Slayground p-13 Read online

  Lozini sighed. “I suppose that’s best,” he said. “I can trust your discretion, Cal.”

  “I hope so,” Caliato said.

  “Call me when it’s over.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Caliato hung up, shut the compartment, and got out of the car. He stretched, inhaled deeply, glanced over at the park, and went into the building to give the others the good news.

  Eight

  TEN O’CLOCK. Exactly on time, Donald Snyder turned his blue Volkswagen and drove up to the gates of Fun Island. He was always on time, whether there was a clock to punch or not, and he was proud of it.

  Sixty-four years of age, Snyder had punched a clock at Westmount Foundry for thirty-eight years, until they’d retired him at sixty, and in all that time he had never once been late. He’d been absent entirely every once in a great while, brought down by flu or some such thing, but if he was going to be present at all, he would be on time.

  He’d carried the same philosophy into retirement with him. He’d had a number of seasonal or part-time jobs since then, and his record of never being late was still unbroken. Even here at Fun Island, where there was neither a clock to be punched nor a boss to see what time he showed up, he was always on time. In at ten, do his rounds punctually, out at exactly six in the morning. A good job for an old man who couldn’t sleep much anyway. Gave him something to do with his time, gave him the exercise of walking around the park all night long, and gave him a little spending money to supplement his retirement income.

  Now he got out of the Volkswagen, a stocky old man in a long overcoat and a nondescript hat, moving with a little winter stiffness in his joints. He went to the gates, gleaming in the Volkswagen’s headlights, pulled the key ring from his overcoat pocket, found the right key, and unlocked the gates. He swung two of them open, making a space big enough to drive the car through, then went back behind the wheel again, drove in, and stopped well clear of the gates. He switched off the engine, but left the lights on so he’d be able to see to close and lock the gates again. He got out of the car, and three men came through the gates with guns in their hands and handkerchiefs over the lower part of their faces.

  Snyder stared at them, refusing to believe it. They said something to him, voices muffled by the cold and the handkerchiefs, but he didn’t understand the words. He just stared.

  They made angry, threatening gestures with the guns, and he saw their eyes above the handkerchiefs, cold and impatient, and finally he understood what it was they wanted — though not why, that was incomprehensible — and slowly he raised his hands up over his head.

  Two of them held the guns on him while the third came around behind him and patted him all over, finding his Colt .44 revolver in his right overcoat pocket. His own gun, had it for years, always carried it on this job, never used it once. Not for real. Used to do some target-shooting with it, some plinking, shot some rats back in the old days when he lived near the city dump where the new apartment houses were now, but he’d never fired that gun once at a human being. Never even pointed it at a human being. Hadn’t thought of it when he’d seen the masked men with guns coming at him. And now they’d taken it away from him.

  He was old, but until just this moment he’d never felt old. Never felt feeble, or useless, or doomed. Not until now. “You people can’t do this,” he said, and hated to hear the new note in his voice. He’d never been querulous before either.

  One of them said, “Let’s go into your office. Come on, move!”

  He obeyed, his hands still up. He moved slowly, them behind him, prodding his shoulders to make him hurry. Two of them following him, the other staying back with his car and the gates. “There’s no money here this time of year,” he said, but they didn’t answer him.

  The door to his office was broken into. It was closed most of the way, but the lock had been broken. “Look at that,” he said. “You fellows do that? What would you do a thing like that for?”

  One of them had a flashlight, and shone it on the broken place on the door. The other one said, “Still in there, you think?”

  “Only one way to find out,” the first one said, and pushed at Snyder with his gun barrel again. “Open the door, old man,” he said. “Go in there, turn on the light. Don’t do any sudden movements, and don’t turn around.”

  Snyder obeyed orders. He stepped in and switched on the light, seeing at once that someone had been in here. Things disturbed, things moved around. A coffee cup on the floor, a map open on the desk, a chair moved over by the window.

  They waited a few seconds, then came in after him. “Sit down,” one of them said, and he sat down. “Put your hands behind you,” and he put his hands behind himself.

  They tied him to the chair, roughly and well. Then they took adhesive tape and taped shut his mouth. One of them went into the John and came back with two small wads of toilet paper and stuck them in Snyder’s ears, and the other one put adhesive tape over his ears to keep the paper in.

  He submitted to it all, but when he saw they meant to tape his eyes, he tried to fight it, lunging backward, waving his head back and forth. Somehow that was a different kind of thing, much worse, much more frightening. He didn’t want his eyes taped.

  But they did it. One of them held his head, and the other one put the tape on, and then he was in darkness and silence. He couldn’t see them. He couldn’t hear them. He was helpless, his brain straining inside its prison of bone to know what they were doing.

  His feet. Through his feet pressed against the floor he could hear the vibrations. They were walking around, doing things around him in the office. Not touching him, but moving around. Faintly he thought he could hear them talking. Through his closed eyelids and the thickness of tape he could sense a dark reddish orange, meaning the light was still on.

  Fire? He suddenly thought of fire, was suddenly terrified that they meant to burn the place down and him in it. He didn’t know why anybody would do a thing like that, he had no rational reason for thinking of it, but once the thought hit him he became convinced, and his heart pounded in terror, and he reared around in the chair, struggling to escape.

  A hand closed on his shoulder, and just stayed there. Not squeezing hard, not hurting. Just staying there, a steady pressure, somehow reassuring. Snyder calmed down, and the hand patted his shoulder and went away. But he was less frightened after that.

  A minute later the vibrations stopped, the reddish orange went to black, he had the sensation that the door had been closed. He was alone. He knew he was alone.

  Nine

  CALIATO STOOD looking out the window at Fun Island. He watched Chaka and Abadandi and Pulsone cross the street, watched them gather in the old man. One of them waved the all-clear, and Caliato said, “Okay. Let’s go over there.”

  “Right,” Benniggio said. He opened the door and stepped back for Caliato to go first.

  Caliato was glad to be getting out of this room at last. Six hours he’d been in here, doing nothing, and that was too long. He stepped outside, inhaled the cold night air, and waited for Benniggio to carefully close the door again and lock it behind them.

  “Tomorrow,” Caliato said, “we’ll have to send somebody to clean up our mess in there.”

  “Okay, Cal,” Benniggio said. “I’ll remember.”

  “Good.”

  They started across the road, and behind them the phone rang. “Hell,” Caliato said under his breath. Would it be Lozini, changing his mind? More probably O’Hara, getting ever more frantic. Caliato said, “Go on over there, see they don’t scare the old man too much. See they do things right.”

  “Okay, Cal.”

  “Shut those gates, but don’t lock them. I’ll be right there.”

  “Right.”

  Caliato went back to the Lincoln, got into the back seat, opened the phone compartment, put the receiver to his ear. “Hello?”

  O’Hara. “We’re still stuck here. What are we gonna do about the night watchman?”

  “We�
�ve already done it,” Caliato said, and told him the new plan.

  O’Hara said, “You mean you’re going into the park?”

  “That’s right. So don’t call here any more, there won’t be anybody to answer the phone.”

  “But you’re not going to do anything, are you? You’ll just stay in by the gate till we get there.”

  “I’ve told you that. How much longer you going to be?”

  “Christ, it ought to be soon, Caliato, I swear it ought to be soon. We’re not the only ones bitching, everybody here is teed off. No roadblocks are going to catch anybody by this time.”

  “Even if there was anybody to catch.”

  “Even if,” O’Hara agreed. “There’s talk about keeping them up till midnight, but that’s just stupid.”

  Two more hours. “See if you can cut it shorter than that,” Caliato said.

  “You know I’ll do my best.”

  “Right. Flash your headlights at the gates when you get here, so we’ll know it’s you.”

  “Will do.”

  Caliato hung up and went across the street, to where Pulsone was on guard at the gates. Caliato went in and Pulsone pointed to the lit doorway where the others were. Caliato went down there and found the watchman trussed up right, except he was jerking around like a fish on a line. Caliato looked at him, looked at Benniggio, said, “I told you to see he didn’t get scared too much.”

  “Nobody did nothing to him, Cal,” Benniggio said. “He was quiet, and then he started jumping around like that.”

  “We don’t want him kicking off with a heart attack,” Caliato said, and went over and put a hand on the old man’s shoulder. He stood there, feeling the old muscles bunching under his hand, and gradually the old man calmed down.

  Benniggio said, “He was in here, our bird was. Busted the door in.”

  “You search the place?”

  Tony Chaka said, “Nothing here, Mr. Caliato. He didn’t leave no marks.” He held up an old long-barreled Colt .44 revolver. “This was on the old guy,” he said. “You want it?”

  Caliato was about to say no, but then he stopped to think that he was the only one here who wasn’t armed. Under normal circumstances it was best he not be armed, that’s one of the reasons he carried Benniggio with him wherever he went, but this time was maybe special. “As a matter of fact, yes,” he said, and took the gun from Chaka and put it in his overcoat pocket. He took his other hand off the old man’s shoulder and said, “We’ll go back to the gate. We’ll wait there.”

  “Right.”

  They went out, shutting off the light and closing the door, and walked back to where the Volkswagen’s lights still gleamed. Caliato told Abadandi to turn off the VW lights, and Abadandi did, and darkness settled down on them. It had been a cloudy day and now it was a cloudy night, no stars, no moon. There were widely spaced streetlights out on Brower Road, one of them casting feeble light past the gates, enough to make out shapes in the darkness, nothing more.

  Benniggio said, “What now, Gal?”

  “Now we wait again,” Caliato said. “We stand here in the open air and we wait.”

  Ten

  ‘TEN-FIFTEEN. O’Hara hunched over the wheel of the prowl car as it tore along Brower Road toward Fun Island. He didn’t dare use the siren, it might cause another patrol to investigate, but there was very little traffic along Brower Road at night anyway, and what there was got out of the way of a police squad car with or without its siren going.

  He’d gotten back to the roadblock ten minutes ago, after his last phone call to Caliato from a booth outside a closed nearby gas station, to discover he’d just wasted five minutes of free time. They’d been relieved as often o’clock. Dunstan gave him the news, pulling a long face, as though what he’d really wanted was to stay on roadblock duty all night long.

  Which was maybe true. Dunstan was a coward, O’Hara knew that, and afraid of this business about the armored-car loot. He hadn’t tried to argue against it since that one time right at the beginning this afternoon, but he hadn’t been enthusiastic either. He hadn’t shared any of O’Hara’s impatience and frustration as hour after hour went by and still they had to stick around at a roadblock set up to capture a figment of O’Hara’s own imagination.

  Which might have even made things worse, actually; knowing that Dunstan wasn’t really sharing his own feelings, it had forced him in a way to be nervous and frustrated for both of them.

  Well, the frustration was over now, the impatience and nervousness were almost done with. They were finally on their way to Fun Island. And Caliato was still there, and hadn’t gone after the money.

  Rationally, O’Hara knew it made more sense for Caliato to split with him and Dunstan. It gave him protection for afterwards, and it gave him a safe front for when they went in to get the guy with the money. He understood that, and he believed it, but at the same time he knew that Caliato was a hood, and hoods couldn’t be trusted, and seventy-three thousand dollars was a lot of money, and lucky breaks like this don’t happen without something going wrong, and the easiest thing to go wrong would be for the hood to get greedy for all the money and therefore double-cross O’Hara.

  It wouldn’t happen, it wasn’t going to happen, but the fear was there. He couldn’t help it, the fear was there. And it didn’t help matters when he tried to think about what he’d do if it did happen, and realized there was nothing he could do, not a damn thing. Blow the whistle on Caliato? How could he do that without blowing the whistle on himself? Or how about complaining to Caliato’s boss, Lozini? He could see himself doing that, going to one hood to complain about how he’d been treated by another hood, he could just feature himself doing something like that.

  But it wasn’t necessary. They’d gotten off duty at goddam last, Caliato was still there, the guy with the money was still there, everything was still going to work out.

  One quarter of seventy-three thousand is eighteen thousand, two hundred fifty. Eighteen thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars.

  How much was eighteen thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars? In understandable terms, how much was it? It was his salary for two years and three weeks, with sixty bucks left over. Two years and three weeks. Standing around at the roadblock this evening, he’d thought back two years and three weeks, he’d tried to work it out exactly where he’d been and what he’d been doing two years and three weeks ago today, and he realized that was a hell of a long time. Two years ago was forever.

  All those paychecks, sitting there in one lump sum in a suitcase he’d seen thrown over a fence. To think of it.

  The last stretch of Brower Road had no traffic at all. O’Hara stood on the accelerator and they leaped down the roadway, till Dunstan said, nervousness in his voice, “There’s still icy spots, Joe. Take it easy a little.” He could be heard trying to grin through his words as he added, “We want to live to spend the money, don’t we?”

  That was true. In any case, they were just about there. O’Hara eased his foot off the accelerator, and the fences unreeling on both sides — gray board around the park on his left, chain link around the parking lotion his right — gradually slowed down. Ahead his lights picked out the tollbooth building and, across the way, the main gates to the park. He tapped the brakes, and noticed a second car beside Caliato’s Lincoln, a pale green Dodge station wagon. He frowned at it. What was that for?

  Dunstan said, “There’s somebody else here, Joe.”

  “I see that.” O’Hara slowed the car almost to a stop, angled it off the road, came to a stop blocking both other cars.

  Dunstan was looking at the wagon. “Who do you suppose it is?”

  “We’ll find out,” O’Hara said.

  They got out of the car, O’Hara tugging his black gloves to a firmer fit on his hands, and he saw Caliato coming toward him from the Fun Island entrance. He stood waiting, unsure of himself and therefore putting on a swaggering front. As Caliato got closer, O’Hara jerked his head toward the Dodge and said, “I see we got
company.”

  “Extra soldiers,” Caliato said. “If we need them.”

  “We’re spreading the pot around a little thin, aren’t we?”

  Caliato grinned. “They’re on salary,” he said. “Three of them, at a hundred bucks a man.”

  “Oh,” O’Hara said. “That’s okay, I guess.”

  Dunstan had come around, and stood silent and awkward beside them. He was making it obvious how uncomfortable he was to be here.

  Caliato said, “The point is, they don’t know about us being on shares. They think we’re turning it all over to Mr. Lozini.”

  Dunstan said, “We aren’t, are we?”

  Caliato smiled. “Don’t worry, it’s all ours. But we don’t want to tell the other boys that, it could make them jealous.”

  “I’ve got you,” said O’Hara.

  “Good. You’ve got a loud-hailer, haven’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Bring it along,” Caliato said.

  “Right.”

  O’Hara turned toward the car, but Dunstan said, “I’ll get it.” As though trying to make up for his poor attitude.

  They waited while Dunstan got out the loud-hailer, and then all three went across the street and through the open gate into the park. One of Caliato’s new troops was standing there, a heavy-set thug O’Hara didn’t recognize. He grinned and nodded at O’Hara and Dunstan, and shut the gate after them O’Hara found it uncomfortable to have somebody like that grin and nod at him that way, as though they were in cahoots, partners, members of the same club. Even though they were “What we’ll try first,” Caliato was saying, “is you and Dunstan go up the main drag here, to about the middle of the park, where we’ll be sure he can see you. Then you announce the place is surrounded, we know he’s there, the jig is up, he better surrender, all that stuff. Then we’ll see what happens.”

  O’Hara nodded. “Right,” he said.

  Dunstan said, “What about the site of the robbery? It’s just the other side of that fence, down a ways. Is anybody still there?”

  Caliato shook his head. “No,” he said, “they all cleared out. The armored car’s gone, everything’s gone. I just had one of the boys go around and check five minutes ago.”