Plunder Squad
by
Richard Stark
1972
Contents
Title Page
Part 1
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Part 2
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Part 3
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Part 4
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Part 1
One
Hearing the click behind him, Parker threw his glass straight back over his right shoulder, and dove off his chair to the left. The bullet furrowed a line through the plans on the table, the sound of the shot echoed loud and long in the closed room, and Parker rolled amid suddenly scrambling feet, his arms folded in tight over his chest. He didn’t have a gun on him, and the first thing to do was get away from the guy who did.
There was no second shot. An armchair was in the corner of the room to Parker’s left, with a drum table beside it, and it was in that direction that he rolled. He banged his shoulder blades into the edge of the chair, spun around behind it, came up to his knees, grabbed the heavy glass ashtray from the table, and flung it at the doorway without pausing to look.
But there was some kind of struggle going on in the doorway, two men in the indistinct darkness of the hall. Parker got to his feet, swept the lamp off the drum table, picked up the table, and ran forward. The other three men who’d been sitting at the table with him were all still on the floor.
The struggle was over before he reached the doorway. The guy sitting on the floor, his eyes dazed, blood on his forehead and more running down from a cut over his left ear, was Ducasse, the one who’d left the room a minute ago and gone to the front of the house to answer the ringing of the doorbell. He had no gun in his hand, he had no grievance against Parker, and the other one was running away through the house toward the front door.
Parker turned that way, but it was stupid to go after a gun with empty hands. He spun back into the room, throwing the table away, shouting, “Give me a gun! Somebody give me a gun!”
Kirwan was their host, and most likely to be armed, but from the expression on his face as he sat there on the floor he was too rattled to make any fast moves. Before he’d figured out any kind of response at all, Parker had crossed to him, patted his torso, found the .38 Special Colt Cobra tucked away in its shoulder holster on his left side, and was moving away toward the door again. Then Kirwan called something, in an urgent voice, but Parker didn’t pause to listen to it.
The front door had already slammed. Parker ran down the hall, past the entranceway to the living room, and out onto the sagging front porch. Somebody was just getting into a car across the street, his torso silhouetted for a moment by the car’s interior light; Parker braced his body against a porch column and fired two shots before the car door slammed and the light went out. But a Cobra is a defense gun, meant for close-in work; its two-inch barrel makes it as accurate as a tennis ball thrown cross-wind in a hurricane. Both bullets were probably somewhere in the car, but neither of them was in the driver.
Parker leaped down to the lawn and raced for the street. Across the way, the driver was grinding his starter, trying to get the damn car to come to life. It did, and jolted forward, but then it stalled again, and he ground it some more.
Parker was at the curb, and still running. This was a working-class residential street, not quite a slum, with a few of its rattier houses rented on a monthly or even weekly basis. It was now two o’clock on a weekday morning and there were neither moving cars nor pedestrians anywhere in sight. Nor was this a neighborhood where people would jump to call the police at the first unusual sound in the night.
