Richard Stark - The Hunter

She was going to help him murder her husband, and that would be the tie between them that would bind her to him. Knowing that she could have chosen death, but had not, she would have to realize how faint her love for Parker really had been, and she would need someone who could share that knowledge and still want her. And that would be him, Mal, the one who had done it with her, the one for whom she had killed.

But it wasn’t done yet. He explained to her now. He and Ryan would be in the connecting bathroom, waiting. They didn’t demand that she do the job right away. She could take all the time she needed, she could wait for just the right moment. But Parker was not to leave the room alive. If he did, one second later she would be dead.

And if she tried to warn Parker, Mal and Ryan would know. They would be watching, they would be listening; they would know. One wrong word and she and Parker would die together, at the same moment. He explained it all twice, making sure she understood. She watched him dully, watching his moving lips rather than his eyes.

“All right,” she said, when he was finished. “I’ll do it. I told you I’d do it.”

“Good.”

He wanted to reach out and pat her shoulder, just touch her flesh, but some instinct warned him not to.

She crossed through the bathroom to the room where Parker lay waiting for her. She walked diagonally across to him, the gun out of his sight in her right hand, held down against her thigh. When she bent to join him, she managed to slip the gun under the mattress, and then his arms were around her and the fierce strength was on him again.

Mal stood in the bathroom, one eye closed, watching through the slit between door and jamb. The bodies moved on the bed in the dim light, and he watched, in a kind of suspended animation, waiting for the thing to be done and over with, for him to be dead and her to be his.

Ryan tugged at his arm, motioning him into the other bedroom and, irritated, he obeyed. Whispering, Ryan wanted to know why they didn’t just plug Parker now, from the bathroom doorway.

Mal shook his head in exasperation. “It might kill her, too,” he said. “And I want her.”

Ryan said, “But she don’t want you, Mal.”

“She will,” he said, and went back to his post at the door.

They were like something in a jungle, those two. He watched, and he couldn’t believe she was always that demanding. She was giving her husband a grand send-off. Or maybe it was just that she was aware Mal was watching, that she was trying to show him how good she was.

It went on and on, until finally Parker got up from the bed and reached for his clothes. He put on a shirt and trousers, that was all, and picked up the automatic from the nightstand. Mal heard him say, “I’ll go see Mal now.”

Mal and Ryan exchanged glances. For Ryan, it was another confirmation of what Mal had already told him. For Mal, it was the startled realization that he’d been telling Ryan the truth all along. The son of a bitch really was planning to kill him!

They saw Parker start for the door; they saw Lynn glance over at them, her face frightened and indecisive. Mal pulled the door open an inch more, enough for her to see the automatic in his hand, and then she reached under the mattress and came up with the revolver and spoke Parker’s name.

They saw the first shot catch him in the gut, and they saw her fire five more shots into him in blind panic and throw the gun away, crying out without words. And then they came into the room.

Mal sent Ryan to the garage for gasoline. They’d burn the house, get rid of all the evidence.

He told Lynn to get dressed. He’d planned to take her now, for the first time, right here in the same room with her dead husband, but the look on her face stopped him. Besides, he felt a sudden urgent need to be out of here, to have the thing behind him and finished and in the past.

They fired the house and left, and on the way to the plane he shot Ryan in the back. “I can fly a plane too,” he told her, grinning. “He never knew that. I’m smarter than Parker thought.”

In the plane, he told her why he was justified. “Parker was figuring to kill me, wasn’t he? It was him or me. Just like it was him or you. The same thing.”

She answered only when he demanded an answer, and then only in monosyllables.

He got to her the first time in Chicago.

He’d gone to the Outfit and he’d given them the money, and they’d just stared at him. They couldn’t believe it. “We’ll let you know, Mal,” they’d said. “We’ll give you a call in a couple days.”

So he went back to the hotel, where she sat waiting for him because there was no place else for her to go, and he got to her for the first time. And she just lay there. He beat upon her like the waves upon a rocky cliff, and like a rocky cliff she remained unmoved. Her expression was dull, her body was unresponsive, her emotions were away off somewhere.

So he figured it was just that it was too soon, she needed some time to adjust. She hadn’t argued about his right to take her; there really wasn’t any problem. She’d come out of it soon enough.

Two days later, a guy came around from the Outfit. He was impressed by the suite, that was clear enough, and he was impressed by the quality of the woman Mal had there with him. And the Outfit was already impressed by the money he’d paid them.

A guy who had the guts to go out and grab that kind of dough, and the loyalty to use it to repay a debt to the Outfit, was a guy the Outfit could use. They had a slot for him. If he worked out this time, he had it made.

There was only one small thing. It would be best if he didn’t work in Chicago. A lot of the rank and file in Chicago knew about his blunder: it might make it difficult for him to be an effective administrator. They had a slot for him in New York.

That was fine by Mal. He wasn’t particularly hipped on Chicago anyway. He thought he’d like New York.

Lynn went with him. She had nowhere else to go.

In New York they made him a sales manager, liquor division. Cigarettes are cheap in the District of Columbia. There’s no state sales tax. Cigarettes are expensive in Canada. There’s an import duty on American brands. On the other hand, Canadian whiskey is cheap in Canada, but there’s an import duty making it expensive in the United States.

So the cars full of cigarettes drive north from Washington, and the same cars, now full of whiskey, drive south from Montreal. About half of the liquor cargo goes as far as New York, and the rest goes on down to Washington.

Mal was the guy who received the liquor shipments in New York. He managed the crew that sold the stuff to selected restaurants and bars and liquor stores. It was purely administrative, seeing that the right quantities went to the right places at the right times, and that nobody tapped the take. It was a job he could do, a job he could like. He fitted in well.

And Lynn stayed with him. She had nowhere else to go. But she didn’t warm up, no matter what he tried, no matter how much time he spent with her, no matter how much dough he spent on her, no matter what. She was a large-as-life doll, no more. It was as though his sweating hulking panting body weren’t even there.

He took to getting his satisfaction elsewhere, with Pearl and with others. He moved out completely at last, giving her enough dough to support herself, and she stayed because she had nowhere else to go. It had occurred to him finally to be afraid of her, to realize that she might one day decide, in desperate expiation, to kill him as she had killed Parker. So when he moved out he made sure she couldn’t find him. She didn’t object; she didn’t suppose that she’d ever want to find him for anything.