Ричард Старк - Flashfire [= Parker]

His second visit, coming to an early show, Parker had waited until the manager left on one of her rounds, then tried the four keys he’d brought with him against the lock in the office door and found the one that worked. The third time, he’d watched the ticket-taker at the door, the only other employee in here except for the concession-stand girl. He was a college kid in a maroon and gray uniform; what did he do when the money was in motion?

Nothing, or nothing that mattered. Once the box office closed, the kid crossed the lobby, went through an Employees Only door and down a flight of stairs to change out of his uniform. So the cashier and the manager were all he had to think about.

Tonight, he stood looking at a poster for a coming attraction, mounted on the wall down the corridor from the manager’s office. He read the names and looked at the colored drawing of an exploding train going over a cliff, as the cashier went by behind him, carrying the metal tray. Farther down the hall, the manager stood in the open doorway. She and the cashier had been doing this routine for years. Neither of them was wary, neither of them looked at the customer reading the poster. The cashier went into the office, the manager shut the door, and Parker heard the sound of the lock as it clicked shut.

He waited just over a minute, then slipped on the surgical gloves and moved quickly down the hall. The key was in his right hand, the Sentinel in his left. He opened the door with one quick movement, stepped into the office, and shut the door.

The manager was on one knee in front of the open black metal box of the safe in the corner behind her desk. The cashier had put the money tray on the manager’s desk and was just starting to hand the cash to her. They both had stacks of bills in their hands. They looked over at Parker, and neither of them was yet alarmed, just startled that somebody had come through that door.

The manager’s name was on a brass plate on her desk. Stepping forward, showing the Sentinel, Parker said, “Gladys, keep that money in your hands. Turn toward me. Turn toward me!” He didn’t want her thinking about hurriedly slamming shut the safe.

Gladys merely gaped, thinking about nothing at all yet, but the cashier, a short stocky round-faced woman, stared at the gun in open-mouthed shock, then sagged against the desk, the stacks of bills falling from her fingers. Her face paled, sweat beaded on her forehead, and her eyes glazed.

Parker said, “Gladys! Don’t let her fall!”

Gladys finally got her wits about her. Scrambling to her feet, tossing onto the desk the money she’d been holding, she leaned toward the cashier, stretching out an arm while she snapped at Parker in a quick harsh voice, “Put that gun away! Don’t you know what you’re doing ?”

A short green vinyl sofa stood against the sidewall. Parker said, “Come on, Gladys, help her to the sofa.”

Gladys had to come around the desk to reach the cashier, but she still glared at Parker. “She’s from Guatemala,” she said, as though that explained everything. “She saw...”

The cashier was moaning now, sliding down the desk, the strength giving out in her legs. Parker said, “Get her to the sofa, Gladys, and she won’t have to look at the gun.”

“Maria,” Gladys murmured, helping the other woman, moving her with difficulty away from the desk and over toward the sofa. “Come on, Maria, he won’t do anything, it’s all right.”

That’s right, Parker wouldn’t be doing anything, at least with the Sentinel, not this time. He wanted to not use it unless he absolutely had to, because that, too, could become a pattern, a series of robberies that always began with the wounding of one of the victims.

The two women sat on the sofa, Maria collapsed into herself like a car-crash dummy, Gladys hovering next to her, murmuring, then turning to glare again at Parker and say, “Are you robbing us? Is that actually what this is? Are you actually robbing us?”

“Yes,” Parker said, and moved around the desk toward the safe.

“For money ?” Gladys demanded. “The trauma you’re giving this poor woman; for money ?”

“Keep her calm,” Parker said, “and nobody’s going to get hurt.”

He had brought with him a collapsible black vinyl bag with a zipper, inside his shirt at the back. Now he took it out, put the Sentinel handy on the desk, and stuffed cash into the bag. When it was full, he zipped it shut and put the rest of the money in his pockets.

There was one line in here for both phone and fax. He unplugged the line at the wall and at the phone, rolled it up, and pocketed it, then carried the vinyl bag and the Sentinel over to the two women on the sofa. “Gladys,” he said.

She looked up at him. She was calmer now, and Maria was getting over her faint. Gladys was ready to stop being angry and start being worried. “You wouldn’t dare shoot that,” she said. “Not with all the people around.”

“Gladys,” Parker said, “there’s gunshots going off in the movies all around us. I could empty this into you, and nobody’d even look away from the screen.”

Gladys blinked, then stared at the gun. She could be seen braving herself to stare at it. Maria moaned again and closed her eyes, but wasn’t unconscious.

Parker said, “I’ll wait out in the hall for a few minutes. If you come out too soon, I’ll shoot you. You know I will, don’t you?”

She looked from the Sentinel to his face. “Yes,” she whispered.

“You decide when to come out, Gladys,” he told her. “But take your time. Think what a trauma it would be for Maria, to see you lying in a lot of blood.”

Gladys swallowed. “I’ll take my time,” she said.

From a pay phone in Houston, Parker called a guy he knew named Mackey and got his girlfriend Brenda. “Ed around?”

“Somewhere,” she said. “I don’t think he’s looking for work.”

“I don’t have any. What I want is a name.”

“Yours or somebody else’s?”

“Both,” Parker said. “Maybe he could call me at — wait a minute — two o’clock your time.”

“You’re in a different time?”

“Yes,” he said, and gave her the number of another pay phone, backward.

“I’ll tell him,” she promised. “How’ve you been keeping yourself?”

“Busy,” he said, and hung up, and went away in his dog collar to make today’s cash deposits into his nine bank accounts, and then shift more of that money into the accounts in Galveston.

At three, changed out of the religious clothes, he went to that second pay phone, mounted on a stick to one side of a gas station, by the air hose. He stopped the Taurus in front of the air hose, got out, stepped toward the phone, and it rang.

Ed Mackey sounded chipper, like always. “Brenda says you’re looking for a name.”

“There was somebody you knew, in Texas or somewhere, could give me a name.”

“I know who you mean,” Mackey said. “I think he specializes in Spanish names, though, you know? People that wanna bring their money north.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Parker said.

“Okay. He’s in Corpus Christi, he’s in the phone book there, he calls himself Julius Norte.” He pronounced the last name as two syllables: Nor-tay.

“Julius Norte,” Parker echoed.

Mackey laughed. “I think maybe his first customer was himself.”

“Could you give him a call? Tell him Edward Lynch is coming by.”

“Sure. When?”

“Tomorrow sometime,” Parker said, and the next day, when he’d finished his bank transactions, he drove south the two hundred miles to Corpus Christi, the southernmost Texan port on the Gulf, nearest to Mexico and South America.