Ричард Старк - Flashfire [= Parker]

This was more of a late-night than an early-morning neighborhood. There was almost no traffic at this time of day, rarely a pedestrian until midmorning. The three days Parker’d watched, AAAAcme hadn’t had a customer before nine-thirty, so their opening time must be merely a long-standing habit.

This morning, the routine was the same as ever. Seeing the Cherokee approach in his rearview mirror, Parker got out of the Taurus, made a show of locking it, and walked down the street toward AAAAcme. The Cherokee passed him and stopped at the curb, and he walked by between Cherokee and storefront. He continued to walk, pacing himself to the normal speed of their movements behind him, and the Cherokee passed him again just before he got to the entrance of the parking lot.

Today he was dressed in a gray sweatshirt over black chinos. The Sentinel was in the right pants pocket, and a Colt.45 from Kentucky was tucked into the front of the chinos under the sweatshirt. Turning in at the entrance to the parking lot, he put his hand in his right pocket.

The driver was getting out of the Cherokee. He gave Parker an incurious look, turned to lock the Cherokee, and Parker stepped rapidly toward him, taking the Sentinel out of his pocket, holding it straight-armed in front of himself, aiming as he moved. He fired once, and the .22 cartridge punched through the meat of the driver’s left leg, halfway between knee and hip, then went on to crack into the door panel of the Cherokee, leaving a starred black dent.

The driver sagged, astonished, falling against the Cherokee, staring over his shoulder at Parker: “What? What?”

Parker stepped very close, showing him the Sentinel. “I shot you,” he said. “The vest doesn’t cover the leg. It doesn’t cover the eye, either. You want one in the eye?”

“Who the fuck are you?” The driver was in shock, the blood drained from his face. He pawed at his left leg.

Parker held the Sentinel close to his face. “Answer me.”

“What’d I do to you? I don’t even know you!”

“I’m robbing you,” Parker told him.

“Jesus! You want my — oh, my God!” he cried, staring at his blood-red hand. “For a fucking wallet ?”

“The store,” Parker said. “We’ll go there, and we’ll go in together.”

“My partner—”

“Will do what you tell him. You do right, in a few minutes you’re on your way to the hospital. You do wrong, in a few minutes you’re on your way to the morgue.”

The driver panted, trying to catch up, get his wits about him. “They’ll get you, you know,” he said.

“So don’t sweat it,” Parker told him. “It’s only money, you’re insured, and they’ll get me. Let’s go.”

“I can’t walk.”

“Then you’re no good to me,” Parker said, and brought the Sentinel up to his face again.

“I’ll try!”

He could walk, with a limp. He kept looking at his red hand, in disbelief. “This is crazy,” he said. “You don’t just shoot people.”

“Yes, I do,” Parker said. “What’s your name?”

The driver blinked at him, bewildered again. “What?”

“Your name.”

“Bancroft. Why, what’s—”

“Your first name.”

“Jack. John — Jack, people call me Jack.”

“Okay, Jack. What’s your partner’s name?”

“First?”

“First.”

“Oliver.”

“Ollie?”

“No, he’s no Ollie, he’s Oliver.”

They were approaching the shopfront. Parker said, “Tell him, ‘I’m shot, this man helped.’ Nothing else. Show him your hand.”

Jack nodded. He was panting pretty badly, limping more. His face was still ashen.

As they reached the shopfront, Parker put the Sentinel away and took out the Colt. Jack knocked on the glass in the door, and it was opened partway by Oliver, who stopped abruptly with the door less than a foot open when he saw Parker. He said, ‘Jack?”

Jack held up his red hand. “I was shot, Oliver, this man helped.” He gestured at his leg.

“What?” Oliver looked at Jack’s trouser leg, now wet with blood. “Jesus Christ!”

Oliver backed away, and Jack limped in, Parker following, shutting the door behind himself, pushing Jack to one side, showing Oliver the Colt. “Oliver, don’t move,” he said.

Oliver looked tough and angry, but he hadn’t been shot. “You son of a bitch, you—”

He was starting to make a move when Jack called, “He knows about the vests!”

Oliver stopped, frowning at his partner.

“That’s right,” Parker said. “Your chest is safe from me. Oliver, help Jack to lie on the floor, facedown.”

Oliver hesitated. Jack said, “Oliver, I’m hurting. Get this over with, let the cops have it.”

Oliver nodded. He told Parker, “They’ll get you, you know.”

“Jack already told me. Move, Oliver.”

Oliver helped Jack to lie facedown on the linoleum floor in front of the counter. The counter was stained wood panel, chest-high, with bulletproof Lucite above and small openings where checks and cash could be passed through. A windowless gray metal door was at one end of the counter, to give access to the rear.

When both men were facedown on the floor, arms behind them, Parker put the Colt away and took from his back pocket a small roll of duct tape. He taped their wrists and ankles, Oliver first, then got Jack’s keys from his pocket. He made sure he had the right key to get back into the shop, and left to walk up the block toward the Taurus.

There was still almost no morning traffic around here. Parker drove the Taurus down to AAAAcme, went back inside, and found Oliver and Jack where he’d left them. Jack was breathing like a whale. When he heard Parker move around, he said, “Willya call 911, for chrissake?”

“Somebody will,” Parker told him, and went through the metal door to the rear part of the shop, where the two metal cases stood unopened on the floor. He lifted their lids and found the stacks of bills he’d expected.

Looking around, he saw an open safe, which Oliver must have just unlocked for the start of the day. Inside were more stacks of bills, and on top of the safe was a lockable gray canvas money sack. Parker put the bills from the safe in the sack, then opened the cash drawers under this side of the counter, and found more bills. There was change, too, which he left.

The two boxes and the sack were now full. Parker carried everything through to the front door. Oliver kept twisting around to glare at him, but Jack merely lay there, eyes closed, cheek on the floor, mouth open, wheezing.

It took two trips to get everything from the store to the Taurus. Parker propped the store door slightly open, so the first customer would be able to get inside and find Oliver and Jack and make that 911 call, and then, at seven minutes to nine, he drove away, looking for the signs to Interstate 65.

In this part of Memphis, integration was complete. There were as many white junkies in this neighborhood as there were black. A number of old-fashioned drunks wandered around here, too, and that’s what Parker was passing himself off as.

For nine days, while getting to know this territory, he’d been living in a small bare room in a moth-eaten residence hotel, blending in with the misfits and losers, paying cash, one day at a time. The Taurus, with most of AAAAcme’s thirty-seven thousand dollars in the door panels, was stashed in the long-term-parking lot out at Memphis International. Parker kept a bottle of fortified wine sticking out of his hip pocket, and sat around on the sidewalks with the other boozers, though he wasn’t the friendly type. He was the sort that kept to himself.

The problem with snooping in a neighborhood like this is not that people will think you’re a heister, but that they’ll think you’re a cop. Whatever might be going on at higher levels, at the street level the cops around here were on the job, not on the take. The drug dealers had lookouts to warn them when legal trouble was near, and all at once the bazaars would disappear, into alleys and doorways and the back seats of rusted-out cars.