Slayground p-13 Read online

  “All right,” Marty called, grudging and reluctant but giving in. “Come on down, then. He’s still got to be in the theater someplace.”

  Parker began to move. He had very little space between the grid and the ceiling, so he moved sitting down, sliding slowly along the bars, heading for the rear wall of the theater. He moved slowly, not wanting to make any noise, not wanting to call attention to himself, and also because of his tiredness. His arms and legs didn’t want to work, they didn’t want to do anything but hang there.

  The last crossbar was close enough to the rear wall so he could sit on it and rest his back against the wall and relax at last. His feet were propped against the next bar, his forearms were resting against his knees, and he lowered his head until it leaned against his arms. Sitting like that, cramped up but at least not having to hold himself in place, he rested and looked down between his legs at the stage below.

  The old man was there now, he was marching back and forth on the stage like a ham actor, his white hair gleaming in all the light. He kept his hands in his overcoat pockets most of the time, every once in a while pulling one hand out in an impatient gesture and holding it up against his forehead like an Indian to shield his eyes as he glared out toward the body of the theater.

  Parker sat up there for twenty minutes, slowly getting some strength back, while down below they searched the same corners of the theater over and over again. They kept shouting to each other that he had to still be inside the building, he couldn’t have gotten out, every door was being watched. But as time went on, the shouts got more defensive, louder and harsher, as though they were trying to convince themselves of something they no longer believed.

  Only once did anyone come even near Parker, and that was when yellow-white sunlight suddenly sliced down from a hole in the roof about fifteen feet away from where he was sitting. It was a trap door being opened over there by somebody standing on the roof.

  The sunlight was lost by the time it reached the garishly lit stage, and almost none of it extended over to where Parker was sitting. He didn’t react, he just stayed there and watched the opening. If legs started to come down, he would then have to move, he’d have to rouse himself and do something about the guy coming in. Otherwise, the only thing to do was sit without moving, and wait, and watch.

  Nobody came through. Nothing at all happened for half a minute, and then a voice called from up there, “Mr. Lozini!”

  The old man looked up, squinting, shielding his eyes with both hands. “Hah?”

  “I’m up on the roof!”

  “I see ya!”

  “There’s nobody up here! No tracks in the snow or nothin.”

  “Then whadaya stickin around up there for? Get the hell down here!”

  There was a very short pause, but a pause, before the guy on the roof answered flatly, “Yes, sir, Mr. Lozini.”

  So tempers were getting short, impatience and frustration were building. That had to be good, it had to make them sloppier. If they were mad at each other, they couldn’t be at their most attentive.

  The trap door closed again after that, and Lozini went back to shouting at people closer to hand.

  A couple of times, while moving around down there on the stage, Lozini came directly under Parker, and he considered the possibility of finding something to drop on the old man. Something metal, something fairly heavy, it would be as good as a bullet dropped from this height, and sometimes when you got rid of a group’s leader the group lost heart and went away.

  But not this time, this time it would be a bad idea. He could kill Lozini, but in doing so he’d let the others know where he was. They’d look up and see him, and they’d see he had no way out, he was trapped there, and they’d have no desire at all to go away. Not until they’d finished the job.

  So he did nothing. He watched Lozini moving around beneath him, he felt the aches in his shoulders and hands and back and legs gradually fading, and he did nothing.

  Lozini finally began to yell that somebody must have let him out, that somebody must have been careless at one of the exits and let the bastard get away. People were sent to take other people’s places on guard duty, the first guards were called in, Lozini screamed at them, they defended themselves, they insisted nobody had left the theater, the guy they were looking for had not slipped through their door.

  Lozini began to yell for the cops, and somebody shouted that they were down by the gates getting into their patrol car. Lozini screamed to send the bastards up here, where the hell did they think they were going? Then everybody stood around and waited, Lozini marched back and forth on the stage, his people stood in the aisles watching him, his other people stood guard at all the exits. Nobody did any looking any more. Without anybody saying it out loud, they’d all accepted the fact that they weren’t going to find their man in this building, whether he was here or not.

  The cops came in at last. Parker heard them before he saw them. The heavier one came shouting and complaining down the aisle. Didn’t Lozini know he and his partner were on duty? Didn’t he know they had to get out on the streets and move around every once in a while?

  “You two belong here!” Lozini yelled at them, pointing at them from the stage. “You screwed up and that’s why Cal’s dead and that means you two stay here until we find that guy!”

  The heavier cop came stomping up onto the stage, followed a few paces back by the younger cop, the diffident hesitant one. The first one yelled, “What do you mean we screwed up! We didn’t do a goddam — “

  “You gave the son of a bitch seven hours to set up in here, that’s what you did. Seven hours! If you’d gone in right away, you would of got him, none of this would of happened. You gave the son of a bitch seven hours!”

  “What could we do, for Christ’s sake? They put us on that goddam roadblock, we couldn’t get — “

  “Yd of got off! You think Yd of stood around that roadblock for seven hours? That’s what’s wrong with the goddam cops, not a one of you’s got the brains of a pissant! You couldn’t figure out — “

  “Now, wait a minute, Lozini, you can’t — “

  “Don’t you tell me what I can do and what I can’t do, you son of a bitch, you’re nothing but one of my two-dollar Boy Scouts, and if you were found with your head busted open in some vacant lot tomorrow morning nobody’d even look twice. So you just watch what the hell you say to me, boy.”

  The cop stood swaying, and Parker watched him, wondering which way he’d go. Cops tend to have pride where their brains ought to be, and right now it was going to be a battle between this cop’s pride and his brains, with the pride telling him he was a cop in a uniform and he shouldn’t let any hood like Lozini chew him out in front of a bunch of other hoods no matter what the situation or the relationship between them, and with the brains telling him Lozini was just as mad as he looked about the death of his protege Gal and wouldn’t think twice about taking it out on a cop, particularly one that he half-blamed for Gal’s death in the first place.

  This time, brains won out. When the cop finally spoke; it was much quieter, so quiet Parker could barely make out the words. “All right,” he said. “You’re upset, I know that. I’m just as sorry about Cal as you are, I respected him as a man, I liked to think he was maybe a friend of mine. Maybe a smarter man than me would have got himself off duty last night, I don’t know. I doubt it, I don’t think anybody got himself off duty last night, but maybe it could have been done. But it wasn’t my decision that we come in here anyway, after the seven hours, it was Cal’s. And yours. I’m sorry about what happened to Cal, but I’m not taking any of the blame for it.”

  “Oh, you’re not. You son of a bitch, you’ll tell me what you will take and what you won’t take.”

  “Any man here will,” the cop said, “if you push him hard enough. Dunstan and me, we’ve got to spend some time on patrol, because if we stay in here all day, sooner or later the captain’s gonna miss us and start people looking for us, and maybe they’ll even
look here, and I don’t think you’d like that. So that’s why we have to leave for a while. We’ll be back within an hour.”

  Lozini didn’t answer anything for a minute. When the cop had turned reasonable it had pulled some of the sting of Lozini’s bad temper, too. He was trying to stay hot and angry, but it wasn’t working too well. Finally, down there, he shrugged and said, “I don’t give a damn. Do what you want. But before you go, I got a cop-type problem here for you.”

  The cop looked around, obviously puzzled. “Sure,” he said. “What is it?”

  “We got us what they call in the mystery books a locked room,” Lozini said. “What my wife reads every night in bed, mysteries about locked rooms. A nice detective problem.” He made a broad gesture, including the whole theater in its sweep.

  “Here’s a theater building,” he said. “We got all the exits watched, every exit has been watched since before the last time we knew for sure the guy was in the building. We’ve searched the place from top to bottom, we’ve looked in every room, I even sent a guy up on the roof. We can’t find him. He isn’t here. So how did he get out? And if he didn’t get out, if he’s still in here, where is he?”

  The cop looked at his partner, and back at Lozini. “How do I know? I don’t know anything about locked-room mysteries. Maybe there’s someplace you didn’t look.”

  “We looked everywhere.”

  “Then he got out in the confusion.”

  “My boys say they weren’t confused, they say they never stopped watchin the doors.”

  “Then he wasn’t in here at all, maybe.”

  “He was in here because he dropped all these pipes and things on our heads. And besides that, we know he was in here because George out there in that Island in the Sky thing saw him come in.”

  The other cop took a hesitant half-step forward and said, “Maybe he’s one of us.”

  They all looked at him. Lozini said, “Hah?”

  “That’s one of the ways they solve it in the mystery stories,” the cop said. His voice sounded nervous, as though he was sorry now he’d started talking. “The way it works,” he went on, “the guy everybody’s looking for doesn’t really exist, he’s actually one of the searchers. Like the guy would be somebody that works for you, and he got in on this robbery, and he spent last night in the park here, and today he made a lot of confusion in the theater here and then just joined everybody else and went around helping to look for himself.”

  There was silence. Everybody looked at the cop — Dunstan, the other cop had called him — and Parker saw the cop squirm under all the attention. He acted as though he was going to say something more, but he never did.

  Finally Lozini spoke. “That’s either a stroke of genius,” he said quietly, “or the goddamnedest piece of shit I ever heard in my life.” He took a step closer to the apron of the stage. “I know every man I called this morning,” he said, “and I don’t see anybody here I didn’t call. You guys that were on the doors before. Did anybody at all go out? One of us, or anybody.”

  There was a ragged response, all no.

  “And the guys I sent to take your places,” Lozini said, “I sent, and I know who they are. You guys go ask them did anybody at all go out since they took over.”

  There was a rustle and shuffle of motion, dying out, and then Lozini looked over at the young cop and said, “That’s the kind of thing my wife would like, she’d go for that. I think you’re wrong, but I think you got brains, that’s a very interesting solution. You got a lotta brains for a cop.”

  The cop sort of bobbed his head and shuffled, but didn’t say anything.

  They waited a couple of minutes until all the messengers had come back, all with the same answer. Nobody had gone out.

  Lozini nodded. “Right,” he said. “That’s what I figured.” He looked at the young cop again. “Any more ideas?”

  “No, sir. No.” The answer was more croaked than spoken.

  “Don’t be afraid, kid,” Lozini said. “That was a very smart idea, very nice. It could of been right. You sure you don’t have any more?”

  The cop shook his head.

  “Too bad,” Lozini said. He looked at the other one. “What about you? Any ideas?”

  “Just leave men on guard at all the doors here,” the older cop said, “and start looking around the rest of the park again. That way, if he’s still in he can’t get out, but if he’s out maybe you’ll find him again.”

  “That kind of thing I can figure out for myself,” Lozini told him. “It’s this other stuff I wanted you guys for, like what your partner come up with.” He turned away from the cop, back to the front of the stage again. “All right,” he said. “We’ll go back to what we were doin before. We’re gonna turn on every light in the park, and then we’re gonna start at one end and sweep right down to the other end, and somewhere in this pile of shit we’re gonna find that son of a bitch, and before we put him out of his misery we’ll ask him how he worked this stunt, gettin out of here.” He turned back to the cops. “You two get back as soon as you can.”

  The older cop said, “We will. Within the hour.”

  Two

  PARKER MOVED. The stiffness had set in again, his joints creaked at every motion of his arms or his legs.

  The inside of the theater was empty now, had been empty for about five minutes. But it was still brightly lighted down there, and he knew the exits were all being watched from the outside.

  He made himself move. The first thing to do was get himself down out of here, and in order to get anywhere at all he was going to have to crawl along the pipes on hands and knees, a little bit at a time, making the creaky muscles work, with the ceiling inches above his back.

  He was heading for where he’d seen the sunlight angle through when the trap door had been opened, and after a little searching around he found it. He pushed up, and it wasn’t locked, and he lifted the trap door a little and raised his head until he could see out onto the roof, see the snow there, the new footprints in it, the blue sky beyond. The air smelled cold and clean.

  At first everything looked safe, but then Parker looked to the left, and hanging in the air was the lookout in the Island in the Sky pot, the one who’d first hollered to everybody that Parker was going into the theater. He was maybe five feet higher than the theater roof and about ten feet away from the edge. He could look right over here and see everything, it would be as easy as looking into a living room from a dining room.

  He was being conscientious about his job, too, moving around in an endless circle inside the waist-high pot, a metal basket-like thing similar to the baskets people ride in when they travel by balloon. His concentration was on the ground, looking all around at the paths and building entrances down there, but he’d be able to see somebody walking around on the theater roof. He’d hardly be able to miss it.

  Parker kept the trap door just barely open, just enough to be able to watch the lookout. There was a knee-high wall around the edge of the roof, and it was maybe seven or eight feet from the trap door. Parker waited, moving his shoulders and his legs, trying to get more limber while he watched the lookout’s movements, and when he felt he was ready, and the lookout was facing the other way on his circuit, Parker came quickly up out of the opening and ran awkwardly the three steps to the edge of the roof and dropped flat again behind the wall. Now he was out of the lookout’s sight, and he could study the roof and find the other entrance to it that the first guy had used.

  It was easy enough to see. It was a small construction on the roof, about the size of two phone booths back to back, with a black metal door on this side. It was near the front of the building, but well out in the visible middle area. The lookout moved around in his circuit too fast for Parker to be able to get to that door, open it, and get down out of sight before the guy had come around and seen him.

  Parker looked up over the top of the low wall, and the guy was just going around and around on his circuit. He’d seen Parker once, and now, like a touris
t hitting a jackpot on the Las Vegas nickel slots, he was going to stay there until he either found Parker again or ran out of nickels.

  What an easy shot he’d be. If Parker were to move about halfway along this wall, to the closest point to the lookout, they’d be maybe twelve feet apart. Four yards. The simplest easiest shot in the world, for a man with a gun.

  Except that a gunshot now would make this rooftop damn crowded. But what the hell, if he was going to wish for a gun he might as well wish for a silencer, too. Even a potato, that makes a good silencer.

  There was maybe a way. It was chancy, but everything was going to be chancy until he got himself out of here. And if it didn’t work he’d just have to move very fast and hope for the best. Because one way or another he had to get down, and that staircase over there was his only way. He’d flown up to the grid, but he wasn’t likely to fly back down again. The rear wall of the theater was brick, and if he was in better physical shape he could probably climb down it, but right now he wouldn’t trust his fingers and toes.

  But he was going to have to trust his arm. His arm and his eye. Not for strength, though, for accuracy.

  It was the only possibility, so it had to be tried, and that was the end of it. Parker began to move, crawling along next to the wall, getting to the point where he’d be closest to that guy in midair over there. Snow was melting beneath him, the wetness seeping through the two pairs of summer pants he was wearing, seeping through his gloves. He moved faster, wanting to get this part done and over with before the cold and the wet made him even less reliable to himself than he already was.

  He got to the right point, and looked over the top of the wall to be sure, and there he was, right over there, out and up from here. It was like lying on the floor in a fairly small room and looking at somebody on a upper bunk on the opposite wall. He seemed almost close enough to touch. Just about twelve feet.