Richard Stark - The Hunter

He was a mess. He had no shoes or socks, his shirt and trousers were bloody and filthy and torn, his face and arms were scratched and bruised, and he couldn’t walk properly. He came at last to a highway, and walked along it for five minutes before state troopers picked him up. He was too worn down to resist, and they vagged him.

His fifth month on the farm, he wrote a careful letter to a guy he knew in Chicago, asking for information about Mal in a roundabout way. He signed the letter by his prison name, Ronald Casper, because he knew it would be read by the censor before it was mailed, but in the body of the letter he tried to make it clear who the writer was.

He got an answer three weeks later, an answer as guarded in its phrasing as his question had been, but through the verbiage about nonexistent relatives he got the story. Mal, it seemed, had left Chicago some time ago, with a woman who could only have been Lynn. He had apparently squared himself with the syndicate and had been taken back into the fold. He had been recently seen in New York, spending heavily and living the good life. Lynn was still with him.

So Parker waited, and when his chance came he took it. He killed a guard rather than wait the two more months until they would have released him anyway. He had to get moving. He wanted Mal Resnick — he wanted him between his hands. Not the money back. Not Lynn back. Just Mal, between his hands.

He headed first for Palm Springs, but the fifteen hundred dollars he’d had in the hotel safe there was gone. Lynn had taken it. He knew without checking that she’d cleaned out his other reserves, too.

He wasn’t a petty thief or a hobo. He didn’t have the background or the training or the temperament for it. He fared badly coming across the country, but he stayed alive. He jackrolled for eating money, traveled by truck when he could get a lift and by train when he couldn’t, and headed east. He avoided the people he knew, and regretted having written the friend in Chicago.

He didn’t want Mal to know he was alive. He didn’t want Mal spooked and on the run. He wanted him easy and content, a fat cat. He wanted him just sitting there, grinning, waiting for Parker’s hands.

Mal was sitting there, grinning, waiting for Parker’s hands. He didn’t know he was waiting for Parker: he thought he was waiting for a chick named Pearl, a junkie with only two bad habits. It was the other habit that interested Mal right now. He sat there in his dressing gown from Japan with a silk dragon brocaded on the back, and he grinned, and he waited for Pearl and Parker.

There was the living room of his suite in the Outfit hotel. The Outfit hotel was a respectable-looking stone structure on Park Avenue in the Fifties, with the name Oakwood Arms on the marquee. The building was eleven stories high, with two L-wings jutting back toward Lexington Avenue, and eight of its eleven stories held innocent, respectable, well-paying guests. The guests on floors one and two and three were not innocent, not respectable, and not well paying. They were Outfit men, and they called the Oakwood Arms home. On the third floor were the permanents, Mal Resnick and the other New York workers who had chosen to live here where questions were never asked because the answers were already known. The second floor was partly filled with other permanents and partly reserved for transients, visiting Outfit men from other parts of the country or occasionally from overseas, in town for conference or vacation. When a junketing syndicate man told his lieutenants, “I’ll be staying with the Outfit while I’m in New York,” they knew he meant the Oakwood Arms.

On the first floor were the conference rooms and bars and ballrooms and dens which the innocent, respectable, well-paying guests never saw. No illegality was ever committed in the Outfit hotel, no wanted man was ever seen to enter or leave the place. No police spy was ever hired by the management, whose security check of its prospective employees would have been the envy of the government boys at Los Alamos.

The police had never raided the place, probably realizing it would be a waste of time, but the hotel was ready for even that emergency. Well-concealed side exits on the first three floors led into adjoining buildings, and the three desk clerks were prepared to alert the Outfit guests before the law could even get into the elevators.

The hotel had only gradually developed to the plush respectability and safety it now enjoyed. Early during Prohibition it had been bought by the liquor syndicate as a plant, where booze could be stored with relative safety at a location pleasantly close to the speakeasies of midtown. During those early years no one made much of an effort to front the place as a normal hotel, but after the racket-busters began to crack down, and the place was raided a few times, the syndicate realized the building could only be useful if it did a good job of pretending to be what it was not. The remaining liquor was pulled out, the hotel was paper-sold to a legit front man, and new employees were brought in who didn’t know a thing about the place’s actual owners or purposes, and for six years the hotel was a sleeper, bringing the syndicate nothing but a small legitimate profit.

In 1930, with the respectable front firmly established, the Oakwood Arms became once more a plant, but this time the mob used it more carefully and more quietly. With the end of Prohibition in 1933, the hotel embarked on its new career as a location for business conferences, as the liquor syndicates merged and disbanded and remerged again in a frantic reshuffling of influence and interest, converting from suddenly legal liquor to still profitably illegal items like gambling, unionizing, prostitution and narcotics.

In the years since, the Oakwood Arms had slowly developed its role in Outfit affairs. It was used more as a permanent or temporary residence for Outfit executives than for any other reason, with occasional conferences and parties as well. Since the Apalachin fiasco of 1957, more and more out-of-town elements of the Outfit had been using the hotel as a safe meeting place. It was quiet, it was well run, and it was guaranteed free from trouble with the law.

So it was with perfect nonchalance that Mal Resnick sat in the living room of his third-floor suite in the hotel, in his dressing gown from Japan, and waited for Pearl, the girl with only two bad habits.

Mal was a beefy man, short and heavy-set, with broad, soft, sloping shoulders and a wide paunch, short thick legs and arms, and a heavy head set square on a thick neck. In the old days, his hands had been large and rough, work coarsened, but now they were only pudgy, the flesh packed thick around the finger bones, the skin soft and pink. He was a cab driver, with a cab driver’s body and a cab driver’s movements, and nothing would ever change that.

Around him were the symbols of his success, the stereo hi-fi built into the wall, the well-stocked bar, the deep-piled carpet and plush armchairs and sofas. His was a two-room suite, living room and bedroom only, proclaiming him still on one of the lower rungs as an Outfit executive. But the fact that he could live here at all proclaimed even louder that he had power within the mob, that he had made it: he wasn’t a goon or a hanger-on, he was one of the Boys.

He looked at his watch and saw that it was quarter after seven. That meant that Pearl was fifteen minutes late, and Mal grinned again. Pearl was late, Pearl would be punished. She knew that, and she would come anyway — and whatever he decided the punishment should be, she would go along with it.

It occurred to him sometimes that she was probably so insensitized by drugs that his punishments meant practically nothing to her, but he rejected the idea. She felt it, by God. When Mal put his hands on her to make her hurt, she hurt. And if it took more to break through the deadening of the heroin in Pearl’s system, so much the better. Mal had the patience, Mal had the time, and Mal had the incentive.