Comeback (11 page)

"But you knew it was going to happen," Calavecci pointed out. "That's why you came to town, because you knew the robbery was going to happen, and the problem is, you didn't inform
us
about it. You knew a felony was going to be committed, and you didn't inform the authorities, and that's called accessory before the fact. If we want to get technical, you know, just to be a pain in the ass with you."

Quindero didn't know exactly how to respond. He snuck another look in Dwayne's direction, then said to Calavecci, "The reason we came here? Sir, we were just—"

"Now, take it easy, Ralph," Calavecci said. "Be careful you don't say anything to make me think you're trying to be a smart guy."

"No, sir, no, sir, I'm cooperating."

"That's right. So's your pal Woody, by the way. That boy's singing like a miner's canary, on videotape. He's the one told us why you're here."

"Woody?" You could see Quindero trying to figure out where the bullet was coming from, so he could dodge it. Or try.

"Now, Tom Carmody," Calavecci said, "he was the inside man in the robbery, we know all that, Tom told us in the hospital. And Tom was good friends with your sister. Mary, is it?"

"My sister— Yeah, she's Mary. But she doesn't have anything to do with this!"

"Well, she did," Calavecci said. "Tom told Mary what was gonna go down here, and she told you, and so you and your pals thought you'd come on out, see what there might be in it for you. Isn't that right?"

"I, uh, I guess. But Mary isn't part of it!"

"Take it easy, Ralph," Calavecci advised. "The point is, you may have had something naughty in mind, but you didn't
do
anything yet. Unless, that is, like I said, we want to get technical with this accessory-before-the-fact business. But I don't think that's going to happen," he finished, and grinned at Quindero.

Who grinned back, falteringly, and said, "I'm glad. Thanks."

Calavecci nodded. "After all, we're gonna want you as a witness, because the
other
two, you know, Woody and Zack, we got them on all kinds of stuff. The handguns, the accessory count, murder one—"

"What?"

"Oh, that's right," Calavecci said, snapping his fingers, "you don't know about that part. Still, your testimony's gonna be very important there."

"Nobody got killed!" Ralph's eyes were actually bulging, his breathing had become audible.

'You're wrong about that, Ralph," Calavecci said. "Somebody got killed, all right. Drowned in a bathtub. Took a long time at it, too, what I hear."

Panicky, Quindero leaned forward, hands gesturing out in front of himself as he said, "We didn't kill anybody! We just drove here, we parked, we didn't—"

"Before
you drove here. Now, we could almost pull accessory on you there, too, but I accept it, you didn't know about the murder, so that's—"

"What
murder? Nobody was murdered!"

"Oh, come on, Ralph," Calavecci said, grinning in high good humor, "figure it out. You can figure it out."

Quindero could, too, though he didn't want to. Watching the young fool's profile, Dwayne saw him struggle with it, shaking his head, half-saying words, taking them back, finally saying, as though it were all just nothing but a joke in bad taste, "No, come on." And then again, asking for mercy, decency, humanity, something, "No, come on, no."

"You know who it is," Calavecci told him, almost crooning now. "Spit it out, Ralph. Tell me the name."

Quindero's mouth hung open. His big eyes filled with tears. He couldn't seem to move or breathe or blink; certainly he couldn't talk. Calavecci studied him with mock sympathy, and then said, "Ralph? You really don't get it? Come on, boy, you're smarter than that."

Dwayne got to his feet, surprising everybody, breaking the moment. Ignoring the punk, he went over to the desk and nodded at Calavecci. "You're having too good a time," he said. "I'll be going off on my own now. That was the Seven Oaks Professional Building? Where you picked these people up?"

Calavecci didn't like being interrupted. Irritated, he said, "What do you mean, off on your own?"

Dwayne turned away, finished with Calavecci, and looked at Quindero's tear-stained face. "Shut up, kid," he said, "until you see a lawyer." And he left.

Sending them out on patrol was a lot cleaner.

When Bill Trowbridge woke up, he had to pee real bad. Also, he'd finished the magazines those crooks had let him bring into the locked storage room with him, when they'd taken over the service station. He'd slept for a while, curled up on the hard floor, but now he was awake, and he had to do something, soon.

He'd figured out who those people had to be. The news of the robbery at the stadium had been all over TV and radio yesterday afternoon, before he'd come to work. They'd said it was three men that had done the job, but they must have gotten that part wrong; it was two men and one woman. And they were hiding from the cops
here.

What to do? They were tough and mean, no question about that. They'd beat up one guy at the stadium so bad he was in the hospital. They were, like the radio and TV said, armed and dangerous. He was lucky all they'd done was lock him in here with the batteries and fan belts.

On the other hand, he did have to pee. And he didn't have any more magazines to distract his mind. And who knew how long they meant to keep him in here, or even if they'd remember to let him out before they left. Or if they even intended to let him out. So, for all those reasons, Bill Trowbridge was climbing the walls.

Literally. The room was deep and narrow, crowded with deep high wooden bins and shelves on both sides, all the way to the top, full of auto parts of various kinds. Fourteen feet up was the ceiling, obscured in darkness, far above the hanging light. Bill climbed up the shelves and bins, finding it easy, using the construction on both sides, and when he got to the top the ceiling was Sheetrock. He punched a hole in it with a length of tailpipe from one of the bins, yanked Sheetrock down and out of the way, dumping the pieces as quietly as possible into nearby empty bins—all the bins above the ten-foot level were empty, dusty, dry—and found two-by-six beams up there, sixteen inches apart. The roof, resting on those beams, was made of planks.

The storage room had plenty of tools. All Bill had to do was be careful about noise. Using screwdrivers, pliers, a flat-sided tire iron and a wrench, he gouged away sections of plank, exposing the tar paper and then the gravelly tar of the surface of the roof itself.

The more he worked, the easier it got, because the more room he had to work in. When he first broke through a section of tar paper and tar to the outer air, the sky was still black, but as he worked it began to lighten out there, and when he finally squeezed himself up between two of the support beams and out onto the rough-surfaced roof it was morning. Real early morning, but morning.

The first thing Bill did was go to the edge of the roof at the back of the building, where it overlooked a narrow stretch of scrubland with bushes and skinny little plane trees on it, and pee over the side, trying to hit branches that wouldn't make too much noise. Then he looked around, wondering how best to get himself down off this roof, and saw the police car!

Oh, boy; talk about luck. The police car was even coming
here.
Bill moved as quickly and silently as he could across the roof, seeing the cop get out of his car over there by the pumps and then walk this way, toward the building.

Standing at the front edge of the roof
, just above the office door, Bill waved his arms over his head to attract the cop's attention. "Hey!" he called.

The cop looked up.

The police were stretched thin, having so many places to search, so many routes to guard, so many barricades to man, so many possibilities to think about. That was why they were doing one-man patrols in what they considered the safest places, and how it was that Liss found a cop all alone in his patrol car, half asleep, parked next to a ramp for a narrow rusty iron bridge over old freight yards. There were a few bars and diners in this neighborhood, a few junkyards and machine shops and auto-repair places, but no homes, and no commercial places open at this hour. Liss circled around into the grassy steep slope above the freight yards, where an old chain-link fence was half broken-down, bent out of the way, rusted and useless. Along there, he found a two-foot length of the metal pipe that had originally been part of the frame of the fence, and held it close along his right leg as he came loping down the empty street toward the patrol car, clutching his upper right arm with his left hand as though he'd been wounded and yelling, "Help! Help!"

The cop, startled out of a moony doze, saw this wounded man running forward, scrambled rapidly and awkwardly out to the pavement, and took the metal pipe directly across the face. He fell backward, half in and half against his car, dazed but trying to reach his holstered pistol, and Liss slammed the open door into him, pinning him there while he swung the pipe three more times at that head.

When Liss pulled the door open, the cop slid to the ground. Liss quickly stripped the uniform off him, not wanting blood on it, and stuffed the body into the trunk, noting the shotguns on racks in there, the first-aid equipment, even a small red-handled ax. Couldn't be better.

The uniform fit fairly well; good enough. Sitting behind the wheel, engine and heater on, uniform cap on his head, police radio giving him the ebb and flow of movement through the night, Liss waited. No rush any more.

* * *

He'd had to rush earlier, hurrying out of the old man's house across from the stadium when Brenda showed up in the station wagon. As they'd loaded the duffel bags over there, Liss had looked around frantically for a car to steal, but there wasn't time, and in any case, with so little traffic at this hour, how could he follow them in a car without being spotted?

So he'd had to do it a different way. It was hard, there were times he thought he was going to fail, but he kept going. Out of necessity, he trailed them on foot.

What made it a little easier, they were driving slowly, carefully, obeying the law, calling no attention to themselves, stopping at every stop sign, waiting at every traffic light. They parked at the curb for quite a while when the construction trailer blew up and the streets filled with fire trucks and police cars and ambulances and all the rest of it, and he could take a breather then, hidden beside an exterior staircase to an old tenement building.

After that, when they moved he ran; when they stopped he walked. Sometimes their lights were just faint red dots far away, and once when they made a turn he thought he'd lost them completely. But he managed to keep up, and to see what their idea was at the gas station, and he admired the move. Indoors, safe, warm. They wouldn't leave till morning, and by then he'd be ready.

In the meantime, he dozed in the warm comfort of the police car, the crackly snarl of the radio's infrequent reports keeping him from the mistake of a deeper sleep, and at first light he got out of the car, stretched, went down the slope to relieve himself, got back into the police car, and drove over to the gas station to get rid of Parker and Mackey and Brenda and get, at last, the goddam money.

Would they be awake or asleep? It was still very early. They wouldn't expect trouble after so many peaceful hours hidden away. They didn't know anyone had any idea they were here. And what would they see when he first showed himself to them? A cop.

He parked at the gas pumps, like a regular customer, and walked toward the station building, getting the cop's handgun out of its holster. Advertising posters and grease-pencil announcements obscured much of the office windows, but as he came nearer he saw there was somebody in there, seated at the desk. Parker? Staring at him?

Did they still have the shotguns?

Liss was deciding to shoot through the plate glass, get it over with, when movement suddenly made him look up. There was something on the roof! Nothing but a silhouette against the gray morning sky, looming over him, a black figure like something out of horror stories, waving its arms and yelling. Without any thought at all, in quick panic, Liss raised the pistol and squeezed off a wild shot.

And then all hell broke loose.

Parker looked past the notices taped to the gas station window and watched Liss come this way across the blacktop, that handgun sliding out of the holster. Parker's hands splayed on the metal tabletop in front of him, and he looked down, remembering the shotguns, seeing only the wrench they'd taken away from the kid. He reached for it, even though it was useless, even though he knew Liss was smart enough to shoot him through the window, not bother to come inside. Why should he?

Parker picked up the wrench, and heard a shot. He stared out at Liss, almost a silhouette against the flat gray morning light out there, and the silhouette was arched backward, the arm with the pistol aimed upward. Liss had fired at what? Something on the roof?

Parker heaved the wrench through the plate glass and launched himself out of the chair toward the open doorway to the service area. Would the racket wake Brenda? Would she know to get that station wagon moving?

The answer was yes, but she was even faster than Parker hoped. As he dove through the doorway, meaning to roll, to come up beside the wagon and yank open its rear door, the engine was already kicking over. Before he was on his feet, it was moving, and he came up to see the garage door splinter as the station wagon roared through it. Brenda hunched and grim over the wheel, Mackey just opening his eyes, his mouth a big astonished O, the car screamed through the wreckage it made of the door, spinning and sliding rightward over smashed plywood, bent metal, crushed glass.

Parker dropped to the concrete floor as the station wagon's rear wheels rifled broken pieces back into the garage, peppering the walls and tools with chunks of wood, metal and glass. He lay there, listening, hands and feet poised under him, trying to figure what was the best route now. What's the way out of this now?