“Don’t mind if I do, Mr Hariss.”
“Alex Kolinski is in jail. He was arrested this afternoon in the act of giving an overdose of heroin to a girl in a Tenderloin hotel.”
Blaney was shocked. He dropped the cigar, had to root around on the unswept floor to find it again. He came erect. “Alex? Busted?”
“They have him cold, according to my information. Now, I know you have always worked for Alex, and I’m sure you hold him in the same sort of esteem that I do. On the other hand, business must continue.” He paused as if inviting comment from the big man across the desk. None was forthcoming. Hariss nodded. “I’m sure that you were sufficiently in Alex’s confidence to know that I have a discreet financial interest in this garage.”
“Sure. Half-owner.”
“There you are,” said Hariss delightedly. “I want to assure you, Blaney, that the situation here at the garage will remain stable while Alex is... away.”
“I’m glad to hear that, Mr Hariss.”
Hariss leaned forward, bringing his heavy ruddy features into the circle of light cast by the desk lamp. “I would like to feel that in the eventuality of Alex’s permanent... absence, I could count on your primary loyalties lying with the... um, partnership instead of with Alex himself. Who, after all, created the trouble in which he now finds himself.”
Blaney leaned forward himself. His lips curved under the heavy mustache. “You’re here, Mr Hariss. Alex ain’t.”
“Admirably put. One other point, Blaney. Alex had certain... outside activities having to do with the projected distribution of a certain highly-lucrative commodity. I’m sure Alex had a... buffer, someone to stand between himself and the street people — who can be unstable and need stern handling from time to time.”
“Yeah,” said Blaney. He sat utterly still, flat-faced, considering. He smiled again. “Yeah. I know who they are, and I’m the man who deals with them.”
“I feel that shortly I will have a kilo of ninety-five percent pure which should be cut and... offered for sale.”
Blaney began, “I thought that was...” Then caught himself and stopped.
“Alex’s arrest has changed that situation,” said Hariss smoothly. “Our best interests now will be served by distributing this commodity ourselves rather than selling it as a unit elsewhere as an expedient toward raising more cash.”
Blaney’s voice tightened hopefully. “I’ll need a percentage.”
“Were you to get a percentage from Alex?”
After an appreciable pause, the big man shook his head. “Lump sum.”
“You’ll get a percentage from me.”
“Hey!” he exclaimed, as if he had run a bluff and had won. “That’s swell, Mr Hariss.”
When Blaney had returned to the garage floor, Hariss laughed to himself. “A percentage — and of course standing between me and danger if anything goes wrong.” He laughed again, softly. “And of course no percentage of the money in the attaché case that the money man will be taking out of Neil Fargo’s hide.”
He dialled his home number, told his daughter to come and pick him up. Then he leaned back in his chair with the contemplative face of a man with a clear conscience and good digestion who has supper on his mind. His wife had recently hired an excellent cook.
Eighteen
Some twenty minutes before Walter Hariss had telephoned his daughter, Docker had driven the yellow Montego up onto the San Francisco Skyway. Not at Tenth and Folsom as the tipster had informed Neil Fargo and Hariss, however, he had entered the concrete maze at Gough and Turk Streets. Freeway is a misnomer during rush-hour traffic; almost instantly, Docker was in the stop-and-go tie-up where the Oak Street on-ramp poured fresh commuters into the Central Freeway’s main stream.
Docker edged the powerful car into the right lane after the South Van Ness/Tenth Street influx had been assimilated, then spent five motionless minutes before he could begin edging forward again.
The delay did not seem to unduly frustrate the hulking blond man, although he did keep a nervous tattoo of muscular fingers going on the steering wheel. His inner tension displayed itself in other ways, too. His bleak eyes behind their hornrims kept searching the cars massed in the growing twilight behind him, and every minute or two he would jab the radio station-selector in search of relief from the mindless rush-hour commercials.
Finally the yellow Montego was past the tight-jammed lanes which went east toward Bay Bridge, and he was able to take the one-lane concrete loop which put him into the main traffic stream south. After he’d left the monstrous concrete spaghetti of the Southern Freeway interchange behind, he was able to touch the posted 50 mph for the first time as holes began appearing among the solid lanes of cars on the Bayshore; Interstate 280 had siphoned off the westbound traffic.
Docker reached 65 mph and began paying even more attention to the rear-view mirror after the South San Francisco off-ramp, but then abruptly abandoned the surveillance.
“Couldn’t spot a tail in this traffic anyway,” he muttered aloud.
He lit a cigarette, which kept his face busy and perhaps his mind as well. His harsh features were illuminated from below by the dashboard lights. His calloused, deadly hands were rock-solid on the wheel except when he moved the dwindling cigarette around in his mouth.
After the San Bruno off-ramp ten miles south of the city, he got into the right-hand lane reserved for the airport turn-off a mile-and-a-half further on. The big yellow car, slowed to a decorous thirty, went by a stalled motorist on the overpass who had his hood raised and a plastic Highway Patrol already helped pennant impaled on his radio aerial.
Ahead of Docker were the ever-changing auto traffic patterns heading toward the twin terminals, each lane now marked with its special destination. Behind, his rear-view mirror showed him, the stalled motorist was slamming down his hood, sprinting around his car for the driver’s side.
Docker smiled grimly to himself. His big hands swerved the auto into the left-hand, PARKING lanes. His foot suddenly goosed the accelerator and the car went into a three-quarters slide right under the INCOMING PLANES ramp and down a narrow blacktop lane which led to the lowest tier of the parking garage.
This won him precious seconds. No lights showed in his rear-view mirror as he collected from the automatic ticket machine, drove under the electronically-folding restraint arm, fast, then stood the car on its nose a dozen yards beyond.
Across half a lane coming in from the right were sawhorses, which bore the sign: LEVEL FULL. USE RAMP TO UPPER FLOORS.
Docker twisted the power-assisted wheel over hard, shot past the sawhorses, almost instantly made a hard left into the intersecting lane. He drove forward three car lengths, stopped, killing lights and motor in the same moment.
The Montego was now in a lane parallel to the entry lane and hidden from any car coming through the ticket machines.
Docker left the car, crept unevenly forward between parked cars, squatted down so his head would not show above them. A bare ten seconds later a car nosed down the ramp, collected a ticket. Docker grinned tightly. It was the stalled motorist’s green Plymouth.
The Plymouth hesitated at the sawhorses. Docker was tense. The Plymouth finally went on. Docker relaxed. He came partially erect so he could watch over the hood of one of the parked cars as it went up the ramp.
It didn’t. It went past, on toward the next intersecting lane down the garage which was parallel to that which was sawhorsed.
Docker ran unevenly back to the Montego, kicked it alive, squealed back to the sawhorse lane, swung quickly back into the main aisle down which the Plymouth had just gone.
Ahead, the Plymouth had already disappeared down one of the cross-lanes.