Plunder Squad (10 page)

Beaghler had flung himself to the ground, and was lying there face down with both forearms over his head. Parker dropped to his right, half lying and half sitting against the side of the gully. He braced his arm against a boulder and fired twice at Uhl. The second shot, Uhl flipped forward, dug his left shoulder into the ground, rolled completely over, got to his feet still running, and ran off to the right on an angle away from the house for half a dozen strides before realizing he was going the wrong way. Parker was just squeezing off another shot at him when he veered back in the right direction, so that one missed.

There was no telling where the one bullet had hit, or how much longer Uhl could keep moving. Parker got to his feet again and ran down the rest of the gully and out across the flat toward the house.

Uhl reached the building, but didn’t go inside. Instead, he ran around the house toward the car. Parker ran across the flat, heading for the other corner of the house, which was nearest him.

The Ford engine roared. Parker reached the house, ran along the side and out to the front, and saw the Ford just starting to move, making a hard U-turn to come around toward the dirt road leading away from here.

Parker braced himself against the corner porch support. The Ford’s rear wheels were spinning in the dirt, Uhl apparently having the accelerator on the floor. The car was rocking, making its tight U, picking up speed. Parker fired two shots into the driver, and knew they’d both hit home.

The car was still moving, still accelerating, still on its tight curve; and now the horn was blowing. Uhl’s foot was on the accelerator, his chest was on the horn ring. The car was coming around in its circle, shooting up double spouts of dust in its wake, moving faster every second.

Parker ducked away to the left and the Ford smashed into the corner of the porch where he’d been standing. The roof support, old and dry, snapped like a pencil, and that whole end of the porch roof came down, crashing onto the car’s hood.

The horn was still blaring, the wheels were still spinning and gouging up dust storms, and now the engine could be heard laboring higher and higher, straining up toward the top of its scale with Uhl’s foot still pressed on the accelerator. Uhl was a dark slumped figure inside the car, unmoving, past worrying about.

Beaghler. Parker turned away from the straining Ford and hurried back down the side of the house toward the hill again. He could see Beaghler sitting on the ground back there, a few feet up the slope.

There wasn’t any more need to run. Parker strode away
from the house and across the flat. Behind him, the horn brayed and the engine screamed.

He was halfway to Beaghler when the explosion came. It wasn’t very big, a flat
crump
sound that vibrated the ground slightly and faded at once in the surrounding emptiness. Parker looked over his shoulder and saw a line of greasy black smoke writing itself upward into the air.

Beaghler hadn’t moved. When Parker got to him, Beaghler grinned slightly, shakily, and said, “Well, you got him.”

“Yes.”

“I’m no trouble to you,” Beaghler said. “You don’t have to do anything about me.”

“That’s the mistake I made with Uhl,” Parker said.

Parker drove the ATV southward through scrubland, looking for a way over or around the ridge separating him from the house. The thick brush-stroke of black smoke drawn upward into the sky was his guide to where he wanted to be, but for the first twenty minutes he couldn’t find a way to get there. Then the hill flattened somewhat, in an area where the trees grew thicker, and Parker worked his way through the trees as though through a labyrinth, occasionally having to back out of a spot where the trunks were too close together. He couldn’t see the smoke from in here, but he maintained his direction fairly well, and when he emerged at last to where the trees were once more sparse, the smoke was up to his left and he was on the correct side of the ridge.

Driving was easier over here, on the flats, but it still took a quarter of an hour to cover the distance back to the house. When he got there, he saw that the house too had caught fire, and both house and car were now little more than black skeletons, both still smoldering. He made a wide sweep around the spot, picked up the dirt road, and headed east.

Something over an hour later he came to a blacktop road which was also mainly east-west. He followed it east until he came to a town that called itself Tracy. At a pay phone in a gas
station there, while the ATV’s tank was being filled, he made a long-distance call to Mackey. There was no answer from his room, so Parker told the desk clerk, “Send somebody out to the pool for him. He’ll be out there.”

It took a couple minutes, but abruptly there was a click and Mackey’s open voice: “Yeah? Hello?”

“Hello, it’s me.”

“What? Oh, yeah.” He sounded very cheerful. “How’d things go?”

“Good. What about things there?”

Mackey’s big grin could be heard in his voice. “It’s on,” he said.

Stan Devers was walking. It was about eleven at night, traffic on the highway was light, and as he strode along the shoulder the crunching of gravel beneath his feet gave him a kind of company.

Lights up ahead—something useful? Yes. A motel. Devers smiled, but didn’t hurry, didn’t alter his pace. He had all the time in the world, unfortunately.

It took nearly ten minutes to get to the motel, a sprawled-out complex of buildings with a swimming pool, a restaurant, and a separate bar. Devers angled across the blacktop to the office and went inside.

There was a girl clerk on duty at the desk. Devers walked over to her, smiling his most easygoing smile. He was twenty-eight, tall, muscular in a beachboy way, with blond hair and a pleasant square-jawed face. He’d had a string of bad luck recently, but he still looked presentable in his sport jacket and slacks, and he only took it as his due when the girl returned his smile with warmth and some obvious interest.

Hustle the girl? No; better the original idea. He said, “Has Mr. Peabody checked in yet?”

The smile grew doubtful. “Peabody?”

“Henry Peabody. He might have been delayed.”

“I’ll just check,” she said, and took a minute to go through her cards. “Sorry,” she said. “Not here yet.”

Devers gestured toward the leatherette sofa on the opposite wall. “I’ll just stick around and wait.”

“Sure,” she said.

There were travel brochures in a metal stand near the sofa. Devers read about the Grand Canyon and other geographical celebrities, and from time to time a customer would arrive in the office and check in. Devers glanced up each time, then looked back at the photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge or whatever.

Once a drunk came in—somewhat heavy-set, fiftyish, well-dressed, florid, drunk but under control. His speech was too careful and his walk too careless, but he carried his alcohol with the assurance of long familiarity. Devers looked at him, put the brochure (“See Great Gorge!”) down on the sofa, got to his feet, and strolled over to the exit door. It was mostly glass, and he looked out at a bronze Toronado sitting out there with headlights and engine both on. But there was a woman in the passenger seat, a young redhead in a V-neck blouse, who gave him a look of flat disinterest and turned away. Devers shrugged and went back to the sofa and reached for another brochure.

The girl made a couple of efforts to strike up a conversation, during lulls between customers: “Looks like your man is really late,” that sort of thing. Devers replied with friendliness and smiles, but also with a remoteness that tended to stifle chit-chat; after a while the girl found paper work to busy herself with instead.

He’d been there almost an hour when the second drunk came in, a carbon copy of the first, except that he was carrying a somewhat heavier load. Once again Devers got to his feet and strolled over to the exit door, and this time it was a Mercedes-Benz sedan purring away out there. And no one in the passenger seat.

Devers stepped outside, looked both ways, opened the rear door of the Mercedes and slid inside. Sample cases, forms, all the paraphernalia of the traveling salesman were scattered around back here. Devers pulled a case up from the floor, put it
on the seat, and got down on the floor himself. It was awkward and uncomfortable down there, but at the same time comforting, as though he were a kid again, playing a game. The engine throbbed throughout the car, and very little light came in and down to where Devers was hiding.

Three or four minutes later the drunk came back out, carrying his room key. He stuffed the key in his shirt pocket, got behind the wheel, and drove slowly around the main building and through the secondary buildings, tapping the brake from time to time, apparently while looking for room numbers on the doors going by. Devers stayed where he was, and waited.

At last the car made a slow tight turn and came to a slightly-too-abrupt stop. Devers raised himself from the floor as the drunk switched off the motor and lights. Devers’ left arm came around the drunk’s head, he caught the drunk’s throat in the crook of his elbow, and he used all his weight to pull backward and down, using the head support atop the seatback to hold the drunk’s head in position while his forearm cut off all air.

The struggle was a short silent flurry. The most dangerous thing was that it would occur to the drunk to lean on the horn, but surprise and fear and drink combined to keep that from happening. Instead, he lunged around as best he could, flailing his arms, kicking out with his feet, scratching with his fingers against the cloth of Devers’ sport-jacket sleeve. Devers kept the pressure steady, and the struggle tapered quickly away, alcohol cutting down the reserve oxygen in the body, bringing unconsciousness a little closer to begin with.

The drunk sagged, his chin against Devers’ elbow. He fluttered twice more, like a beached fish, and then he was still.

Devers cautiously released him, a bit at a time. No movement, though the drunk’s breath could still be heard—and smelled. Devers reached around him, found the room key in his shirt pocket, and got out of the car.

It was a ground-floor unit in a two-story section of the motel. Devers opened the door, then went back and got the drunk and carried him inside. Dumping him on the bed, he shut the room door, then went through his pockets. Eighty-seven dollars
in the wallet, plus credit cards. Sixty-two cents in change. Nothing else of interest.

There were Venetian blinds over the window. Devers cut the pull cords loose and used them to tie the drunk’s hands and feet. A towel made a useful gag.

Next, the phone. Devers picked it up, and when the motel operator came on he said, “This is room three twenty-seven. I want to leave a call for eleven in the morning.”

“Eleven o’clock. Yes, sir.”

“Thank you.”

The
Do Not Disturb
card was in the writing-table drawer with the Gideon Bible and the postcards showing the main dining room. Devers went out, pulled the door shut and locked behind him, and hung the card over the knob. Then he went over and got behind the wheel of the Mercedes.

It was a diesel, the only diesel automobile sold in America. The fuel gauge was three-quarters full. Devers backed out of the slot, made a U-turn, and drove out of the motel to the highway. The city he’d left was to the east; he turned west.

A diesel accelerates slowly, but otherwise runs smoothly and quietly. Devers was impatient till he got the car up to sixty-five, but then he switched on the radio and listened to rock music while driving along.

Check-out time back at that motel was noon. When the eleven o’clock wake-up call wasn’t answered, the operator wouldn’t worry much; people do that sort of thing all the time. It would probably be shortly after twelve when the manager would finally decide to unlock the door and see what the story was. Meaning that Devers had a good eleven hours to be somewhere else. At sixty-five miles an hour, there were a lot of somewhere elses he could get to.

Four years ago Stan Devers had been an Air Force enlisted man, having been kicked out of ROTC in college because of a dislike for discipline combined with a contempt for one particular officer. He’d been a Finance Clerk, on a base where the payroll was still in cash—that kind of setup didn’t happen any more—and he’d worked out a way to take the payroll one
month. He’d gotten involved with a few professional thieves, and they’d done the robbery, but things had gone wrong and Devers’ connection with it had become known. He’d had to leave, and had lived in various ways ever since. One of the other people in on the job, a guy named Parker, had sent him to a retired ex-thief named Handy McKay, now running a diner in Presque Isle, Maine, and McKay had gotten him in on a few jobs since. But some bad luck had happened over the last few weeks, and the end of it was Devers walking out of that city back there with nothing in his pockets but lint.

Well, now he had a car, and eighty-seven dollars and sixty-two cents, and a wallet full of identification in the name Matthew Dawson, and several credit cards in the same name, and a good eleven hours to go someplace where he could see about changing his luck around.

He drove west steadily until nine-thirty in the morning, and then dropped in to a little town with a diner, where he had breakfast and phoned Handy McKay. When Handy came on, Devers identified himself and said, “I’m really ready for you to have something for me.”

“As a matter of fact,” Handy said, “I got a call about you just yesterday. Our mutual friend would like to see you.”

Devers smiled. He hadn’t seen Parker since the Air Force job. “That would be very nice,” he said.

Lou Sternberg stepped out of the plane and went carefully down the steps toward the tarmac, turning his raincoat collar up around his neck. He preferred airports where you went directly from the plane to the terminal, through an enclosed walkway. The sun was shining and the air was fairly warm, but there was a breeze; no sense looking for trouble.

He wasn’t going to be met at the airport, which was just as well. Give him a chance to relax a bit from the trip before having any business discussions. He carried his small brown suitcase into the terminal and out the other side to the taxi stand. The driver he drew was young and long-haired and hungry-looking; he had cowboy written all over him. Unfortunate, but there wasn’t much choice. Sternberg hoped the motel wouldn’t be too far away.

A short and stout man, Sternberg had difficulty getting into the back seat of most cars, including this one. He pushed the suitcase ahead of himself along the seat, then puffed and grunted himself into position, while the driver watched him alertly—even, perhaps, impatiently—in the rear-view mirror. “First Standard Motel,” Sternberg told him as he shut the door behind himself, and the driver immediately flipped down the metal arm to start the meter and tromped his foot on the accelerator.
The cab jerked away from the curb, snapping Sternberg’s head back. He pursed his lips, and braced himself for the ride.

He did try to keep quiet, keep his opinions to himself, but the driver was just too recklessly incompetent. After running a stop sign at the terminal exit, he began to dart and weave through fairly heavy traffic, bouncing Sternberg and his suitcase back and forth on the rear seat, until at last Sternberg leaned forward, clutched the seatback in front of him, and called, “I’m not in any hurry.”

“I am.” The driver hunched over his wheel, and didn’t slacken speed.

“Perhaps I should take another taxi,” Sternberg said. He could feel his emotional state becoming increasingly unstable, just what he didn’t want before a business meeting.

“Look, fella,” the driver said, “I got a living to make.”

“You’re in the wrong occupation,” Sternberg told him. “You don’t know the first thing about driving an automobile. Now either slow down to the normal traffic flow, or find me another taxi.”

The driver responded with grumbling—the words “coward” and “chicken” were mixed in with it—but he also slowed down, and the rest of the fifteen-minute journey was at least bearable.

As they turned in at the motel, Sternberg thought he recognized Ed Mackey on the diving board over at the swimming pool; then the figure dove into the blue water. Sternberg shivered inside his raincoat.

The fare was two dollars; Sternberg gave him two singles and a quarter, and the driver studied the money in disgust and said, “Thanks, sport.”

“I would usually give fifty cents,” Sternberg said, “but I would like to encourage you to enter some different profession for which you might have more aptitude.”

The driver spun away in a cloud of bad temper, and Sternberg carried his suitcase into the office. He’d made his reservation in advance, so that was all right, but then there was trouble finding a bellboy to carry the bag to his room. “Most
people have cars,” the desk clerk said, as though Sternberg were somehow at fault in not having one.

Sternberg pursed his lips. He said nothing, but his mind was full of acid comments on the continuing decline of service in America. Every time he came back, it seemed, the country had slid even further into its morass of sullen ineptitude. His little town house in London—2, Montpelier Gardens, S.W.6—was such a haven from all of this arrogant incompetence, it was a pity ever to have to leave it. But, as some unsung philosopher once said, “Don’t shit where you eat.” London was where Sternberg lived, with his plants and his promenades and his piano; he would never work there, never. The United States was where he earned his living, the necessary returns to the charnel house which made the London town house possible.

At last an ill-dressed and ill-dispositioned bellboy was found, and he led the way, carrying the suitcase and room key, out of the office and around the blacktop roadway toward the rooms.

They passed this time closer to the pool. That was Ed Mackey, now climbing up the ladder at the deep end. Mackey swept the hair back out of his eyes, looked over toward Sternberg going by in his raincoat, and waved, grinning. Sternberg touched the side of a finger to the brim of his cap in response, and moved on, leaving Mackey in his wake, standing there dripping beside the pool, hands on his hips, a big grin on his face.

The room was, of course, a plastic replica of an Italian Line stateroom. Sternberg sighed, placed a folded dollar bill in the bellboy’s flaccid hand, and firmly closed the door behind him.

Ghastly. Drinking glasses in the bathroom were encased in little white paper bags imprinted with a message including the word “sanitized.” A similar message was on the paper band bridging the toilet seat. It was like dating a sexual hysteric who can never stop talking about her virginity.

Motel cleanliness is next to motel paranoia; in the closet the hangers were in two sections, separable, so that the part which could be removed from the closet was useless without the part
attached to the crossbar. Thus the motel protected itself from those who would rent a room only as a ruse to enable them to steal hangers.

The air conditioner had been on, but Sternberg switched it off first thing, turned the thermostat up to seventy-three, and opened the window slightly. By the time he’d unpacked and de-sanitized everything, the air in the room had a bit of life in it. Sternberg stripped to his boxer shorts, turned down the bed, settled himself comfortably with the pillows behind his back, and opened the Anthony Powell novel he’d started on the plane. It was Magnus Donners he wanted to identify with, but he kept finding his sympathies going to Widmerpool.

Forty-five minutes later the phone rang. It was, as Sternberg had expected, Ed Mackey: “Hello, Lou?”

“Speaking,” Sternberg said.

“This is Ed.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I guess you want to rest up for a while.”

“If possible.”

“We’re gonna have a meeting tonight. I’ll pick you up at nine.”

“Fine,” Sternberg said.

“Have a good trip?”

“As good as could be expected,” Sternberg said. “I’ll see you at nine,” he said, to end the chit-chat. He hung up, and went immediately back to his book.