Ричард Старк - Flashfire [= Parker]

She looked out ahead, far down the straight wide road, and said with surprise, “Well, there’s something you don’t see every day.”

Loretta almost looked at Leslie, or asked what it was you don’t see every day, but she caught herself in time and went on being a lump.

Leslie watched the fire engine down there, rolling north, moving very fast in the left lane, overtaking everything on the road. “It’s a fire engine, Loretta,” she said. “A great big red fire engine. See it? I wonder where it’s going.”

Loretta finally did focus on the fire engine, having to turn her head to keep watching it as they passed one another. She actually started to smile, but then became aware of Leslie observing her, and quickly frowned instead.

“I like fire engines,” Leslie said, expecting no response and getting none.

“I like fire engines,” Hal Carlson said as they highballed north.

Seated beside him, Jerry Ross grinned. “What I like,” he said, “is fire.”

Seven-thirty. Mrs. Helena Stockworth Fritz was not part of the herd. She was, in fact, above the herd, as the whole world acknowledged, and that’s why she did not, before each ball, pay a visit at the bank.

The late Mr. Fritz (munitions, oil, cargo ships, warehouses, all inherited) had, many years ago, during a spate of politically inspired financier kidnappings, installed a safe room in the middle of Seascape, which Mrs. Fritz still used for her most valuable valuables. The safe room was a concrete box, twelve feet square and eight feet high, built under the building, into the water table but sealed and dry. A dedicated phone line in stainless-steel pipe ran underground from the safe room to the phone company’s lines out at the road, though in fact that telephone had never once been used.

If, however, some phalanx of Che Guevaras actually had launched an attack on Seascape back in those parlous times, Mr. and Mrs. Fritz would simply have locked themselves into the safe room, which included plumbing facilities and stored food, very like a fallout shelter from two decades before, and would have phoned the Palm Beach police to come repel the invaders.

That had never happened, but the room was far from useless. It was impregnable and temperature-controlled, and in it Mrs. Fritz kept her furs, her jewelry, and, in the off-season, much of her best silver. Which meant she never had to join the hoi polloi crowding around the gray mirrors at the bank.

The mirror in the safe room, before which Mrs. Fritz now stood, studying the effect she would make in this gown, with this necklace, these bracelets, this brooch, these rings, and this tiara, was not tinted a discreet gray, like the mirror at the bank. Mrs. Fritz was a realist and didn’t need to squint when she gazed upon herself. (Nor would she ever stoop to buy a thirty-year-old husband.) She had lived a long time, and done much, and enjoyed herself thoroughly along the way, and if that life showed its traces on her face and body, what of it? It was an honest life, lived well. She had nothing to hide.

Satisfied with tonight’s appearance, Mrs. Fritz left and locked the safe room, then rode the stairlift up to the ground floor, where her walker awaited. Charles LeGrand was her frequent walker, a cultured homosexual probably even older than she was, neat and tidy in his blazer and ascot, smiling from within his very small goatee. Offering his elbow for her hand, “You look charmante tonight, Helena,” he said.

“Thank you, Charles.”

They walked through the ballroom on their way to the car. Mrs. Fritz noted with approval the ranks of rented padded chairs for the bidders, now in rows facing the auctioneer’s lectern, each with its numbered paddle waiting on the seat. The platform for the musicians was in place, the side tables were covered in damask but not yet bearing their loads of plates and glasses and cutlery, the portable bar-on-wheels stood ready for tomorrow night’s bartender, and all was as it was supposed to be.

The amplifiers under their white tablecloths she didn’t even notice.

The Voyager’s dashboard clock read 7:21 when Leslie steered into the visitors’ parking area outside the Elmer Neuman Memorial Hospital in Snake River. Perfect timing.

In her three previous visits to Daniel here, Leslie had learned what she needed to know about the hospital routine. Was this what criminals called “casing the joint”? She knew, for instance, that visiting hours ended at eight P.M., to accommodate visitors who had day jobs. She also knew that down the hall from Daniel lay an old woman named Emily Studworth, who seemed to be permanently unconscious and to never receive visitors. And she further knew that the clerical staff at the hospital changed shift at six P.M.

Leslie shut off the Voyager’s engine and looked in the rearview mirror at Loretta. “Okay, Loretta,” she said. “We just go and do it and come right back out.”

Loretta was already in the wheelchair that Leslie had rented from a place in Riviera Beach called Benson’s Sick Room and Party Supplies. Her mulish pouting expression fit the wheelchair very well; she was great in the part.

Leslie got out of the Voyager, slid open its side door, pulled out the ramp, and carefully backed Loretta and the wheelchair down to the blacktop. Then she shut and locked the car, and pushed the wheelchair across the parking lot and up the handicap-access ramp to the hospital’s front door.

Since this was the first time she was arriving at the hospital after six P.M., the receptionist who checked the visitors in had never seen her before, and had no way to know that before this she’d always visited a patient named Daniel Parmitt. “Emily Studworth,” Leslie told her.

The receptionist nodded and wrote that on her sheet. “You’re relatives?”

“We’re her grandnieces. Loretta really wanted to see her auntie Emily just once more.”

“You don’t have much time,” the receptionist warned her. “Visiting hours end at eight.”

“That’s all right, we just want to be with her for a few minutes.”

Leslie wheeled Loretta down the hall to the elevators and up to the third floor. The people at the nurses’ station gave them a brief incurious look as they came out of the elevator. Leslie smiled at them and pushed the wheelchair down the hall to Daniel’s room, which was in semi-darkness, only one small light gleaming yellow on the wall over the bed. They entered, and she pushed the door mostly closed behind her.

He was asleep, but as she entered the room he was suddenly awake, his eyes glinting in the yellow light. She pushed the wheelchair over beside the bed and whispered, “Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“Help me, Loretta.”

Obediently, Loretta stood up from the wheelchair and removed the long coat and big-brimmed straw hat. She put them on the bed along with her purse, which had been concealed in the wheelchair. Then she and Leslie helped Daniel get out of bed.

He was stronger each day, but still very weak. The muscles in the sides of his jaw bunched and moved with his determination. He got his legs over the side of the bed, and then, with one of them on either side of him, he made it to his feet.

Leslie said, “Can you stand alone?”

“Yes.” It was whispered through gritted teeth.

He stood unmoving, like a tree. They helped him put on the long coat, over the hospital gown that was all he wore, then helped him ease down into the wheelchair. He folded his hands in his lap, to not be noticeable, and Leslie fixed the straw hat on his head.

Meantime, Loretta had sat on the bed to remove her fake-fur shin-high brown boots. She had soft pumps in her purse that she now slipped on instead.