Plunder Squad

Seven

Parker sat in the passenger seat and watched the dark side streets go by. Mackey was driving the small truck, a red Ford Econoline van, with the six paintings stacked in the back, still in their protective crates, and covered by a tarp.

It was a little before midnight, and they were following Second Avenue south through Manhattan. Until 34th Street they’d been in pretty heavy traffic, but then most of it had peeled off for the Midtown Tunnel to Queens and Long Island, and the rest had dropped off one by one until now, south of 14th Street, they were just about alone. Two cruising taxis, dome lights lit, and one slow-moving police car were quickly left behind.

Parker said, “This is a beautiful setup for a hijack.”

Mackey grinned at him in the dark. “From Renard? You kidding?”

“This isn’t his kind of neighborhood.”

“He needed a place we could drive the truck into.” Mackey raised his right hand to make a limp wrist, and spoke in an exaggerated falsetto. “This place is owned by a friend of his.”

Parker glanced over his shoulder. There was no partition between him and the cargo area. He said, “I’m going to get in back.”

Mackey looked thoughtful. “You really think Renard might pull something?”

“No. But I’m running a string of bad luck.”

Mackey shrugged. “Go ahead, then.”

Parker slid out of the seat and worked his way back past the paintings to the rear doors. They had small square panes of glass in them, he could see the two empty cabs jockeying for position a block back. Turning the other way, he could look over the tops of the painting crates and past Mackey’s shoulder at the street in front. He had to stand crouched, bracing his back against the side wall. In that position, he took his revolver from under his jacket and held it loosely in his right hand—a .38 Special Colt Agent with a hammer shroud, a new gun that had only been fired five times, for sighting-in.

When Mackey made the right turn onto the side street, Parker kept turning his head back and forth, watching front and rear, waiting for movement from anywhere. It was a narrow street, reduced to one traffic lane by the solid row of cars parked on each side. Midway down the block the unlit lumberyard sign could be seen, but not clearly read; the streetlights were widely separated, and little light reached the street from the tenement windows.

It was a block of mixed residences and businesses. Besides the lumberyard, contained in a fairly narrow five-story building, there was a liquor store, a Spanish grocery, a dry cleaner’s and a children’s-wear store scattered amid the brick and stone tenements, all of them closed.

There were no pedestrians moving, and no other cars in motion. Mackey reached the lumberyard, turned, and came to a stop facing the closed corrugated garage-type door. He honked once, according to the agreed instructions, and immediately Renard himself appeared in the headlight glow from the office door just to the right. He was squinting and blinking in the light, and looked very nervous. He gave a jerky wave of the hand, went back inside, and a few seconds later the electrically controlled garage door began to slide up.

Parker, resting his gun hand on top of the crates, peered forward into the lumberyard building. An empty concrete floor extended well back, flanked on both sides by deep bins full of wood. Toward the back were stacks of sheetrock and building materials, and along the rear wall was the bench saw. No one was in sight.

Parker turned around to watch the street again. Still nothing. The truck moved completely into the building and stopped, and the garage door could be heard coming down again.

“Looks okay,” Mackey said.

Parker looked to his left, through the glass toward the office. The three men who came running out of there were all carrying handguns, and none of them was Renard.

“Reverse! Get us out of here!”

But it was too late; the door was sliding down over the exit. Mackey shifted into reverse and tromped on the accelerator, and the truck squealed backward and slammed into the bottom of the door, which had come down just far enough to cover the truck’s rear windows. The door stopped moving, and the truck engine stalled when Mackey’s foot was knocked off the accelerator by the jolt.

Parker had been knocked off his feet. He got up quickly behind the crates again, and Mackey was staring out the front of the van, clawing for his own gun and shouting, “Which way are they coming?”

“On the right.”

Mackey shoved open the door beside him on his left, looked to his right, and three or four shots smashed the right side window, punched into Mackey, and drove him backwards out the door he’d opened and onto the concrete.

Parker waited. They’d been driving with the windows shut, but now with one window smashed and the opposite door open he could hear voices from outside:

“You get him?”

“We all got him.”

“See is he dead. Harry, get that faggot out here.”Someone ran across the front of the van. Parker saw his head through the windshield, but did nothing. “He’s dead!”

“There was supposed to be two of them. Where the hell’s the other one?”

Parker waited, the revolver atop the crates, pointing toward the front of the van.

“He come in alone.”

“Renard? Where the hell is—? Get him over here, will you?”

“I don’t—I don’t want to be—” That was Renard’s voice, terrified out of its wits.

“Shut up. There was supposed to be two of them, right?” “They said—he said—”

“Well, only one showed up. Harry, George, go on outside, keep an eye open. They might have had an idea about this.”

“Right.”

“Can I go now?” Renard again.

“Let’s just see about the merchandise first. Maybe they were cute, maybe the second man has the stuff.” “What am I supposed to—”

“Get in there. Take a look, see is it all there.”

“I don’t want—”

“Get in there.”

Parker crouched behind the crates. He felt the van rock slightly on its springs, metal scraping against metal up behind his head where door and truck were jammed together, and then Renard, twitching and terrified, was making his way around the passenger seat and into the cargo area.

Parker let him get all the way in, let him start to lift the tarpaulin; then he stood up and leaned forward, pushing the revolver into Renard’s face, whispering, “You scream and we’re both dead. But you first.”

Renard went white, and began to slump toward the floor. Parker reached his other hand over, grabbed Renard by the hair, yanked upward hard. The pain cut through Renard’s need to faint, and his eyes got their focus back again. He stared at Parker like a bird staring at a snake.

A voice from outside: “Is it all there?”

Parker whispered, “Tell him it’ll take a minute.” When Renard did nothing, Parker shook his head by the hair to attract his attention. “Tell him! It’ll take a minute.”

Still staring at Parker, Renard called over his shoulder, “It’ll lake, uh— It’ll take a minute.”

“Why?”

“You have to check inside one crate.”

“I have to check inside one crate,” Renard called.

“Well, snap it up.”

With the hand holding his hair, Parker pressed Renard down till he was kneeling beside the crates. Parker crouched facing him, let go of his hair, and whispered, “What is this? This isn’t your idea.”

“I didn’t want to have anything—”

“Keep it down. And forget that other stuff; just tell me what’s going on.”

Renard licked his lips, and gave the crates a frightened, resentful look. “This is all Leon’s fault,” he whispered. He was being petulant through the fear.

“Griffith? He’s dead.”

“He needed money.” Now the resentful look was turned toward Parker. “For you people.”

“And?”

“He wanted to borrow from me. I couldn’t do it, I, uh . . . My own financial situation wasn’t—”

Parker shook his head in impatience. “What happened?”

“I sent him to some people I knew. To loan him the money.”

“Mob money.”

“I don’t know, I—” Renard glanced over his shoulder toward the front of the truck. “I suppose so.”

“After Griffith killed himself,” Parker said, “they came to you to get the money back.”

Renard nodded.

“And you gave them us instead.”

“They wanted you. They wanted the paintings.”From outside, the leader’s voice called, “Renard. what the hell are you doing?”

“Tell him you need help.”

Renard’s eyes widened. Shrilly, he whispered, “I don’t want to die!”

“Nobody does. Tell him you need help.”

The van rocked on its springs again. Somebody was leaning his elbows in on the passenger seat, looking around the edge of the seat toward the darkness at the rear of the truck. The only light source was still the van headlights, illuminating the interior of the lumberyard but leaving the cargo area of the truck almost totally dark.

“Renard? What’s going on?”

Parker pressed the revolver barrel into Renard’s side.

“I—I need some help here. With the, uh, with the crates.”

“For Christ’s sake.”

From the voice, it was the leader himself climbing in over the passenger seat, coming this way. Parker waited, his left hand on Renard’s right arm, his right hand holding the gun.

“What’s the problem?”

Parker raised himself, extending the revolver out at arm’s length across the top of the crates to be sure the other guy saw it in the poor light in here. Barely above a whisper, he said, “The problem is, you’re dead if you open your mouth.”

The guy was a professional: heavy-set, medium height, wearing a dark zippered jacket and dark shirt. He was about forty, with a heavy jawline and eyes that didn’t waste time with surprise. He looked at Parker and said, “So there you are. You come along after all.”

Parker said, “Call to someone to come drive the truck forward. Say it’s so you can open the rear doors.”

“And if I tell you to go to hell?”

“You’ll go there first. Call to Harry.”

The guy looked puzzled. “Harry? Why?”

“Because it’s a name I know.”

The puzzlement lasted a few more seconds, and then he nodded and said, “Yeah, I see. I call a name that doesn’t match anybody out there, then they know there’s something up. I didn’t think of that, but it’s a good one.” He turned his head away and yelled, “Harry!” The sound was huge in the confined space back here, and Renard winced from it as though he’d been slapped on the forehead.

From outside a muffled voice called back, “What?”

“Come drive this truck forward a little, so we can open these doors!”

“Right!”

Parker whispered, “Don’t get yourself killed.”

The guy gave him a flat look. “Not me,” he said. “You.”

His voice trembling, Renard said, “I’m in the middle. I don’t want any of this.”

They both ignored him. They kept watching one another’s eyes, and a minute later Harry climbed into the driver’s seat and called back, “You need any help back there, Al?”

Al was facing the rear of the truck. Without turning, without moving his eyes from Parker’s, he called, “No, everything’s fine. Just move the truck.”

They all waited, Renard trembling, crouched back against the side wall like a reluctant referee between the other two. Harry started the engine, and the truck lunged forward, then moved more slowly, then stopped. “That okay?”

Parker could hear a whirring sound. The garage door. Going up or down?

Al called, “Yeah, that’s fine. Go on back out front.” He was still watching Parker, and he seemed to be smiling a little.

Parker fumbled behind himself for the inside latch, found it, pressed down, shoved backward. With a grinding sound, both doors popped open, and Parker jumped backward to the concrete, as Al ducked behind the crates, shouting, “He’s going out the back! Get him!”

The bottom of the garage door was a foot from the floor, and still going down. Parker fired at a moving figure to his right, wasted a shot at the interior of the truck, and leaped to his left. Coming around the corner of the truck, he found an open-mouthed Harry just climbing out. Parker fired, Harry fell on the body of Ed Mackey, and Parker jumped over the both of them, ran around the front of the truck, and found Al and two others blocking the only exit, through the office. Renard wasn’t in sight, but he didn’t matter anyway.

Two shots were fired at him, but Parker had ducked back against the front of the truck again. He spun back, swung around the open driver’s side door, put a foot in the middle of Harry’s back, and stepped into the seat behind the wheel. Harry had left the engine running; Parker shifted into drive, accelerated to the far end of the long room, slammed on the brakes to stop just before running into the bench saw, shifted into reverse, put the accelerator on the floor, and twisted around in the seat to watch the garage door rushing this way, seen through the open rear doors. Renard, still in the back of the van, was screaming and waving his arms the other side of the crates, but Parker ignored him.

Parker was braced, one arm around the seat, the other hand on the steering wheel for guidance, both feet pressed flat on the floor, but it was still a jolt when the van crashed into the metal door. Renard was flung off his feet into the door, and the six crates slid rasping after him, thumping indiscriminately into Renard and the door.

The corrugated metal had bent, but it hadn’t broken. Parker shifted into drive again, and the van spurted forward, the crates and Renard spilling out onto the concrete in its wake.

The garage door wasn’t going to give. And now that the crates were all over the place back there it was impossible to get another clear run at it anyway. And the open floor area was too narrow to turn the truck around in. Parker reached the far end, skidded to a stop an inch from the bench saw again, shifted into park, and looked back through the truck to see the three men running this way. He fired twice, hit nobody, and they all scattered.

They had the front, with the only way out. This was a solid concrete block wall back here, extending twenty-five feet up to the ceiling. There were lumber bins all the way up on both sides, with ladders and walkways. But he wasn’t going up; he wasn’t about to tree himself.

Directly ahead of him through the windshield was the bench saw, and to the left of it three cardboard boxes full of the bits and pieces of wood left over from sawing. Parker put his gun away under his jacket, opened the truck’s glove compartment, and found four pieces of paper in it: the vehicle registration, a Master Charge receipt for a gas purchase, and two rental forms on flimsy pink onionskin. He rolled the papers into a tube, lit one end, bent it down to get the flame going good, and then rolled the left window down and tossed the burning paper into the nearest cardboard box.

“Hey, you!”

A voice from the front end of the room. Al. Parker glanced back and saw no one; they were keeping under cover. He called. “What?”

“We don’t care about you. It’s just the paintings we want.”

Even if that had been true in the beginning, it wouldn’t be true now. But Parker needed time, and the way to fill it was with talk. He called, “Prove it, then.”

“Sure, Mac. What do you want us to do?”

“Open the garage door.” Parker looked at the cardboard box. It was only half full, and he couldn’t see the paper inside it. There’d been a wisp of dark smoke at first, but nothing now.

“What do you think, we’re crazy? What if a cop car goes by, sees all this shit all over the floor?”

Another voice yelled, “You couldn’t back that truck out anyway.”

Had the paper gone out? Maybe he should rip off some of the lining of his jacket, use that. He called, “What do you want me to do?”

“Just walk out,” Al yelled, with elaborate innocence. “We don’t care about you, like I said. Just the paintings.”

“How can I believe you?” Was that smoke? White smoke this time.

“Why should we care about you? We never saw you before. We’re not killers, pal, we’re just here for the paintings.”The second voice called, “Yeah, we’re art lovers.”

Smoke was coming from the cardboard box, but it was too slow to build. Parker opened his jacket, ripped a panel of lining out of the left side, while he called back, “Come out and put your guns down. Then I’ll walk out.”

“Oh, no, Mac. Now you want us to trust you, and we don’t have to. All we have to do is wait you out.”

The cloth didn’t want to burn. Was it some goddam fiberglass or something?

The second voice yelled, “Or starve you out. We got all the time in the world.”

The lining caught all at once, and Parker was holding a handful of flame. He leaned way out of the window, and tossed it into a second of the cardboard boxes.

“What the hell!”

“What’s he doing?”

Shots were fired; Parker pulled his arm back inside. They were yelling at one another back there, and a few more bullets hit the truck.

Smoke puffed up from the second box, and then a fist of orange flame.

Parker shifted into reverse, angled back to the left, shifted into drive, moved up till the truck body covered the burning boxes from the three guys at the other end of the room. Parker slid out on the right side, grabbed a couple of one-by-twelves leaning against the wall beside the bench saw, laid them flat over the second box, with a space between. The flames shifted at once to smoke, but with smaller flames still working underneath. The fire wouldn’t go out, but now it would give plenty of smoke.

They were still yelling back there, and still firing an occasional shot, but they couldn’t seem to find anything coherent for them all to do. Smoke billowed up toward the ceiling, spread out through the air, and now the first cardboard box was also flaming up.

Parker kept most of his body covered by the front of the truck, and reached in through the driver’s window to push the gear lever one notch from park to reverse. The truck at once began to roll backward, at about five miles an hour, and Parker walked along with it.

The place was filling with smoke. Already his eyes were burning, it was hard to keep from blinking, hard to make out details in what he was seeing. He moved to his left, to the right side of the truck, and saw one of them hurrying forward from cover, assuming Parker to be at the wheel, and that therefore it was safe to come up on the right side of the truck.

Parker dropped him with one shot, moved out to his left, crouched, and made a run straight for the office door. Behind him, the van bumped into one of the crates, pushed it sluggishly a few feet, and stopped.

Al appeared in the office doorway, blinking in the smoky air, pushing his gun out ahead of himself. He and Parker both fired, both missed, and then Parker ran into him in the doorway and Al went crashing back into the customers’ counter. Parker shot him, turned around, and fired twice at the last one, running this way from cover on the opposite side of the garage door. The guy dropped behind a crate and fired back, but there was no reason to worry about him now; the street door was to Parker’s back, with nothing between him and it except Al, sitting dazed on the floor, clutching his stomach and looking at nothing at all.

The entire rear wall of the building was aflame, writhing orange ribbons up the face of the concrete block, fire leaping from bin to bin. There was a growing crackling roar, and a quickly building heat. Parker stared at the six crates in the firelight; the other fifteen had been given back with an anonymous tip, and now these six were gone for good. Forever.

Parker turned away. When he opened the street door a wind shoved it open the rest of the way, pushed against his body, rushed past him to feed the fire. He went out, looked both ways, turned right, started walking.

Two blocks later he heard the sirens, but they came to the fire from a different direction, and didn’t pass him. A block after that he found an empty cab to take him to where he’d parked his car.