Comeback (10 page)

"What we did," Woody mumbled, feeling so sorry for himself he was almost in tears. "What we did, and for nothing."

"Shut
up,
Woody."

"What we did, what we did."

Ralph frowned at Woody's miserably unhappy profile. "What are you talking about?"

"He's talking about," Zack snarled, "what an asshole he is. It isn't over, all right? We aren't done, all right?"

Ralph said, "Zack, we don't know where they are. If the cops can't find them, how are
we
gonna find them?"

"Luggage," Zack said.

Woody was still deep in his own misery, but Ralph bit: "Luggage?"

"She didn't take any luggage when she left the motel," Zack said. "None of them did. Just those duffel bags, and that was for the job. Remember, the radio said. So they didn't take their luggage, so they're going back."

Ralph felt a sudden surge of hope, and even Woody looked up. Ralph said, 'To the motel!"

"They're going back," Zack said, absolutely sure of himself. "And so are we."

Same parking space. The nearby pizza place was closed, but they found another and settled down in their usual vantage point to eat and to wait. Across the way, the windows of rooms 16 and 17 were dark. No car parked in front. Not back yet.

After a while, Ralph said, "Maybe they're hiding the loot. Maybe they're doing that first, so it won't be on them if they get stopped."

"That's okay," Zack said.

"But maybe it won't be with them," Ralph said, because Zack didn't seem to be getting the point.

"That's all
right,"
Zack said. "If it isn't with them, they'll tell us where it is. Okay?" Zack pulled that switchblade out of his pocket again, snapped it open, whapped it down onto the dashboard where he'd kept it before. "With
that,
okay? We'll ask with that, and they'll tell us."

Ralph looked at the knife, the blade glinting sharp, reflecting a nearby streetlight. Troubled by a sudden thought, he licked his lips and said, "Zack? That isn't how you asked Mary, is it?"

Woody made a small sound deep in his throat.

Loud, covering Woody, Zack said, "Of course not! Jesus, Ralph, we didn't cut her, all right? I never even showed her the knife. Jesus Christ."

"Okay," Ralph said. "Okay."

Zack gave Woody a disgusted warning look, then reached out to switch on the radio. "Let's hear something cheerful for once," he said.

They listened to Top 40s, interspersed with news reports. They kept hearing about the three robbers and the half million dollars and how the three robbers were still on the loose, and it never occurred to them. They sat there in the parking lot, visible to the street, three guys in a car with out-of-state plates, listening to the news reports about how every cop within five hundred miles was looking for the three robbers, and it never occurred to them for a second, not until about twelve million watts' worth of searchlights and floodlights were suddenly beamed at them from every direction in the universe, including a helicopter up above.

'Jesus!" Zack cried, blinded by all the light, and would have made the fatal mistake of switching on the car engine if Ralph hadn't been just smart enough to yell, "No!" and grab his elbow.

They sat in the car in the empty parking lot, impaled by all that light, specimen bugs on a display board, and shadows moved out there. Cops, armed to the teeth, easing through the light as through heavy fog, moving cautiously in this direction.

"You in the car!"A
hugely amplified voice, coming from everywhere.
"Don't move! Make no movements!"

Woody started to cry. "I don't fucking believe this," Zack said, but it wasn't clear whether it was the cops' sudden presence or Woody crying that he didn't believe.

Ralph, amazed at his own capacity for quick thinking, leaned another inch forward over the seat back and said, "We didn't break any laws. We're driving to the coast, we stopped here for a pizza and rest a while."

"Right right right," Zack said. He was blinking like mad, his fingers twitching on the steering wheel.

One cop, braver than the others, approached Zack's door, opened it, and stepped back. He was carrying a shotgun—a freaking
shotgun,
for Christ's sake!—at port arms, and what he said was ridiculous: "Sir, would you step out of the car, please?"
Sir!

"Officer," Zack said, his voice sounding much younger and more vulnerable than usual, "officer, uh, something wrong, officer?"

'Just step out of the car, please, sir."

So Zack, fumbling a bit in nervousness, stepped out of the car, and the cop asked to see

ID, continuing with the horrible grotesque parody of politeness. In the car, Woody hunched down in his corner of the front seat, moaning, while Ralph kept unwillingly looking at that switchblade knife on the dashboard, as big as a bayonet in all that light.

Zack's driver's license was handed on back to some other cop, and then more cops approached the car, also loaded down with weapons, and called on Ralph and Woody to get out, which they did. Woody, no longer crying, just stood there and trembled, like a horse on the way to the dogfood factory, while Ralph looked all around, trying to see, interested despite himself in what was happening.

More
sirs,
more requests for ID, more licenses passed back into the darkness behind all that light. Then the frisk.
Sir,
would you face the car?
Sir,
would you place your hands on the car roof?
Sir,
would you move your feet back? Farther apart,
sir.
Thank you very much,
sir.

Pat pat pat; nothing. They were permitted to stand normally again, feeling a little better. Damn good thing the two pistols were stashed with their bags in the trunk.

"Sir, would you mind opening the trunk?"

They stared at one another, stuck, screwed, completely fucked over, and another cop came out of the darkness into the light to say, "Which one is Quindero?"

A distraction from the question of the trunk. But was this a good thing, or a bad thing? "Me," Ralph said, raising his hand like a kid in school. "Ralph Quindero."

The cop was a little older than the other cops, and not in uniform, and with no guns in his hands. It was hard to see people's faces in all this light, expressions and features got washed out to nothing, but still Ralph had the feeling there wasn't much he'd like in that face. The plainclothes cop, no inflection in his voice, said, "You're from Memphis?"

"Yes, sir."

"You know a Mary Quindero?"

Woody made the weirdest sound Ralph had ever heard, like a screen door being crushed or something. Ralph looked at him, just as Woody dropped to his knees, arms hanging at his sides. What the hell?

"Sir? You know a Mary Quindero?"

"She's my sister," Ralph said. "What's going on?"

The plainclothes cop turned away to the other cops. "Bring them in," he said, and walked away into the darkness, and Woody began to keen, like a dog when somebody's died.

Dwayne was in Archibald's suite, waiting. He didn't want to be there, but if he went to his own room down the hall Archibald would just keep telephoning every five minutes, so it was better to be here in the comfort of the man's suite, with Calavecci given this number to call if anything happened, even if that did mean he had to put up with Tina marching back and forth in a tight robe all the time, like a hooker on a runway, flashing those heavy legs.

Archibald marched, too, back and forth, back and forth, stopping every once in a while to glare at the phone, as though it had betrayed him in some fashion. "Why don't they
call?"

"Cause they don't have anything to say," Dwayne suggested.

Tina, voice dripping sympathy, said, "Will? You want a massage? Come on in the bedroom, I'll give you a nice massage."

Well, Dwayne knew what
that
meant, but Archibald was too distracted by the loss of the money even to respond to his harlot. "No, I can't think," he said. 'You go to bed, Tina, I'll be along later."

"I want to wait with you," she said, and so she did.

What was this like? In some ways, it was like a wake, sitting around being polite in the presence of a death in the family. More than that, it was almost as though the money hadn't been stolen, it had been kidnapped, and they were waiting to hear from the kidnappers, hear what the terms were for getting the money back.

When the phone finally did ring, at almost three in the morning, it seemed at first as though nobody was going to answer it. Archibald and Tina, both pacing, stopped to stare at the instrument, on a round table at one end of the sofa. Dwayne, seated at the other end of the same sofa, also looked at the phone, but didn't reach for it because this, after all, wasn't his suite. Then he realized that while he was deferring to Archibald, Archibald was deferring to him, as the professional in this situation. Once that became clear,

Dwayne lunged across the sofa, scooped up the receiver, and said, 'Thorsen."

"Calavecci. You want to come down to Broad Street?" That was what they called police headquarters, a big old pile of limestone built during the Wobbly scares, back in the twenties.

"You got them?"

"No, I don't," Calavecci said, "I'm sorry to say. I got something else, though. Very interesting."

"Be right there," Dwayne said, but of course he had to give Archibald about ten minutes of explanation about that one-minute phone call before he could leave.

Calavecci met him in a small barren office that had the look of a place whose regular occupant had just been fired, but which was in fact nobody's regular space. It was a meeting/conference/interrogation room, with an extra chair in one corner for the stenographer, for when the confession was to be taken, and a phone on the desk for calling the stenographer.

Calavecci and Dwayne sat across the desk from one another, both comfortable in this room, and Calavecci said, "We couldn't believe we were so lucky, so of course we weren't. What we had was three white males in a car with Tennessee plates, where you people are from, and it's parked for

hours in a professional building parking lot, where the building's closed for the night."

"Three's the right number," Dwayne agreed.

"But the wrong guys." Calavecci grinned and shrugged. "But interesting nonetheless. Your boy Tom Carmody—"

"The inside man."

"The clown," Calavecci agreed. "His girlfriend Mary Quindero turns up drowned in a closet. Not a usual way to go."

Dwayne, trying to be patient, said, "That's right."

"One of the three guys in the Tennessee car is her brother Ralph."

"Ah," Dwayne said, getting it. "Tom to George Liss to a couple of his pals, so that's our doers. Then Tom to Mary Quindero to her brother Ralph to
his
pals, they decide to do the doers."

"The sheer quantity of assholes in this world," Calavecci said, "never ceases to amaze me. You want some know-nothing clown come in, louse things up? No problem."

"But the sister's dead," Dwayne said. "How does that come into it?"

"The other two," Calavecci said, "Isaac Flynn and Robert Kellman—"

"Isaac Flynn?"

Calavecci shrugged. "That's what it says on his driver's license. Twenty, twenty-five years ago,

people named their kids all kinds of stuff, like they were brands of cereal. Anyway, these two, Flynn and Kellman, they leaned on the sister because she clammed up when she realized what her brother had in mind. Of course, these are not guys who get the details right."

Dwayne shook his head, having trouble here. "They killed his sister, and the brother kept on with them?"

"He didn't know. He still doesn't know." Calavecci smiled like a wolf. "I thought you'd like to be here when we tell him, see what falls out of the tree."

He's tougher than I am, Dwayne told himself, a thought that didn't come to him often and which left him slightly uneasy. But if this was a test, he'd have no trouble passing: "Should be interesting," he said.

Ralph Quindero was about what Dwayne had expected: Beede Bailey without the comedy, a sad sack who would always be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just smart enough to get into trouble.

What do you do with such people? Dwayne had dealt with a number of them in his Marine years, and they were a real problem. They weren't mean or vicious, they were just inevitable losers who screwed themselves up and made trouble for everybody near them along the way.

Your only hope was a war; you'd put them on patrol till they didn't come back.

It was too late for a war to help Ralph Quindero, who came shuffling into the interrogation room with his guard and, at Calavecci's direction, sat in I he chair Dwayne had vacated, Dwayne now being in the corner on the stenographer's chair, to observe. Quindero gave him one curious look on his way in, but Calavecci was clearly the authority figure here, and Quindero was doing what his brand of clown always did; once it's too late, be polite and cooperative with everybody. Ingratiating.

With Calavecci and Quindero seated facing one another, Dwayne in the corner, and the uniformed guard leaning against the door, Calavecci said, "Well, Ralph, you're a lucky man."

Quindero looked confused, as well he might: "I am?"

"Oh, absolutely," Calavecci said. "After all, what've we got on you? Eating a pizza in a parking lot. No crime there."

Quindero's slumped spine was beginning to straighten, hope was lifting him up. "That's right," he said, his voice tinged with awe.

"Of course," Calavecci went on, "there's the issue of those handguns in the trunk, but they weren't yours, right?"

"No, sir. They're not mine."

"And the car isn't yours. The car's Zack's, so the guns are
his
problem."

"Yes, sir!"

"Of course," Calavecci said, "if we wanted to get really technical..." He waited, and grinned at Quindero, a sly and nasty little grin.

Hope stumbled. Quindero began to fidget in the chair. "Sir? Technical?"

"Well," Calavecci said, "there's the matter of the robbery out at the stadium."

Quindero blinked, confused now. "Sir? I didn't have anything to do with that, we didn't, we didn't rob anybody!"