said, “There’s guys out on the sides of the house. They’ll blow your head off, you stick it out there.”
“For Christ’s sake, how many of them are there?”
“I think there’s a hundred.”
They talked about it some more. They were the full complement of Dulare’s men up here now, and they didn’t like being stuck on the second floor. A couple of them suggested they simply go down the back stairs and out the kitchen door and get the hell away from here, but the others decided that wouldn’t work either; any man who ran away would sooner or later have to answer to Ernie Dulare. One said, “So we go down the back stairs and get these bastards from behind. Do the same thing to them they’re doing to us.”
Parker, standing in Grofield’s doorway, listened to the entire conversation. If they’d decided to run away, he would have let them go, but in the end they chose to go down to the kitchen and try attacking the invaders from behind, so that was that. Parker took the flashlight from his pocket as he followed them to the stairs, waited until he was sure they were all in the narrow walled staircase, then stood in the doorway at the top, switched the light on, and began firing into them.
Downstairs, in the main parlor off the front staircase, Dulare and Quittner sat on the floor away from the windows, and in the reflected headlight glare tried to put together some kind of sensible defense. Dulare’s man Rigno was out roaming around the house, calling in the rest of the remaining men, gathering them all here in this room. Quittner was saying, “They don’t have much time. They know they have to hit and run, before the police get here.”
Dulare grunted. “They are hitting, goddammit,” he said. “I picked the wrong side in this fight.”
“No,” Quittner said. “You had to side with Buenadella. So does Frank, that’s why I’m here. No matter how much destruction this man Parker causes here tonight, he’s still only a transient, he’ll come and go. The organization has to stay together.”
“We’re goddam falling apart right now,” Dulare said.
Across the main front hall, Fred Ducasse slowly entered the formal dining room. Everything was clear ahead of him, but he didn’t know about the man lying on the floor to his right, over by the archway to the front hall. For just a second Ducasse was framed against a window behind him and to his left; a bullet hit him in the right side of the head, knocking him into a hutch filled with pewter and memorial plates.
More men crawled into the front parlor, staying below the level of the windows. Rigno was in last, and reported to Dulare: “That’s all there is. I shouted upstairs, but there’s nobody up there.”
Dulare did a fast head-count, and there were seventeen men in the room, counting Quittner and himself. “We’ve got to sit tight,” he told them. “We’ll get cops here pretty soon, these people will have to take off. All we do for now is sit here and wait them out.”
That’s when Handy McKay rolled the bomb through the doorway.
Fifty-three
Frank Elkins parked across the road from the hospital and switched the headlights off. Then he and Ralph Wiss waited a minute to get used to the darkness.
Across the way, the hospital showed the only lights in the neighborhood. It was equipped with standby electric-generating equipment sufficient for operating rooms, medical machinery, refrigeration equipment, and some internal lighting, but not enough to illuminate the parking lots or other outside areas, so from here it was merely a pattern of lighted windows hanging in black space.
Wiss said, “It looks like a Halloween pumpkin.”
Elkins squinted. “I don’t see any face.”
“No, a pumpkin done like a building. You know? Instead of a face.”
Elkins frowned in the darkness, uncomprehending. “A pumpkin done like a building?”
“Forget it,” Wiss said. “Come on, let’s go.”
They got out of the car—the interior light was an oasis of warm yellow while the doors were open—and walked across the road and up the driveway to the hospital building. The Emergency entrance sign was off, but they could make out the blacktop lane leading around to the side. They walked around that way, and saw the glow of low- wattage bulbs in the vicinity of the glass doors leading into Emergency. In the yellow-brown light two ambulances were parked near the doors, facing out.
Avoiding the light, Wiss and Elkins skirted the Emergency entrance and made their way toward the rear of the building. Light-spill from windows over their heads gave a faint yellow sheen, enough for them to see what they were doing.
Inside a fenced enclosure was the hospital’s motor pool: four more ambulances, a mobile operating unit, and two other specialty vehicles. Wiss touched the simple padlock closing the gate and it opened for him. He stood by the gate and waited while Elkins selected the ambulance he wanted, crossed the wires under the dash, and drove the vehicle out without switching on its lights. Wiss locked the gate again, got into the ambulance with Elkins, and they rode together out to the street. Elkins stopped next to their car, and Wiss said, “I’ll follow you. I don’t know the way.”
“Right.”
Wiss changed over to the car, Elkins switched on his headlights, and the two vehicles drove away.
Fifty-four
Parker held the flashlight while Handy worked on the wall safe in Buenadella’s den.
The whole thing had taken less than half an hour. Fred Ducasse was dead. Tom Hurley had been shot in the arm, not badly, and had been taken away by Nick Dalesia; they wouldn’t be coming back. Dan Wycza and Ed Mackey and Stan Devers were upstairs strapping Grofield onto a mattress for the trip down and out of the house. Philly Webb and Mike Carlow were away getting other cars, to replace the ones that had been shot up a bit on the
