“Okay, get us out of here. Back, forward, I don’t care. Just away. Now.”
“I’m sorry,” said Poe. “I shot my wad getting us back from 2005. Being shot at didn’t make it easier, you know. I can’t budge us until I’ve drunk some wine and slept a full a day and night.”
“In that case, Mr. Poe, I need a hostage.”
“I am no longer famous enough to be a hostage. Too many pen names. They’ll shoot me and blame you. No, we need a more creative solution.”
“Any bright ideas?’ Stark asked. He felt himself running on empty.
“One,” said Poe. “I’ve used it before, but hopefully they don’t read. Give me your gun.”
“Fat chance.”
“Lay it down, over there. I’ll tell them you dropped it when you ran. Quickly, they’re out of the cars. Do it, man! One gun won’t make a difference.”
Poe was right about that. The cops were hauling shotguns from their trunks.
“Give me your gun and take the dough down in the hole. I’ll cover until they’re gone.”
Shaking his head dubiously, Stark slid the gun across the rock and slithered into the hole. The ladder chose that moment to break and he fell hard, but not far enough to do any damage. Overhead, the sky went black as Poe shoved the door over the hole.
“In pace requiescat!”
“What?”
Poe’s answer, if indeed he had answered, was drowned out by clanging and banging. It sounded like he was covering the door with heavy stones. Stark heard the cops scrambling up the steep rock, calling to each other, shouting at Poe.
“He went that-a-way!” Poe cried. “Look! He dropped his gun.”
Stark heard grunts, curses, the thump of rubber-soled shoes. Sirens. Then silence.
He waited a long time.
“Can I come out, now?”
Silence.
“Hey! Poe!”
Again silence.
“For crissake, Poe!”
He couldn’t reach the door. He wrapped his garrison belt around the broken ladder rail and climbed the rungs gingerly. The repair held until he pushed up. The weight of the rock was too much; the ladder twisted and he fell again. He landed flat on his back and in that position pushed the unbroken ladder rail against the door like a pole. The rocks were really heavy. Stark pushed up with all his might. Nothing. He took a deep breath and concentrated his considerable strength by imagining he was using the ladder to impale Edgar Allan Poe.
Slowly the door lifted. He could hear the rocks sliding off, a noise like fingernails on a blackboard. Suddenly the door felt light and it flew away and the sky poured in. Stark patched the ladder again, picked up the suitcase, and very carefully climbed out. The sun had set behind a Jersey condominium and the Hudson River was mauve and fading fast. The cops were gone. So was Poe.
Stark smiled. Not a bad deal. It was a mystery why Poe had split, but now all the money was his. The only thing he had lost was his gun, and he could afford to buy another.
About a year later, Stark was pretending to read magazines in a newsstand across the street from a lightly guarded Connecticut National Bank, when he spotted the name E. P. Allan embossed in shiny foil on a fat paperback mystery novel. His old friend Poe, who had saved his ass in Riverside Park and helped bankroll a memorable winter at a Bahamas resort.
The book, In Quick, Out Fast, was touted as the first in E. P. Allan’s new series of “astonishingly realistic” mystery thrillers featuring a brilliant armed robber who hit banks and armored cars. This first volume, of a projected ten, had already sold to the movies. A bunch of best-selling writers had given it glowing blurbs, but the one that speared Stark’s eye was lifted from a Kirkus prepublication review:
“More, much more, than an action-packed, crackerjack, unbelievably realistic yarn about a bank robbery on New York City’s East Side that goes bad. It’s as if you were there, shoulder to shoulder with a quick-thinking, fast-acting hero you will want to read about again and again and again. Read it and cheer. Read it and wonder how E. P. Allan could know such things. Read it and weep.”
JUSTIN SCOTT (aka Paul Garrison, aka J. S. Blazer, aka Alexander Cole) was nominated for the Edgar Award for best first novel and best short story. He writes the Ben Abbott detective mysteries set in small-town Connecticut. He cowrites the early-twentieth-century Isaac Bell detective adventure series with Clive Cussler; The Assassin, their latest Isaac Bell novel, debuted in March 2015. His novel The Shipkiller is honored in the International Thriller Writers anthology Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads. His main pen name is Paul Garrison, under which he writes modern sea stories and, for the Robert Ludlum banner, The Janson Command and The Janson Option.
CHIN YONG-YUN
MAKES A SHIDDACH
S. J. Rozan