 5 C C/O ALDERBAN HOTEL, TOM LYNCH Then he went and had dinner. Afterwards he went upstairs to his room again and looked in the suitcase. He’d picked it up just to have luggage for the sake of the desk clerk, but on the other hand it would be nice to know what was in it. It wasn’t locked.

  He put it on the bed and opened it.

  Two suits, a dark gray and a medium brown, both meant for a short and very wide man who still believed in eighteen-inch cuffs. Three white shirts with wide collars and French cuffs. Four ties, all with diagonal stripes and muted colors. Boxer shorts. Undershirts. Black socks and dark green socks. Three sets of cuff links, one with Roman emperors, one with rabbit silhouettes, one with horses’ heads, and three matching tie clasps. A deck of cards with pornographic pictures on the back in red and blue. Various Jade East toiletries. A toothbrush and toothpaste for sensitive gums. Electric razor. A packet of business cards:

  JOHN “JACK” HORGAN CATBIRD PLUMBING SUPPLIES CORP.

  St. Louis, Mo. You ‘re Sitting On the Catbird Seat A pint of Ballantine Scotch. An address book full of business firms. Bottles of aspirin and Alka-Seltzer, and a tube of unidentified prescription ointment.

  Parker put everything back except the scotch and stowed the suitcase in the closet. Then he watched television awhile before going back to sleep.

  Late the next morning he picked up his five hundred at the Western Union office in the lobby. He went out of the hotel and walked four blocks to an antique store in a run-down side street. The inside of the place was packed and crammed and dusty. It looked to be mostly junk, antique only in the sense that it was old.