Backflash
By
RICHARD STARK
Copyright Š 1998 by Richard Stark
This is for Walter and Carol, who got married tomorrow.
ONE
1
When the car stopped rolling, Parker kicked out the rest of the windshield and crawled through onto the wrinkled hood, Glock first. He slid to the left, around the tree that had made the Seville finally jolt to a stop, and listened. The siren receded, far upslope. These woods held a shocked silence, after the crash; every animal ear in a hundred yards was as alert as Parker’s.
Nobody came down the hill, following the scar through the trees. There was just the one car in pursuit up there, federal agents of some kind, probably trying right now to make radio contact with the rest of their crew, and still chasing the truck with the rockets, figuring they’d come back to the wrecked car later.
Later was good enough for Parker. He eased around the tree and bent to move down the less-battered right side of the Seville, where he’d been seated next to the driver. The glass from that window was gone; he looked in at Howell at the wheel, and Howell looked back, his eyes scared, but his mouth twisted in what was supposed to be an ironic grin. “They clamped me,” he said, and shook his head.
Parker looked at him. The firewall and steering column and door had all folded in on him, like he was the jelly in the doughnut. He’d live, but it would take two acetylene torches four hours to cut him out of there. “You’re fucked,” Parker told him.
“I thought I was,” Howell said.
Parker moved on and tried to open the rear door, which still had its glass, but it was jammed. He smashed out the window with the barrel of the Glock, reached in, grabbed the workout bag by the handle, and pulled it out through the new hole. Bag in left hand, Glock in right, he moved over again to look in at Howell, and Howell hadn’t moved. He was still looking out, at Parker. Howell was mostly bald, and his head was streaked with bleeding cuts and hobnailed with hard drops of sweat. He breathed through his open mouth, and kept looking at Parker. His legs and torso and left arm were clamped, but his right arm was free. His pistol was on the seat by his right hip. He could reach it, but he left it there, and looked at Parker, and breathed through his open mouth, and more blood and more sweat oozed out onto his bald head.
Parker hefted the bag, and the Glock. Howell shook his head. “Come on, Parker,” he said. “You know me better than that.”
Parker considered him. He didn’t like to leave a loose end behind, sometimes they followed you, they showed up later when you were trying to think about something else. He moved the Glock slightly, rested the barrel on the open window.
Howell said, “You knowme, Parker.”
“And you know me.”
“Not anymore.” Howell smiled, showing blood-lined teeth, and said, “This crash knocked my memory loose. I don’t even know who Iam, anymore. It’s all gone.”
“They’ll try to make it worth your while, bargain you down.”
“Not worth mywhile,” Howell said. “Not with you out there. I’ll catch up on my reading.”
Parker thought about it. He knew Howell, he trusted him on the job, they’d watch each other’s back, they’d give each other a straight count when the jackpot was in. But for the long haul?
Howell nodded at the bag. “Have a beer on me,” he suggested.
Parker nodded, and made up his mind. “See you in twenty years,” he said, and turned away, to head downslope.
“I’ll be rested,” Howell called after him.
2
It was a house on a lake called Colliver Pond, seventy miles from New York, a deep rural corner where New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania meet. A narrow blacktop road skirted the lake, among the pines, and the house, gray stone and brown shingle, squatted quiet and inconspicuous between road and shore. Now, in April, the trees not yet fully leafed out, the clapboard houses on both sides could clearly be seen, each of them less than fifty feet away, but it didn’t matter; they were empty. This was mostly a resort community, lower-level white-collar, people who came here three months every summer and left their “cottages” unoccupied the rest of the year. Only fifteen percent of the houses around the lake were lived in full-time, and most of those were over on the other side, in the lee of the mountain, out of the winter wind.
For Parker, it was ideal. A place to stay, to lie low when nothing was going on, a “home” as people called it, and no neighbors. In the summer, when the clerks came out to swim and fish and boat, Parker and Claire went somewhere else.
Late afternoon, amber lights warm in the windows. Parker turned in at the driveway, at the wheel of a red Subaru, two days and three cars since the Seville had gone off that mountain road and he’d left Howell behind. The Subaru was a mace, a safe car, not in any cop’s computer, so long as nobody looked too closely at the paperwork and the serial numbers. Parker steered it down the drive through the trees and shrubbery that took the place of the lawn here, and ahead of him the left side door of the double attached garage slid upward; so Claire had seen him coming. He drove in and got out of the car as the door slid down, and Claire was in the yellow-lit rectangle of doorway to the kitchen. “Welcome home, Mr. Lynch,” she said.
Claire had jokes, and that was one of them; they were all wasted on Parker. She’d known him as Lynch when they’d first met, so she liked to greet him with that name, because it showed they had a history. She wanted to believe they had a history, in both directions.
“Hello,” he said, and crossed out of the garage, carrying the workout bag. He stopped in the doorway to kiss her, and in that move opened himself again to all the warmth he’d shut out since he’d gone away. The homecomings were always good, because they were a kind of coming back to life.
After the kiss, she smiled at him and took his hand and nodded at the workout bag: “Not the laundry,” she suggested.
“A hundred forty thousand,” he told her. “Supposed to be. I didn’t count it yet.”
“I like it that you save the fun parts for me,” she said.
What she meant was, she didn’t want any part of it at all, what happened when he was away. They’d met in the first place because her ex-brother-in-law, an idiot named Billy Lebatard, had involved her in a robbery at a coin convention that had gone very sour. At the end of it, Billy was dead, there was blood everywhere, and Parker had dragged Claire into safety at the last second. She’d been married once, earlier, to an airline pilot who’d died in a crash; with that, and the mess Billy’d made, she wanted no more. Once, a couple of hard-edged clowns had broken in here, but Parker had dealt with it, and now he and Claire were together most of the time, warming themselves at each other’s fire, liking the calm. When Parker went away, as he sometimes did, she wanted to know nothing about it. She was willing, at the most, while he showered, to count the money and leave it in stacks on the coffee table in the living room for him to see when he came in, wearing a black robe and carrying a glass. She sat on the sofa without expression and said, “A hundred forty thousand exactly.”
“Good.”
‘Just like the paper said.”
He sat on the sofa beside her and cocked his head. “The paper?”
“You haven’t read any newspapers?”
“I’ve been moving.”
“Before you went away,” she said, “a man named Howell phoned you.”
“Right.”
“A man named Howell is dead.”
That surprised him. “Dead? How dead?”
“Injuries from an automobile accident. While escaping, the car he drove crashed down a mountainside. The other three people, and a small truck with anti-tank rockets, all escaped. Arrests are expected.”
“They killed him,” Parker said.
“Who killed him?”
“The law. Feds or local. Let me see the paper.”