Comeback

9

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.

It was another ten minute drive to the gas station, during which one police patrol car passed, going the other way. It slowed as they came together, the two cops giving the people in the station wagon a very long stare, but Brenda smiled and waved at them, and they nodded with dignity and drove on.

"One thing I don't want to have to do," Brenda said, sounding a little nervous as she watched the police car recede in her mirror, "is outrun a lot of cops in their town."

"At that point," Parker told her, "we give the whole thing up. Lose the car and the goods, and go to ground."

"Don't even think it," Mackey said.

They saw no more traffic, and then there was the gas station with all its gleaming lights, out ahead of them, an oasis of glitter in the surrounding dark. Beyond the station's lights, occasional smaller lights could be seen going by, fifteen or twenty feet up in the air; the big trucks on the interstate overpass.

"We'll get out here," Parker said to Brenda, "and we'll give you five minutes."

"Fine."

Brenda pulled the station wagon to the curb, and the men got out. Looking back the way they'd come, Parker frowned. Had something moved back there? As Brenda drove away, Parker stepped into the street, peering down the long empty stretch of it. No movement. Just the darkness.

"What is it?"

"Nothing," Parker said.

The gas station was on this side, a block and a half away. They crossed the street and walked down the opposite sidewalk. Facing the gas station was a closed tire store, with sale signs in the windows. They paused there to look across the way, through the large open doorway into the service area. Over there, Brenda was just backing the station wagon into the service area, on the side with the lift, being directed by a skinny kid in white company coveralls and his own baseball cap. He seemed to be the only one on duty tonight.

"We have time," Parker said. "I want a look at the ramp."

They walked on another long block to the two on-ramps for the interstate, and saw a state highway patrol car parked on each one, tucked up partway along the ramp, so you'd already have made the turn before you saw it. "Just like we thought," Mackey said.

'Just like we knew," Parker said.

The one advantage was, where the highway patrolmen were, they wouldn't be aware of anything going on at the gas station. Leaving them there, keeping to the shadows, Parker and Mackey walked back and went beyond the gas station again before crossing to its side of the street and making their approach.

The kid had the station wagon up on the lift now and was checking the brake fluid, which should have kept him occupied, except that there was a bell over the office door that sounded when Parker entered, Mackey coming in behind him. Parker went to the doorway connecting the office with the service area, while Mackey went straight to the messy metal desk and riffled through the drawers, shoving credit card slips and other junk out of the way.

The kid came in fast, polite and ready to serve, but holding the wrench he'd used to open the brake drum cap. "Sorry, gentlemen, I didn't hear your car come—" He took in the absence of a car out by the pumps at the same time he saw Mackey at the desk. "Hey!"

Mackey straightened, shaking his head at the kid, disappointed in him. "You don't have a gun in here," he complained.

Bewildered, the kid stared at Mackey and said, "No! What do we want with a—? What are you doing there!"

Mackey came around the desk toward the kid, spreading his empty hands, saying, "That's a hell of a thing. What if we were robbers?"

It had crossed the kid's mind that that's just what they were. Blinking from Parker to Mackey, both of them now too close to him, he said, "You're not?"

"Not at the moment," Mackey said, and grinned.

Parker held out his hand. "If you give me the wrench," he said, "the lady behind you won't have to crack your head open."

Everything was happening too fast; the kid could never get set, never get a response ready before the encounter took another turn. Looking over his shoulder, he saw Brenda there behind him, holding up a shiny large socket wrench for him to see. She wasn't smiling. She looked businesslike. The kid said, "You're with these guys?"

Mackey laughed. "She's the boss!" he announced. "That's Ma Barker!"

"The wrench," Parker said.

The kid shrugged, and handed it over. "If you're not gonna hold the place up," he said, "then I don't get it."

"We're all going to stay here a while," Parker told him. "Where do you turn off the lights?"

This astonished the kid more than anything so far: "You want to close,?"

"You're getting a vacation," Mackey explained. "An unexpected brief vacation."

Parker tapped the kid's chest with the wrench, leaving a grease smear on the white coveralls. "The lights."

The kid blinked, then pointed at the circuit breaker box on the back wall behind the desk. "We do it there," he said. "You can't turn them all off, though. There's some stuff we've got to leave on."

"For now," Parker said, "just turn off the outside lights."

Reluctant but obedient, the kid did as he was told, wide-eyed, as though it were some kind of sacrilege to close a 24-hour gas station.

Next, they had him lower the hydraulic lift, to bring the station wagon back down, and shut and lock the service area door, a double-width overhead garage door full of rectangular windows. Then they looked around at their new environment and found, at the right rear of the service area, a door to a storage room that was tucked in behind the office. Long and narrow, the storage room was full of fan belts and cans of oil and high wooden racks of tires. The door was open, but there was a padlock on the hasp on the outside.

Mackey said, ''Write down the combination, will you?"

"I'm not sure I know it," the kid said, deciding to be crafty.

Mackey shrugged. "That's up to you," he said. "We're gonna lock you in there now, so you won't be in our hair. I figured to let you out when we go, but you want to take your chances on somebody coming along, that's up to you."

The kid remembered the combination then, and wrote it on a service order pad. He also asked if he could bring into the room with him the two magazines from the desk that he'd been reading, and they said okay. He went in without trouble, dragging along a wooden chair and carrying his magazines. He even grinned at them tentatively as they closed the door.

Fixing the padlock, Mackey said, "Not a bad kid. A bright future, I think."

"A smart kid," Parker said. "He knows he wants a future."

They turned off the rest of the lights, shutting the station entirely. A little illumination seeped out from under the storage room door, where the kid was reading his magazines, but not enough to be seen out in the street.

Mackey and Brenda caught up on some of their missed sleep in the station wagon. Parker made himself as comfortable as he could on the vinyl stuffed chair in the office, feet up on the desk. He dozed off a few times, never for very long, and then one time he opened his eyes and it was daylight; six or six-thirty in the morning.

And what had awakened him was a city police car out there, just pulling to a stop, this side of the pumps. There was only one cop in it. He got out on this side, and turned his back to look out over the top of his car at the street, looking left and right. His uniform was the wrong size, legs too short, jacket too loose.

Parker put his feet on the floor and leaned forward. The cop turned and started toward the office, right hand unhooking the flap on his holster, closing around the service revolver in there. Under the police cap, it was George Liss.