Interface

Nineteen

When Gus Rizzato had arrived at San Francisco International, he had first sought out a white courtesy telephone as instructed, had duly spoken to Nolan Avery — who was a short, rotund, worried-looking man in a green suit.

“He’s here now,” Nolan Avery had said. “He’s having a beer in that little bar off the South Terminal concourse.”

“Where’s his car?”

“Bottom level, down at the north end under the air blower in a No Parking area. Our man missed it first time around, but went back—”

“All right, I’ll page you again in a few minutes, give you a phone number. You call me there when Docker starts back for his car. Got that?”

“Yes, sir, Mr Rizzato.” Avery’s voice had paused. “That other man, that private detective or whoever he is, hasn’t shown up yet.”

“Probably still on the freeway. There was a hell of a pile-up at South City. I went around, but cars that had gone by that exit before they started the rerouting are stuck until they clear it. He was a few minutes ahead of me, so he’s still sitting there.” Rizzato had chuckled, then his voice had hardened. “Remember, when he shows up, you tell him nothing. Docker hasn’t shown, you’ve never heard of me. Got that?”

“Yes, Mr Rizzato.”

Now Gus Rizzato sat in the phone booth, waiting for Docker’s return to the parking garage. Nolan Avery had the number. Rizzato’s face was composed, without impatience or expectation. He found a pimple under his chin, seemed to take sensual pleasure in popping it and wiping his thumbnail on his trouser leg. Twice, after making sure no one was in sight, he stepped from the booth to draw his knife from his neck sheath with that blinding, practiced speed. When the knife was in his hand, his eyes got a moist, hot look.

The phone rang. Avery’s voice said, “Docker’s just going down the ramp to the luggage area. I think he’s on his way to the garage.”

“All right, peel off,” snapped Rizzato.

“I’d better follow him to make sure—”

“Peel off.”

It took Docker a few minutes longer than it should have, but finally, standing in the shadows a few cars away from the yellow Montego, Rizzato could hear the echoing, uneven footsteps approaching. Docker stopped in the shadows a dozen feet from his car.

Rizzato drew his lips back from his teeth in a mirthless grin, began walking toward the big blond man whom he had never seen before but recognized instantly from the descriptions. He called, “Is that your car, sir?”

Then, in seconds, he was in position. He looked upward to draw Docker’s eyes, got his hand on his knife with a casual gesture. Then his arm swept down, the knife now an extension of himself, and drove the blade up under Docker’s sternum.

That’s when things went wrong.

Docker leaned back, mouth open, to see where whatever had apparently fallen on the small man’s head had come from. It should have left his solar plexus beautifully open to attack. But Docker kept right on arching back, past the vertical. As he did, his right foot moved back about eighteen inches and planted itself at right angles to Rizzato. His right knee flexed slightly, taking his weight.

But Rizzato was already driving his knife in and up at the place where Docker’s middle had been, face contorted with effort and with a delighted rage. There was no way he could check the lunge, even though Docker’s body had moved back just beyond the furthest reach of the knife jab. Rizzato grunted with effort as his blade found only empty air. Docker’s left knee already had pumped up to his waist and was snapping his leg straight out.

Docker’s big shoe, turned so the side of his foot was parallel to the concrete floor, crashed into Gus Rizzato’s chest. The force of the kick smashed the little man against the next car with his arms flailing for balance. The knife went flying, landed a dozen paces away where an overhead fluorescent glared down on it.

Docker got one quick stride toward it, cried out, and crumpled with both hands clutching his apparently traitorous right knee. Rizzato, seeing this, found strength to drag in air, enough to get to the knife and pick it up. He leaned back, gasping, against the side of a car with the knife gleaming dully in his right hand.

“Old... war wound, Docker?” he panted mockingly.

Docker was on one knee. The light glinted off his glasses. His head was up, his mouth open, as his left hand scrabbled around for the dropped car keys. His right hand found the handle of the car door to drag him up. He stood with his back to the car, slightly crouched, panting.

“If my knee... wasn’t fucked up...”

“It is, Docker.” Rizzato had begun his gradual deadly circling as he moved in for the kill. He was doing what he lived for. He hissed, “It’s the fear that does it, Docker, knowing it’s coming. The piss’ll be running down your leg before I put it into you.”

“Can’t we... deal? The briefcase... for... for my...”

“For your life? I’ve already got that, Docker.” Rizzato made a quick thrusting feint, playing with his man, then leapt back laughing from Docker’s clumsy attempt to parry. “Once or twice in the belly, Docker, to soften you up. Then the eyes. Then...”

Peeler Rizzato went in low, crouched and terrible and deadly, an exceptional knife-fighter carrying darkness with him like a man come to steal corpses. His face was murderous with delight. He was poised on the balls of his feet, balanced for move and feint and thrust as a boxer is, his vital areas well protected by the outthrust, always weaving blade. He moved it in short, swift slashes, ready now to disable Docker’s protective arms.

But that too was a feint. He jabbed instead, suddenly deadly, for the stomach. Somehow Docker, with a quick left-hand sweep and going up on his toes like a matador, was lucky enough to turn arm and blade clumsily aside. The steel rang against the car door.

Frustrated, Peeler sprang back. He weaved, crouched, feinted.

Light gleamed on Docker’s long blond hair. He was in a crouch himself now. Rizzato lunged. But somehow Docker was not there, was circling his opponent with his jerky, lopsided step. Able to put full weight on the right knee which, though it still made him limp, seemed to have miraculously recovered its full strength.

Rizzato gave a pattering uneasy step or two.

And Docker laughed. “It’s the fear,” he said mockingly.

Their circling had carried them away from the cars, out into the open. The garage was deserted. Sudden, almost blind fury flooded across Peeler Rizzato’s face. He came bolt upright for a moment, his eyes wild. He sputtered, “You... it’s... you fucker!”

On the last word, he lunged.

As he did, Docker gave a tremendous screeching bellow that checked the knifeman’s flow of movement for a millisecond of time. In that briefest of instants, Docker’s left hand snapped forward so steel fingers could slam shut around Peeler’s wrist like a jail sentence. The hand went in and up and around, carrying Peeler’s arm with it; Docker’s shoulder jolted up under Peeler’s elbow but Docker’s left hand kept right on going down.

Peeler’s elbow was dislocated with a sound like a housewife ripping a dustcloth. The knife rattled on the concrete. The imprisoning hand kept moving, so Peeler perforce followed it screeching with pain.

This brought his face forward and down, into the path of the calloused, awful edge of Docker’s other hand, being driven out and up in a backhand lash.

Peeler saw it coming; he died squealing his terror. The knife edge of the hand entered his face just under the nose. Front teeth, violently separated roots and all from the gums, flew out from the little killer’s face like popping corn; needles of splintered nasal bone were rammed up into the jelly-like substance of his brain’s frontal lobes.

Docker sprang nimbly back, let the dying husk go down face forward. Blood poured across the concrete, spattering the tips of Docker’s well-polished shoes. Docker turned and limped blindly away, stood with his bare palm resting on the polished fender of somebody’s car. His color was that of a spent distance runner just before he collapses of mild shock and vomits on the cinders.

“He had to die,” Docker said aloud.

No one answered him. From behind him came the echoing mechanized voice intoning PLEASE WALK ON AND OFF RAMP.

“HE HAD TO DIE!” Docker shouted at the voice.

The voice continued its mindless litany of instruction. Docker seemed to be coming out of it a little. He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes. He bent, peered at himself in the car’s side-mirror. It gave him back a pair of staring, terrified eyes in a dread-filled face.

“Too much blood,” he said to the face. “Too many dead.” Then he found a hollow laugh. “The little wop took it out of you, didn’t he, Docker?”

His image mouthed his own words but did not respond. He nodded solemnly, put back on his glasses, shot a quick look around the garage. Far down the aisle he could see three people walking.

Docker toed the insignificant corpse under the nearest car, wiping his shoe-tips on it in the process, recovered attaché case and car keys. Somewhere a car motor started, throbbed. He saw a car beginning to back out, down by the escalator shaft.

He slipped on his gloves as he got into the Montego, then slid down so the top of his head did not show above the window line. He waited. His precautions were unnecessary. The car turned up one of the aisles leading to the exit ramp before getting down to his end of the garage.

Before leaving, Docker got back out, went over to the car he had leaned upon after killing Rizzato, and with the elbow of his topcoat carefully wiped his palm print from the fender.

Docker presented his ticket to the pimple-faced woman at the exit gate one floor above, entered the traffic stream which would take him up over the freeway and then down into the south-bound lanes. It was completely dark now, except for the blare of whizzing headlights.

“Somebody could be back there,” Docker muttered aloud. He kicked it up to seventy-five, though the Millbrae exit he intended to take was only a long mile south, weaved through slower traffic as if with a release of terrific tension.

At the last possible moment, he jammed the wheel hard enough over so he screamed almost sideways right across three lanes of cars and whipped into the off-ramp in a yelp of scorching rubber and the thunder of serrated, crosswise warning curbs under his tires. Horns blared and brakes shrieked, but nobody hit him; and then the Montego was at a decorous exit-ramp twenty-five that would keep the CHP off its tail.

At El Camino Real, main artery of the Peninsula’s tightly-packed suburban clutter, he went south again. Docker’s fingers drummed the wheel. The mathemetical possibility of a tail still existed: somebody could have been behind him who had anticipated such an exit and had lain far enough back not to be caught napping.

Therefore, a squealing right into Trousdale from the left lane, in front of a station wagon being stood on its nose by its outraged woman driver. Left into Marco Polo, seconds later right into the spacious grounds of Peninsula Hospital, twist the wheel again to shoot into a DOCTORS ONLY slot in a small courtyard beyond the arched ambulance entrance, killing lights, motor, and sliding down in the seat all in one motion.

Nothing. No green Plymouth or any other car thrust a questing nose into the courtyard; none passed in the blacktop beyond the arch.

Docker got out of there, for fifteen minutes played around in the curved residential streets lacing the subdivisions rising up the flank of the hills between Burlingame and the sea. Nobody stuck to his mirror for more than a block. Adeline Drive carried him into Hillside, and Hillside soon found the old Skyline which Interstate 280 had rendered obsolete.

Here Docker turned the big car north, back toward the city from which he just had escaped. Thirty feet short of a lonely phone booth, he pulled off on the shoulder. He got out a large flashlight, went over the car quickly and competently for electronic bleepers which might have been placed on the unguarded machine in the airport parking garage. It was clean, but Docker still seemed set on preparing for some final action; he got the long-armed lug wrench from the trunk and put it on the front seat beside the attaché case.

He limped to the phone booth, shut the door long enough to dial, then opened it so he would be in darkness. The car lights were off. He was only a shadow listening to the electronic bleeps and chuckles which would carry him through to his number. As he waited, he stared unseeingly at the great gleaming castles of the airport far below and a couple of miles away.

The operator asked for more money. Interstate 280 whined late commuter traffic south and early fun traffic north. Belatedly, Docker ripped a handkerchief apart with his teeth, stuffed enough of the strips into his mouth to give him the distinctively muffled voice which carried so much greater menace than normal tones ever could.

“Hariss residence.” Young voice, female.

“Give me your father.”

Docker’s tongue adjusted his mouthful of sodden linen. “Give me your father.”

Careless clatter of receiver on Formica countertop. Steps receding, teenage voice bawling. Steps returning. Slight scrape of receiver being lifted. Abrupt rattle of another extension being picked up.

“Walter Hariss speaking.”

“Get the cunt off the other line.”

After a momentary silence, Hariss’ voice, congested with rage, said, “Dawn.”

“Bi-i-ig deal,” said the teenage voice. “I’ve heard it before.” But within a few seconds, Docker and Hariss were alone on the line.

“Listen, you bastard, whoever you are, my family—”

“It’s Peeler,” whined Docker in his asthmatic voice. He became querulous. “His teeth are all over the floor. I had to wipe his blood off my shoes.”

The silence was longer this time. Hariss’ tense, almost frightened voice said, “Gus... Gus is...”

“His nose is up under his forehead.” Docker’s laughter almost got away into hysteria. “Marquez. Kolinski. Rizzato.”

There was cold terror in the importer’s voice by this time.

“Doc... Is this Docker? What do you want?” He was almost whispering. “What is it, damn you? You’ve got the... the merchandise, the money...”

The operator said, “Your three minutes are up, sir, please signal when through.”

“Thank you, operator.” Docker laughed again. “That’s how long you’ve got, Hariss — as far as I am away from you. Then...”

“My God!” whispered Hariss’ new, terrified voice. “Lo... look, you’ve got a quarter of a million in dope, street prices. Keep it. You’ve got a hundred-seventy-five thousand cash. Keep it. All—”

“I want your life, Hariss,” said Docker in measured tones that carried conviction even through the muffling handkerchief.

“But... but why?”

Docker laughed again. The laughter went into registers where normal laughter never went.

“Does that matter, Hariss? Your life. Tonight.”

The line was dead. Docker had hung up.