Richard Stark - The Hunter

Stegman stopped in the parking lot, which was almost empty. “The Bay’s polluted,” he said. “There’s no swimming here. Kids come here at night and neck, that’s all.” He shifted in the seat, facing Parker, and said, “Now what’s this about Sidney? He wouldn’t dare run off with the dough.”

“He didn’t.” Parker took the envelope out of his pocket and dropped it on top of the dashboard. “I took it away from him.”

Stegman’s hand reached toward the radio switch. “What the hell is this? What are you up to?”

“Touch that switch and I’ll break your arm.”

Stegman’s hand stopped.

Parker nodded. “I’m looking for Mal Resnick,” he said. “You’re going to tell me where he is.”

“No. Even if I knew, the answer would still be no.”

“You’ll tell me. I want to tell him he doesn’t have to pay her off any more.”

“Why not?”

“She’s dead. So is your fat pansy. You can be dead, too, if you want.”

Stegman licked his lips. He turned his head and nodded at the small stone buildings out at the end of the pier. “There’s people there,” he said. “All I got to do is holler.”

“You’d never get it out. Take a deep breath and you’re dead. Open your mouth wide and you’re dead.”

Stegman looked back at him. “I don’t see no gun,” he said. “I don’t see no weapon.”

Parker held up his hands. “You see two of them,” he said. “They’re all I need.”

“You’re out of your mind. It’s broad daylight. We’re in the front seat of a car. People see us scuffling—”

“There wouldn’t be any scuffle, Stegman. I’d touch you once, and you’d be dead. Look at me. You know this isn’t a bluff.”

Stegman met his eye, and Parker waited. Stegman blinked, and looked down at the radio. Parker said, “You don’t have that long. He won’t be calling for ten minutes. You’ll be dead in five if you don’t tell me where Mal is.”

“I don’t know where he is. That’s the truth. I believe you — you’re crazy enough to try it — but that’s still the truth. I don’t know where he is.”

“You got that dough from him.”

“There’s a checking account in the bank near my office. On Rockaway Parkway. There’s a hundred bucks in it to keep it alive. Every month Mal deposits eleven hundred. Then I write a check and take it out. I keep the hundred for myself and send the grand to the girl. A different messenger every month, the way he wanted it.”

Parker gnawed on his cheek.

Stegman said, “He’s scared of the girl. That’s the way it looks to me.”

“He must have left you a way to get in touch with him.”

“No. He said he’d see me around.” Stegman exhaled sharply, shaking his head. “Mister,” he said, “I don’t know nothing about this. I don’t know who you are, or the girl, or why the payoff. Mal and I used to hang around together in the old days, before he went out to California. So he shows up three months ago and says do him a favor. I’ll pick up an extra C a month, and there’s no problem, no law, nothing. So I’ll do him the favor, what the hell. But now you come around and talk about killing me. That much a buddy of Mal I’m not. If I knew where he was, I’d tell you. That’s straight. If he was setting me up for this, some guy coming around going to kill me, he should have picked another boy. He should have told me what might happen. You think I’d come out for a ride with you?”

Parker shrugged. “All right.”

“I’ll tell you this much. He’s in New York, that I know.”

“How do you know?”

“He said so. When he come around for me to do this little favor. I asked him how he liked it out west, and he said he was through out there. From now on, he was staying in the big town. He got like lonesome, he said.”

“So where would he be? You know him from the old days. Where would he hang out?”

“I don’t have any idea. He was gone a long time.”

“You could check.”

“I could say I’d check. Then you’d get out of the car, and I’d mind my own business some more. And I’d tell my drivers, they see you around again, they should jump on you with both feet.“ He shrugged. “You know that as well as I do.”

Parker nodded. “So I’ll find him some other way. You want Sidney back, you send somebody up to Lynn Parker’s place. I got him locked in the bedroom.”

“I thought you said he was dead.”

“He isn’t.”

“Is the girl there, too?”

“No. She’s in the morgue. All right, let’s go back. You can drop me off at the subway.”

“Sure.” Stegman stopped for a red light and shook his head. “This’ll teach me. No more favors.”

“You came out all right. So far.”

Stegman turned his head. “What do you mean, so far?”

“You happen to run into Mal somewhere, you don’t want to mention me.”

“Don’t worry, friend. No more favors!”

He changed trains three times, but there wasn’t anyone following him. He was disgusted. It meant Stegman was telling the truth, and it was a dead end. Otherwise, a tail would have led to the connection.

He wanted Mal. He wanted Mal between his hands...

It had started ten months ago. There were four of them in it: Parker and his wife and Mal and a Canadian hotshot named Chester. Chester was the one who set it up. He’d heard about the arms deal, and he saw the angle right away. He brought Mal into it, and Mal brought in Parker.

It was a sweet setup. Eighty thousand dollars’ worth of munitions, with over-writes along the way bringing the total up to ninety-three grand and change. The goods were American, picked up here and there, and trucked piecemeal into Canada. It was easier to get the stuff into Canada than either into Mexico or out of a United States port, and once in Canada there was no trouble getting it airborne.

There was a small airfield up in Keewatin, near Angikuni Lake, and at the right time of year the roads were passable. There were two planes, making two trips each, heading first westward over MacKenzie and Yukon and B.C. to the Pacific, and then turning south. One island stop for refueling, and then on south-ward again. The buyers were South American revolutionaries with a mountain airfield and a yen for bloodshed.

Chester learned about the transaction through a friend of his who’d gotten a job driving one of the trucks north into Canada. He learned the details of the operation and knew that, in a deal like this, payment would have to be in cash. That made it a natural for a hijacking. There would never be any law called in, and there was nothing to fear from a bunch of mountain guerrillas a continent away.

As to the Americans and Canadians doing the selling, they wouldn’t care; they wouldn’t be out of pocket at all. They’d still have their munitions, and there was always a market for munitions.

The truck driver didn’t know when or where the money was supposed to change hands, but Chester found out from him the name of a man who did know, a lawyer named Bleak from San Francisco, one of the backers who’d put up the money in the states for the initial purchase of the arms. He also learned that he had five weeks before the arms would all have been delivered to the field in Keewatin.

Chester at that time was a straight busher when it came to operations like armed robbery. Most of his experience was with cross-the-border running of one kind or another. He’d bring pornography into the states and bootleg it in Chicago or Detroit, transport cigarettes north and whiskey south, wheel bent goods into Canada for sale fence-to-fence, and things like that. He’d taken one fall, in a Michigan pen, when he was stopped at the border in a hot car with a bad daub job. The motor number was still there for all the world to see. And the spare tire was full of Chesterfields.