Tonight something was going to happen.
Deighan took the gun out of the clamshell holster at his belt. It was a Smith & Wesson .38 wadcutter, lightweight, compact — a good piece, one of the best he’d ever owned. He held it in his hand, watching as the lookout performed as if on cue — walked to the pier, stopped, then moved out along its flat surface. When the guy had gone halfway, Deighan came out of the shadows and went down the slope at an angle across the driveway, to the rear of the cabin. His shoes made little sliding sounds on the needled ground, but they weren’t sounds that carried.
He’d been over this ground three times before, dry runs the last two Thursday nights and once during the day when nobody was around; he knew just where and how to go. The lookout was lighting up again, his back to the cabin, when Deighan reached the rear wall. He eased along it to the spare-bedroom window. The sash went up easily, noiselessly. He could hear them then, in the rec room — voices, ice against glass, the click and rattle of the chips. He got the ski mask from his jacket pocket, slipped it over his head, snugged it down. Then he climbed through the window, put his penlight on just long enough to orient himself, went straight across to the door that led into the rec room.
It didn’t make a sound, either, when he opened it. He went in with the revolver extended, elbow locked. Sturgess saw him first. He said, “Jesus Christ!” and his body went as stiff as if he were suffering a stroke. The others turned in their chairs, gawking. The Shooter started up out of his.
Deighan said, fast and hard, “Sit still if you don’t want to die. Hands on the table where I can see them — all of you. Do it!”
They weren’t stupid; they did what they were told. Deighan watched them through a thin haze of tobacco smoke. Six men around the hexagonal poker table, hands flat on its green baize, heads lifted or twisted to stare at him. He knew five of them. Mannlicher, the fat owner of the Nevornia Club at Crystal Bay; he had Family ties, even though he was a Prussian, because he’d once done some favors for an east-coast capo. Brandt, Mannlicher’s cousin and private enforcer, who doubled as the Nevornia’s floor boss. Bellah, the quasi-legitimate real-estate developer and high roller. Sturgess, the bankroll behind the Jackpot Lounge down at South Shore. And the Shooter — hired muscle, hired gun, part-time coke runner, whose real name was Dennis D’Allesandro. The sixth man was the pigeon they’d lured in for this particular game, a lean guy in his fifties with Texas oil money written all over him and his fancy clothes — Donley or Dona van, something like that.
Mannlicher was the bank tonight; the table behind his chair was covered with stacks of dead presidents — fifties and hundreds, mostly. Deighan took out the folded-up flour sack, tossed it on top of the poker chips that littered the baize in front of Mannlicher. “All right. Fill it.”
The fat man didn’t move. He was no pushover; he was hard, tough, mean. And he didn’t like being ripped off. Veins bulged in his neck, throbbed in his temples. The violence in him was close to the surface now, held thinly in check.
“You know who we are?” he said. “Who I am?”
“Fill it.”
“You dumb bastard. You’ll never live to spend it.”
“Fill the sack. Now.”
Deighan’s eyes, more than his gun, made up Mannlicher’s mind for him. He picked up the sack, pushed around in his chair, began to savagely feed in the stacks of bills.
“The rest of you,” Deighan said, “put your wallets, watches, jewelry on the table. Everything of value. Hurry it up.”
The Texan said, “Listen heah—” and Deighan pointed the .38 at his head and said, “One more word, you’re a dead man.” The Texan made an effort to stare him down, but it was just to save face; after two or three seconds he lowered his gaze and began stripping the rings off his fingers.
The rest of them didn’t make any fuss. Bellah was sweating; he kept swiping it out of his eyes, his hands moving in little jerks and twitches. Brandt’s eyes were like dull knives, cutting away at Deighan’s masked face. D’Allesandro showed no emotion of any kind. That was his trademark; he was your original iceman. They might have called him that, maybe, if he’d been like one of those old-timers who used an ice pick or a blade. As it was, with his preferences, the Shooter was the right name for him.
Mannlicher had the sack full now. The platinum ring on his left hand, with its circle of fat diamonds, made little gleams and glints in the shine from the low-hanging droplight. The idea of losing that bothered him even more than losing his money; he kept running the fingers of his other hand over the stones.
“The ring,” Deighan said to him. “Take it off.”
“Go to hell.”
“Take it off or I’ll put a third eye in the middle of your forehead. Your choice.”
Mannlicher hesitated, tried to stare him down, didn’t have any better luck at it than the Texan. There was a tense moment; then, because he didn’t want to die over a piece of jewelry, he yanked the ring off, slammed it down hard in the middle of the table.
Deighan said, “Put it in the sack. The wallets and the rest of the stuff too.”
This time Mannlicher didn’t hesitate. He did as he’d been told.
“All right,” Deighan said. “Now get up and go over by the bar. Lie down on the floor on your belly.”
Mannlicher got up slowly, his jaw set and his teeth clenched as if to keep the violence from spewing out like vomit. He lay down on the floor. Deighan gestured at Brandt, said, “You next. Then the rest of you, one at a time.”
When they were all on the floor he moved to the table, caught up the sack. “Stay where you are for ten minutes,” he told them. “You move before that, or call to the guy outside, I’ll blow the place up. I got a grenade in my pocket, the fragmentation kind. Anybody doubt it?”
None of them said anything.
Deighan backed up into the spare bedroom, leaving the door open so he could watch them all the way to the window. He put his head out, saw no sign of the lookout. Still down by the lake somewhere. The whole thing had taken just a few minutes.
He swung out through the window, hurried away in the shadows — but in the opposite direction from the driveway and the road above. On the far side of the cabin there was a path that angled through the pine forest to the north; he found it, followed it at a trot. Enough moonlight penetrated through the branches overhead to let him see where he was going.
He was almost to the lakefront when the commotion started back there: voices, angry and pulsing in the night, Mannlicher’s the loudest of them. They hadn’t waited the full ten minutes, but then he hadn’t expected them to. It didn’t matter. The Shooter’s cabin was invisible from here, cut off by a wooded finger of land a hundred yards wide. And they wouldn’t be looking for him along the water, anyway. They’d be up on the road, combing that area; they’d figure automatically that his transportation was a car.
The hard yellow-and-black gleam of the lake was just ahead, the rushes and ferns where he’d tied up the rented Beachcraft inboard. He moved across the sandy strip of beach, waded out to his calves, dropped the loaded flour sack into the boat, and then eased the craft free of the rushes before he lifted himself over the gunwale. The engine caught with a quiet rumble the first time he turned the key.
They were still making noise back at the cabin, blundering around like fools, as he eased away into the night.
2
The motel was called the Whispering Pines. It was back off Highway 28 below Crystal Bay, a good half mile from the lake, tucked up in a grove of pines and Douglas fir. Deighan’s cabin was the farthest from the office, detached from its nearest neighbor by thirty feet of open ground.