Richard Stark - The Jugger

Parker knew what he meant. He meant he wasn’t that sure anyway that he could get Parker before Parker got him.

“You’re right,” Parker told him.

Parker’s note read:

I killed Adolph Tiftus. He came in my room and we argued and I hit him with the ashtray. Then I went to Joe Shardin’s house and saw Captain Younger and told him it was half an hour earlier than it was. I scared Rhonda Samuels into making up the story about Jim Chambers.

Younger read it and said, “Fine. That covers the whole thing.”

They were sitting at the kitchen table in Joe Sheer’s Omaha apartment. Parker had found pen and paper and had written his note first, to keep Younger from getting suspicious. Now he pushed the pen and the pad of paper across the desk and said, “Your turn.”

“Sure,” said Younger, but he kept holding Parker’s note, and there was a thoughtful look in his eye.

Parker told him, “Forget it. You still need me. You need me to find the dough, and you need me to help you when you find the guy that killed Tiftus.”

“I didn’t have any plans,” Younger said. He put the note down, took the pen, and started to write. Parker watched him and waited.

This was a quiet neighborhood Joe had picked. There wasn’t a sound coming in the kitchen window, not a sound anywhere but the ballpoint pen sliding over the paper as Younger wrote his suicide note.

When it was done, Parker took it and read it:

I killed Joseph Shardin. I didn’t mean to, I was trying to extort money from him and it was an accident. Dr. Rayborn knows all about it, he helped me cover it up. He had to, because I had something on him.

Younger said, “How is it?”

“Fine,” said Parker, and took the .22 pistol out of his pocket. “Keep your palms flat on the table,” he said.

Younger’s eyes got bigger. He said, “What are you gonna do?”

Parker reached out for the note he’d written, crumpled it, and stuffed it in his pocket. Then he got to his feet. “You don’t move,” he said. “You don’t make a single move.”

“You found it,” Younger said. His voice was bitter and disgusted. “You found it. It was in the house there all the time.”

“I didn’t find a dollar,” Parker told him. “Joe told you the truth, there wasn’t any half million.”

“You’re lying.”

Parker shook his head. “No more,” he said. “There’s no more reason to lie.”

Younger raised his eyes and looked at Parker’s face and saw what Parker meant. He said, “You can’t do this. You can’t get away with it.”

Carefully, so he wouldn’t wrinkle it, Parker picked up Younger’s note and put it up on top of the refrigerator, where it would be out of Younger’s reach.

Younger said, “If there isn’t any money, you don’t have to kill me.”

“I can’t trust you,” Parker told him. “I can’t ever trust you. If I let you live, you’ll always think the half million’s around somewhere; you’ll think I’ve got it.”

“No. No, I won’t, I’ll—”

“We’ll talk about it,” Parker promised. “But first I want your gun. I don’t want you armed while we talk about it.”

“We can talk about it,” Younger said nodding. “You’re right, we can talk about it. There’s always some other way to do things, you don’t have to—”

“Your gun,” Parker said. “Reach in under your coat and take it out and put it on the table. When you take it out, just use your thumb and first finger and just hold it by the butt. And move slow and careful.”

“Sure thing, Willis. I won’t try anything.” Younger was sweating now, scared and eager, trying to find some reason to think he might be alive fifteen minutes from now. He took his pistol out the way Parker had told him, and put it down on the table.

It was a .32, a Smith & Wesson Model 30. Parker took a clean white handkerchief from his pocket and picked Younger’s pistol up in his right hand. He held the .22 now in his left.

Younger’s hands were still pressed palm down on the Formica table-top, but they were trembling anyway. He watched Parker, and he kept smiling. He was smiling with nerves, and with some stupid idea that a smile would show Parker he was really an all-right guy after all, and with fear. He said, “I believe you, Willis. There isn’t any money. I believe you.”

“Too late,” Parker told him. He walked around the table and stuck the .32 up close against Younger’s chest, at an angle the way it would be if Younger were holding the gun himself in his right hand. Younger’s mouth opened, and his hands started to come up from the table to protect himself, and Parker pulled the trigger.

After that, it took less than five minutes to get everything arranged. He closed Younger’s hand around the .32, he put the note back down on the table and wiped it with the cloth where he’d handled one corner, and he removed his prints from the few things he’d touched in the room. From then on, anything he touched he held with the handkerchief. He went through the apartment the way he’d gone through Joe’s house, making sure there was nothing in here to lead to him or anyone else Joe knew from the old days. He got the envelope from Younger’s pocket with the list of Joe’s jobs and the names, and he burned it in an ashtray along with the note he’d written about killing Tiftus. He flushed the ashes down the toilet.

When he was done, everything was satisfactory. This should answer Regan’s questions. Regan had wanted to know about Joseph Shardin, so here it was. Younger had been extorting the old man, and accidentally killed him. Three of Shardin’s old friends had come to town for the funeral, one of them had killed the second, and the third didn’t have anything to do with it. The third had maybe suspected what Younger had done to the old man, but he hadn’t been able to prove anything so he hadn’t said anything. When the investigation into the killing of Tiftus was done, this third man left. Younger, feeling remorse, went into Omaha to the old man’s apartment there — proving he’d had the run of the old man’s life and goods — and there he wrote a suicide note and killed himself.

Fine. The only thing left to do was to get Rhonda Samuels out of town. If she were left there she might get sore and start blowing whistles.

Parker took one last look around and saw that everything was done here. He left the apartment.

Parker went into one of the phone booths in the row and copied down the number. Then he walked across the terminal to the Western Union office on the other side. A loud metallic voice was calling out train departures.

In the Western Union office, Parker took a blank and made out a telegram to Rhonda Samuels, Sagamore Hotel, Sagamore, Nebraska. He gave her the number of the phone in the booth across the way and wrote: “Call me six o’clock from pay phone.” He handed this across the desk to the woman, who said, “You forgot to sign it, sir.”

“No name,” Parker told her. “They’ll know who it’s from.”

“It has to have a name,” she said.

He leaned towards her, making the effort to be patient and friendly, and winked. “It’s a kind of gag,” he said.

“Oh.” She smiled. “Very well.”

He paid for the telegram, and then went out and across the terminal to the restaurant. He had a meal that was too late to be called lunch, too early to be called dinner. He sat awhile over his second cup of coffee, and then went out and wandered around the terminal awhile. At ten minutes to six he went and sat on the little stool in the phone booth.

She didn’t call till five after the hour. Parker picked the receiver up on the first ring, and put it to his ear, but he didn’t say anything. There was silence a few seconds, and then a voice said, hesitantly, “Hello?”