Ричард Старк - Flashfire [= Parker]

Again he rang the bell and walked in, and again the guard dog looked up from his fotonovela to watch Parker cross the room. Norte was on the phone, but he said something quiet in Spanish, hung up, and got smiling to his feet. “Right on time,” he said.

He wanted to shake hands again, so Parker shook his hand, then took out the money and placed it on the desk. Norte smiled at it. “You don’t mind if I count.”

“Go ahead.”

Norte did, then said, “Bobby will take your picture.”

“Bobby?”

Norte indicated the guard dog. “Roberto,” he said. “Not a name you could use.”

“No.”

Norte spoke to Bobby in Spanish, and the guard dog put down his fotonovela and stood. Norte said to Parker, “You go with Bobby.”

Parker went with Bobby, through the door at the back of the room into what still was a kitchen, though not many meals would be made here. Bedrooms and a bathroom were off the kitchen to the right and rear.

A camera was set up on a tall tripod at head height, facing a blank wall. Bobby, moving toward the camera, made a shooing gesture for Parker to stand by the wall. When Parker went over there, he saw a pair of white footprints painted on the floor and stood on them.

Bobby was efficient, if silent. He moved his head to show Parker how to pose, then quickly took three shots. Still saying nothing, he led Parker back to the other room.

The money was gone from the desk, and Norte was standing beside it, smiling farewell. “Phone me Friday afternoon,” he said. “It should be ready by then.”

“Good,” Parker said, and left, and drove back to the motel. Later, after dinner, he put on black clothing, took his b&e tools out from under the trunk bed in the Taurus, and drove south again, one hundred fifty miles almost to the border, turning east at Harlingen toward South Padre Island, where the rich boaters keep their country villas and retirement homes.

Bay View, Laguna Vista, Port Isabel; this is where the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway begins, where the rich sea-loving Texans are based, alternating between agreeable “cottages” and even more agreeable yachts, moored just at the end of the lawn. In the evenings, they visit one another, play bridge, drink, gossip, plan excursions across the Gulf to the islands of the Caribbean. Half the houses are full of light, warmth, good cheer; the other half are empty.

A little after nine in the evening, Parker left the Taurus in the parking lot of a chain drugstore that wouldn’t close till midnight. He left the parking lot over a chain-link fence at the back, and kept to the rear of houses, moving as far as possible from the lit-up noisy ones, crossing only side streets and only at their darkest points. This area was patrolled almost as heavily as Palm Beach, but he was keeping himself dark and silent.

All of the houses along the Waterway are equipped with alarm systems; enter through any door or window, and if the alarm is not switched off at the control pad within forty-five seconds it will signal both the town police and the security service. But where is the control pad to be found? In every house, it is just inside, next to the door nearest to where the car is parked. It was never hard to figure out which door that was.

In the next hour and a half, Parker went into nine houses, and the method was always the same. Interior pockets in the back of his coat carried his tools, which included a telephone handset with alligator clips, a special one used by telephone company repairmen to check lines. With this, he could attach to the house’s phone line outdoors, where it came in from the pole, and call that line. He could always hear it ring, inside the house. If the answering machine picked up, or there was no answer after ten rings, and no dog barked, it was his. He’d go to the door nearest where the car would normally be parked and use his small pry bar to pop it.

Inside, on the wall, its red light lit, would be the alarm control pad. He never needed the full forty-five seconds to short-circuit and disarm it. Then he’d move through the house, looking only for cash. He had to leave behind hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry, bonds, paintings, cameras, watches, and all the other toys of the leisured rich, but it didn’t matter: there was always cash. There was often a wall safe, which he would find by lifting pictures along the way and get into with hammer and chisel, and the wall safes always produced bundles of cash, often still in the paper band from the bank.

Nine houses, a little over a hundred twenty thousand dollars. Finished, he skirted the areas he’d already been through, made his way back to the drugstore fifteen minutes before it would close, and drove back north to Corpus Christi.

Tomorrow, he’d have more money for the banks in Houston.

On Friday, from a different motel in Corpus Christi, Parker phoned Norte, got the Poco Repro machine, left a message, and Norte phoned right back: “We’re ready, Mr. Lynch,” he said.

“I’ll come right down,” Parker told him, and drove down to Norte’s place, but when he turned the corner a black Chevy Blazer was parked in front of the house, with white exhaust visible at the tailpipe. Parker decided not to stop, but drove on by, and saw the driver alone in the Blazer, a chunky man in a white dress shirt, with the pie face and thick black hair of the Mayan Indian. He sat facing front, hands on the steering wheel, waiting, patient.

Another customer was with Norte. Parker drove on down to the next corner and went around it. He didn’t want Norte’s other customers to meet him, and they probably didn’t want him to meet them.

He spent ten minutes driving around the neighborhood before going back to Norte’s house again, to see the Blazer still there. But this time its engine was off and the driver was gone.

Parker slowed, peering at the house. The “Ring Bell And Walk In” sign, which had been there ten minutes ago, was gone now from its hook above the bell button.

Something wrong. Parker drove three-quarters of the way around the block, parked, and walked on to the house.

Blazer still there, sign still gone. No one visible in the windows. He walked up to the house and around it to the left to the carport. The Infiniti was there, as before. There was just enough room between the car and the house to slide down there and look through the high window over Bobby’s desk.

Norte was at his own elegant desk, on the phone. Bobby stood in the middle of the room, an automatic loose in his hand. Three men lay facedown on the floor, wrists and ankles and mouths swathed in duct tape. One of them was the Mayan driver.

The thing to do was go away somewhere and phone. Parker moved back from the window, sidled past the Infiniti, and when he got to the front corner of the house Bobby was there, the automatic pointed at Parker’s chest. With his other hand he gestured: Come with me.

Parker shrugged. He walked past Bobby and around to the front door and in, Bobby trailing after him.

Norte was off the phone now, standing behind his desk, looking aggravated. “Bad timing, Mr. Lynch,” he said.

“Hand me the papers and I’ll go,” Parker told him.

Two of the men, not the driver, had twisted around to stare up at Parker, not as though he might help but as though he might be more trouble. Norte, with a sad smile and a harried look, shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You see the situation here, no?”

“Dissatisfied customers,” Parker suggested.

But Norte shook that away. “No, I don’t have dissatisfied customers. What I got, I got a customer doesn’t want anybody alive that knows who he is now and what he looks like now. That fuckhead sent these fuckheads to kill Bobby and me.”