month. If you don’t hear from me, turn the gun over to the law. I guess there’s skin scrapings from Stern on it or something to tie me in with what happened to Stern, and it’ll keep.
PARKER
He looked at it, then crossed out “Parker”, and wrote in its place “Chuck”. He put the note in an envelope, wrote her name on the outside, and tucked the envelope in his pocket. The other six letters went into the same pocket. He got the .25, stripped the silencer off it, and went to the bedroom closet. He pulled Menner out on to the bedroom floor, wiped his own prints from the gun, and closed Menner’s hand around it. It might not hold up as suicide the angle was probably wrong, and Menner had two too many bullets in him but it should help to slow the law down. And the gun, if it could be traced at all, couldn’t be traced past Stern to Parker.
Out back, he threw the silencer into a garbage can. Then he walked around to Rampon Boulevard and caught a cab. “Hotel Maharajah.”
There was no one he recognized in the lobby. He left the note for Bett at the desk and went up to his room. It was empty. As far as he could tell, no one had been in it. He packed his suitcase, stuffing the six wallets into it, with the identity cards and driver’s licences, but without the seventeen hundred dollars they’d once contained, and went downstairs to check out. This time, he was going to settle things with the Outfit once and for all. This time, he was going straight to Bronson.
4
LAST YEAR, it was, Parker had let his finances run low, and a job that had seemed promising had fallen through in the planning stage, so when this Mal Resnick told him about the island job he decided to take it on. Munitions were being sold by a private group of Americans and Canadians to a lunatic group of South American fidelistas, and a tiny Pacific island had been chosen for the transfer of arms and money. This particular island had been picked because it was uninhabited and because the Seabee-built World War II airfield there was still usable. Mal and Parker and the others decided to take the money away.
There were six of them in it: a Canadian named Chester, who’d originally found out about the deal; a man named Ryan, who knew how to fly a plane; a methodical, reliable gunman named Sill; Parker’s wife, Lynn; Mal Resnick and Parker. With Lynn waiting in the abandoned house they’d chosen as their California base, the five men had flown to the island, turned the trick with a minimum of fuss, and flown back to the mainland. And that night, in the California house, the double-crossing had started.
Mal had begun by talking to Ryan, telling him Parker was planning a cross. Then he’d killed Chester in his sleep, and had gone to Ryan to tell him Parker had started, had already done for Chester, and that Sill was siding with Parker. Ryan wasn’t a subtle man; he accepted the story the way Mal fed it to him. Later it was Ryan who finished Sill.
Then Parker’s wife, Lynn, had been brought into it. Mal had wanted her from the first minute he’d seen her. He now saw a way to get her. He used the threat of death to force her to kill Parker herself, and she did her best. But her first bullet slammed into Parker’s belt buckle and he dropped; and she emptied the gun over his head.
So far as Mal knew, the operation was still sweet. He put a torch to the house, shot Ryan in the back, and took off with Lynn and the ninety-thousand-dollar haul. He had a purpose for that money. Four years before he’d worked in Chicago for the Outfit, but he’d loused up, dumping forty thousand dollars of uncut snow when he mistook the Outfit tail for a plainclothesman. The Outfit had let him live, which had surprised him, but had told him not to come back without the cash to pay for his mistake. Now Mal had the cash.
He took Lynn with him. She was now a silent block of ice, but he thought he could eventually thaw her out. They went to New York, and he gave the Outfit back every penny with interest and penalties a little over fifty thousand. He invested the rest, and sat around waiting for the Outfit to offer him something. He got a job, a better one than he’d had before, and settled in New York to live the way he thought he should.
But Parker wasn’t dead. Badly bruised by the bullet that had slammed his belt buckle into his stomach, he’d managed to crawl out of the burning house wearing nothing but a pair of trousers and had wandered, half-delirious, three days before being picked up. He had no identification on him and no money. He refused to tell the law anything, and wound up with a six-month vag stint on a prison farm his one and only fall. It also caused him to lose some of his anonymity his fingerprints went on file, under the name he’d grudgingly given them: Ronald Kasper. Even when he’d been in the Army ‘42 to ‘44, when he got his BCD for blackmarketeering he’d managed to avoid having his fingerprints recorded by bribing a file clerk to replace them with his own. So now he had one more reason to get hold of Mal.
Finally, he broke out of the prison farm, bummed his way across the country, and went to New York to look for Mal and Lynn. They were separated now, Mal having given up trying to get Lynn to respond to him. Parker found Lynn and she killed herself. He couldn’t have finished her off, but she did it herself. Then he found Mal, and evened the account.
So Lynn and Mal were both dead, but Parker was still broke. Mal had given his share forty-five thousand to the Outfit, so Parker went to the Outfit to get it back. They hadn’t wanted to give it to him, so he used pressure, disrupting the New York organization, and threatening to cause them trouble all across the country if he didn’t get his money.
“I’ve worked my particular line for eighteen years,” he told them. “In that time, I’ve worked with about a hundred different men. Among them, they’ve worked with just about every pro in the business. There’s you people with your organization, and there’s us. We don’t have any organization, but we’re professionals. We know each other. We stick with each other. And we don’t hit the syndicate. We don’t hit casinos, or lay-off bookies, or narcotic caches. You’re sitting there wide open, you can’t squeal to the law, but we don’t hit you.
“If you don’t give me my money I write letters, to those hundred men I told you about. I tell them: ‘the syndicate hit me for forty-five G. Do me a favour and hit them back once, when you’ve got the chance.’
“Maybe half of them will say the hell with it. The other half are like me they’ve got a job all cased. A lot of us are like that. You organized people are so wide open. We walk into a syndicate place and we look around, and just automatically we think it over, we think about it like a job. We don’t do anything about it, because you people are on the same side as us, but we think about it. I’ve walked around for years with three syndicate grabs all mapped out in my head, but I’ve never done anything about it. The same with a lot of the people I know. So all of a sudden they’ve got the green light, they’ve got an excuse. They’ll grab for it.”
They weren’t sure whether it was bluff or not, but they agreed to pay. Parker was causing them too much trouble anyway. He’d killed Carter, one of the two men in charge of the New York area, and then managed to get a gun on the surviving boss, Fairfax. With Parker standing over him, Fairfax telephoned Bronson, head of the national organization, and Bronson came to terms. He put the forty-five thousand in a trap, and Parker walked through the trap and came out on the other side with the money. Knowing that the Outfit and Bronson personally would now try to hunt him down and kill him, Parker had gone to a plastic surgeon who worked outside the law, and came out with a new face.
But now the Outfit knew about the new face. And they also knew about his cover name, Willis.
