Slayground p-13 Page 4

  Possibility two was a fantasy, and he knew it, and he pushed it to one side. But what about possibility one? Could they really mean to lay siege to him here, just wait outside until he came out?

  It seemed unlikely, it seemed damn unlikely. Unless they thought he didn’t know they were there. But even so — All right, say that’s their plan, say they’re waiting, they don’t figure to come in at all. What does that mean, how does it change things?

  It doesn’t change them at all. Because he wasn’t going to go out, and sooner or later — sometime tonight it would have to be — they’d understand that he wasn’t going out, and then they’d understand that they were going to have to come in.

  Parker nodded to himself, thinking about it. His expression was flat, bleak. He was going to have to be patient, and sit here, and wait for them out there to understand the situation.

  He waited.

  Ten o’clock. Parker had eaten the crackers from the shelf over the hot plate, and was on his second cup of instant coffee when the headlights flashed over the row of gates. He drained the cup, put it down on the floor behind him, and peered through the window.

  Nothing happened for a long minute. The headlights continued to shine on the gates. Then a shadow moved vaguely in front of the lights, and one pair of the gates swung open, pushed by a stocky old man in a long overcoat and a nondescript hat.

  The watchman? That’s who it had to be.

  Parker waited, following it all through the window. The watchman disappeared again, and a minute later a car drove slowly through the gates and stopped. A dark Volkswagen, blue or green, it was hard to say which.

  The watchman got out of the Volkswagen, and three men came through the gates with guns in their hands and handkerchiefs over the lower part of their faces.

  The watchman seemed too stunned to understand them at first. Parker watched them make angry gestures with their guns, and finally the watchman slowly lifted his hands up over his head. One of the others frisked him, and brought a long-barreled pistol out of the watchman’s overcoat pocket.

  Two of them gestured to him to move, to walk toward the office, and he did so, obviously complaining and arguing, walking along with his hands up over his head. The two followed him, pushing his shoulders with their gun barrels, while the third stood in the open gates, lit by the red glow from the Volkswagen’s tail-lights, and gestured to others outside to come in.

  Parker got to his feet. He switched off the electric heater, and as the dim red light in the room faded to black, he opened the office door, stepped out into the darkness, and moved silently away.

  PART TWO

  One

  “LOOK,” CALIATO said.

  He’d just given O’Hara the money, and now all four of them stood there and watched a guy throw a suitcase over the locked gates of Fun Island and then climb over them himself. He dropped to the ground on the inside, grabbed the suitcase, and disappeared.

  Benniggio said, “I hear a siren.”

  Caliato listened. “Close,” he said. “Coming this way.”

  “We better blow,” Benniggio said.

  Caliato could hear the nervousness in Benniggio’s voice. He’s supposed to protect me, he thought, but he didn’t say anything. Not in front of the cops.

  O’Hara was showing nervousness, too, standing there looking at the envelope in his hand as though wishing there was a drawer handy to shove it in. “If it’s for us — ” he started.

  Caliato was impatient when he met nervousness, because it was never the right response to anything. “It isn’t for us,” he said. “If it was for us, they’d come with sneakers on. It’s for that bird just went into Fun Island. Get on your beeper and see what’s up.”

  “Right,” O’Hara said, and ran around to get into his patrol car. The other cop, Dunstan, went along with him. Caliato noticed O’Hara stashed the envelope in the glove compartment before getting on the radio.

  The siren went by, very close. Going along Abelard Road. It went on a ways farther, and then stopped. When it stopped, more sirens could be heard, coming this way.

  Benniggio said, “I don’t like this, Cal.”

  “I don’t like you wetting your pants in front of cops,” Caliato told him. “Get hold of yourself.”

  “I’m the one that’s heeled,” Benniggio said. He thumped his chest. “You know what happens if I get picked up with this thing?”

  “A boy like you, without a record? They’ll slap your wrist. That’s why you’re along, you can afford to carry heat. I can’t. Just hold tight, Benny, nothing’s happened yet.”

  Caliato walked out in front of the toll building and looked down to the right, where the guy with the suitcase had come from. There was a car lying on its side against the fence down there by the intersection. Nobody moving around it.

  He heard the patrol-car door open, and he walked back as O’Hara stepped out of the car. O’Hara looked excited. He said, “A bunch knocked over an armored car! Right over by the ball park. That must be one of them.”

  “Their car didn’t make the corner,” Caliato said. “It’s tipped over down there. You didn’t report him, did you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Tell them you saw him,” Caliato said. “Tell them you saw him get out of the wrecked car and commandeer another. He took off down Brower Road here, and you lost him.”

  O’Hara didn’t get it. “How come?”

  Caliato said, “What do you think he had in that suitcase, dirty laundry?”

  O’Hara looked startled. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  “Move,” Caliato told him.

  O’Hara moved. People always did move when Caliato told them to, he had a natural talent for leadership. He was thirty-eight years old, and he knew for a certainty he’d be running this city before he was fifty. Lozini was top man now, but he was getting old, and already he deferred to Caliato on some issue. Caliato still had to handle the payoffs, that had to be done personally by an executive, but within a couple of years he’d be too important for this kind of thing. And when he moved up, he knew Lozini would go along with whoever Caliato recommended as his own replacement.

  In the meantime, he was patient. He’d learned early that the one thing a man with leadership qualities has to look out for is making the current leaders nervous. Leaders don’t like to be nervous, they don’t like to be around a guy who looks like he’s in a hurry to take over. More than one guy with perfectly good leadership potential had had an unexpectedly short career because he’d forgotten not to make the current top men nervous. It was a mistake Caliato never made. He was patient, he was truly patient. He was in no hurry to get to where he knew he was going, and the men above him — especially Lozini — saw that quality of patience in him and were therefore not made nervous.

  Now, as O’Hara sat in the patrol car talking again into his microphone, Caliato said, “Benny, get me Lozini on the phone.”

  “Sure, Gal,” Benniggio said. He was young and excitable, but he was basically all right. He’d season. He went over to the Lincoln, got into the back seat, and began to dial the telephone there.

  O’Hara came over from the patrol car, looking unhappy. “They want us to give chase,” he said.

  “So give chase.”

  “What about him?” O’Hara nodded his head toward the entrance to Fun Island.

  “He’ll keep,” Caliato said. “He can’t get out of there, you know that.”

  “You won’t go in after him without us?” O’Hara was worried about his piece of pie, that was obvious.

  “I wouldn’t take a step in there without law,” Caliato told him. “That uniform of yours can save us a lot of aggravation.”

  “We get off at six,” O’Hara said.

  “We’ll be here.”

  O’Hara still hesitated, glancing worriedly over at the amusement park, then shrugged and said, “If there’s any hangup, I’ll phone you.”

  “Sure. You better get on the stick.”

  “Right.”r />
  O’Hara trotted over to the patrol car, and Benniggio got out of the Lincoln, calling, “Okay, Cal.”

  Caliato went over to the Lincoln. “Watch over there that he doesn’t come out,” he said, and got into the back seat and shut the door. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the patrol car pull out onto Brower Road and turn left. He picked up the phone and said, “Caliato here.”

  “One moment for Mr. Lozini, please.” It was a woman’s voice with a faint English accent. But that was all right, Lozini was an old man and a successful man, and if an old and successful man wanted to put on airs with English secretaries, that was his privilege. Maybe some day Caliato would want to spread himself the same way.

  Not when he first took over, though. For the first year or so, a new leader should be humble, one of the troops, modest and mild. A patient man doesn’t show off until it’s time.

  “Cal?” You couldn’t tell from Lozini’s voice that he was old, he sounded tough and strong. Which he was. “Something wrong there?”

  “No. Something good.” He gave Lozini a quick summary of what had happened, finishing, “I figure we’ll stick around here till O’Hara and the other one get back. Then we go in, they make a legal pinch, and the guy tries to escape.”

  “How much is in it?”

  “I don’t know. It was an armored car he hit, it can’t be nickels and dimes.”

  There was a little silence, and then Lozini said, “If you can’t do it quiet, you don’t do it.”

  “Naturally.”

  “The situation’s a little tricky right now, you know that. We got to keep our heads down.”

  “I know,” Caliato said. “Believe me, I know what comes first. If it looks like there’s going to be trouble, I’ll come right the hell away from it.”

  “Good man. You want any help down there?”

  “Not for slices. It’s only one suitcase he carried in with him.”

  “You can afford a C-note a man.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll send you three. Any preference?”

  “Not Rigno, and not Taliamaze. Other than that, anybody you got free.”

  Lozini chuckled. “You got a good head on your shoulders, Cal,” he said. “Give me a call when it’s over. If it ain’t too late, we’ll have dinner, you can tell me about it.”

  Caliato knew how proud Lozini was of his cooking, though actually what he cooked was ordinary, neither terrible nor great. Still, the old man thought it was great, and it was an honor to be invited, so Caliato said, “In that case, I guarantee we’ll be done early. And I’ll work up an appetite.”

  “You do that, Cal. I’ll send you some boys.”

  Two

  DUNSTAN WAS terrified. “Joe,” he said, “this is different, this isn’t the same thing at all.”

  “It’s more dough,” O’Hara told him, “that’s what it is. Our piece alone will be more than that whole envelope Caliato gave me.” The siren was whining above their heads, O’Hara had both hands on the steering wheel, they were tearing after a fantasy down Brower Road.

  Dunstan said, “Joe, we’ll have to kill him. Don’t you realize that?”

  “Who said anything about kill? You don’t think he’ll give up when he sees he’s trapped?”

  “Joe, we couldn’t bring him in. Don’t try and tell me dumb lies, I can think as good as the next man. We take his money away and bring him downtown and all he has to do is open his mouth once.”

  O’Hara looked troubled, as though he didn’t want to hear what Dunstan was saying. “So we’ll work something out,” he said. “We don’t have to bring him downtown. We trade him, we take the suitcase and let him go.”

  “We couldn’t take the chance, and you know it.” Dunstan shook his head, blinking at the roadway in front of them. “Besides, Caliato won’t let him go. He wouldn’t stand for it.”

  “Caliato isn’t running us,” O’Hara said angrily.

  Dunstan looked at him, but he had sense enough not to tell O’Hara the truth. O’Hara had to know it anyway, just as much as Dunstan did. Caliato ran O’Hara exactly the way O’Hara ran Dunstan, which had nothing to do with seniority in grade or time on the force or age or anything else. It was pecking order, that’s all, pure pecking order. O’Hara was dominant over Duns tan, and they both knew it. And Caliato was dominant over O’Hara, and they both knew it.

  In point of fact, O’Hara did have age and seniority on the force over Dunstan. Dunstan was twenty-seven years old, four years on the force. The Army had made him an MP during his three-year enlistment — they’d trained him in the field of his choice, as a refrigeration engineer, but after tech school they’d made him an MP — and when none of the other jobs he’d gotten after the Army had worked out, he’d just naturally drifted into the police force. He didn’t expect to be commissioner ever, he didn’t expect even to be a precinct captain at any time in his future. All he expected was a quiet life on the force, fairly decent pay with under-the-counter bonuses, and no trouble.

  This armored-car robber struck Dunstan as trouble, huge threatening trouble. Being in on the grease that lubricated the day-to-day affairs of the police department was pleasant, and since nearly a quarter of the force was in on it to some extent or other — including a lot of higher-ups — it wasn’t really dangerous, Dunstan had no objections there. But this armored-car robber, that was something else again.

  He tried once more. “I’ve never killed anybody in my life, Joe,” he said. “I couldn’t just shoot a man down like that. Make him surrender, and then just shoot him down. Christ, Joe, I don’t think you could do a thing like that either.”

  “I wouldn’t,” O’Hara said. “If it came to that — and I say if it came to that — you know Caliato would handle it. That sort of thing doesn’t bother him, he’s done it before.”

  “I don’t like it,” Dunstan said, stubbornly. “I don’t want to be in on it.”

  O’Hara gave him a quick look, then glared out at the road again. “You want to come down sick? Call in, tell them you’re throwing up, I have to take you home.”

  Dunstan frowned. “I don’t know what to do,” he said.

  “Go home.”

  “I’d still know about it. Joe, maybe what we ought to do is call in and tell the truth. We can say he circled back, we just saw him going into the park now.”

  “What good does that do us?”

  “Maybe there’s a reward. If there’s a lot of money, then there probably is a reward.”

  O’Hara grimaced, facing straight ahead. “I can see Caliato standing still for that,” he said. “Do we split this great reward with him? ‘Here, Caliato, here’s twenty bucks for your trouble, thanks for watching the pigeon while we drove around the countryside.’” He shook his head. “Sometimes, Paul, you don’t make much sense.”

  Dunstan didn’t have anything else to say, so he just sat there and chewed on a knuckle and watched the road unreel in front of the windshield. The siren kept howling, but you got used to that pretty soon, you no longer really noticed it. After running with the siren for a while, sometimes you’d turn it off and all of a sudden the air would be humming, you’d feel almost dizzy, as though now there was a noise and before there’d been silence.

  What was he going to do? He knew he could follow O’Hara’s suggestion, he could claim sickness, nobody would question it, he had a good attendance record. He could call in now, O’Hara would drop him off at home, and he’d be out of it, from there on, it wouldn’t concern him at all.

  But it would. He’d be home there all right, but he’d know about it. By his very silence he’d be a part of it. If something went wrong, now or at sometime in the future, and they caught up with O’Hara for his part in it, they’d have Paul Dunstan too, they’d snap him up in the same net, and his silence alone would convict him. That he had known where the robber was, that he had known what O’Hara and the others were going to do, and that he had not communicated that information to his superiors. That’s all it would need
. If the thing went wrong somehow, having been at home wouldn’t help Dunstan at all.

  He wished it hadn’t ever happened, that’s what he wished, because no matter which way he looked, it was still a mess. If he went home now he’d not only still be culpable, he wouldn’t share in the take, which meant he’d be running the risk without any chance at the profit, which was in some ways the worst option open to him. Besides the fact that O’Hara would never let him forget it. O’Hara and Caliato and Caliato’s friends would all be convinced from now on that Paul Dunstan was a coward, they’d treat him with indifference and contempt, O’Hara would probably make life impossible for him.

  But to go there meant taking part in murder. Murder One. He knew that, the knowledge scraped over his nerves like steel wool, he couldn’t ignore it or turn his back on it like O’Hara. Whatever their main motivation, whatever their main goal, what they were all planning to do today was murder a fellow human being. Shoot him down while he was defenseless, and hide behind the protection of their uniforms to do it.

  It was a bind, a rotten stinking bind, and no matter which way he turned he saw no way out of it. He couldn’t blow the whistle, O’Hara would really make life hell on him then. Not to mention Caliato. He had no idea what Caliato might do to him if he spoiled their chance at this robber. That wasn’t one of his options at all.

  He only had the two options. He could either be sick and go home to avoid being actually present for it, thus eliminating his share of the money but keeping his share of the blame, or he could go along, thus actually being involved in the murder but also being involved in the split.