Comeback (4 page)

After that, they mostly watched television, with the sound very low. Which meant they mostly watched other angles of what was going on outside. The half-million-dollar robbery at the arena—whether the exaggeration was Archibald's, the cops', or the television people's, was hard to guess—was the biggest event in this town since the last Rolling Stones farewell tour.

Around nine o'clock, Mackey moved the curtain slightly at the corner of the living room window, looked out, and said, "Parker, they're gonna still be here tomorrow morning."

The idea was, Brenda was expected at six in the morning. She'd drive by in a station wagon they'd promoted earlier, and if things seemed all right she'd come on into the parking area, they'd switch the goods, set the fuse on the bomb, and take off. (The only way to be sure they wouldn't leave incriminating evidence in the trailer was to blow it up.) But now Mackey, shaking his head as he looked out the window, said, "When Brenda gets here, she's gonna have to check in with the cops."

"They'll be gone," Parker said. "You're just getting antsy."

"And that's the truth," Mackey agreed, moving away from the window, sitting down again. "I never lived inside a tin can before," he explained. "Now I know how minestrone feels."

"How does Tom Carmody feel," Liss said tensely, "that's all I want to know."

Parker said, "He's got a concussion. He'll come out of it tomorrow groggy. They won't lean on him very hard, not right away. By the time they're really looking him over, he won't be nervous any more."

"Tom," Liss said, "will
always
be nervous."

Parker shrugged. "So will you, I guess."

Mackey leaned back, fingers laced behind his head, aggressive grin on his face. "Snowbound with my pals," he said. "Everybody getting along. No problems. From here on in, everything's gravy."

A flat metallic
click
woke Parker. He opened his eyes and in the darkness saw the dull glint of the shotgun barrels a foot from his face. Beyond them, Liss's eyes stood out, the whites luminous, as though lit from within.

Making a hoarse scared rale in his throat, Liss pulled the second trigger, and that
click
sounded again as Parker kicked him in the chest. Liss bounced backward into the wall, and Parker's left hand went up and closed around the barrels, yanking the shotgun away. Grasping the barrels with both hands, he surged up from the sofa and lunged the shotgun forward, the butt smashing into Liss's face.

"Hey! What the hell?" Mackey came boiling up from the other sofa, getting in Parker's way, the two of them stumbling around in the cramped space as Liss fell to the floor, then crawled quickly through the doorway into the other room.

"It's
Liss,"
Parker said, pushing Mackey away. "Wanting it all."

"Son of a bitch."

Parker went to one knee, felt under the sofa cushion, came out with just one of the shells. Getting to his feet, he broke the shotgun as he went through the doorway. The exit door stood open. Thumbing in the shell, slapping the shotgun shut, Parker crossed to see Liss out there, hesitating over the three duffel bags.

They'd each crammed their third of the take into one of the bags, and Liss had moved all three outside before turning to rid himself of his partners: one barrel into Parker, then quickly one into Mackey, all of them together in the narrow room. If Parker hadn't quietly emptied the three shotguns earlier tonight, one time when he had gone to the john and the other two were watching television, he and Mackey would be dead.

Liss had thought he might grab one or more of the bags anyway, on his way out, but when he saw Parker in the doorway he gave that up and just ran. Parker jumped down to the asphalt and watched Liss dash across the parking area, bent low and weaving as he went. Parker stood where he was, shotgun in both hands, not pointing anywhere in particular.

Mackey leaped down beside him, empty hands closed into fists. "Shoot the cocksucker! What's the matter with you?"

"No need," Parker said. "And a noise could draw a crowd."

Furious, Mackey said, "Don't leave him
alive,
God damn it." He acted as though he wanted to pull the shotgun out of Parker's hands, and was restraining himself with difficulty.

Liss was out of sight now. The police had finished clearing out of here a little after ten, and the three in the trailer had gone to sleep around midnight, three hours ago, Liss on the sofa in the office, with the money and the guns. He could have just taken the money and left, but he hadn't wanted Parker and Mackey behind him the rest of his life.

Apparently, Mackey returned the feeling. "Parker," he said, "that was a mistake. We could have afforded a little noise, not to have him around any more."

Parker never saw any point in arguing over past events. He said, "Can you call Brenda?"

"Yeah, you're right," Mackey said. "We can't stay here any more." Peering away into the night where Liss had disappeared, he said, "He'll need time to get guns and friends, but I'll bet you, Parker, he still thinks this money is his."

Parker sat on the weedy ground, the chain link fence against his back, the reloaded shotgun on his lap. Out ahead of him, in the darkness, beyond the narrow strip of scrubland, the empty asphalt parking area stretched across to the big round bulk of the arena. Off to the right, its metal side picking up the glints of distant streetlights, waited the construction trailer. The three sacks of money were back inside it, and the padlock was once more in place on the door.

Parker had been seated here for twenty minutes, and so far nothing had happened. The only weapons they had were the shotguns, so Mackey had gone off unarmed to find a phone booth and call Brenda. She'd come to where he was, pick him up, and then drive on to the arena.

This town wasn't George Liss's home base, so he shouldn't immediately be able to lay his hands on guns and colleagues. There was time enough.

The car that nosed into the parking area entrance, way over by the arena building, wasn't a station wagon. It paused just inside the parking area, then switched off its headlights. In darkness, it drove slowly around on the asphalt, stopping two or three times, pausing, then driving on, moving in apparently random ways.

Liss? With friends? Parker lay flat against the fence, shotgun tucked in against his side, and watched the car move around the parking area like a hunting dog that's lost the scent.

Eventually the people in the car saw the construction trailer and drove over to it, still with no lights. They stopped beside the trailer and two men got out, one from the front seat and one from the back. When they opened the two right-hand doors, the interior light went on, and Parker could see that neither of them was Liss. Nor was the third man, the driver. The strangers shut the car doors, killing the light, and went over to look at the trailer, poking at its padlock.

Parker sat up, holding the shotgun in both hands. If they tried to break into the trailer he'd have to move against them. He had extra shells in his shirt pocket, but could only fire twice before having to reload. He should be closer, to put one charge into the two at the trailer door and the other into the driver. To give them something as a distraction while he reloaded.

Slowly, silently, he got to his feet and moved to his right, to put the bulk of the trailer between himself and the three newcomers. But as he edged up closer they moved away from the trailer, losing interest in it. Parker hunkered down, and the two guys got back into their car. In the brief moment when the interior light was on, he could see they were arguing among themselves, all three. He could hear the driver grind gears, and the car jerked away.

It made one more stop, over by the arena, and Parker saw the light come on briefly as the two guys got out again and went over to look at the accordion gates closed and locked over the broad arena entrance. They didn't seem to have anything particular in mind. They
were
dogs who'd lost a scent.

Finally they got back into their car, and this time it drove away entirely, out the exit from the parking area and out of sight. Two minutes later, another pair of headlights appeared way over there, and when Parker hunkered down next to the trailer to silhouette the car it was the station wagon.

This vehicle switched down to parking lights as it turned this way, then came straight across the empty lot to the trailer and stopped. Brenda was driving, Mackey beside her.

Mackey, more sensible than the strangers in the other car, had removed the bulb from the interior light, so nothing flashed when he climbed out and came across to Parker and said, "Did you make those guys?"

"Don't know them," Parker told him. He still held the shotgun and kept glancing toward the parking area entrance.

"Our delay is," Mackey said, "they were watching the motel. They followed Brenda when she left to pick me up. She took some time and shook them before she got to me, and told me about it, and damn if they weren't right ahead of us three blocks from here. We hung back and watched them come in and fuck around and then come back out. What did they do in here?"

"Looked lost," Parker said. Now he leaned the shotgun against the trailer and did the combination on the padlock as he said, "They know something, or they think something, but not enough. They came over here and sniffed around the trailer, but not as if they knew for sure this was it. It's like they think we didn't leave, but they don't know what happened instead. They were trying to figure out how to get into the arena, like maybe we're still in there."

"Friends of Liss?"

"Or Carmody's girl friend," Parker suggested. He pulled open the trailer door. "Too many people hanging around."

"Time to go someplace else," Mackey agreed. He opened the station wagon's cargo door, and he and Parker carried the three duffel bags from the trailer to lay them side by side on the station wagon's floor, like mail sacks. Then Parker put the shotgun in the office with the other two and plugged the bomb into the electric outlet beside the desk. He and Mackey got into the front seat with Brenda. They drove away from there, and three minutes later the trailer exploded itself into a million guitar picks.

Brenda drove, Mackey sat in the middle, and Parker was on the right. He bent his head sometimes to look at the outside mirror on his door, but nothing showed behind them. Four in the morning, this was a quiet town.

Except, of course, when a construction trailer blows up with a force that rattles windows a block away. The trio in the car heard it go, and Brenda immediately pulled into the curb among a line of parked cars, cutting the lights and engine. They kept their heads down and waited, and a couple minutes later the parade of official vehicles started: fire engines, police cars, emergency service trucks, all thundering along at top speed, sirens wailing and red-and-white gumdrops and tootsie rolls flashing.

The flow of excited public servants lasted five minutes or so, and finally ebbed with the appearance of a bright red fire chief's station wagon, making a slower and more dignified approach to the scene.

They let that last one go by, and then Brenda started up their own station wagon and took them farther away from the center of excitement. "Where next?" she said.

Mackey said, "Well, we can't go back to the motel, I know that much. Those extra guys, whoever they are, that's where they'll go, back where they were watching Brenda, stake it out, wait for us."

"I know," Parker said.

Brenda said, "I want to tell you, Ed, I'll be leaving a whole lot of cosmetics back in that room."

"We'll buy you a suitcase of the stuff," Mackey promised her, "out of Liss's share."

"Good."

"But the other problem is," Mackey went on, "we can't go to that empty house where we were gonna stash the goods, because naturally Liss knows about that place, and he just might show up there."

"Well, we can't drive around all night," Brenda said, taking a random right turn. "Some cop'11 stop us just on general principles, and then he'll want to look at our laundry back there."

Mackey said, "The same thing would happen if we try to drive
out
of town. This is a very tense location right now. And if we go check into some other hotel somewhere at this hour in the night, we're still drawing too much of the wrong kind of attention."

"What we want now," Parker said, "is an all-night gas station."

Mackey frowned, leaning against Brenda to look at the gas gauge on the dashboard. "Why?"

Brenda, quicker than that, said, "I saw one out by the interstate."

Looking past Mackey's confused frown at Brenda, Parker said, "We'll get out a block before you reach the place. You go on in, you tell the guy you just got off the interstate because there's something knocking under the hood and you don't know what it is."

"The dumb broad in the car," Brenda said.

"That's right."

Mackey's frown turned to a smile. "He puts it on the rack," he said. "Inside."

Brenda said, "So I better tell him it's something with the brakes. Otherwise, we'll just stay outside by the pumps and he'll look under the hood."

Mackey beamed at Brenda's profile. "You see, Parker?" he said. "You see what I mean?"

"Yes," Parker said, and bent his head to look in the outside mirror once more. Something? He squinted at the distorting mirror—
objects in mirror are closer than they appear
was etched into the glass—but there was nothing back there but parked cars, dark houses, streetlights, traffic lights playing solitaire.
Had
there been something? Hard to tell. Nothing now. Maybe it had been a car crossing an intersection back there.