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

  Three men came out of the first plane, twelve out of the second. Among the twelve were two men carrying bulging briefcases. These two stayed behind the others. The groups met, and came across the field toward the control shack.

  “Wait,” whispered Parker. “Wait.”

  The first one was reaching for the doorknob before Parker started firing. He had one machine gun at the window to the left of the door, and Sill had the other at the window to the right. Chester and Mal had rifles at the windows farther away on either side. Ryan was in a barracks, the nearest building to the right, with the third rifle. They each also had a sidearm.

  The initial burst of gunfire dropped seven of the fifteen. The rest scattered, the pilots and the men carrying the briefcases scurrying back toward the planes. Parker got one of the briefcase-carriers and Ryan the other. They lay out on the cracked tarmac, the briefcases beside them.

  Four of the South Americans ran at the barracks where Ryan was holed in. He got one of them, Sill got two more, and the fourth managed to get into the building, where Ryan hunted him down and finished him.

  The battle was brief and one-sided. The last South American took refuge in a storage shed. He had two pistols, and they finally had to burn him out. Then they checked the briefcases to be sure they contained the money, and boarded their own plane. By morning they were back in California, landing on the field behind the estate. There they counted the take, which came to ninety-three thousand, four hundred dollars. After deducting the bankrolling expenses, they were left with just over ninety thousand dollars.

  They had already decided on the split. Chester, as the man who had made the job possible, was to get a third: thirty thousand dollars. Mal and Parker each were to get a quarter: twenty-two thousand, five hundred. And Ryan and Sill were to split the last sixth between them: fifteen thousand, seven and a half thousand each. Parker intended to take Mal's slice, too, which would give him a total of forty-five thousand—fifty percent of the take. That was the way it should be.

  In the deserted mansion, they made the count and the split, and they were to spend the night there—they were all short on sleep—before heading back to Chicago and separating. Parker planned on getting rid of Mal that night, but he hadn't counted on a double cross, not one involving his wife.

  The place was still furnished, and Parker and his wife stayed awake late, in the movie star's bed in the movie star's bedroom. They made love, and smoked cigarettes, and made love. It was always like that after a job. He would be fierce then, and strong, and demanding, and exultant, allowing his emotions the only release he permitted them. Always, for a month or two after a job, they wouldn't skip a night, and often it would be more than once a night. Then gradually his passion would slacken, lessening with their cash reserves until near-celibacy just before the next job. The pattern was always the same, and Lynn had grown used to it, though not without difficulty.

  At two in the morning Parker rose from the bed, donned shirt and trousers, and took up the automatic from the stand beside the bed. “I'll go see Mal now,” he told her, and headed for the door.

  His hand on the knob, she called his name. He turned around, questioning, irritated, and saw the Police Positive in her hand. He had just had time to remember that it had to be either Chester or Mal—the two who'd been given the revolvers—when she pulled the trigger and a heavy punch in his stomach drove the breath and the consciousness out of him.

  It was his belt buckle that saved him. Her first shot had hit the buckle, mashing it into his flesh. The gun had jumped in her hand, the next five shots all going over his falling body and into the wood of the door. But she'd fired six shots at him, and she'd seen him fall, and she couldn't believe that he was anything but dead.

  He awoke to heat and suffocation. They'd set fire to the house. He was lying on his face and, when he drew his knees up under him in order to stand, pain lanced through his stomach and he saw, in the dim fire-glow, blood on his shirt and trousers.

  He thought at first that the bullet was in him, but then he realized what had happened. The buckle, a silver one with a black engraved P, was mashed into a ragged cup-shape. Beneath it, the skin was purplish, and he seemed to be bleeding from his pores. His stomach ached fiercely, as though a heavy iron weight had been crammed into it.

  He stood only because he wanted to stand, not because it was possible, and he moved in an agonized side-shuffle, leaning most of his weight against the wall. His chest and shoulders pressed to the wall, he edged slowly out of the room and down the hall.

  He should have left the house right away. The far end of the hall was ablaze, and thick smoke filled the stairwell ahead of him. But he had to know which one it was. He made the circuit of the rooms where the others had slept.

  Mal was gone. Chester lay dead, his throat cut. Sill was there, dead the same way. Ryan was gone.

  Ryan had killed them both—it was his kind of kill. And Mal had given Lynn the revolver, to kill him. Mal had set it up, that was clear, but they'd been in too much of a hurry, wanting to be long gone before daylight. She had fired six shots at him, and he had lain bleeding on the floor, but they hadn't made sure. And that was their mistake.

  When he tried to go down the broad staircase into the smoke and the flames, his legs gave out and he fell, rolling and bumping down, landing unconscious again at the foot of the stairs. The heat forced him awake again, and he crawled for the door. There was less smoke at floor level; he could just make out the door, miles away across a flat plain of polished wood. The parallel lines of the flooring rushed away across the plain to converge at the door, like the lined landscapes in a surrealist painting.

  He came at last to the door, and crawled up its rococo face to the ornate knob. It took both hands to turn it, and then he flung himself back, falling away, pulling the door open after him. Only then could he crawl over the sill and across the veranda and between two of the pillars and down the two-foot drop to the coolness of the lawn.

  After a while, he had strength enough to get on his hands and knees and crawl around the house and down the path toward the landing strip. Midway, in the darkness, he stumbled across a leg, in shoe and trousers. He searched the pockets and found matches. When he lit one, he looked into the dead eyes of Ryan. A chill touched him, a reaction stronger than he was used to when faced with death, and he shook the match out at once. But he had seen the bullet holes in the dead man's chest.

  The plane was gone. As he lay on the ground by the landing strip, resting, he heard the faint sound of sirens, and knew he had to get away. This time, he managed to get to his feet and stay on them without holding on to anything. He lurched across the landing strip and into the woods on the other side.

  When he came to the fence surrounding the property, he searched until he found a spot where the earth was soft, and scraped away dirt with his hands until he could crawl underneath. Then he went on, staggering downhill and then along a valley until, with false dawn outlining the mountains ahead of him, he fainted.

  He spent three days lying in the underbrush, never more than semiconscious. The fact that he lay practically unmoving for three days, and that he didn't take in any food during that time, helped to speed the healing. The next time he came fully awake there was only a dull pain in his stomach, vying unsuccessfully with the fierce ache of hunger. He could stand now with only a faint dizziness, caused by his hunger, and walk with nothing more worrisome than a labored stiffness in his joints. He left the valley, heading westward, trying to find his way back to civilization.

  He was a mess. He had no shoes or socks, his shirt and trousers were bloody and filthy and torn, his face and arms were scratched and bruised, and he couldn't walk properly. He came at last to a highway, and walked along it for five minutes before state troopers picked him up. He was too worn down to resist, and they vagged him.

  His fifth month on the farm, he wrote a careful letter to a guy he knew in Chicago, asking for information about Mal in a roundabout way. He signed the lette
r by his prison name, Ronald Casper, because he knew it would be read by the censor before it was mailed, but in the body of the letter he tried to make it clear who the writer was.

  He got an answer three weeks later, an answer as guarded in its phrasing as his question had been, but through the verbiage about nonexistent relatives he got the story. Mal, it seemed, had left Chicago some time ago, with a woman who could only have been Lynn. He had apparently squared himself with the syndicate and had been taken back into the fold. He had been recently seen in New York, spending heavily and living the good life. Lynn was still with him.

  So Parker waited, and when his chance came he took it. He killed a guard rather than wait the two more months until they would have released him anyway. He had to get moving. He wanted Mal Resnick—he wanted him between his hands. Not the money back. Not Lynn back. Just Mal, between his hands.

  He headed first for Palm Springs, but the fifteen hundred dollars he'd had in the hotel safe there was gone. Lynn had taken it. He knew without checking that she'd cleaned out his other reserves, too.

  He wasn't a petty thief or a hobo. He didn't have the background or the training or the temperament for it. He fared badly coming across the country, but he stayed alive. He jackrolled for eating money, traveled by truck when he could get a lift and by train when he couldn't, and headed east. He avoided the people he knew, and regretted having written the friend in Chicago.

  He didn't want Mal to know he was alive. He didn't want Mal spooked and on the run. He wanted him easy and content, a fat cat. He wanted him just sitting there, grinning, waiting for Parker's hands.

  TWO

  1

  Mal was sitting there, grinning, waiting for Parker's hands. He didn't know he was waiting for Parker: he thought he was waiting for a chick named Pearl, a junkie with only two bad habits. It was the other habit that interested Mal right now. He sat there in his dressing gown from Japan with a silk dragon brocaded on the back, and he grinned, and he waited for Pearl and Parker.

  There was the living room of his suite in the Outfit hotel. The Outfit hotel was a respectable-looking stone structure on Park Avenue in the Fifties, with the name Oakwood Arms on the marquee. The building was eleven stories high, with two L-wings jutting back toward Lexington Avenue, and eight of its eleven stories held innocent, respectable, well-paying guests. The guests on floors one and two and three were not innocent, not respectable, and not well paying. They were Outfit men, and they called the Oakwood Arms home. On the third floor were the permanents, Mal Resnick and the other New York workers who had chosen to live here where questions were never asked because the answers were already known. The second floor was partly filled with other permanents and partly reserved for transients, visiting Outfit men from other parts of the country or occasionally from overseas, in town for conference or vacation. When a junketing syndicate man told his lieutenants, “I'll be staying with the Outfit while I'm in New York,” they knew he meant the Oakwood Arms.

  On the first floor were the conference rooms and bars and ballrooms and dens which the innocent, respectable, well-paying guests never saw. No illegality was ever committed in the Outfit hotel, no wanted man was ever seen to enter or leave the place. No police spy was ever hired by the management, whose security check of its prospective employees would have been the envy of the government boys at Los Alamos.

  The police had never raided the place, probably realizing it would be a waste of time, but the hotel was ready for even that emergency. Well-concealed side exits on the first three floors led into adjoining buildings, and the three desk clerks were prepared to alert the Outfit guests before the law could even get into the elevators.

  The hotel had only gradually developed to the plush respectability and safety it now enjoyed. Early during Prohibition it had been bought by the liquor syndicate as a plant, where booze could be stored with relative safety at a location pleasantly close to the speakeasies of midtown. During those early years no one made much of an effort to front the place as a normal hotel, but after the racket-busters began to crack down, and the place was raided a few times, the syndicate realized the building could only be useful if it did a good job of pretending to be what it was not. The remaining liquor was pulled out, the hotel was paper-sold to a legit front man, and new employees were brought in who didn't know a thing about the place's actual owners or purposes, and for six years the hotel was a sleeper, bringing the syndicate nothing but a small legitimate profit.

  In 1930, with the respectable front firmly established, the Oakwood Arms became once more a plant, but this time the mob used it more carefully and more quietly. With the end of Prohibition in 1933, the hotel embarked on its new career as a location for business conferences, as the liquor syndicates merged and disbanded and remerged again in a frantic reshuffling of influence and interest, converting from suddenly legal liquor to still profitably illegal items like gambling, unionizing, prostitution and narcotics.

  In the years since, the Oakwood Arms had slowly developed its role in Outfit affairs. It was used more as a permanent or temporary residence for Outfit executives than for any other reason, with occasional conferences and parties as well. Since the Apalachin fiasco of 1957, more and more out-of-town elements of the Outfit had been using the hotel as a safe meeting place. It was quiet, it was well run, and it was guaranteed free from trouble with the law.

  So it was with perfect nonchalance that Mal Resnick sat in the living room of his third-floor suite in the hotel, in his dressing gown from Japan, and waited for Pearl, the girl with only two bad habits.

  Mal was a beefy man, short and heavy-set, with broad, soft, sloping shoulders and a wide paunch, short thick legs and arms, and a heavy head set square on a thick neck. In the old days, his hands had been large and rough, work coarsened, but now they were only pudgy, the flesh packed thick around the finger bones, the skin soft and pink. He was a cab driver, with a cab driver's body and a cab driver's movements, and nothing would ever change that.

  Around him were the symbols of his success, the stereo hi-fi built into the wall, the well-stocked bar, the deep-piled carpet and plush armchairs and sofas. His was a two-room suite, living room and bedroom only, proclaiming him still on one of the lower rungs as an Outfit executive. But the fact that he could live here at all proclaimed even louder that he had power within the mob, that he had made it: he wasn't a goon or a hanger-on, he was one of the Boys.

  He looked at his watch and saw that it was quarter after seven. That meant that Pearl was fifteen minutes late, and Mal grinned again. Pearl was late, Pearl would be punished. She knew that, and she would come anyway—and whatever he decided the punishment should be, she would go along with it.

  It occurred to him sometimes that she was probably so insensitized by drugs that his punishments meant practically nothing to her, but he rejected the idea. She felt it, by God. When Mal put his hands on her to make her hurt, she hurt. And if it took more to break through the deadening of the heroin in Pearl's system, so much the better. Mal had the patience, Mal had the time, and Mal had the incentive.

  He looked at his watch again, saw that it was twenty minutes past seven, and the phone rang. His right hand reached out negligently, expecting it was Pearl calling in resigned panic from some phone booth somewhere in the world, and he brought the phone lazily to his ear. “Mal,” he said.

  “Mal, this is Fred Haskell. I'm sorry to call you at home, but—”

  “Don't be sorry, sweetie. Just don't call.”

  “But,” said Haskell, “I thought maybe this was important. Maybe I ought to call you right away.”

  Haskell was a junior executive, a rung or two beneath Mal in the Outfit chain of command. Mal still remembered too clearly the last time he'd loused himself up by a stupid mistake on Outfit business, so he didn't throw his weight around now. He said instead, “Something about business, Fred?”

  “I'm not sure. I got a call from that cab guy out in Brooklyn. Stegman. He wanted to get in touch with you.”


  Mal frowned. He didn't like to be reminded of Stegman or of Lynn or of anything else connected with that operation. “You didn't give him my number, sweetie,” he said.

  “Hell no, Mal—you know me. I told him I hadn't seen you in months.”

  “Good boy.”

  “So he said I should ask around. He said he had to get in touch with you, it was important.”

  Mal's frown deepened. Was that stuff coming back to plague him? It couldn't. Unless maybe Lynn was suddenly deciding she wanted more dough.

  He ought to drop that bitch, she wasn't worth it. A grand a month was heavy money; he couldn't really afford it. And what did he get from her? Nothing. He put it to her a few times, and every damn time she just lay there like a board and closed her eyes and went a million miles away somewhere. He tried to hurt her, and she hurt easy, but he couldn't reach her any other way at all, and the hell with that.

  Was she a danger to him? If he was to drop her now, what the hell could she do? Not a damn thing. She didn't know where he was, and even if she did he had nothing to fear from her physically. And if she spread the word about where and how he'd gotten the dough to pay back the Outfit, all he had to do was say she was a lying, vindictive bitch, he'd kept her for a while and then gotten tired of her and she was trying to get even. Nobody would listen to her.