Richard Stark - The Hunter

“What dough?”

“Didn’t you know about it? That’s the whole reason he took this job, out of the country and everything. He was going to do some other job in Chicago and it fell through—”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Ryan, glad to be presented with a fact he could verify. “I was in on that, too, I know about that.”

“Yeah, well, Parker needs dough bad. That’s why he took this job when the other one fell through. Think about it, Ryan. Did he ever work outside the country before?”

“Parker? Nah, he’s always worked the states.”

“That’s what I mean. So I thought maybe he needed dough bad enough to want to cross us. That’s why I wanted to ask your advice.”

Ryan chewed on it a while longer, his head shaking slowly back and forth as he thought. Finally, he shook his head more decisively and said, “No. He wouldn’t do it, Mal. He’d know better than that. I’d find him — you better believe it — and he knows that. Parker wouldn’t cross me, he knows better.”

“Listen, that’s the part scares me. If Parker was going to cross us, he wouldn’t want to leave us alive, hunting for him. He’d want to be damn sure we were dead long before he’d leave this house.”

“Yeah,” said Ryan slowly. “Yeah, I never thought of that.”

Mal looked up at him. “What do you think we ought to do?”

“I don’t know,” Ryan said. “I want to think it over. Parker. It just don’t sound like him.”

“If he’s planning anything, it’ll be tonight. After we’re all in bed.”

“I got to think this over.”

“Let me know,” Mal had said. “We don’t have much time!”

“Yeah. Jeez — Parker.” Ryan went away shaking his head.

Later that night Mal took a knife and slit the sleeping Chester’s throat. He got rid of the knife and ran to Ryan’s room. “Ryan, wake up! He got Chester — Parker already done for Chester!”

Ryan hadn’t been asleep. He’d been lying awake in the darkness, his hand on the gun under his pillow, his eyes watching the door. Although he hadn’t said anything about it, he’d nearly shot Mal when he came into the room.

The two of them went and looked at Chester’s body. “Parker,” said Ryan wonderingly. He shook his head. “I wouldn’t of believed it.”

“We got to get him, Ryan,” Mal said. “Before he gets us, we got to get him.”

Ryan nodded heavily. “Yeah. I’ll get the gun.”

“No,” said Mal. “Wait a second. We don’t want to do it that way.”

Ryan paused, brow furrowed. “What way, then? You got a better idea?”

Mal had a better idea. It had just come to him, just that minute, and it excited him, nerved him up, gave him goose bumps. He’d originally planned just this much, the way it was going, setting Ryan on Parker so it didn’t matter which one survived. He’d be in the background waiting to finish the other.

But now all at once he had this idea, and he didn’t stop to analyze it, to think about how it was more complicated, more risky, more dangerous. He just knew it was the way to do it, the way it had to be done. When things hit him that way, his mind was closed, there was no longer any possibility but the one idea strong in his head.

Lynn. Lynn Parker. The bastard’s wife, the butt-twitching, high-breasted, long-legged wife.

From the minute he’d seen her first, in the cab in Chicago when he recognized Parker and braced him for the proposition, he’d had hot pants for that bitch. He’d looked at her, and wanted her, and because she was Parker’s he couldn’t go near her. And that made him want her all the more.

She’d do the job for them. She herself, she’d do it. It came to him, and he knew it was perfect.

“Lynn,” he said. “She does the job for us. It’s perfect.”

Ryan frowned ponderously. “Lynn? She’s his wife, Mal.”

“I know that. She’s the only one could catch him off guard. You know the bastard, Ryan. You want to brace him with him ready and eager for you? The hell with that.”

“How you gonna get Lynn to do it? It don’t make sense, Mal.”

“We tell her the score. She either takes care of him or she’s dead. We put it to her that way. We let her know we mean it — it’s her or him.”

Ryan thought slowly into it, a worried expression on his face. “I don’t know, Mal,” he said laboriously. “Lynn, she’s his wife, I don’t know—”

“You don’t want to brace him, Ryan.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“It’s worth a try. If it don’t work, we regroup, that’s all.” Ryan frowned harder.

“We don’t have a hell of a lot of time,” Mal said quickly.

“We’ve got to make our move before he makes his.”

“Yeah,” said Ryan. “Okay. We try it.”

On the way down the hall, Ryan stopped off in Sill’s room for a minute. That left only Parker to be taken care of.

There was a bathroom between each pair of bedrooms, connected on both sides. They went into the bedroom next to the one occupied by Parker and Lynn, and waited by the slightly open bathroom door.

She finally came through the door on the other side, nude, and they grabbed her the minute she closed the door, and hustled her into the other bedroom. Ryan showed her the knife, darkly smeared, and Mal his gun, and she knew better than to shout.

“We got something to tell you,” Mal said, talking low and quick. “Listen close. Somebody’s going to die in the room next door tonight, and you got the choice. It can be you, or it can be Parker. If you want, it can be both. Which is it?”

She stared up at him, shaking her head. “I don’t know what you mean. What is it, Mal? I don’t know what you mean.”

“I told you,” he said. “Somebody’s going to die in there. It’s you or Parker. Take your pick.”

“How can I—? I don’t get it, Mal. Please, I don’t know what you mean.”

“Ryan, touch her with the knife,” Mal said.

He touched her, the tip of the knife against the underpart of her left breast, not quite enough pressure to break the skin. Her face was big and blank.

“Take your pick, Lynn,” Mal said. “You or Parker. Quick.”

She licked her lips, staring from face to face. Finally, in a voice almost too low to hear, she whispered, “I don’t want to die.”

Mal had Sill’s automatic in his pocket. He took it out and handed her his own revolver. “Point that at either Ryan or me,” he said, “and you’re dead right now.”

She looked from the gun in her hand to his face and back to the gun again. “You want me—? You want me to—?”

“Think it over,” he said. “Take your time.” He ostentatiously looked at his wrist watch. “You got thirty seconds.”

“You can’t want me to— to—”

“You got twenty seconds.”

“Mal, please. For God’s sake, Mal—”

“Twenty seconds. Ryan, touch her with the knife again.”

Ryan touched the tip of the knife to the same place on the underpart of her breast, but Mal said, “No, not there. On the red.” She flinched, and he said, “Ten seconds. Yes or no?”

“Oh, God,” she whispered. The knife was against her and she was afraid to move. “Don’t make me kill him, Mal.”

“Four seconds,” he said. “Better poke a littler harder, Ryan. Two seconds. One—”

“All right!”

Mal exhaled, letting the burden slip from his shoulders. He hadn’t wanted her dead. That was the last thing in the world he wanted.

It was working out fine, detail after detail, he was getting everything he wanted. He wanted the dough, all of it, to repay the syndicate and get back into the Outfit, where he belonged. He was getting the dough, share after share, first Chester’s and then Sill’s and now Parker’s and soon Ryan’s. And he wanted Lynn, who was tied completely to Parker and he was going to get her too.