Firebreak

by Richard Stark

  He's out, Lloyd thought, and frowned at the small screen. Because the terms of his parole included his agreement to stay away from the Net and from computers entirely, the components he'd assembled into this supposed music equipment in his study were all miniaturized, including the screen. He could see the entire picture, very small, or a quarter of the picture at a time. But with most text, by leaning in close and removing his glasses, he could read enough to get the idea. This time, he had the idea all right.

  Brad was out. His so-called partner, the man who'd cheated him, the man he'd tried to kill and to steal from, the man who had so unbalanced him that he'd done all those things that had led him straight into prison, that rotten son of a bitch was out.

  And he wasn't even supposed to be. He'd been stealing from the feds, and was supposed to stay inside another three or four years at the least. But, reading deeper into the news report, Lloyd saw that Brad had become part of a federal housecleaning project, thinning out the population in overcrowded prisons by early release of some non-violent inmates with good career and rehabilitation prospects.

  Brad fit that profile because he was going back into business with George Carew, his one-time lawyer and still brother-in-law, who would bring Brad into his new and already successful on-line legal consultancy. George would also take legal responsibility for Brad, and house him until he got back on his feet.

  In that case, Lloyd knew where Brad was. With all his new money, some of it stolen from Lloyd, George Carew had built himself a mansion on Cape Ann, east of Ipswich, less than forty miles north of Boston, a gabled and turreted monstrosity on a rocky height overlooking the cape and the Atlantic beyond, something straight out of the Bronte sisters. George had rooms in that place he hadn't even named yet, much less furnished and occupied; there would be plenty of room for Brad there.

  And George would take Brad in, help him "until he got back on his feet," because Brad, unlike Lloyd, had kept his mouth shut. The time Brad had done had been for George as well.

  I could go there, Lloyd thought. He switched off the machine and left the study and spent the rest of that day and evening thinking how he and Brad were in the same state now, less than three hours apart, and he could go see Brad if he wanted, talk to him if he wanted.

  But why would he want to? He had no desire to lose his self-control again, so what point was there in confrontation? He could only show himself to be weak, a loser, a second-rater stuck in the past. Winners move on to the new game.

  I'll be a winner, Lloyd told himself. I'll move on to the new game, and this robbery in Montana will make it possible. I won't try to meet with Brad, not now. Not until I'm back on my feet.

  Unsure he'd be able to sleep, he'd taken a pill when going to bed, so they had to pound on the door quite a while before they roused him, which made them even more impatient and angry, pushing him around for no reason at all. Half a dozen state cops, four in uniform and two in plainclothes, questioning him about anything and everything in his life, demanding to make a complete search of the entire house, an intrusion much more serious and difficult than anything they'd ever done to him before.

  He was so groggy from the pill that they'd been there almost an hour, prying, prodding, making a mess in every room they searched, before he realized what this had to be. It was because Brad had been released. They were telling him, stay away from your old partner, stay away from the guy you tried to kill. They never mentioned Brad's name, and neither did Lloyd, but that was what it was all about.

  Thank God he hadn't kept the gun. When Parker had made him clean up, after he'd been so stupid as to shoot that man in the face, he'd thought at first he might keep the gun, hide it somewhere, but then decided he wasn't somebody who should trust himself with a gun. So he'd stuffed it inside the tarp that held the body, and gun and body went together over that bridge into the river. Right now he was very relieved he'd made that choice, because this search of the house was thorough. They would have found the gun. And then he would never have been out of jail again, his entire life.

  But they didn't find the computer, the Web access. They never did, and they never would, because he'd made it look so convincingly like something else. He had that tiny victory, at least.

  What they did accomplish, though, that they'd never accomplished before, was at last to break his confidence that he would ever someday climb out of this mess. When he asked one of the plainclothesmen, near the end, "Why are you doing this?" the man smirked at him, and said, "Because we can."

  "That's no reason."

  "We don't need a reason," the plainclothesman told him. "You're our hobby, Lloyd, and we'll come around and play anytime we want."

  The pill had worn off by the time they left, at four in the morning. The pill had worn off, and so had his belief that he could go on being Larry Lloyd, that somewhere down the line he would return to the life and the self that had once been his. They weren't going to let him. They were never going to let him.

  4:12 a.m., the computer told him, when he clicked it on. He went directly into the American Airlines computer, as he'd done more than once before, and made it give him a first-class ticket on tomorrow afternoon's flight from Boston's Logan Airport to Lambert in St. Louis, in the name of Larry Perkins. Months ago, he'd persuaded the Department of Motor Vehicles computer in Boston to give him a driver's license in that name, which he would show at the ticket counter at Logan tomorrow.

  4:27 a.m., the computer told him, when he shut it down, disassembled it, trashed it so that no one would ever know what it had been or what it had known and done. Quickly he moved through the house, taking only what he felt he absolutely needed. He had a lot to do, and very little time to do it in.

  5:03 read the dashboard clock on his old Honda Accord when he started it up and drove out of his house for the last time.

  11:00 a.m. Lloyd remembered George Carew's house, remembered being shown around it, remembered visiting three or four times back when they were all still supposedly friends.

  The place was set near the apex of a high triangle of land that jutted eastward out over Cape Ann. An electric fence stretched across the base of the triangle, a quarter mile east of the nearest coastal road. George owned all the land from road to cliff, but had only cleared the triangle, leaving the pine-and-laurel woods intact over the rest of the property, with a narrow gravel access road through it.

  There was no way to get through from the front unobserved and unobstructed. That left the approach from the sea.

  There was no real beach in that area, merely a sloping rock face covered with stones and pebbles that rose up from the water to meet the boulder-and-dirt cliff face. The cliff wasn't vertical, but steep, with irregular setbacks. Scrub trees clutched to the steep slope, sometimes blown away in ocean storms. George had planned to give himself ocean access with a series of staircases down from the house, but Lloyd doubted he'd done it. George's relationship with nature was as observer, through a window, not as participant, running up and down outside staircases.

  A mile farther north of George's property, a seafood restaurant had been built, where the land was much nearer sea level and the coastal road had swung in close to the cape. Lloyd left the Honda in the parking lot there and walked south along the shoreline, over the rough shifting surface of loose pebbles. It was hard going, but the tide was mostly out, so he had a wide enough swath of fairly level ground to make his way along.

  When he reached George's triangle, the house was invisible from below, but he knew where it was. And no, as he'd expected, the staircases had not been built.

  Lloyd wasn't a very physical type himself, but he could do it when he had to. He looked to see where the slope was least steep, with the most setbacks, and with enough trees to hold on to on the way up, and started to climb.

  It was about sixty feet up, about as tall as a six-story building, but the climb was much steeper than any staircase. Several times he had to pull himself upward, clinging with both hands to the rough hard trunk of a
scraggy pine, and three times he had to pause at a relatively flat spot to sit awhile, pant, wait for the trembling in his arms and legs to ease.

  But at last he was there. He straightened, holding to two shrubs, and could just look over the lip of the land across manicured lawn to the hulking dark stone house. No one was in sight.

  The top few feet were the steepest, and the lawn itself had no handholds for him, so at first he couldn't make the transition, and looking down from here was making him dizzy. Heart pounding, he crab-sidled to the right until he found a place where jutting teeth of stone and the grayed stumps of two small trees cut away by George's gardener to improve the view gave him footholds so he could crawl up and over the edge, chest on the stubbly November grass as he pulled himself along by his elbows.

  He didn't stand. The house was about twenty feet away, its many windows glittering in the late-morning sun. For anybody in the house, that sun would make it harder to see outside right now, but if he were to stand up he'd still be very noticeable.

  On all fours, he crawled over to the house, stood at last against its rough stone, and moved around it to the left. As he remembered it, the kitchens—there were two—were around on this side, with the delivery entrance.

  Yes. The doors here were all massive and dark, new made to look old, imported from Scotland. With strong security across the front of the property, and the cliff and ocean at the rear, there was no reason to lock any of the doors here by day, so Lloyd just opened this one and walked in.

  The first kitchen he came to was empty. There was a small bathroom off it, and he realized his nervousness had made it necessary for him to use it. While in there, he studied himself in the mirror and saw he was a mess, hands and face scratched from the climb, clothing rumpled and dirty, hair turned into a fright wig. He washed, patted down his clothing, made himself look as neat as he could, then stepped outside to find a maid now in the kitchen. Before he could decide what to do, she nodded at him, murmured something in Spanish, and went on with her work.

  So luck was with him. If he'd still looked the same mess as a few minutes ago, she wouldn't have mistaken him for a houseguest. Smiling at her, feeling all at once less nervous, he strode confidently from the kitchen.

  For the next twenty minutes, he roamed the house. From time to time he saw or heard people, heard George's voice from a nearby room once, saw servants, saw people who were not servants but whom he didn't know, but he made certain no one after that first maid saw him. He was ready with lies and evasions if he did unexpectedly bump into somebody, but it didn't happen.

  He roamed the downstairs, saw lunch being prepared, then took the grand major staircase, which split at the top to go left and right, both sides coming to the same large second-floor hall. There were mostly bedrooms and baths along here, and in the third bedroom on the left, when he opened the door, there was Brad, seated on an unmade bed, wearing a green polo shirt and tan chinos and pulling on a black sock. He looked up with surprise, and if that was actually fear Lloyd saw on his face for just an instant, it was immediately gone, as Brad leaped up from the bed with that false booming good fellowship Lloyd remembered so well, one sock on, one foot bare, spreading his arms as he cried, "Larry! My God, look at you!"

  And all at once, Lloyd was himself again. The nerd, the follower, the number two, the fellow born to be a sidekick. The years on his own had, after all, been horrible ones, left to make his own decisions, with no one to trail after and obey. Brad was a leader, and needed Larry. Larry was a follower, and needed Brad. It was as simple as that.

  Lloyd stood there, stunned at himself more than at Brad, and accepted the bear hug Brad gave him, without actually responding. Then Brad stepped back, looked him up and down, grinning like any college pal in the presence of his old college pal once more, saying, "Let me look at you. You've changed."

  "We both have."

  It was true. Time and prison had hardened them both, though it was less obvious in Brad. He'd always been sure of himself, and seemed now like a man it would actually be dangerous to cross.

  And I thought, Lloyd told himself, I thought I was going to be dangerous to cross. What a fool I am.

  Brad said, "How did you do this? What a surprise! Why didn't you phone? I guess you saw the ink I got."

  "Yes, I read it," Lloyd said. "Non-violent. Ready to be rehabilitated."

  'That's me," Brad said, and laughed. "You gonna come back with me, Larry? We'll kick the shit out of them, you and me."

  Lloyd was bewildered by the both of them. Shouldn't Brad be full of recriminations, because Lloyd had ratted him out? Shouldn't Lloyd be full of recriminations, because Brad had stolen from him and humiliated him? But somehow they seemed to have gone immediately past all that, to be already at a

  new relationship. Or the old relationship, as though nothing had ever happened.

  But things had happened. Looking around, trying to get his bearings, Lloyd saw, on the antique dresser, a bottle of red wine, half drunk, the cork stuck back in it. He said, "Still taking the wine to bed with you?"

  "It's been years since I could, baby," Brad said. "But you know about that, you've been there. Listen, what happened to your face? You've got scratches there."

  Walking to the dresser, Lloyd said, "I came up the cliff. Okay if I look at this?"

  "Sure," Brad said, as Lloyd picked up the bottle and read the label. "You came up the cliff

  "Uh-huh."

  "For God's sake, why?"

  "Well," Lloyd said, "I came to kill you." And he swung the bottle as hard as he could into that smiling lying face.

  Brad staggered back, hands coming up toward his face, and Lloyd pursued him, swinging the bottle again, just as hard.

  The third time, the bottle smashed, leaving him with the jagged neck. After that, it got easier.

  Larry Perkins made his St. Louis flight out of Logan with half an hour to spare.

  7

  It was turning out to be one of those days. Dave Rappleyea didn't like it when it turned out to be one of those days, and fortunately, here at the lodge, those days were infrequent. But this was turning out to be one of them.

  By "one of those days," Dave Rappleyea meant a day with incidents in it. A good day, as far as he was concerned, had no incidents in it at all. A good day was one where he could sit quietly at his station in front of the bank of security monitors and play DoomRangers II from the beginning of his tour at eight a.m. through lunch at noon brought to him at the station by Myrna or Fred, till the end of his tour at four. A good day was also one in which the roster had not yet rotated back to him being the one to go up to the main house after dinner to flush all the toilets and walk through all the rooms so the sensors and monitors could make note of him, and the duty guy would therefore know that everything at the main house was still working the way it was supposed to.

  Of the eight resident staff members here at Paxton Marino's hunting lodge in Montana, five of them, one of the women and four of the men, were simple obsessive geeks, happy with their own company and their own pastime, like Dave. For instance, one was an amateur naturalist, spending all his free time out in the woods, turning over rocks, collecting slugs and ants and all kinds of wriggly crap, while another one was Net crazy, lurking in chat rooms all her waking hours, adding her address to more and more monster mailing lists, receiving endless dumb jokes or chain letters through the ether and dutifully passing them on.

  The remaining three staff, one woman and two men, were silent anti-social secret-hoarders, people who would have joined the French Foreign Legion if they spoke the language. Warily they guarded their personal stories from everybody else, none of whom cared. And none of them were aware that, in hiring them, Marino's personnel people had been following the guidelines they'd been given for this low-level job in this isolated place; self-sufficient compulsives who wouldn't get bored and, even more important, wouldn't get curious.

  It was pretty much a democracy the staff had worked out here, developing their sy
stems from scratch, none of them having known any of the others before they'd been hired on here. All had backgrounds in security and knew the role without having to be overseen. Greg was technically the boss, who could give them orders if he wanted to, but Greg was one of the paranoid three, and preferred no contact with other human beings at all.

  So it was usually a good gig, this little house halfway up the mountain, an anti-community of solitaries. Dave Rappleyea had never been so content in his life. Except, of course, every once in a while, when there was one of those days.

  This one had begun with a phone call, which Dave had logged in at 9:38 a.m. It was the duty man's (or woman's) job to deal with any incoming from the outer world, as well as to monitor security up at the main house, so when the phone rang, it was Dave's job to punch the outside-line button on the console in front of himself (very like a Star Trek control room), pick up the receiver, and say, "Lodge," the sufficiently minimal approved response on the phone that wouldn't give too much away.

  "Oh, ello."

  The call was from a snobby English-sounding woman who said she was calling from Texas, that she was the executive assistant of Horace Griffith, and that Mr. Griffith would be arriving at Great Falls airport at one this afternoon and would require to be met.

  Dave knew who Horace Griffith was. A very fancy-schmancy art dealer that Mr. Marino bought pictures from, some of them on walls here at the lodge, over fireplaces or sofas, all of them European and old, all of them dull as anything, none of them as visually exciting as even one frame of DoomRangers II. Whenever Mr. Griffith came to the lodge, there was a certain amount of extra activity, but not normally too irritatingly distracting.

  Dave agreed he'd have someone drive down to meet Mr. Griffith—that would be Fred, today—and the woman said there would also be a shipment coming up with Mr. Griffith, in a hired truck with a hired driver. "Mr. Marino has approved," she assured him.