The Black Ice Score

by Richard Stark

  “Good.” To Gonor he said, “We're going to need a truck, a small delivery van. The smaller the better.”

  “I'm afraid we don't own a truck,” Gonor said.

  “Then buy one. Old. Used. As old as you can get.”

  Gonor nodded. “We can do that.”

  “When you've got it,” Parker said, “give me a call. And Formutesca, you be ready with the old clothes.”

  Smiling, pleased, Formutesca nodded. “I will,” he said.

  Parker got to his feet. “That's all for now,” he said. “If you've got a cleaning lady, take that stuff off the walls.”

  “I'm keeping this room locked,” Gonor said.

  “All right.”

  Gonor walked him to the door. “I believe you're a good teacher,” he said. “And I believe you will find us quick students.”

  “That's good,” Parker said.

  5

  Hoskins got to his feet when Parker came into the room. The gun in his right hand was small but efficient-looking.

  Parker took his key out of the lock and shut the door. He dropped the key on the dresser and shrugged out of his coat. Hoskins watched him, a faintly pleasant expression on his face, attempting to be the club man meeting an old friend at the club. The gun spoiled the effect, and so did the wariness he couldn't keep from showing in his eyes.

  Parker tossed his coat on the bed, and Hoskins flinched, just a little. If he was that nervous, he might fire the gun by accident. To calm him down a little, Parker talked softly to him, saying, “Somebody let you in?”

  Hoskins had control of himself again. “No, no, dear boy,” he said. “One picks up keys here and there, you know. They fit a variety of locks.”

  The “dear boy” was new. Parker, looking closely at him, now saw that Hoskins was drunk. Quietly drunk, in a steady and dignified way. Full of what he himself undoubtedly would call Dutch courage.

  Parker turned toward the bathroom. “You want a drink?”

  “I think not. You're playing with Gonor and that crowd, aren't you?”

  Parker stopped and looked at him. “Playing?”

  “On their team.”

  Parker shrugged.

  “The only question is,” Hoskins said, “did you send those two cannibals down to the bar after me that day or didn't you?”

  Parker said, “That isn't the question.”

  “It isn't? Really, dear boy. What is the question, then?”

  Parker said, “How to keep you from coming back.”

  Hoskins opened his mouth to laugh. “But you can't,” he said. “I have the smell of gold in my nostrils now.”

  “You want a piece.”

  “Of course. But not for nothing; I'm not like that. I can contribute, you know.”

  “Contribute what?”

  “Myself. My expertise, for what it's worth. Because whatever you may think of Gonor and his lieutenants, dear boy, you should never underestimate them. You won't get the booty away from them all by yourself, you know.”

  Parker said, “What if I'm not going to take it away from them at all?”

  Hoskins made a mocking face, lifting one eyebrow. “What, settle for twenty-five thousand? You don't look that sort of man to me, Mr Walker.”

  “I'll tell you another sort of man I'm not,” Parker said. “I don't do business with a man holding a gun on me.”

  Hoskins looked at the gun in his hand as though mildly surprised to see it still there. Shrugging, he smiled amiably and said, “I didn't know what your attitude would be, of course. I had to be ready to protect myself in case you were going to be difficult.”

  “I won't be difficult,” Parker said, “if you can be reasonable. And useful. We should be able to work something out.”

  There was relief evident in Hoskins' smile now. “I thought you were a sensible man,” he said. “I thought we could get together.”

  Parker pointed at the gun. “Not with that in your hand,” he said. “Put it away.”

  “Of course,” said Hoskins. “Sorry, old man.” He tucked the gun away in his hip pocket.

  Parker walked over toward him, hand extended for a shake, saying, “Now we can start a partnership.”

  Hoskins was delighted. “Bound to be a profitable one,” he said, and put his hand out for Parker's. Parker hit him high on the right cheek and he fell backward over the bed and landed on his side on the floor.

  Parker walked around the bed and kicked Hoskins once. Hoskins fell back and didn't move.

  Parker went to one knee and emptied Hoskins' pockets, beginning with the gun, a Beretta .22 automatic, lethal at arm's length but not much good beyond that. In the other hip pocket was a wallet. Hoskins had two Diner's Club cards, one in the name of Fields, one in the name of Goldstein. He also had fifty-three dollars in cash, a California driver's license giving his name as Wilfred R. Hoskins, a wallet calendar from a New York City bank giving formulas for finding Manhattan addresses on the back, and a baggage claim check from Penn Station.

  Parker tossed the wallet on the bed, rolled Hoskins over, and went through the rest of his pockets. A pack of Salem cigarettes, a Zippo lighter engraved with the word Burma, a key to room 627 at the Edward Hotel, Broadway and Seventy-second Street, the return of a round-trip United Air Lines ticket from Los Angeles, date open, a switchblade knife, a small packet of tissues, a key pouch containing half a dozen keys, including one to a General Motors car, and a small notebook with its own short ballpoint pen inside. In the notebook there was a crossed-out notation of the name and address Parker had had the last time he was up in New York—Matthew Walker, Room 723, Normanton Hotel—and beneath it the name and address this time—Thomas Lynch, Room 516, Winchester Hotel. On another page there were four names in descending order, followed by an address:

  Goma

  Jock Daask

  Avon Marten

  Robert Quilp

  193 Riverside Drive, Apt. 7-J

  Parker went back to Hoskins' wallet, checked the back of the bank calendar, and found 193 Riverside Drive would be around West Ninety-first Street. Too far north to be a first-rate address.

  Hoskins made a sound in his throat and moved his head a little. Parker put everything back in his pockets except the notebook and the Beretta, which he put away in a dresser drawer.

  Hoskins was stirring now. Parker went over and grabbed him under the arms and dragged him over to the window. He opened the window, and March air rushed in, cold and wet. He lifted Hoskins and turned him so his chest was on the windowsill and his head hung out the window. West Forty-fourth Street was five stories down.

  “Wake up,” Parker said, and reached over Hoskins' shoulder to slap his face.

  The slap and the cold air finished the job of bringing Hoskins around. Parker had his other hand on Hoskins' back holding him in place, and he felt him stiffen when his eyes opened and he saw nothing but air beneath him for fifty feet.

  Hoskins struggled, trying to get back in, but Parker held him there like a moth pinned to a display board. Hoskins was calling things out there, amazed things and terrified things.

  Parker waited till Hoskins settled down a little, then he dragged him back in. Hoskins' face was bright red, as though paint had been poured on it. “For God's sake,” he said. “For God's sake.” He was sober.

  Parker said, “The next time you come around, I don't bring you back in.”

  “For God's sake, man.” Hoskins was touching himself all over—tie, cheek, belt, hair, mouth—as though to reassure himself he was still there. “You didn't have to—”

  “You wouldn't listen to me. Will you listen to me now?”

  “Of course, man. Good God, you don't have to—“

  “Then listen.” Parker stood in front of him and spoke slowly and carefully, looking into Hoskins' frightened eyes.

  “I am working with Gonor,” he said. “I am taking the cut he offered me. I am not taking anything else and I am not helping you take anything else. Do you understand that?”

  Ho
skins had begun to blink rapidly, the prelude to shaky defiance, an attempt to get back his self-esteem. “I understand,” he said. Then, very high and fast, “Oh, I understand, don't you worry. You want the whole thing for yourself, that's plain enough. Well, you can have it, for all the good it'll do you. You're as crazy as those black madmen and you deserve each other and I hope before you're done you'll all kill each other off, because they won't be as easy to fool as you think, they'll be on to—“

  Parker slapped him, open-handed, just hard enough to stop the flow of words. “You didn't listen,” he said.

  Hoskins put his hand to his cheek. “I said I was out,” he said as though some great injustice had just been done him.

  Parker looked at him and considered. Keep pushing and convince him of the truth? There was no point in it, not if he'd been sufficiently convinced to keep himself away from the action. In fact, it might be better if he thought Parker greedy enough to try for the whole pie himself. Hoskins would tend to stay a long way away from the kind of fight a Parker and a Gonor could have together.

  Parker nodded and stepped back. “Good,” he said. “You're out. Use that ticket to L.A.”

  Hoskins felt for it in his jacket pocket in quick panic, and showed relief when it was still there. Then he felt the rest of his pockets and became aggrieved. “My gun!” he cried. “My notebook!”

  “You don't need a gun,” Parker told him. “Not on the plane.”

  “My notebook.”

  “You don't need to take notes.”

  “Listen,” Hoskins said, getting loud, “you can't do-”

  Parker turned away from him and went over and opened the hall door. “Goodbye,” he said.

  “You can't—” Hoskins said. “You can't just—”

  “I don't want to have to touch you,” Parker said.

  Hoskins looked like a man who wanted very much to start punching something. But all he did was stand there rocking slightly on the balls of his feet and glaring at Parker in helpless rage.

  Parker started toward him from the door.

  “I'm going,” Hoskins said, trying not to sound too hasty. “Don't worry, I'm going. Back to L.A. I wouldn't be involved in this—”

  “That's good.”

  “But you'll regret it, mark my words. You'll wish you had a man you could trust at your side.”

  Parker didn't say anything to that. Hoskins looked anxiously around trying to find something else to say, but there wasn't any more. He shook his head, tried to put on the scowling expression of a patrician leaving by his own choice and walked past Parker and out of the room.

  Parker shut the door after him.

  6

  It was a half-ton Ford panel truck, seven years old, dark blue. Some previous owner's firm name and address and phone number had been painted off the doors and body sides with broad sweeps of paler blue, itself old enough now to be chipped in places. Parker was at the wheel, Formutesca beside him, and he was finding the transmission almost unworkable. But the truck wouldn't be needed long, and it would never be asked to travel very far or very fast, so it would do.

  Formutesca was wearing his paint-smeared trousers, an old flannel shirt, an old brown leather jacket with ragged elbows and cuffs, and old brown shoes. Parker was in a suit and topcoat, but had his tie loose and his shirt collar open.

  They turned into Thirty-eighth Street from Park Avenue and found a parking space just up the block from the museum. Parker cut the ignition, pocketed the key, and said to Formutesca, “You ready?”

  “I think I have stage fright,” Formuesca said with a slightly shaky smile. “But I'll be all right.”

  “Good,” Parker said. He picked up the clipboard from the seat between them and got out of the truck. He waited on the sidewalk while Formutesca went around to the rear of the truck and got the toolbox and the seven-foot stepladder.

  “Heavy,” Formutesca said, grinning shakily.

  “All you have to do,” Parker told him, “is look sullen and stupid.”

  “At this hour,” Formutesca said, “that should be easy.” It was a little after two in the morning.

  Parker led the way down the sidewalk to the building just this side of the museum. The pictures Gonor had taken showed this one to be the better bet of the two. The other was a residential hotel, but this one was primarily an office building, with very few twenty-four-hour tenants. Also, the windows in this building's fifth floor seemed to be at just about the right height, and two of them side by side were of frosted glass, surely meaning rest rooms.

  There was a green canopy out front. Parker went under it, pushed open the door, held it for Formutesca, then went over and pushed the bell button beside the word Superintendent. When nothing happened after half a minute he rang again, and this time there came a response, a garbled voice sputtering out of the speaker above the buttons. The words couldn't be made out, but the meaning was clear; he wanted to know who it was.

  Parker leaned close to the speaker. “Water supply,” he said. He sounded bored and irritated.

  “Wha?”

  “Water supply,” Parker said, louder.

  “Whadaya want?”

  “We gotta get in.”

  There was a pause, and then a grudging, “Hold on.”

  They waited nearly five minutes, and then a short and heavyset man appeared at the end of the corridor inside. He was wearing a maroon robe, brown pants and slippers, and he walked in a heavy-footed waddle. He came slowly down to the glass doors, looked through them at Parker and Formutesca, then opened one door and said, “You people know what time it is?”

  “We don't like it any better than you do,” Parker said. “If they'd done it right the first time, we wouldn't have to be here on any emergency call.”

  “What emergency call? I didn't call nobody.”

  “Not you,” Parker said. He walked through the doorway, Formutesca behind him. “The City,” Parker said. “It's that fifth-floor men's room again.”

  “What do you mean, again?” The superintendent was still half asleep; he was irritated, and he was bewildered. But he wasn't suspicious.

  “It was supposed to be fixed three months ago,” Parker said. He consulted his clipboard. “Some smart inspector said it was all taken care of.”

  “What inspector?”

  Parker frowned suspiciously at him. “Didn't you get that men's room fixed?” he asked. “Three months ago?”

  The superintendent shook his head, befuddled. “There's nothing wrong with any men's room in here,” he said. “There hasn't been.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Parker jabbed a thumb at the street. “You almost had a water main blow up out there, that's how much there's nothing wrong.”

  The superintendent looked toward the street, then back at Parker. “I don't know a thing about it,” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Parker, showing disgust. “You know what that means, don't you? Somebody layin' down on the job. Nobody came around here three months ago, that's what happened.”

  “Sure it is,” the superintendent said, happy to have something he could be knowledgeable about. “Nobody came around at all.”

  “That's what I mean,” Parker said. He shook his head. “All right,” he said, “let's get the damn thing done right this time. Is it locked up there?”

  “No. I'll take you up.”

  “Good.”

  Parker felt Formutesca trying to catch his eye, but the worst thing you could do in a situation like this was step out of character. Parker faced front and followed the superintendent down the hall to the elevator, Formutesca coming along behind him.

  They rode up to the fifth floor and the superintendent showed them where the men's room was. Then Parker said, “All right. What we want you to do is go down and turn off the water. You got a watch with a second hand?”

  The superintendent was confused again, but he nodded. “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Okay. We want you to time it. Turn it off for exactly fifteen minutes, and then turn it back on a
gain. You got that?”

  “Fifteen minutes,” said the superintendent.

  “You can go a few seconds one way or the other,” Parker told him, “but get it as close as you can.”

  “Okay,” the superintendent said.

  “We'll give you a couple minutes to get down there,” Parker said.

  The superintendent turned away, shaking his head. “You never get any sleep in this damn job,” he said.

  “You think you got troubles,” Parker told him.

  “I know,” the superintendent said, walking away. “It's rough all over.”

  Parker and Formutesca went into the men's room. Formutesca was grinning the second the door closed. “That was beautiful,” he said. “That was really beautiful.”

  “Don't giggle and wink when he's around,” Parker said. “ We're not here for fun.”

  Formutesca looked sheepish. “I'm sorry,” he said. “You're right. It was just nervousness. I'll be better now.”

  “Good.”

  Parker went over and opened the window. Four feet away and about a foot higher than the windowsill was the rim of the museum roof. “Perfect,” Parker said. “Let's have the ladder.”

  They slid the ladder top-first out of the window till it rested with one end on the museum roof and the other end on the windowsill. Then, while Formutesca held the ladder in place, Parker went on hands and knees across it to the museum roof. He stepped off on to the roof and Formutesca pulled the ladder back in at the other end. If the superintendent should come back in while Parker was gone, Formutesca would just lean against the wall and be stupid.

  The roof surface was tar, quiet beneath Parker's feet. He hurried over to the mounded shape of the elevator-shaft housing, found the padlock holding the lid down, and took from an inside pocket a small envelope with a dozen keys inside. He tried three keys before finding the right one, then put the rest back in the envelope and the envelope back in his pocket. The right key he put in a different pocket, removed the padlock, and lifted the housing cover. He got out a pencil flash and looked inside the shaft.

  It was fine. There was a broad metal beam one could stand on when one first climbed in, and the side cables were easily accessible for climbing down. The top of the elevator was a bare seven feet below him now, being stopped at the top floor, which was unexpected good luck. They'd assumed the Kasempas would keep the elevator at the first-floor level when they weren't using it, in case Gonor or someone else should visit the place, but apparently they were feeling very secure and sure of themselves.