Comeback by Richard Stark Page A

nearby streetlight. Troubled by a sudden thought, he licked his lips and said, "Zack? That isn't how you asked Mary, is it?"
    Woody made a small sound deep in his throat.
    Loud, covering Woody, Zack said, "Of course not! Jesus, Ralph, we didn't cut her, all right? I never even showed her the knife. Jesus Christ."
    "Okay," Ralph said. "Okay."
    Zack gave Woody a disgusted warning look, then reached out to switch on the radio. "Let's hear something cheerful for once," he said.
    They listened to Top 40s, interspersed with news reports. They kept hearing about the three robbers and the half million dollars and how the three robbers were still on the loose, and it never occurred to them. They sat there in the parking lot, visible to the street, three guys in a car with out-of-state plates, listening to the news reports about how every cop within five hundred miles was looking for the three robbers, and it never occurred to them for a second, not until about twelve million watts' worth of searchlights and floodlights were suddenly beamed at them from every direction in the universe, including a helicopter up above.
    'Jesus!" Zack cried, blinded by all the light, and would have made the fatal mistake of switching on the car engine if Ralph hadn't been just smart enough to yell, "No!" and grab his elbow.
    They sat in the car in the empty parking lot, impaled by all that light, specimen bugs on a display board, and shadows moved out there. Cops, armed to the teeth, easing through the light as through heavy fog, moving cautiously in this direction.
    "You in the car!"A hugely amplified voice, coming from everywhere. "Don't move! Make no movements!"
    Woody started to cry. "I don't fucking believe this," Zack said, but it wasn't clear whether it was the cops' sudden presence or Woody crying that he didn't believe.
    Ralph, amazed at his own capacity for quick thinking, leaned another inch forward over the seat back and said, "We didn't break any laws. We're driving to the coast, we stopped here for a pizza and rest a while."
    "Right right right," Zack said. He was blinking like mad, his fingers twitching on the steering wheel.
    One cop, braver than the others, approached Zack's door, opened it, and stepped back. He was carrying a shotgun—a freaking shotgun, for Christ's sake!—at port arms, and what he said was ridiculous: "Sir, would you step out of the car, please?" Sir!
    "Officer," Zack said, his voice sounding much younger and more vulnerable than usual, "officer, uh, something wrong, officer?"
    'Just step out of the car, please, sir."
    So Zack, fumbling a bit in nervousness, stepped out of the car, and the cop asked to see
    ID, continuing with the horrible grotesque parody of politeness. In the car, Woody hunched down in his corner of the front seat, moaning, while Ralph kept unwillingly looking at that switchblade knife on the dashboard, as big as a bayonet in all that light.
    Zack's driver's license was handed on back to some other cop, and then more cops approached the car, also loaded down with weapons, and called on Ralph and Woody to get out, which they did. Woody, no longer crying, just stood there and trembled, like a horse on the way to the dogfood factory, while Ralph looked all around, trying to see, interested despite himself in what was happening.
    More sirs, more requests for ID, more licenses passed back into the darkness behind all that light. Then the frisk. Sir, would you face the car? Sir, would you place your hands on the car roof? Sir, would you move your feet back? Farther apart, sir. Thank you very much, sir.
    Pat pat pat; nothing. They were permitted to stand normally again, feeling a little better. Damn good thing the two pistols were stashed with their bags in the trunk.
    "Sir, would you mind opening the trunk?"
    They stared at one another, stuck, screwed, completely fucked over, and another cop came out of the darkness into the light to say, "Which one is Quindero?"
    A distraction from the question of the