Richard Stark
(Donald E Westlake writing as Richard Stark)
The Steel Hit (1963)
Parker has cheated the Outfit. He must act to protect his new identity. When the bandages came off, he looked in the mirror at a stranger. Only the eyes were familiar - flawed onyx, cold and hard.
PART ONE
Chapter 1.
WHEN the bandages came off, Parker looked in the mirror at a stranger. He nodded to the stranger and looked beyond at the reflection of Dr Adler.
Parker had been at the sanitarium a little over four weeks now. He had come in with a face that the New York syndicate wanted to put a bullet in, and now he was going back out with a face that meant nothing to anyone. The face had cost him nearly eighteen thousand, leaving him about nine from his last job to tide him over till he got rolling again. The syndicate trouble had been a bad time, but that was over now.
Parker stood a while longer at the mirror, studying the stranger. He had a long narrow nose, flat cheeks, a wide lipless mouth, a jutting jaw. There were tiny bunchings of flesh beneath the brows, forcing them out just a bit from the forehead, subtly changing the contours of the face. Only the eyes were familiar, flawed onyx, cold and hard.
It was a good job. Paid for in advance, it should be. Parker nodded again at his new face, turned away from the mirror, and watched the doctor drop the bandaging into a wastebasket. “When can I get out of here?”
“Any time you’re ready.”
Dr Adler was tall and bony and grey-haired. From 1931 till 1939 he had worked with the California Communist Party, setting up strike camps. After the Second World War, in which ” he had done plastic surgery in an Army hospital in Oregon, he had set up private practice in San Francisco. But in 1949 a Congressional Committee had exploded his past in his face. He wasn’t stripped of his licence, just of his livelihood. Since 1951 he had made his living as a plastic surgeon to those outside the law, operating a sanitarium front near Lincoln, Nebraska.
Dr Adler crossed the room again, going to the door, where he paused. “When you’re dressed, come down to the office. I have a letter for you.”
“From Joe Sheer?”
“I think so.”
Joe Sheer was the retired jugger who’d vouched for him with the doctor. When the doctor left, Parker opened the closet door and took out the new suit, a dark brown he’d bought on the way here and never worn. He chucked out of the white pyjamas and into his clothes, and took one last look at himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door. He was a big man, flat and squared-off, with boxy shoulders and a narrow waist. He had big hands, corrugated with veins, and long hard arms. He looked like a man who’d made money, but who’d made it without sitting behind a desk.
The new face went with the rest of him as well as the old one had. Satisfied, he picked up his suitcase and left the room and went downstairs to the office. The sanitarium was one large building, office and waiting-room and staff living quarters on the first floor, patients’ rooms on the second. There was space for twenty-three patients, and Dr Adler maintained a staff of four — two nurses, a cook, and a handyman. There was rarely more than one patient in the place, and half the time there were no patients at all. But he had state licences to worry about, and Federal taxes, so a large part of his take went for false front.
Parker went into the doctor’s office. “I left some old clothes upstairs. You can throw them away for me.”
“All right. Here.” He held out an envelope.
Parker took it and ripped it open. Inside was a brief pencil-scrawled note:
Mr Anson, I understand you might be interested in a fast-moving investment with triple level protection, guaranteed to turn over a profit of at least fifty thousand in an incredibly short length of time. The stock is automotive, of course, and I understand it’s course has been carefully plotted against future profits. If you are interested, get in touch with Mr Lasker in Cincinnati at your earliest convenience. He’s at the Warwick.
JOE
Parker read the letter, then turned the envelope over and studied the flap. Dr Adler said, “Yes, I steamed it open.”
“You did a bad job,” Parker told him. He dropped letter and envelope on the desk.
The doctor shrugged. “I get bored sometimes,” he said. “So I read other people’s mail.”
“Joe said I could trust you.”
“With your face. Not with your mail.” He smiled, thinly. “I am a doctor, Mr Anson. That is all I want to be. If circumstances had been different I’d be a doctor in San Francisco today with more reputable patients and a more lucrative practice. It doesn’t matter, I’m still a doctor. And that’s all. A doctor, not an informer, not a thief. I’ve taken all the money from you I intend to take, and once you leave here we will undoubtedly never have dealings again. Unless you recommend someone else, of course, or need yet another face. I read that letter on a whim.”
“You get whims often?”
“I never get whims that would cut off my supply of patients, Mr Anson.”
Parker considered, studying him. Joe had said he was a little off, but that it was nothing to worry about. Parker shrugged. “All right. Do you know what the letter meant?”
“I have no idea. I’d be fascinated to know, however.”
“It’s an armoured car hold-up. Three guards. The job is figured to make the grab while it’s on a highway, instead of in a city. Fifty grand is what they figure my share would be.” Parker reached down and flipped the letter closer to the doctor. “You see it there?”
The doctor read the letter, slowly, holding it in both hands. His hands were so clean they looked bleached. He nodded. “Yes, I see.”
“Can your man give me a ride to town?”
“Of course. You’ll probably find him in the kitchen.”
“Thanks. I’ll take my case.”
“Oh, yes. I forgot.” The doctor stood up, went over to the dark green safe in the corner, and twisted the combination. He opened the door and took out a light brown typewriter case. The typewriter case contained eight thousand five hundred dollars, all of Parker’s cash.
Parker took the case and picked up the suitcase. “I’ll be seeing you around.”
“I doubt it.”
When Parker left, the doctor was studying the letter again, a thin smile on his lips.
Chapter 2
DR ADLER’S handyman was punch-drunk, though he’d never been in the ring. He’d been a Party organizer in the ‘thirties, among the migrant crop harvesters, and scab-wielded two-by-fours had scrambled his brains. His former fluency with dialectic was gone; these days the driving of a hydromatic Chrysler was the most complicated exercise his brain could handle. He was fifty-four and his face was lumpy, with scar tissue around the eyes. The doctor called him “Stubbs”.
Parker found him in the kitchen, a stainless-steel room kept spotless because most of its equipment was never used. Stubbs sat on a steel table against one wall, holding a white coffee mug in both hands. The cook, a thin ex-whore named May, was reading the back of a box of Fab.
Parker said to Stubbs, “You’re supposed to drive me into Lincoln.”
Stubbs frowned at him. “We got a Chrysler.”
“Am I being kidded, friend?”
“No,” May said. To Stubbs, she said, “To the city, Stubbs. He wants you to drive him to the city.” She turned back to Parker. “Did the doctor say it’s okay?”
“Yeah.”
Stubbs got down from the table, laboriously. “I never drove a Lincoln,” he said, “I drove a Rolls once. It belonged to a sympathizer. That was down south some place, near Dago. They killed a Joe Goss that time, blew the whole thing wide open. It would of been a good strike up to then, a deputy drove over this little girl, broke her leg. But then — the guys had to kill that Joe Goss, and it was all over.” He scratched his cheek.
I The flesh was soft, and gave like dough under his fingernails. “Where you want to go?”