Deadly Edge: A Parker Novel (4 page)

Parker put his hand on the knob and waited for the other two to come down to him. Then, quickly, he opened the door and stepped through.

One of the notes with the map had said: “One private guard in the hall—armed—always watches show.” He was there, he was watching the show, he never saw Parker and the other two come in at all.

On this floor, there were offices along one side of the corridor only, opposite the stairwell entrance. The other side of the corridor had sections of plate glass at intervals, through which could be seen the main soup bowl of the auditorium. The ceiling of the auditorium, barnacled with lighting equipment, was just above these plate-glass windows, giving the impression that one was viewing from above the auditorium rather than from within it—for the Caesar effect.

It was at one of these windows that the guard was standing. A thin and potbellied man in his fifties, wearing a gray uniform with a gold circular patch on the sleeve, a wood-handled revolver in a holster high up toward the waist on his right side, he was standing there with his hands clasped behind him, head bent forward and down, face in a relaxed expression of blank attention, as though he were daydreaming under cover of the noise. With only space and the one sheet of glass in the way, the sound volume here was very loud, much louder even than in the stairwell.

Parker walked down the corridor toward the guard, Keegan to his left and Briley to his right, forming a triangle shape that filled the width of the hall. They were halfway from the stairwell entrance before their movement
attracted the guard’s attention; then he made a startled automatic move toward his revolver. But it was too high on his waist—he’d put it there for the comfort of his potbelly, no doubt—and a leather strap was snapped in place over the top of the holster to keep the revolver from falling out, and the three faceless men walking toward him all had guns already in their hands. And there was no furniture, no handy open doorway, no place to run, no cover to hide behind; nothing but the empty hallway. The guard, looking bitter and angry and disgusted, straightened from the half-crouch he’d naturally moved into, and slowly lifted his hands over his head.

“Put them down,” Parker said. The guard didn’t make out the words through the noise, so Parker went closer and said again, “Put your hands down. Leave them at your sides. Now walk toward us.” When the guard was no longer in front of the glass, Parker said, “Now stop. Turn left. Put your hands on the wall in front of you at head-height. Lean forward. Touch your forehead to the wall.”

The guard managed as far as touching his hatbrim to the wall. Briley came forward and took the revolver out of the holster, having to use two hands to unsnap the leather strap. He put the revolver away in his hip pocket, and took his own automatic out again, then stepped back a pace.

Parker said, “All right. Straighten up. Turn around. Good.”

Briley took the two-way radio from the guard’s left shirt pocket and backed up next to Parker again. The guard was looking more disgusted by the second.

Parker said, “What’s your name?”

The guard frowned at him, not understanding the reason for the question, but he answered it: “Dockery.”

“First name.”

“Patrick.”

“Do they call you Patrick or Pat?”

“When it’s bums like you,” the guard said bitterly, “they call me Mr. Dockery.”

Briley, grinning, said, “Ah, Paddy Dockery, you talk mighty big when it’s three against one. You know you’re safe from us. I’d like to see you in a fair fight.”

Dockery gave him a brooding look. “You’ll laugh out of the other side of your face,” he said.

“All right, Dockery,” Parker said. “Turn around. Walk slowly to the men’s room.”

The four of them made a small silent procession, out of phase with the beat of the music surrounding them. Dockery passed four doors on his left side, and turned toward the fifth, reaching his hand out to the knob.

Parker said, “If you open that door, I’ll kill you and everybody the other side of it. I said the men’s room.”

Dockery’s hand hesitated, an inch from the knob. His shoulders were tensed to reject the bullet, but in the end he leaned back from the door and his hand dropped to his side. Not turning to look at Parker, he said, “It’s not my own life I was thinking of.”

“I know that,” Parker said. This was one of his specialties, as electricity was one of Keegan’s specialties and driving was one of Morris’s. Rare is the high-number robbery that isn’t cluttered up with people—bank customers or armored-car guards or store clerks or whatever. One of Parker’s specialties was handling the people, which meant keeping them quiet, making sure none of them got
killed, making sure none of them loused up the routine. The last was the most important, and the others would be sacrificed to it, if necessary, though a neat job was always better.

Parker was now handling the person called Patrick Dockery. Dockery was a proud and prickly man, and what he would be feeling now was mostly humiliation. He was the kind who would take almost any sort of damn-fool risk, would even throw his life away, to erase humiliation. He would open the wrong door, he might even turn and attack three armed men. He had to be handled until he’d been successfully maneuvered into the privacy of the men’s room, where he could be physically restrained. Out here in the hall, it meant giving him his respect back, easing his sense of humiliation. By letting him wise off, and by acknowledging that it really had been other people’s lives he’d been thinking of when he’d moved his hand back from that doorknob. Parker was treating his foolhardiness as though it were worthy of respect; if he had judged his man right, Dockery would respond by being good and doing what he was told.

As he did. He led them now to the right room, and all four trooped inside, around the green metal wall divider just inside the door and into the main open green-tiled square of the room itself, where Parker said, “Take off the uniform.”

There was no way around this. The humiliation was harsh and blatant, but it was necessary.

Dockery turned around, and there were pale circles of strain around his eyes. “You go to hell,” he said.

“You aren’t going to stop us,” Parker told him. “Don’t make things tougher for yourself.”

Dockery glared a second longer, and then suddenly
ran backward away from them, his head back and mouth open, shoving the first two fingers of his right hand down his throat.

“Damn it!” Briley jumped forward like a steeplechaser, swinging hard and fast with the automatic, the way he’d swung the ax earlier up on the roof. The barrel clipped Dockery on the forearm, near the wrist, and Dockery instinctively moved the arm, his hand no longer near his mouth. His hat had fallen off, and Briley kicked it to the side, then lunged forward, punching his shoulder into Dockery’s chest and running him backward the rest of the way into the wall, where he hit the side edge of a urinal, half-turned, and hit his left shoulder and the side of his head against the tile wall. Briley held him pinned there at arm’s length, his hand flat with splayed fingers on Dockery’s chest, as with the toe of his right shoe he started angrily kicking Dockery’s shins. “Son of a bitch,” he said, kicking at Dockery’s legs. “Stupid-ass son of a bitch.”

Parker came up beside them and said, “Stop that.” The music was down to a usable level again in here; he could talk in a normal tone of voice.

Briley stopped the kicking, but kept holding Dockery jammed against the wall. Turning his head, he complained, “He was gonna throw up on his uniform! I got to
wear
that uniform!”

“That was his idea,” Parker said.

“He thinks he’s smart.” Briley was panting and enraged. Glaring at Dockery through the eyeholes of his mask, he said, “Gonna screw up our plan, not let me wear the uniform. You know what kind of smart that is? That’s
stupid
smart!”

Parker leaned close to look at Dockery, who seemed dazed and winded and in pain. Parker said, “If you
cause us any more trouble, I don’t answer for what he’ll do to you.”

Dockery blinked at him, still mutinous. “I’ll remember you people.”

“That you will,” Briley said. He abruptly pulled his hand away from Dockery’s chest and stepped back a pace, and Dockery almost fell, but grabbed the urinal and held himself up till he got his balance back.

“Take off your tie,” Parker said, and when Dockery didn’t move at once, Briley yelled, “Damn it, I’ll kick you into hamburger, I swear to God I will!”

Parker, still looking at Dockery, said to Briley, “That’s enough. He’ll do it. He wants to be in shape to identify us at the line-up.”

It was the right approach, at last. Dockery almost smiled, and there was less mutiny and more strength in his voice when he said, “And you’ll be there, don’t you worry. And I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” With a sudden angry gesture, as though it were an act of defiance, he reached up and yanked down on the knot of his tie, pulling the tie loose and flinging it with a contemptuous underhand flip toward Briley, who caught it in midair and said, “Do me a favor. Hang by your thumbs till we show up.”

Keegan, who had stayed over by the door in case anyone else should come in, the toolkit at the floor by his feet, now called, “What’s taking so long? We don’t have all night.”

“We’re ahead of schedule,” Parker called to him. They didn’t have that specific a schedule, but he didn’t want Dockery to get the idea he could fight them some more by moving very slowly.

As it was, Dockery was slow enough. Briley took each piece of clothing as it was tossed at him, and stood
there with the parts of uniform over one arm. He wasn’t naturally a cruel man, and by the time Dockery got to his trousers Briley had cooled off and was no longer angry. Dockery had fresh jagged cuts on both shins, the skin around the cuts ragged like wrinkled onion-skin paper, droplets of blood oozing to the surface of the cuts. The trousers were the last, and when Briley had them he stood there a couple of seconds looking at Dockery’s legs, and then said, in a muted voice, “I’m sorry I did that.”

“You will be,” Dockery said. His face was tight and unforgiving.

“I got mad, is all,” Briley explained, apologizing again.

Dockery didn’t bother to answer that. He turned his head to look at Parker, accepting him as the leader and waiting to be told what to do next.

Parker said, “Go over to the first stall.”

Dockery was in his underwear, socks, and shoes. Somehow he had more dignity now, not less. Out of the uniform, more of his own individuality was apparent; he looked less potbellied, and less ineffective. He seemed to sense the change in his appearance himself, and to behave accordingly; he strode over to the stall without fuss, without either defiance or defeat.

Briley had gone into another stall to change. Keegan came over to watch Dockery while Parker put his automatic away, took the handcuffs from his left hip pocket, got Dockery seated in the stall, and handcuffed his hands behind him, the cuff chain running under the pipe that came out of the wall about thirty inches from the ground. Dockery would be fairly comfortable there, but wouldn’t be able to get away.

Parker stepped back out of the stall and was about
to pull the metal door shut when Dockery called, “Hey.” Parker looked at him, and Dockery said, “I don’t want any of you killed. I want you captured alive. I want to be able to testify against you, and I want to be able to see your faces. I want you to get sent up. I want to know that you’ll be getting years of what you gave me tonight.”

“It may happen,” Parker said, and shut the stall door.

Briley was coming out, in the uniform and without his mask. The pants were a little too short, and too big around the waist, but the shortness just made him look like an old man, and the gunbelt disguised the excess material at the waist.

Briley’s taking the guard’s part was a last-minute change in the routine. An old man named Berridge had originally been set to do it. There’d been three meetings to set things up, and at the beginning of the third, Berridge had said, “There’s no point trying to lie to you boys. Or lie to me, either. I’ve lost my nerve. Maybe I’m too old, or I’ve had too much time inside, I don’t know. But I can feel inside my stomach I can’t do it.” Parker and the others had known better than to try to get a man to do what he felt he was incapable of doing—they’d be too dependent on one another during the job—but it was too late by then to get somebody to take Berridge’s place. This final Saturday night show before the Civic Auditorium was torn down was their only shot: a full house, all cash sales, no advance sales. Every dollar spent for a seat inside that jampacked soup bowl was still in this building, tonight only. So they’d altered the routine to go with a string of four instead of five, and the result was Briley in the guard’s uniform, grinning, self-conscious to be in the trappings of Authority.

“How’s it look?”

“It’ll pass,” Parker said.

Keegan said, “The pants are too short.”

Briley looked at him. “You want me to send them out?”

“I only said.”

“You’ll do,” Parker said.

“The hat was too big,” Briley said. “I put some toilet paper around the brim.” He took the hat off, grinned at the inside, and put it back on. “I’ll go on out.”

Parker and Keegan waited half a minute, and then followed Briley out, Keegan carrying the toolkit again. They looked down to the right, and Briley was standing at the window, looking down at the musicians. There was no music right now, and the crowd noise was steadily dropping. Briley was standing in a good imitation of Dockery’s original position; stomach jutting out, head forward and down, hands clasped behind his back.

Parker looked to his left, down through one of the windows at the platform in the middle of the auditorium. The four musicians who had been there were gone. Bulky stagehands in T-shirts and work pants, looking like citizens of a different planet from everybody else in the auditorium, were spreading a bright red carpet in the middle of the platform, moving the microphones and amplifiers around, and wheeling out a small keyboard instrument like a midget piano. In the middle of the red carpet was the white outline of a triangle, with an eye in it.