The Steel Hit p-2 Page 9

  Parker put on the sunglasses and the baseball cap, and stuck the red flag in his back pocket. He looked both ways, but there was no traffic, so he crossed the road and found a dead branch on the other side. He used that to prop up the detour sign in the right-hand lane, but beyond the dead-end turnoff. In the meantime, Handy turned the Ford around so it was backed into the bushes and facing across the road. When Alma took the detour, he’d drive across and block her exit.

  Parker lit a cigarette and waited. A pale green Volkswagen came along, and slowed when it saw Parker and the detour sign. Parker took out the red flat and motioned for the Volkswagen to go by in the passing lane. The Volkswagen did, with a young man driving and the girl beside him wearing a yellow bandana and reflecting sunglasses. She looked at Parker as they went by, and then twisted around to look at him some more through the rear window. “He looked tough.”

  The young man looked at her, but because of the reflecting sunglasses he saw his own face instead of her eyes. But then she licked her upper lip, the top of her tongue moist and trembling, and he said, “Ah. A ditchdigger.”

  Parker finished smoking his cigarette, and looked across at Handy. Handy was hunched at the wheel, the position of his body looking nervous. Parker began to wonder if Skimm had been in on the cross. If he had been, she wouldn’t be coming along this road. But it didn’t make sense that Skimm had been in it, it didn’t figure that way at all.

  Another car came into sight way down the road and Parker stood up straighter. But when it came closer it turned out to be an old black Packard with a prim old woman at the wheel, and Parker motioned for her to go by in the passing lane. She stopped instead, and leaned out the right-hand window. “What seems to be the trouble, young man?”

  “Roadwork,” he answered.

  “It certainly is about time!” She straightened again and drove off.

  A little while after the Packard had disappeared at the far curve. Parker saw the Dodge coming. He knew it was the Dodge the second he saw it, and he motioned at Handy. Handy grinned, and let go of the wheel. He could relax now. The dodge came closer, and Parker could see that Alma was alone in it, so he’d been right all the way down the line.

  The Dodge was coming fast, too fast for someone who couldn’t afford to be stopped by the law, and Parker stepped out into the passing lane, and waved the red flag at her, while motioning with his other hand that she should turn right. The car sagged when she hit the brakes, and then she made the turn.

  At the last minute, she must have recognized Parker or seen the Ford across the road, because she slammed on the brakes again and tried to get back to the highway, but she was already too far and her left front fender crumpled into a tree. The Ford came across and turned blocking the turnoff, and Handy ran over to the Dodge. He had the .38 in his hand, but when he got there the job was finished and Parker was putting the Sauer away again under his shirt. Alma had run only three steps from the car.

  They opened the rear door, and Skimm was lying on the money with a paring knife in his chest, which was why she’d taken longer than they’d expected. They pulled him out and got to the money. They stayed behind the Dodge, and the Ford was on the other side of that, so the occasional cars going by didn’t bother them.

  There were four metal boxes of bills and five bags of coins. Handy took care of the locks on the boxes, and they started to count. The bills were all bound in stacks of a hundred, so the counting didn’t take long. There was just over fifty-four thousand dollars in bills.

  Parker took out six thousand, for the bankrolling, and they split the rest in half. Parker stowed his share in the suitcase he’d put in the back of the Ford; Handy put his back in two of the metal boxes and stashed them in the trunk of the Dodge. Then Parker picked up a bag of coins in each hand and walked deeper into the woods. The ground was mushy, and when he came to a stream he stopped and dropped the two bags on the ground. On the way back, he passed Handy carrying two more bags in.

  Parker went back and got the fifty, and when he got to the stream again Handy had already slashed one of the bags open and was dumping rolls of quarters out on to the ground, scattering them around. Parker slit open another bag, this one containing rolls of pennies, and walked up the stream a ways, then started dumping. He stamped the rolls of coins into the ground and kicked them into the stream.

  It took them a while to get all the coins scattered around. They didn’t want them, because they weren’t worth the trouble to carry. There was probably less than six hundred dollars in all the five bags put together, and that six hundred was more awkward to carry and more dangerous to dispose of than the entire fifty-four thousand in paper. Banks in the area would be on the alert for a stranger wanting to unload rolls of coins. Getting rid of one roll here and one roll there would be a full-time job. The police knew that, and all professional thieves knew it, and so coins were practically never a part of any boodle.

  After they’d finished mining the whole area with rolls of coins, they slashed the canvas bags to ribbons and buried them. Then they went back to the cars. Parker had already moved the detour sign off the road and now he took it deeper into the woods and threw it away. Handy, meanwhile, started the Dodge; hitting the tree hadn’t hurt it much, just dented the fender and bumper. It was his getaway car, since he wasn’t going back to New Jersey with Parker.

  They said so long to each other. “You can get in touch with me through Joe Sheer,” Parker said.

  “Arnie La Pointe usually knows where I am,” Handy answered.

  “Right.”

  Parker turned the Ford around, and headed back for the bridge. In the rear-view mirror, he saw the green Dodge come out of the turnoff and go up the road towards the ferry. He took a long way around to get to the farmhouse, not wanting to be too near the diner. He went around through New Brunswick, and it was nearly two o’clock before he got there.

  He walked in and the first thing he saw was that the automatic was gone from the card table. The second thing he noticed was that the door to the fruit cellar was still barred. He backed out, looking all around him, and walked around the farmhouse until he came to the ragged hole in the outside wall where Stubbs had knocked the clapboard through and crawled out. He walked over to the dirt road and saw where Stubbs had walked on the soft clay between the tyre tracks. He grimaced and went back to the farmhouse and saw that Stubbs had even taken time to shave.

  He couldn’t wait one more day, thought Parker. He had to go complicate things again. He looked around at the empty slopes around the farmhouse, dotted with scrub. Where the hell have you got to, Stubbs? he thought. Where did you go, Stubbs?

  PART THREE

  Chapter 1

  DARKNESS. Pitch-black darkness, and no sound other than the sounds you make yourself. Blackness and silence and absolute solitude, twenty-two hours a day for two weeks.

  Stubbs was lucky. Up and down the country roads of California in the ‘thirties, travelling with the migrant crop-pickers, fighting with the scabs and being stomped every once in a while in a back room by the deputies, had dulled Stubbs’s brain. Whole areas of emotion and understanding were muffled for him now, and his brain was no longer capable of complicated thoughts or abstract ideas, and that was lucky. He could stand up under the silent solitary darkness a lot better than a man with a whole brain.

  He didn’t panic, and he didn’t talk to himself, and he didn’t concoct crazy complicated schemes that would have forced Parker to kill him. He didn’t butt his head against a wall like a rat in a maze. He stopped shaving and he stopped fighting back, because his brain was good enough to tell him there was no reason to shave and no reason to fight back. But other than that he didn’t do anything that a more sensitive man might have done.

  Since he was starting with only part of a mind anyway, it was easier for Stubbs to revert to the animal. A man with a whole brain would panic first, do all the idiotic things that come from panic, and if he survived the panic then he would be reverted to the animal. For Stubb
s it was simpler and more direct.

  When an animal is enclosed, he concentrates on only one thing — getting out. And the first way he tries is by digging. Sometime after Parker left on the third day, Stubbs felt his way across the concrete floor to the nearest wall, and then crawled along the wall, feeling the concrete floor and the concrete blocks of the wall where they angled together, looking for a break in one or the other, but he couldn’t find a thing. Then he went around again, and this time he found a place where the floor had crumbled a little bit, just at the edge of the wall.

  He tried to remember the place without being able to see it, and stumbled away to the broken-down shelves where the farmer’s wife had once kept her canning. He got a chunk of wood and went back and for a while he couldn’t find the tiny place where the floor had crumbled; but then he did. He poked at the broken place in the floor with the jagged end of the piece of wood, and for a long while he didn’t seem to be getting anywhere at all. It would have been easier if he could see what he was doing. Every once in a while he felt the broken place with his fingers, and a few more grains of concrete would brush away, and he’d poke at it some more.

  By the time he was too exhausted to work any more he had a hole in the floor the size of his fist. Then he fell asleep, and the next thing he knew, Parker was kicking at the door and telling him to come out, and it was the fourth day.

  The fourth day and the fifth day and the sixth day he worked on the concrete with chunks of wood, and by the sixth day he had a hole more than a foot in diameter, and he’d started scooping out the dirt. Parker never came into the fruit cellar, because there was no light in there and no reason to go in, so Stubbs didn’t try to hide the dirt or the broken rubble of concrete. But on the seventh day he thought to check outside, when Parker let him out, to see just how much digging he had to do.

  The land slanted, so that there were only three steps up from the basement level at the back, but around at the side where he’d been working the land slanted up. He judged where the spot would be, and saw that it was impossible. The ground was up the wall on the outside to about shoulder height, judging from inside, and Stubbs knew he’d never be able to get through that. He’d have to dig down first, to get under the wall, and then over, and then up maybe five feet or more. He didn’t have any tools, and he didn’t have any light, and he wouldn’t know whether he was digging in the right direction or not.

  After Parker left, that seventh day, Stubbs didn’t do anything at all. He sat on the floor in the blackness, listening to his own breathing because that was all there was to listen to, and after a while he felt like crying but he didn’t. Even with half a brain, an important failure can affect a man.

  The eighth day he stopped shaving, and he stopped looking for an opening when Parker let him out for his two hours in the air. He stopped shaving because he felt despair after the failure of the digging, and he stopped looking for an opening because Parker had never given him one and never would. The ninth day, he didn’t do anything.

  If an animal can’t dig out, it will try to break out, to force its way through the enclosure. The tenth day, after Parker left, Stubbs tried battering down the door. He hit it with his shoulder, and then he backed off and hit it again. That was the closest he came to panic, because of the rhythmic pattern of the movement against the door and because of the pain it made along his arm and shoulder and because the door didn’t give at all. When he came close to panic, he stopped hitting the door and stumbled across the black room and sat down.

  First the animal tried to go under, and then through, and then over. The eleventh day, Stubbs attacked the ceiling. It was just low enough so Stubbs could strain up on tiptoe and touch the wood between the beams. He knew the farmhouse was sagging and old, and he thought the flooring might be rotten. He got another piece of the shelving and spent a while ramming at the ceiling, trying to break a hole. Because he couldn’t see, he sometimes hit the beams instead, and it would jar both arms and sometimes make him drop the piece of wood. Dust and dirt fell down on him as he struck upwards, and he couldn’t break through.

  Then, on the twelfth day, one of the others gave him a flashlight. At first, he couldn’t really believe it, and he kept the joy in, because he was afraid it was a joke or something and they’d take it away again before putting him back in the fruit cellar.

  But then he realized it wasn’t a joke; Parker was impersonal, not cruel. He never did anything without a reason, and there was no reason to taunt Stubbs, so the flashlight was really his. Parker didn’t feel sorry for him because he didn’t feel anything for him at all, with the possible exception of irritation. But Handy felt sorry for him and that was the break.

  They put him back in the fruit cellar, and then they left. Stubbs switched on the flashlight and looked at the enclosure. He found the little pile of rubble and dirt where he’d tried to dig his way out, and when he looked for it he saw the scarred place on the ceiling where he’d tried to force his way out. He saw the broken-down shelving he’d been stumbling over from time to time, and he saw his way out.

  If he’d had a light before, he’d have been out by now. The wall was concrete block, practically all the way up. But for the last foot, along the outer wall, it wasn’t concrete block. The beams rested on the top row of blocks and between them the wall was just wooden siding, ordinary wooden siding. Stubbs inspected that part of the wall all the way along, and saw how old and rotten and warped the wood looked.

  He worked that night, and he worked the thirteenth day except when Parker came to let him out for a while. On the fourteenth day he crawled out on to the ground and rolled over on his back and looked up at the sky. The sun was straight up above him, so it was noon. He lay on his back for a while, smelling the world and looking up at the sky and listening to the small sounds the trees and bushes made in the breeze, and then he got to his feet.

  He knew Parker always came in the afternoon some time. He remembered vaguely that Parker and Handy had told him they would let him go soon anyway, but he’d stopped paying attention to what they said. And even if it was just tomorrow when they’d let him out, he didn’t want to wait. He wasn’t going back in that cellar again.

  He went around back and into the basement because he was hungry. He ate cold beans out of a can and drank some water, and then he saw the small mirror Parker had brought with the razor and the can of lather. He looked at himself and knew he had to take a chance on staying long enough to shave.

  He shaved, and that made him feel better. Then he took the automatic from the card table and went back around to the side of the house, where he threw out his jacket and cap before climbing out himself. He brushed them off as best he could, brushed his trouser legs, put on the jacket and the cap, and walked out to the road. The automatic was out of sight under his jacket, tucked under his belt.

  The first thing he wanted to do was see if the car was still there in Newark. He had money in his pockets, and if the car was still there he could go ahead and do what he’d set out to do two weeks ago, before Parker had trapped him. He didn’t want to get even with Parker or blow the whistle on Parker. He wasn’t interested in Parker at all, any more than Parker was interested in him. He just wanted to get away and continue looking for the man who’d killed Dr Adler.

  A middle-aged man who said he repaired tractors gave Stubbs a lift into New Brunswick, and from there he took a train to Newark. Once he got to Newark he ran into a problem because he didn’t know where the car was. He remembered some street names from when he’d been trailing Parker away from Skimm’s house, so he took a cab to one intersection he remembered and walked from there.

  It looked different in the daytime and pretty soon he got lost. But then he caught sight of a railroad bridge crossing a street down to his left, and he remembered the car had been left at the end of a street by a railroad embankment.

  He picked a direction, hoping it was right, and walked along parallel to the tracks, a block away, looking down each cross street he came
to. After a while he saw a church on a corner that he vaguely remembered, so he thought he must be on the right track. He kept going past the church, and two blocks later he saw the car, still parked where he’d left it.

  He sighed with relief, because he’d thought the police might have towed it away by now. The engine didn’t want to start at first, but after a while it did, and Stubbs carefully turned the Lincoln around in the narrow street.

  There were two men left to find, and one of them was supposed to be in New York City. These days he was using the name Wells.

  Chapter 2

  IN 1946, money was loose in the United States. But from another angle, money was tight. That was the year between the war and the cold war, and at the top level money was tight because the men at the top level expected a reduction in government spending now that the war was over. This would mean a reduction in heavy manufacturing and a general tightening of the belt until the nation had made the adjustment from a war to a peace economy. The men at the top gloomily looked forward to a long hard peace, and money with them was tight.

  But at the bottom level, money was loose. The servicemen were getting out, and they were getting theirs. The GI Bill let them go to school or buy a house or just sit around on their duffs for fifty-two weeks. The defence plant workers — who’d been getting theirs all along — now had something to spend it on. Cars were being manufactured again and new housing was springing up everywhere, and rationing and other restrictions were disappearing. So the men at the bottom happily looked forward to a long soft peace, and money with them was loose.

  There was this man named Wallerbaugh, C. Frederick Wallerbaugh, and he had made a very good living for a number of years by doing the sort of things with stocks that no one is supposed to do. He had a Seat, and his racket was its own respectable front, and no one bothered him. The men at the top ignore the Wallerbaughs for the same reason that a police force retires a graft taker rather than prosecuting him — exposure of dirtiness in a part of the system reflects on the rest of the system. So Wallerbaugh did well, and the only men who could have stopped him ignored him. But in 1946 money at the top was tight, and Wallerbaugh, as usual, had over-extended himself.