The Hunter: A Parker Novel (Parker Novels) Read online

  They got into the limousine, and Stegman drove it out around the shack to the street. Looking out the rear window, Parker saw the cop standing in the shack doorway, frowning.

  Stegman drove up to the corner of Rockaway Parkway and turned left. “You can start talking any time,” he said.

  Parker pointed at the two-way radio under the dashboard. “If you're not back in twenty minutes, Sparks calls you, is that it?”

  “And if I don't answer,” Stegman answered, “he calls every other car I've got. How come you know about Sidney?”

  “I was with the girl. Lynn Parker.”

  Stegman glanced at him, then back at the traffic. “You know a lot. How come I don't recognize you?”

  “I just got in town. Watch your driving, there's a lot of kids.”

  “I know how to drive.”

  “Maybe we better wait till we get to this beach.”

  Stegman shrugged.

  They drove nine blocks down Rockaway Parkway, then through an underpass under the Belt Parkway and around a circle to a broad cobblestone pier sticking out into Jamaica Bay. There were a couple of Parks Department-type buildings out at the far end of the pier. The rest was parking lot, with a few small skinny trees, the whole surrounded by a railed concrete walk and benches.

  Stegman stopped in the parking lot, which was almost empty. “The Bay's polluted,” he said. “There's no swimming here. Kids come here at night and neck, that's all.” He shifted in the seat, facing Parker, and said, “Now what's this about Sidney? He wouldn't dare run off with the dough.”

  “He didn't.” Parker took the envelope out of his pocket and dropped it on top of the dashboard. “I took it away from him.”

  Stegman's hand reached toward the radio switch. “What the hell is this? What are you up to?”

  “Touch that switch and I'll break your arm.”

  Stegman's hand stopped.

  Parker nodded. “I'm looking for Mal Resnick,” he said. “You're going to tell me where he is.”

  “No. Even if I knew, the answer would still be no.”

  “You'll tell me. I want to tell him he doesn't have to pay her off any more.”

  “Why not?”

  “She's dead. So is your fat pansy. You can be dead, too, if you want.”

  Stegman licked his lips. He turned his head and nodded at the small stone buildings out at the end of the pier. “There's people there,” he said. “All I got to do is holler.”

  “You'd never get it out. Take a deep breath and you're dead. Open your mouth wide and you're dead.”

  Stegman looked back at him. “I don't see no gun,” he said. “I don't see no weapon.”

  Parker held up his hands. “You see two of them,” he said. “They're all I need.”

  “You're out of your mind. It's broad daylight. We're in the front seat of a car. People see us scuffling—”

  “There wouldn't be any scuffle, Stegman. I'd touch you once, and you'd be dead. Look at me. You know this isn't a bluff.”

  Stegman met his eye, and Parker waited. Stegman blinked, and looked down at the radio. Parker said, “You don't have that long. He won't be calling for ten minutes. You'll be dead in five if you don't tell me where Mal is.”

  “I don't know where he is. That's the truth. I believe you—you're crazy enough to try it—but that's still the truth. I don't know where he is.”

  “You got that dough from him.”

  “There's a checking account in the bank near my office. On Rockaway Parkway. There's a hundred bucks in it to keep it alive. Every month Mal deposits eleven hundred. Then I write a check and take it out. I keep the hundred for myself and send the grand to the girl. A different messenger every month, the way he wanted it.”

  Parker gnawed on his cheek.

  Stegman said, “He's scared of the girl. That's the way it looks to me.”

  “He must have left you a way to get in touch with him.”

  “No. He said he'd see me around.” Stegman exhaled sharply, shaking his head. “Mister,” he said, “I don't know nothing about this. I don't know who you are, or the girl, or why the payoff. Mal and I used to hang around together in the old days, before he went out to California. So he shows up three months ago and says do him a favor. I'll pick up an extra C a month, and there's no problem, no law, nothing. So I'll do him the favor, what the hell. But now you come around and talk about killing me. That much a buddy of Mal I'm not. If I knew where he was, I'd tell you. That's straight. If he was setting me up for this, some guy coming around going to kill me, he should have picked another boy. He should have told me what might happen. You think I'd come out for a ride with you?”

  Parker shrugged. “All right.”

  “I'll tell you this much. He's in New York, that I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He said so. When he come around for me to do this little favor. I asked him how he liked it out west, and he said he was through out there. From now on, he was staying in the big town. He got like lonesome, he said.”

  “So where would he be? You know him from the old days. Where would he hang out?”

  “I don't have any idea. He was gone a long time.”

  “You could check.”

  “I could say I'd check. Then you'd get out of the car, and I'd mind my own business some more. And I'd tell my drivers, they see you around again, they should jump on you with both feet.“ He shrugged. “You know that as well as I do.”

  Parker nodded. “So I'll find him some other way. You want Sidney back, you send somebody up to Lynn Parker's place. I got him locked in the bedroom.”

  “I thought you said he was dead.”

  “He isn't.”

  “Is the girl there, too?”

  “No. She's in the morgue. All right, let's go back. You can drop me off at the subway.”

  “Sure.” Stegman stopped for a red light and shook his head. “This'll teach me. No more favors.”

  “You came out all right. So far.”

  Stegman turned his head. “What do you mean, so far?”

  “You happen to run into Mal somewhere, you don't want to mention me.”

  “Don't worry, friend. No more favors!”

  6

  He changed trains three times, but there wasn't anyone following him. He was disgusted. It meant Stegman was telling the truth, and it was a dead end. Otherwise, a tail would have led to the connection.

  He wanted Mal. He wanted Mal between his hands. . . .

  It had started ten months ago. There were four of them in it: Parker and his wife and Mal and a Canadian hotshot named Chester. Chester was the one who set it up. He'd heard about the arms deal, and he saw the angle right away. He brought Mal into it, and Mal brought in Parker.

  It was a sweet setup. Eighty thousand dollars' worth of munitions, with over-writes along the way bringing the total up to ninety-three grand and change. The goods were American, picked up here and there, and trucked piecemeal into Canada. It was easier to get the stuff into Canada than either into Mexico or out of a United States port, and once in Canada there was no trouble getting it airborne.

  There was a small airfield up in Keewatin, near Angikuni Lake, and at the right time of year the roads were passable. There were two planes, making two trips each, heading first westward over MacKenzie and Yukon and B.C. to the Pacific, and then turning south. One island stop for refueling, and then on south-ward again. The buyers were South American revolutionaries with a mountain airfield and a yen for bloodshed.

  Chester learned about the transaction through a friend of his who'd gotten a job driving one of the trucks north into Canada. He learned the details of the operation and knew that, in a deal like this, payment would have to be in cash. That made it a natural for a hijacking. There would never be any law called in, and there was nothing to fear from a bunch of mountain guerrillas a continent away.

  As to the Americans and Canadians doing the selling, they wouldn't care; they wouldn't be out of pocket at all. They'd st
ill have their munitions, and there was always a market for munitions.

  The truck driver didn't know when or where the money was supposed to change hands, but Chester found out from him the name of a man who did know, a lawyer named Bleak from San Francisco, one of the backers who'd put up the money in the states for the initial purchase of the arms. He also learned that he had five weeks before the arms would all have been delivered to the field in Keewatin.

  Chester at that time was a straight busher when it came to operations like armed robbery. Most of his experience was with cross-the-border running of one kind or another. He'd bring pornography into the states and bootleg it in Chicago or Detroit, transport cigarettes north and whiskey south, wheel bent goods into Canada for sale fence-to-fence, and things like that. He'd taken one fall, in a Michigan pen, when he was stopped at the border in a hot car with a bad daub job. The motor number was still there for all the world to see. And the spare tire was full of Chesterfields.

  A small, thin, narrow-faced ferret of a man, Chester knew the munitions money was pie on the sill, but he was also smart enough to know he wasn't smart enough to take it away by himself. So he drifted south into Chicago, full of his information, and there hooked up with Mal Resnick.

  Mal Resnick was a big-mouth coward who'd blown a syndicate connection four years before and was making a living these days in a hack, steering for some of the local business. The way he'd loused up with the syndicate, he lost his nerve and dumped forty thousand dollars of uncut snow he was delivering when he mistook the organization linebacker for a plainclothes cop. They took three of his teeth and kicked him out in the street, telling him to go earn the forty grand and then come back. He'd worked intermediary once or twice in the last year for Chester peddling pornography.

  If Chester had a failing, it was that he believed people were what they thought they were. Mal Resnick, despite the syndicate error, still thought of himself as a redhot, a smart boy with guts and connections. Chester believed him, and so it was to Mal he went with the story of the munitions and the ninety-three thousand dollars. They discussed it over the table in Mal's roach ridden kitchen, and Mal, seeing the potential as clearly as Chester had, immediately bought in.

  The operation, at this point, ran into a snag that threatened to hold it up forever. Despite his promises and his big words, Mal didn't really know anybody worth adding to the group, but he couldn't bring himself to admit the fact to Chester. He stalled the little man off, while desperately looking up old syndicate acquaintances, with none of whom he'd ever been very close anyway, and all of whom were content with the work they had. They didn't even want to listen to his proposition. This went on for ten days, until the night Parker and his wife hailed Mal's cab just off the Loop.

  Parker wasn't a syndicate boy, and never had been. He worked a job every year or so, payroll or armored car or bank, never taking anything but unmarked and untraceable cash. He never worked with more than four or five others, and never came in on a job unless he was sure of the competence of his associates. Nor did he always work with the same people.

  He kept his money in hotel safes, and lived his life in resort hotels—Miami, Las Vegas and Palm Springs—taking on another job only when his cash on hand dropped below five thousand dollars. He had never been tagged for any of his jobs, nor was there a police file on him anywhere in the world.

  Mal had met Parker once, six years before, through a syndicate gun who had earlier worked a job with Parker in Omaha. He recognized Parker and immediately gave him the proposition.

  Ordinarily, Parker wouldn't have bothered to listen. But his finances were low, and the job he'd come to Chicago to see about had fallen through. Mal's acquaintanceship with the syndicate gun did serve as a sort of character reference, so he listened. And the idea appealed to him. No law on the trail. That would be a welcome change. And ninety-three grand was a nice pie to split.

  Mal introduced Parker and Chester, and Parker thereafter felt even better about the operation. Chester was small-time, but serious and intelligent and close-mouthed. There wasn't any doubt that his information could be trusted nor that he'd be a definite help when the job was pulled.

  So far as Parker was concerned, the only thing wrong with the job was Mal. He was a blowhard and a coward, and he could screw things up one way or the other, before, during or after. But Chester was sold on him, and he did have a prior claim to be in the deal, so there was nothing Parker could do about it, except plan to get rid of him as soon as the job was done. Blowhards and cowards were liabilities and Parker had evaded the law this long by systematically canceling his liabilities as soon as possible.

  One thing he could do to offset Mal was bring in a couple more men. He convinced Chester that they'd need at least five men to run the operation successfully, and then he contacted Ryan and Sill, good men both, who had also bowed out of the job he'd come to see about and were still in Chicago.

  They had three weeks and during that time Parker gradually took over as leader of the string. He arranged for the bankrolling of the job, and set them up with the rental of a small plane. Whether the money was to change hands at Angikuni Lake or the Pacific island, they would need an airplane to get at it. Ryan could fly, and had the necessary licenses. Parker also arranged for the arming of the group.

  Less than a week before the exchange was to be made, they boarded the rented plane at Chicago and flew to San Francisco. Once in town, Ryan and Sill shadowed the lawyer, Bleak, until they knew the general pattern of his movements. Then, with one day to go, they hit his apartment at two in the morning.

  Bleak was an elderly man, a widower whose financial interests, aside from law practice and munitions trading, included real estate, stock speculation and a piece of an airplane manufacturing concern. He lived alone in his hilltop apartment, except for a Filipino houseboy who slept in and who was killed in his sleep by Ryan.

  Bleak didn't want to talk, and Parker put Mal to work on him on the theory that cowards make the best torturers. Mal worked with enthusiasm, and before dawn Bleak had told them all they wanted to know.

  The money, he told them, was to be brought north by planes from South America to Canada. Two men from the sellers' group were to be at the island fueling point. The money would be turned over to them there, and they would be guarded by a group of revolutionaries until the planes took off from Canada with the second and last load of munitions. One of the pilots would then radio to the island, and the two men would be allowed to leave with the money.

  This part of the operation was tricky, involving radio conversations between individuals on both sides of the transaction, and both sides had worked out code signals to warn of any treachery. Neither group trusted the other very much.

  The island, Bleak told them, was a small uninhabited chunk of rock named Keeley's Island, about two hundred miles southwest of San Francisco. During the Second World War, the Coast Guard had maintained a small base there, from which they had operated sub-hunting planes, but for the last fifteen years the place had been deserted. The airfield was still usable, and the necessary gasoline had already been brought out to the island and stored. The two men from Bleak's group were already on the island, and the planes, carrying the money, were due at one o'clock the next morning.

  Before they left the apartment, Ryan slit the old man's throat. Otherwise, despite his protestations, he might have gotten on the phone and changed the whole plan.

  East of the city, up in the hills, there was a private estate currently unoccupied, the former residence of a movie star. She had owned an airplane, a Piper Cub, and the estate included a small landing strip. The rented plane was there. They drove up there in a stolen Volkswagen Microbus, and Lynn waited in the empty main house while the others boarded the plane and took off for the island.

  They found Keeley's Island on the second pass, and landed to gunfire from the rotting control shack. Parker grabbed up one of the machine guns, jumped out of the plane and, while the others kept up a distracting retu
rn fire, made a dash for the nearest storage shed. He worked his way around the shed, and raked the control shack until his ammunition was used up. He waited then, and there was only silence. When he pushed his way into the shack, the two defenders were dead.

  Ryan maneuvered the plane out of sight, into one of the still-standing hangars, and they sat down to wait. They had arrived at sundown. The dead men had set out small tin cans filled with gasoline along the runway edges, to be lit as markers for the South American planes when they would arrive. Ryan and Sill went out and lit them a little after midnight, and the first plane roared wide-winged into their flickering light at twenty minutes past one. It rolled to a stop on the taxiway off the end of the strip, and the second plane sailed down after it a couple of minutes later.

  In the control shack, the five men watched. Mal kept licking his lips and Chester kept studying his rifle to be sure it was really loaded, but the other three waited unmoving.