Operation Whiplash Read online

  “Sorry, Mario,” Frank’s voice said in the same husky whisper I’d heard before. “Bolts said you’re a loser.” Then he raised his voice. “Tony! Chris! The bastard got Mario!”

  I was already running for the stairwell to the third floor again. Far below me I could hear the grumbling roar of a big diesel firing up. I could also hear Frank’s pad-pad-pad on the stairs as he pursued me. Taking care of Rubelli for his boss Bolts hadn’t taken Frank’s eye off the main course.

  I ran past the open mouth of the freight elevator and struggled to open the third-floor fire door which was the twin of the one I’d had open on the floor below. The door slid back with a screeching groan. A gun went off behind me, and a star-splash of paint-battered steel appeared around a hole in the thick door. That damn gun of Frank’s could shoot through a mountain. I bulled the door open and forced myself out onto the creaking fire escape. The door closed automatically behind me with another night-shattering boom.

  Frank was still coming, but he’d be careful how he opened that fire door. He didn’t know at what point I’d stop and line up on the opening, waiting for him to step out. And I still had to clear the alley before the roaring diesel I could now hear much more plainly blocked it.

  I raced down the fire escape at top speed, the swirling fog no wetter than the moisture already on my face. My breath caught in my throat as the rickety metal under my feet groaned, sagged, and shifted. It felt as if I were descending on rope. Anchor bolts started to protest with metallic shrieks as I swung around the bobbing second floor platform and started down the last flight. The entire structure was shuddering so uncontrollably I found myself holding my breath.

  I reached the bottom landing of the ripplingly rusted pile that appeared to be about to fall away from the side of the building, dropped to my knees, jammed my automatic into my belt, grabbed the bottom rung of a sawed-off ladder, and suspended myself above the alley still nine feet below me.

  Then I let go.

  The shock when I landed in the alleybed ran from my ankles through my spine to the top of my head. I staggered, forced myself upright, snatched the automatic from my belt, and started to run toward the street end of the alley.

  Then I stopped.

  I could see the swing of huge headlights as an enormous truck was steered deftly into the mouth of the alley. There couldn’t have been more than six inches’ clearance on either side, but the driver, Tony, was teaming it at 20 m.p.h. I turned and ran for the rear of the building.

  A bullet bounced off a chunk of brickwork beside me before I heard the sound of the shot. I looked over my shoulder. Frank was standing on the uppermost fire escape platform. He started to fire again, then either changed his mind or found he’d emptied his gun. He started to run down the fire escape.

  At the building line, I turned and raised my automatic. I was already lined up on Frank when the entire fire escape pulled away from the building with an ear-splitting scream of tortured metal. Frank yelled piercingly when he felt himself falling. I don’t think he even had time to realize that the fire escape was dropping directly into the path of the truck thundering through the alley.

  The fire escape smashed to the ground and bounced. Before it settled the gigantic truck flattened the whole thing under its sixteen wheels with a monstrous crunching noise. I could see the wide-eyed look of horror on the driver’s face as he stamped on the brake too late to do anything except lurch forward and crack his own skull against the windshield.

  One headlight of the truck had been punched out by a jagged end of rusted fire-escape steel.

  The other, glowing like a one-eyed monster crouched above its prey, showed a fine mist of powdery red-brick dust sifting slowly down into the alley.

  Nothing moved.

  There was no sound from the warehouse.

  The mechanics had probably taken shelter in the grease pits.

  The night’s silence after the previous uproar made me feel as if I’d gone deaf.

  I had to force myself into motion. I walked to the truck, got down on my hands and knees and then my belly, and crawled under the side with the least debris beneath it. I came out at the back after pushing some metal out of my way, got to my feet, and approached the mouth of the alley very, very carefully.

  It wouldn’t have surprised me to see a thousand people in the street, attracted by the gunfire and assorted pandemonium. There was no one in the street. I had to reassure myself that it had all happened in a few short minutes.

  The fog made the lights coming from the open door of the maintenance shop just a whitish glow.

  I turned my back on the lights and walked away.

  At the first corner I stopped and waited for a full two minutes.

  I didn’t want to take any company back to the car with me.

  When nothing happened, I holstered the automatic I’d been carrying under my armpit, then set out again.

  I wondered grimly what Jed’s reaction would be when he saw the next day’s newspaper.

  • • •

  “You haven’t said a word,” Hazel complained ten minutes later when we were rolling across Tampa Bay. The gray-cotton fog held our speed down to twenty miles an hour. Only a thin strip of dark water could be seen on either side of the causeway. Hazel glanced over at me impatiently. “Say something, will you? What happened? And what’s all that red dirt on your sweater?”

  “I had to crawl under a truck.”

  Hazel’s disgusted snort rolled right off me. I was still marveling at the nonappearance of neighborhood people after the tremendous hubbub at the warehouse. That area of Tampa, of course, had had years of practice in minding its own business. And while the action had seemed to me to drag on interminably, it had actually been compressed into a very brief period of time.”

  Hazel poked me in the ribs. “What did you find?” she persisted.

  “That you’ve been leading a double life.”

  “Double life? What are you talking about?”

  I patted the folders under my sweater. Roger Craig, I was sure, would be happy to see the one on Lou Espada. It would probably fill in for Craig some previous blank spots in Hudson’s financial history. “I have here indisputable evidence,” I told Hazel solemnly, “that you’ve been running guns into Central and South America.”

  “Gun running? Smuggling guns? You’re kidding!”

  We had turned onto Route 19, and the fog was thinning. I leaned back and lighted a cigarette. Belated reaction was setting in. The adrenalin that had sustained me during the deadly hide-and-seek warehouse session had evaporated. I felt drained.

  “Colisimo wasn’t kidding,” I said. “He had you carefully documented as the prime force in the Andrews Trading Company, which apparently had been a steady supplier of illicit weapons.” I took a long drag on my cigarette. “The thing is, why didn’t he use it? What was he waiting for? Why didn’t he see to it that this folder was put into the hands of the feds?”

  “I’d have beaten it in any court in the country!” Hazel snapped.

  “Sure you would, after you’d paid four million in legal fees.”

  “Maybe it was his last resort? If nothing else worked?”

  “I’d have thought he’d do it the other way around,” I said slowly. “If he’d hit you with this when you arrived in Hudson, you’d have been tied up indefinitely. Even if he’d only threatened you with it, via Nate Pepperman, he’d have had a handle on you until you figured a way out. So why did he decide to go the ugly route instead?”

  Hazel furnished no answer. We rode in silence for awhile. My brain seemed to have shifted down into second gear during the warehouse episode, but it began to pick up speed again. “There’s something else I don’t understand about this mess,” I broke the silence. “Ordinarily the syndicate stays away from crime that carries a federal rap. They don’t kidnap, except each other. They don’t rob banks. Until the money got so big, they didn’t peddle dope. I never heard of them running guns, until this time. Nowadays most of them
even pay their income taxes. Colisimo is running dead against the grain, and I’d like to know why.”

  “This whole business of trying to make me look like a gunrunner just seems silly to me,” Hazel said tartly.

  “It wouldn’t be for the average citizen faced with such a charge in view of Colisimo’s documentation. Do you suppose he found out belatedly that you swung the kind of financial weight that wouldn’t let you be bulled around?”

  “It depends on the bull,” my redhead said softly. She reached across the front seat and squeezed my thigh.

  I patted her hand, but almost absentmindedly. “I think it’s past time I made a phone call my lumpenproleteriat brain is telling me I should have made a long time ago,” I said.

  “You mean right now?”

  “At the next roadside phone.”

  “Who’s the call to?”

  “A man I’ve neglected for quite a long time.”

  Hazel asked no more questions when I didn’t elaborate. Kaiser leaned over the back seat to which he had been banished for the return trip and licked the back of my neck. Hazel pushed him back onto the rear seat. I lit another cigarette from the stub of the first one while I tried to guess what Colisimo’s reaction would be to the events of the past two nights. Bolts’s abrupt and deadly removal of Rubelli from his organization almost surely signified Colisimo’s taking a personal hand.

  No one could identify me as the miscreant in the separate affairs that had taken place at the Barbarossa Restaurant and the Deakin Trucking Company warehouse, but it was highly doubtful that Colisimo was going to be in any doubt about where the trouble had originated. He had lost the lid on the trash can of his Hudson, Florida, undertaking, and the man wouldn’t be Bolts Colisimo if he didn’t react. Somehow I had to—

  “There’s a phone booth,” Hazel interrupted my thoughts.

  The lighted booth was a few feet off the road in a small enclave carved out of shrubbery. “This might take a little while,” I said as I opened the car door. “Roust Kaiser from the back seat and catch yourself forty winks.”

  “I will if I feel sleepy,” she answered.

  I reached into the glove compartment and removed the small leather sack of quarters I always kept there. In the phone booth I dialed the long-distance operator. I cracked the booth door open so the light went out. “I want to call Rudy Hernandez, person-to-person, at the Golden Peacock Nightclub in Mobile, Alabama, operator,” I said. “I don’t have the phone number.”

  “One moment, sir.”

  While I waited I returned to the line of thought I’d been pursuing when Hazel’s announcing the roadside phone booth had interrupted me: Bolts Colisimo’s reaction to recent events. One loose thread bothered me more and more. Colisimo hadn’t been able to get his hands on Hazel, and he hadn’t been able to get his hands on me, but he sure as hell could get his hands on Jed Raymond. It hadn’t seemed important at the time when I used Jed’s name to get Casey Deakin to talk to me, but it would be foolish to count on Deakin’s not repeating the information to Rubelli while Robin Ford was playing inquisitioner. It was beginning to seem—

  “Sir?” the operator’s voice said in my ear.

  “Go ahead, operator.”

  “I’m ringing your number.”

  The rings continued for so long I was afraid the nightclub had closed for the evening, but finally someone answered. I listened to the operator telling the answerer that she had a person-to-person call for Rudy Hernandez.

  “This is Hernandez,” Rudy said. He sounded so grumpy I wondered if he’d been balling one of the waitresses on the couch in his office.

  “All ready, sir,” the operator said to me.

  “Hey, Rudy,” I began. “About that piece of real estate. The surveyor says it doesn’t measure up to the deed. I don’t think—” We both heard the click as the operator cut herself out of the circuit. “Okay, Rudy,” I began again. “This is the.41 caliber man who picked up an over-and-under and a little thin steel from you last week.”

  “So what?” Rudy rumbled. “What the hell d’you want at this time of night?”

  “I want The Schemer’s current telephone number.”

  “Jesus,” Rudy sighed heavily, but I heard him put down the phone while he presumably looked in his wallet for the information.

  Robert “The Schemer” Frenz was an unusual man. He was a professional planner who set up bank jobs for a fee or a percentage of the gross. He would lay out the entire operation, supplying escape routes, local police procedures, and the most precise details on bank floor plans, alarm systems, and personnel. He never took part in a job, but his information was always impeccable. One of my most successful operations had been laid out by The Schemer, the job that had brought me to Hudson in the first place.

  The Schemer changed phone numbers frequently, but there were three or four places like the Golden Peacock around the country where his current number could always be obtained if you had the right credentials.

  “Yeah, you there, Forty-One Caliber,” Rudy’s voice came back on the line. “It’s Area Code 301, 589-5288.” I closed the booth door to get enough light to jot it down.

  “Thanks, man,” I said. “I’ll be checking in again with you one of these days.”

  He grunted and hung up.

  I paid for the call when the operator came back on the line, then asked her to dial the number Rudy had just supplied. It went through more quickly. A feminine voice answered by repeating the called number. “This is Carl Kessler,” I said, employing a name I’d used with The Schemer before. “I’d like a call-back.” I gave her the booth phone number and hung up.

  Robert Frenz operated behind a screen of answering services and call-backs. If he didn’t like the sound of the call-in, he made no call-back. He was unreachable when he wanted to be.

  Once again I dropped quarters to match the payment the operator asked for, then waited for Frenz’s response. It came in about three minutes. “Kessler?” the smoothly calm, familiar voice inquired.

  “That’s right.” In the background I heard a mechanical chunking sound followed by the noise of rapid-staccato typing much faster than a human could manage. I wondered if Frenz had gone computerized. It would be just like him.

  “What happened at Massillon?” Frenz asked me.

  Massillon was a bad memory from the past. Five of us had taken on a bank there. “The score was three to two against,” I answered. We’d gotten two lawmen.

  “What was the first name of the other survivor?”

  “Barney.”

  “Correct, Kessler. Hang on. Pay no attention to the static.”

  I waited. The telephone earpiece crackled, and when Frenz spoke again his voice sounded as though it were coming from inside a long, hollow pipe. It was an eerie, unreal tone, and I wondered if The Schemer had become so sophisticated that he had installed some sort of one-way scrambling device for his protection. “What do you need?” the mechanical voice asked me.

  “What do you have on the Suncoast Trust Company in Hudson, Florida?”

  “One moment.”

  Again I waited. I didn’t want anything on the Suncoast Trust Company, but I knew Frenz would refuse to answer the next question I planned to ask unless he thought it was in connection with his specialty, setting up a bank job.

  “I have almost nothing worth mentioning,” the hollow-sounding voice said. “Just a floor plan that shows no wiring details. I can’t even guarantee its accuracy since I never checked it out. Sorry, I can’t help with a full-scale scheme.”

  Everything was a scheme to Frenz, never a plan or a job or an operation. That was how he’d obtained his nickname. “But you can work one up for me?” I asked.

  “Of course, but it will take about a week.”

  “Something that goes with it that would take a lot less time could help me make up my mind about it,” I said casually. “I have a couple of would-be partners for the job. In fact, they came to me with it. The names are Angelo Colisimo and Mario Rub
elli. Do you have anything on them?”

  There was a short pause. “Those names sound like The Family,” Frenz said at last.

  His voice was filled with distaste. I knew that The Schemer walked a narrow path with people like Colisimo. Frenz had to take special care to avoid tapping one of their holdings. The Family types had so infiltrated legitimate business that it was difficult sometimes to keep from stepping on their toes. I knew that several years previously Frenz had set up a beautiful savings and loan association job, not knowing it belonged to a branch of The Family. The three unfortunates who pulled it weren’t very neat-looking when the fuzz found their bodies in a creek a couple of nights later.

  “That’s one of the reasons I’m calling you,” I said.

  “My advice to you is to cut out right now,” Frenz replied.

  “The job really is a plum, Schemer. Or it could be if they’re not trying to set me up for something,” I said.

  “Are, we talking no scheme, no pay?” he asked. “My time is worth something.”

  “Sure it is,” I tried to soothe him. “I’ll pay you for any information you provide whether the job goes through or not.”

  “A thousand?”

  I hesitated. Bolts Colisimo was getting to be an expensive proposition. “I’ll mail it to you,” I promised finally.

  “To Robert Adair, General Delivery, Main Post Office, Washington, D.C.,” Frenz said briskly. “But I’ll tell you, Kessler, if your track record wasn’t good with me I wouldn’t even touch it.” Frenz’ tone was positive. “Now what do you want, exactly?”

  “Recent background,” I said. “Anything you feel will help me make up my mind. If you can do it in an hour, I’ll wait right here for your call,” I tried to push him along. “This could be a good touch if the parts fit.”

  “I’ll call you back,” he answered.

  I swung the booth door open all the way back to keep the light off after I stepped outside. I wanted no late-night drivers pulling in and pre-empting the phone, interfering with The Schemer’s call-back. I stood for a moment savoring the warm night air, laden with a piney odor from the grove of trees surrounding the booth. An occasional car rushed by on the highway, headlights boring the night. We had run out of the fog zone twenty miles back down the road, and the stars shone brightly overhead. Somewhere in the tree belt an owl hooted mournfully. After a moment another answered, and they carried on an intermittent duet.