The Hunter: A Parker Novel (Parker Novels) Page 9

  She finally came through the door on the other side, nude, and they grabbed her the minute she closed the door, and hustled her into the other bedroom. Ryan showed her the knife, darkly smeared, and Mal his gun, and she knew better than to shout.

  “We got something to tell you,” Mal said, talking low and quick. “Listen close. Somebody's going to die in the room next door tonight, and you got the choice. It can be you, or it can be Parker. If you want, it can be both. Which is it?”

  She stared up at him, shaking her head. “I don't know what you mean. What is it, Mal? I don't know what you mean.”

  “I told you,” he said. “Somebody's going to die in there. It's you or Parker. Take your pick.”

  “How can I—? I don't get it, Mal. Please, I don't know what you mean.”

  “Ryan, touch her with the knife,” Mal said.

  He touched her, the tip of the knife against the underpart of her left breast, not quite enough pressure to break the skin. Her face was big and blank.

  “Take your pick, Lynn,” Mal said. “You or Parker. Quick.”

  She licked her lips, staring from face to face. Finally, in a voice almost too low to hear, she whispered, “I don't want to die.”

  Mal had Sill's automatic in his pocket. He took it out and handed her his own revolver. “Point that at either Ryan or me,” he said, “and you're dead right now.”

  She looked from the gun in her hand to his face and back to the gun again. “You want me—? You want me to—?”

  “Think it over,” he said. “Take your time.” He ostentatiously looked at his wrist watch. “You got thirty seconds.”

  “You can't want me to—to—”

  “You got twenty seconds.”

  “Mal, please. For God's sake, Mal—”

  “Twenty seconds. Ryan, touch her with the knife again.”

  Ryan touched the tip of the knife to the same place on the underpart of her breast, but Mal said, “No, not there. On the red.” She flinched, and he said, “Ten seconds. Yes or no?”

  “Oh, God,” she whispered. The knife was against her and she was afraid to move. “Don't make me kill him, Mal.”

  “Four seconds,” he said. “Better poke a littler harder, Ryan. Two seconds. One—”

  “All right!”

  Mal exhaled, letting the burden slip from his shoulders. He hadn't wanted her dead. That was the last thing in the world he wanted.

  It was working out fine, detail after detail, he was getting everything he wanted. He wanted the dough, all of it, to repay the syndicate and get back into the Outfit, where he belonged. He was getting the dough, share after share, first Chester's and then Sill's and now Parker's and soon Ryan's. And he wanted Lynn, who was tied completely to Parker and he was going to get her too.

  She was going to help him murder her husband, and that would be the tie between them that would bind her to him. Knowing that she could have chosen death, but had not, she would have to realize how faint her love for Parker really had been, and she would need someone who could share that knowledge and still want her. And that would be him, Mal, the one who had done it with her, the one for whom she had killed.

  But it wasn't done yet. He explained to her now. He and Ryan would be in the connecting bathroom, waiting. They didn't demand that she do the job right away. She could take all the time she needed, she could wait for just the right moment. But Parker was not to leave the room alive. If he did, one second later she would be dead.

  And if she tried to warn Parker, Mal and Ryan would know. They would be watching, they would be listening; they would know. One wrong word and she and Parker would die together, at the same moment. He explained it all twice, making sure she understood. She watched him dully, watching his moving lips rather than his eyes.

  “All right,” she said, when he was finished. “I'll do it. I told you I'd do it.”

  “Good.”

  He wanted to reach out and pat her shoulder, just touch her flesh, but some instinct warned him not to.

  She crossed through the bathroom to the room where Parker lay waiting for her. She walked diagonally across to him, the gun out of his sight in her right hand, held down against her thigh. When she bent to join him, she managed to slip the gun under the mattress, and then his arms were around her and the fierce strength was on him again.

  Mal stood in the bathroom, one eye closed, watching through the slit between door and jamb. The bodies moved on the bed in the dim light, and he watched, in a kind of suspended animation, waiting for the thing to be done and over with, for him to be dead and her to be his.

  Ryan tugged at his arm, motioning him into the other bedroom and, irritated, he obeyed. Whispering, Ryan wanted to know why they didn't just plug Parker now, from the bathroom doorway.

  Mal shook his head in exasperation. “It might kill her, too,” he said. “And I want her.”

  Ryan said, “But she don't want you, Mal.”

  “She will,” he said, and went back to his post at the door.

  They were like something in a jungle, those two. He watched, and he couldn't believe she was always that demanding. She was giving her husband a grand send-off. Or maybe it was just that she was aware Mal was watching, that she was trying to show him how good she was.

  It went on and on, until finally Parker got up from the bed and reached for his clothes. He put on a shirt and trousers, that was all, and picked up the automatic from the nightstand. Mal heard him say, “I'll go see Mal now.”

  Mal and Ryan exchanged glances. For Ryan, it was another confirmation of what Mal had already told him. For Mal, it was the startled realization that he'd been telling Ryan the truth all along. The son of a bitch really was planning to kill him!

  They saw Parker start for the door; they saw Lynn glance over at them, her face frightened and indecisive. Mal pulled the door open an inch more, enough for her to see the automatic in his hand, and then she reached under the mattress and came up with the revolver and spoke Parker's name.

  They saw the first shot catch him in the gut, and they saw her fire five more shots into him in blind panic and throw the gun away, crying out without words. And then they came into the room.

  Mal sent Ryan to the garage for gasoline. They'd burn the house, get rid of all the evidence.

  He told Lynn to get dressed. He'd planned to take her now, for the first time, right here in the same room with her dead husband, but the look on her face stopped him. Besides, he felt a sudden urgent need to be out of here, to have the thing behind him and finished and in the past.

  They fired the house and left, and on the way to the plane he shot Ryan in the back. “I can fly a plane too,” he told her, grinning. “He never knew that. I'm smarter than Parker thought.”

  In the plane, he told her why he was justified. “Parker was figuring to kill me, wasn't he? It was him or me. Just like it was him or you. The same thing.”

  She answered only when he demanded an answer, and then only in monosyllables.

  He got to her the first time in Chicago.

  He'd gone to the Outfit and he'd given them the money, and they'd just stared at him. They couldn't believe it. “We'll let you know, Mal,” they'd said. “We'll give you a call in a couple days.”

  So he went back to the hotel, where she sat waiting for him because there was no place else for her to go, and he got to her for the first time. And she just lay there. He beat upon her like the waves upon a rocky cliff, and like a rocky cliff she remained unmoved. Her expression was dull, her body was unresponsive, her emotions were away off somewhere.

  So he figured it was just that it was too soon, she needed some time to adjust. She hadn't argued about his right to take her; there really wasn't any problem. She'd come out of it soon enough.

  Two days later, a guy came around from the Outfit. He was impressed by the suite, that was clear enough, and he was impressed by the quality of the woman Mal had there with him. And the Outfit was already impressed by the money he'd paid them.

>   A guy who had the guts to go out and grab that kind of dough, and the loyalty to use it to repay a debt to the Outfit, was a guy the Outfit could use. They had a slot for him. If he worked out this time, he had it made.

  There was only one small thing. It would be best if he didn't work in Chicago. A lot of the rank and file in Chicago knew about his blunder: it might make it difficult for him to be an effective administrator. They had a slot for him in New York.

  That was fine by Mal. He wasn't particularly hipped on Chicago anyway. He thought he'd like New York.

  Lynn went with him. She had nowhere else to go.

  In New York they made him a sales manager, liquor division. Cigarettes are cheap in the District of Columbia. There's no state sales tax. Cigarettes are expensive in Canada. There's an import duty on American brands. On the other hand, Canadian whiskey is cheap in Canada, but there's an import duty making it expensive in the United States.

  So the cars full of cigarettes drive north from Washington, and the same cars, now full of whiskey, drive south from Montreal. About half of the liquor cargo goes as far as New York, and the rest goes on down to Washington.

  Mal was the guy who received the liquor shipments in New York. He managed the crew that sold the stuff to selected restaurants and bars and liquor stores. It was purely administrative, seeing that the right quantities went to the right places at the right times, and that nobody tapped the take. It was a job he could do, a job he could like. He fitted in well.

  And Lynn stayed with him. She had nowhere else to go. But she didn't warm up, no matter what he tried, no matter how much time he spent with her, no matter how much dough he spent on her, no matter what. She was a large-as-life doll, no more. It was as though his sweating hulking panting body weren't even there.

  He took to getting his satisfaction elsewhere, with Pearl and with others. He moved out completely at last, giving her enough dough to support herself, and she stayed because she had nowhere else to go. It had occurred to him finally to be afraid of her, to realize that she might one day decide, in desperate expiation, to kill him as she had killed Parker. So when he moved out he made sure she couldn't find him. She didn't object; she didn't suppose that she'd ever want to find him for anything.

  The time went by and he settled into his life, getting used to the job and the people and the city, knowing that he was doing good work and that he would within a year or two be in line for a boost up the ladder. Keeley's Island and the estate and the eighty thousand dollars gradually faded into memory, until a guy named Stegman told him that Parker was alive and looking.

  The dead man fulfilled his ambitions. He got the best hotel suite and the best professional lay. And he got them just in time.

  THREE

  1

  For Parker, it had been a cold thin trail from Stegman the cabman in Canarsie to the window of the St. David Hotel. The Canarsie thing had been a dead end. Lynn had been easy to find; she'd had a telephone listing under her own name. No reason for her not to—Parker was supposed to be dead. But Mal was more cautious. Or he was using a different name.

  So Parker had come back to Manhattan from Canarsie, to the hotel where they'd kept the room for him because he hadn't told them otherwise. He'd stripped off the clothing he'd worn for the last three days, showered and shaved, dressed again, and gone out for something to eat, and to think it over. . . .

  Sitting at the table in the restaurant, he'd worked it out in his mind. He'd tried to get to Mal through Lynn, and the trail had gone cold almost before it started. So now he'd have to try it a different way. Mal was supposed to be connected with the syndicate again. Maybe he could find him through the syndicate.

  He didn't like it that way. Syndicate people had a reputation for sticking together. He'd start nosing around and, the first thing, Mal would hear about it. Mal would know he was alive and looking for him. But it ought to flush him out. And otherwise the whole thing was hung up, no place to go.

  He finished his meal and took a cab uptown to Central Park West and 104th Street. This was the wrong end of the park where the slums had spread south and east to lap at the very edge of the greenery. Parker walked west on 104th till he came to the grocery store. BODEGA, it called itself, Spanish for grocery, in black letters on yellow, beneath the Pepsi-Cola emblem. Underneath BODEGA it gave the proprietor's name in smaller black letters. Delgardo.

  Inside there was a stink compounded of roach poison, rotted flour, floor wax, old wood, humankind and a hundred other things. Two short heavy women in shiny black fingered the hard rolls. In the narrow space behind the counter a tiny fat man with a thick moustache scratched his left elbow and looked at nothing at all.

  Parker pushed past the women and said to the man, “Is Jimmy around these days?”

  Delgardo kept scratching his elbow. His eyes came back from infinity and studied Parker's face. “You a friend of Jimmy's?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So how come you don't know where he is?”

  “We lost touch.”

  “So how come I never seen you before?”

  “Jimmy drove for me on that payroll job in Buffalo.”

  Delgardo's hands twitched suddenly, and his eyes flicked in alarm to the two women. In a quick undertone he said, “Don't talk that way.”

  Without lowering his voice Parker said, “You wanted to know who I was. Now you know. Now you can tell me where Jimmy is.”

  Delgardo fidgeted a minute, but the two women had shown no signs of interest. He fingered his mustache nervously and said, “Come in the back.”

  Parker followed him deeper into the store, past a greasy curtain. In the back room the stink was even stronger. Delgardo, smelling of peppers, came close to whisper, “He's in Canada. Driving, you know.”

  “Cigarettes?”

  “Yes.”

  “When's he coming back?”

  “Two, three days.”

  “Gimme pencil and paper.”

  “Yes. Wait here.”

  Parker waited, lighting a cigarette against the stink, while Delgardo went back to the front of the store. There was a flurry of rapid-fire Spanish between Delgardo and one or both of the women. They'd been stealing while he was in back.

  He came back angry, and took a deep breath. He shrugged at Parker. “You know how they are.”

  He gave him a long yellow pencil and a greasy three-by-five memo pad and Parker wrote down the name of the hotel.

  “When he comes back, he should call me there. Parker, tell him. If I'm not in, leave a message.”

  “Parker? You better write it down.”

  “It's an easy name to remember.”

  Parker gave him back the memo pad and pencil. Delgardo hesitated, still wanting him to write the name down, then shrugged and led the way back to the front of the store.

  The two women were still there, looking silent and frightened. Two uniformed policemen were there, too, filling the store. Their expressions blank and hard, they studied Parker, and Parker said, “Wallet.” He reached slowly to his back pocket. They waited, and Parker pulled out the wallet and handed it to the nearest of them.

  They both read the driver's license, giving his name as Edward Johnson, and then they gave the wallet back and one of them said, “What was the business in the back of the store? Did you buy something or sell something?”

  “Neither.”

  “Nothing like that, officers,” said Delgardo hurriedly. “You know me, I don't do nothing like that.” He was sweating beneath his mustache.

  “Nothing like what?” one of the cops asked.

  Delgardo looked flustered. Parker said, “Nothing like junk.” He shucked off his jacket, rolled up his shirt sleeves, showed them his bare arms. “I don't take it, buy it, sell it or carry it,” he said. “Get the broads out of here, I'll show you my legs. No needle marks there either.”

  “That won't be necessary,” said the talking cop. “Just empty your pockets. You too, Delgardo. And let's see the pad.”

  He
glanced at the memo pad, looked at Parker. “What's doing at the Carlington Hotel?”

  “I'm staying there,” Parker said.

  “That isn't what it said on your driver's license.”

  “I had a fight with my wife.”

  “What was the business in the back of the store?”

  “We had a Coke together,” said Parker. “I'm an old friend of Jimmy's. I come around to look him up.”

  “An old friend from where?”

  “Upstate. We worked for the same trucker, up in Buffalo.”