First week in May. Sunlight danced on the broad river. Across the way, the Palisades made a vertical curtain of dark gray stone, behind which was New Jersey. This restaurant, called the Palisader and catering mostly to the tourist trade, was built on the eastern shore of the river, just above the city of Yonkers, New York City’s neighbor to the north. That was the northeast corner of New Jersey over there, behind the Palisades, with New York State beginning just to the right, leading up toward West Point. A few sailboats roamed the river today, sunlight turning their white sails almost to porcelain. There were no big boats out there.
Parker looked away from the view, and saw Mike Carlow come this way, following the same hostess. He nodded at Parker, took the seat across from him, then looked out at the view. “Nothing yet, I guess,” he said.
“Not yet.” Cathman had said it would happen between one and three, and it was now just twelve-thirty.
“I’ve got a sister in Connecticut,” Carlow said. “If we’re gonna do this thing, I might bunk in with her for a while, save all this flying around.”
“Well, it’s looking real,” Parker said, and the girl came swishing back through the tables, this time with huge Dan Wycza in her wake. She gestured toward Parker and Carlow with a slender hand and wrist that only emphasized Wycza’s bulk, smiled at them all impersonally, and sailed away.
Wycza looked at the remaining places at the table; he could sit with his back to the view or to the door. “Never be last,” he announced, and pulled out the view-facing chair. Settling carefully into it, the chair creaking beneath him, he said, “So we’ll do it?”
“Unless something new happens,” Parker told him. “I called Lou Sternberg again this morning, he’ll come over next week.”
“Good.” Wycza picked up his menu, but then looked out at the river and said, “What we need’s somebody that can walk on water.”
Carlow grunted. “They don’t play on our team,” he said.
Wycza shrugged. “If the price is right,” he said, and studied the menu.
Their order was taken by a skinny boy wearing a big black bow tie that looked as though somebody was pulling a practical joke on him. After he left, Parker said, “We need a woman. Not to walk on water.”
“What about yours?” Wycza asked him.
Parker shook his head. “Not what she does.”
Carlow asked, “What do we need?”
“Young, thin, good-looking. That could look frail maybe.”
Grinning, Wycza said, “Like the little lady led me here.”
“Like that,” Parker agreed. “But one of us.”
Carlow said, “There was a girl with Tommy Carpenter like that. You know Tommy?”
“We worked on something together with Lou Sternberg once,” Parker said. “What was her name? Noelle.”
“Noelle Braselle,” Carlow said, and smiled. “I always thought that was a nifty name.”
Parker said, “But she comes with Tommy, doesn’t she? That’s two more slices, not one.”
Shaking his head, Carlow said, “Tommy got arrested or something. Well, they both did.”
“That’s the job,” Parker said. “The same job, with Lou. Some paintings we took. Those two got grabbed, but then they got let go, they had a good lawyer.”
“Well, it scared Tommy,” Carlow said. “You wouldn’t think he’d be a guy to spook, but he did. He quit, right then and there.”
Wycza said, “Do I know these people?”
“I don’t think so,” Parker said.
“You’d remember Noelle,” Carlow told him.
Parker said to Carlow, “Where’s Tommy?”
“Out of the country. Went to the Caribbean somewhere, doing something else. Nothing bent, he doesn’t want the arm on him ever again. Left Noelle without a partner, but the last I heard, she’s still around.”
Parker said, “Can you find her? I’d have gone through Tommy’s contact, but that can’t be any good now.”
“I’ll ask,” Carlow said.
Wycza said, “I smell my money.”
They looked at him, and he was gazing out the window, and when they turned that way the ship was just sliding into view from the left. On the gleaming blue-gray water, among the few sailboats, against the dark gray drapery of the Palisades, it looked like any small cruise ship, white and sparkly, a big oval wedding cake, except in the wrong setting. It should be in the Caribbean, with Tommy Carpenter, not steaming up the Hudson River beside gray stone cliffs, north out of New York City.
“I can’t read the name,” Carlow said. “You suppose they changed it already? Spirit of the Hudson?”
“They changed that name,” Wycza assured him, “half an hour out of Biloxi.”
Parker looked at the ship, out in the center channel. A big shiny white empty box, going upriver to be filled with money. For the first time, he was absolutely sure they were going to do it. Seeing it out there, big and slow and unaware, he knew it belonged to him. He could almost walk over to it, on the water.
TWO
1
The same bums were in the Lido. Parker stood at the street end of the bar to have his beer, then went out to the gray day no sunlight this time to lean against the Subaru for two minutes until Hanzen came shuffling out of the bar and headed this way along the sidewalk. Then Parker wordlessly got behind the wheel, and Hanzen slid into the passenger seat beside him, and Parker drove on down Warren Street toward the invisible river.
Hanzen said, “Where we going today?”
“Drive around and talk.”
“Take it out of town, then,” Hanzen advised. “Do your left on Third Street.”
There were lights at every intersection, not staggered. When he could, Parker turned left on Third Street, and within a couple of blocks they were away from houses and traffic lights, with scrubby woodland on both sides of the road.
Hanzen, sounding amused, said, “I guess you want me to go first.”
“If you got something to say,” Parker said.
“I talked to Pete Rudd about you.”
“I know you did.”
“And I know you know. Pete told me what you do, and I could trust you as long as you could trust me.”
“I don’t trust your biker friends,” Parker said.
Hanzen snorted. “I don’t come attached to any bikers,” he said. “I do business with those boys, that’s all, and Iwouldn’t trust them around the corner.”
Parker said nothing to that. An intersection was coming up, with signs for a bridge across the river, and Hanzen said, “Bear to the left, we’ll stay on this side and go south along the river.”
Parker did so, and after a minute Hanzen said, “I get the feeling you want meto tell youwhat your story is.”
“If you want.”
They were on a two-lane concrete road. There was woodsy hillslope up to their left, and the same down to their right, with the slate-gray river every once in a while visible down there. Nodding at the river, Hanzen said, “There’s only one change I know of lately, out there.”
“Uh huh.”
“It’s got a boat full of money.”
“Uh huh.”
“And here you are.”
Parker said nothing to that, so Hanzen said, “Pete probably told you I done time.”
“He didn’t have to.”
“Well, yeah, I suppose he didn’t. The thing is, I don’t want to do any more.”
“Good,” Parker said.
Hanzen said, “There’s fellas, and you know them, too, that liketo be in there. They won’t admit it, they probably don’t even know it themselves, but they like it. They like not having to be in charge of their own life, not having that chance to fuck up all the time. Life is regular, simple routines, food not so bad, you can pick some okay guys to be your pals, you don’t have to be tense any more.”
Parker drove. Traffic was light, mostly pickup trucks and delivery vans. Hanzen said, “You get into a little job with a fella like that, he’s just waiting the chance to make that mistake, screw it up just enough so he can say, you got me, officer, and back into the nest he goes. And you with him.”