The Jugger (5 page)

'... out of it. Come on, Willis, snap out of it. I don't have all day. Get with it, fella, get with it.'

Now there was something else added to it all; somebody poking and pushing at his left shoulder. He complained, and moved around again, twisting on the concrete floor, and all at once he was out of it completely, eyes open, brain working. He sat up and stared into the face of Captain Younger.

They were in a basement, garishly lit by bare bulbs in fixtures along the central beam. The concrete floor was painted a greyish blue. Captain Younger was sitting on the next-to-the-bottom step of the stairs leading up to the main floor, and Parker had been lying on his back right in front of the stairs.

Captain Younger said, You conscious now?'

Parker said, 'I was slugged.'

You sure you didn't fall downstairs?'

Parker shrugged. He was still woozy, having trouble thinking, having trouble making things connect so they made sense. The best thing for now was to say not much of anything; otherwise he might say something stupid and make trouble for himself.

Captain Younger pointed and said, You chopped up the side of your face there pretty good.'

Parker said nothing. He closed his eyes and tried to make his brain come into focus.

Captain Younger said, 'Don't pass out again. I got questions for you.'

'Don't worry.'

'Like for instance,' Captain Younger said, 'What were you digging for?'

Parker opened his eyes. 'What?'

Captain Younger pointed off to the right. 'What were you digging for, Willis? What were you trying to find?'

Parker turned his head, slowly, and looked over where the captain was pointing. There was a coal-bin over there, with wooden slat sides. There wasn't any coal in the coal-bin, because the furnace had long since been converted to oil, and the concrete floor didn't extend into the coal-bin. The coal-bin had a dirt floor, most of which had been dug into. A big mound of dirt was out on the concrete.

Captain Younger said, 'Well?'

'I didn't do that.'

'Come on, Willis, you think I'm stupid?'

Parker squinted up at him, trying to think. Younger wasn't kidding around; he really did think Parker had done that digging. So Parker's first thought, that Younger or somebody working for Younger had been down in the cellar and had slugged him, was probably wrong. There was somebody else in this, too, somebody Younger didn't know anything about.

Tiftus? Could it possibly be Tiftus? Could that little bastard have been the one down here?

Captain Younger leaned forward, his round face inches from Parker's. A thin sheen of perspiration covered his face, glinting like wet varnish. In a hoarser and quieter tone, he said, 'I know what you're looking for, Willis. I knew what you were up to the second you came to town. You found out the old bastard was dead and you figured to just come in here and have everything your own way.'

He wasn't making any sense all. Parker shook his head and said, You're talking Chinese. I'm going to stand up now.'

'Go right ahead.'

Parker reached out and grabbed the staircase banister and used it to drag himself up to standing. Captain Younger had got to his feet in the meantime and retreated, up three more steps, so he was out of Parker's reach.

Parker looked up at him and said, 'Let's go upstairs.'

'What were you digging for, Willis?'

'It's the way I exercise.' He put his hand on the banister again, and started up the steps.

Captain Younger retreated backwards up the stairs, looking affronted. 'You'll tell me, Willis,' he said. His voice was a little thrill. 'You'll tell me anything I want to know. Before I'm done with you…' He didn't finish the sentence; he'd reached the top of the stairs. He backed out of the way and glared, and Parker came on up the stairs and through the hall and into the bathroom.

The face he looked at in the mirror over the sink was a mess. The left side of it, from the jawline up into the hair above his ear, was all mottled red and purple and black, as though somebody had thrown bright-coloured mud on him. A puffiness and darkness was developing around his left eye; unless he did something about it soon, he was going to have a hell of a shiner.

Captain Younger came and stood in the doorway and said, 'That's a real job you did on yourself.'

'Call your tame doctor, I need him.'

'Sure, Willis. Just as soon as you tell me what I want to know.'

Parker was feeling impatient, and he was still rocky from having been slugged, so he said more than he would have usually. He turned to look at Captain Younger and say, 'You know everything already. You know I was digging down there without a shovel, and you know I hit myself on the side of the face. You know what I was looking for. What else do you want?'

'What was that you said? About the shovel?' Captain Younger was so startled he almost crossed the threshold and got close enough for Parker to reach out for him.

Parker said, 'Did you see a shovel down there? What do you think the guy hit me with?'

All of a sudden there was a gun in Captain Younger's hand. 'So you found it,' he said. 'You had an accomplice, and you found it, and he took off with it.'

'With what? When do you start making sense?'

'Where's he going, Willis? There's still a chance for you to get a cut. You tell me where he's going, what he looks like, what name he travels under. I can get out an alarm on him, have him picked up for questioning no matter where he goes. You can't get him, but I can.'

Parker shook his head. 'There's a hell of a lot of morons with guns,' he said. 'I talk to you after I see the doctor.'

Captain Younger seemed to consider for a minute, and then he said, 'So you're not worried about wasting time. So maybe you
know
where he's going.'

Parker waited. Sooner or later Younger was going to have to start making sense.

Younger motioned with the gun. 'All right, Willis,' he said. 'Let's go into the living-room. I'll call Dr. Rayborn for you. He can come right over here and take care of you, and then we'll talk. I'm not taking you down to headquarters; I'm keeping you right here, and when we're done with the doctor you'll tell me everything I want to know.'

They walked into the living-room, Parker first, and Parker settled himself in an overstuffed armchair where the light from the windows was all behind him, where Captain Younger wouldn't be able to see his face very well. Younger got on the phone and made his call and then sat down fat and smug on the sofa, the gun held casually in his lap. His brown suit was baggy and creaseless, his cowboy hat was tipped back on his head. He looked like a yokel Khrushchev.

They sat in silence a minute or two, and then Younger said, 'I know what you think. You think I'm just another hick cop. Well, that's all right, Willis, I don't mind. You go on thinking that, you think that just as long as you can. Dr. Rayborn'll be here in a little while, and he'll get you all fixed up nice and new, and then you can start telling me all about yourself and what your connection was with Joe Sheer.'

It took Parker a few seconds to realize that Captain Younger had just said Joe's real name, not the cover name he'd been buried under. Parker squinted, and saw Captain Younger sitting over there pleased and contented, smiling like the Cheshire cat.

'… all about yourself and what your connection was with Joe Sheer.'

That was easy. What his connection was with Joe Sheer most recently, he had come up to this rotten little town to find out if it was going to be necessary to kill Joe Sheer or not. And all about himself, that was even easier; he was a thief.

Once or twice a year, Parker was in on an institutional robbery — the robbing from organizations rather than from individuals. It wasn't out of humanity that he limited himself to organizations, it was just that organizations had more money than individuals; organizations like banks or jewellery stores or one of those firms that still paid its employees in cash.

Parker wasn't a single-o. He always worked with a pickup group gathered for that single specific job. Every man was a specialist, and Parker's specialities were two; planning and violence. Other men were specialists in opening safes or scaling walls or making up blueprints from nothing more than observation, but Parker was a specialist at planning an operation so it ran smoothly, and at stopping any outsider who might be thinking of lousing things up.

It was rare for a job to take more than a month in the planning and the operation, so it was rare for Parker to spend more than a month to six weeks a year at his work. The rest of the time he lived on the proceeds, usually in a coastal resort centre, under the name Charles Willis. Charles Willis owned pieces of small businesses — parking lots and laundromats and things like that — here and there around the country; they never brought him a dime, but they justified his income on his Federal tax forms. As Charles Willis he had a complete background, documents and everything, enough to satisfy anybody.

He had been Charles Willis in Miami Beach, spending the money from his last job — at a place called Copper Canyon, North Dakota, in the course of which he'd met the woman he was living with now — when the first letter had come from Joe Sheer. It had read:

Parker,
I think I got some trouble here, but I'll take care of it. But maybe you better not try to get in touch with me for a while, until I get everything squared away again. I'm not down in my place in Omaha, but staying up here in my house in Sagamore. If anybody tries to get in touch with you through me for the next while I'll have to tell them to go to you direct if I'm sure of who it is. If I'm not sure, I'll just play dumb, until this trouble straightens itself out. I'll let you know when everything is okay again.
Joe

Joe Sheer was an old-time jugger who'd cracked his first safe the other side of the First World War. He wasn't working any more now, but in his day he'd been one of the best safe and vault men in the business. There wasn't a bank vault made he couldn't open, and he worked at staying on top of the profession. Under three or four names, at different addresses around the country, he got all the trade papers and promotional copy from every safe and vault manufacturer, private protective association, and manufacturer of locks and burglar alarms; and he got all the banking association trade journals. Nor was he, like most juggers, limited in his methods; he could use nitro or the torch or the hammer or a drill, whatever was best for the particular job. When he was active, he'd been in steady demand.

But about five years ago he'd retired. Like Parker, like most of the professionals in this business, he'd had a cover name for years, complete with a faked-up way of earning a livelihood and all the documents you could ask for to prove identity. Among those documents was a Social Security card. When, shortly after his sixty-fifth birthday, he began to receive Social Security payments, Joe Sheer laughed for a week and then retired. His Social Security payments didn't cover the standard of living he was used to, but they didn't have to; he'd salted away some of his take over the years, enough to keep him going clear to the other side of the actuarial tables.

Joe had retired from the active side of the business, but not from the profession entirely. He still sat in on occasional planning sessions for a small piece of the action, and he operated as an answering service of sorts for Parker and a few other guys in the business.

The thing was, when Parker was being Charles Willis, he didn't want anybody contacting him as Parker. Almost everybody else in the business felt the same way; they didn't want other people in the business busting in on them when they were using their cover identities. So Parker, like a lot of others, had a friend who relayed any messages that might come along, who served as the one link between Parker and Charles Willis. Joe Sheer was the friend. If anyone in the business wanted to get in touch with Parker, he had to contact Joe Sheer, tell Joe the story, and wait for Joe to pass the word on to Parker. If Parker then felt like it, he would meet the other guy wherever the original message had said. If he didn't feel like it, there was no answer. His not showing up was its own answer.

For the last five years, that had been the main connection between Parker and Joe Sheer, the message bit. Plus, one time a couple years ago, he'd holed up at Joe's place in Omaha while Joe got him set up for a plastic surgeon to give him a new face; the one he'd carried around till then had got unpopular. Since then, except for occasional messages from other people through Joe, Parker had had no direct contact with him.

When he got the letter, he wondered a little what sort of trouble Joe was in, but since Joe had sounded confident that he could take care of it himself, and since in their business worrying about one's own self was a full-time job, Parker hadn't wasted any sleep over Joe Sheer. He was still flush from the Copper Canyon job anyway, and not looking for work, so it didn't matter to him if the messenger service broke down for a while.

The second letter came a month later. It read: