“That’s what happened,” Karns said. “He claimed our outfit owed him some money. Forty-five thousand, to be exact. The whole situation was ambivalent, and Bronson decided not to pay him. So he made various kinds of trouble and—”
“That’s what he’s doing here,” Lozini said.
Karns said, “Well, Bronson finally paid him off, but then he decided Parker shouldn’t get away with that, and he sent some people to—annoy him. That was when Parker figured he’d be better off dealing with Bronson’s successor.”
“You.”
“I had nothing to do with it,” Karns said. “Though I admit I didn’t mind it happening. But I didn’t meet Parker myself until a couple years later, when he helped us with some competition we had off the Texas coast. Did you ever hear about that?”
“No. What happened?”
“Ask around,” Karns said. “Maybe somebody local could tell you. Ask about Cockaigne.”
Lozini frowned. “Cockaigne?” He’d never heard of it.
“An island. But if you’re calling to ask me what I think about your problem with Parker, my advice is to pay the man.”
“I don’t have his money,” Lozini said. “He thinks I got it, but I don’t. Somebody else did.”
“But he holds you responsible?”
“Goddamnit, I’m not!”
“Good luck,” Karns said, with cool good humor in his voice, and hung up.
Lozini wanted to go on arguing, but he was holding a dead phone. Feeling angry and foolish, he slammed the receiver down and glared across the empty room. “I won’t be pushed,” he said aloud.
Eleven
At two-thirty in the afternoon Parker made another call to Lozini. When he’d phoned twenty minutes ago, Lozini hadn’t been available. “But I know he wants to talk to you,” the male voice had said. “He’s between destinations at the moment. Could he reach you anywhere?”
That had been too stupid a question even to answer. “I’ll call back in twenty minutes,” Parker had said, and had hung up, and now he was in a different phone booth making the second call.
The same male voice as last time said, “Oh, yes. Mr. Lozini just came in. Hold on, please.”
“For sixty seconds,” Parker said. Two years ago the local hoods and the local law had been in tight with each other enough to work together hunting him down in that amusement park, so maybe they were close enough for Lozini to have friends on the force who wouldn’t mind tracing him a phone call.
“Less,” the voice said, and went away.
Waiting, Parker looked around at the sunny afternoon. Grofield was at the wheel of the bronze Impala they’d rented this morning, after they’d checked out separately from the hotel. With the amount of fuss they’d made in this town last night, it was a good idea not to stay in any one place too long. The credit card they’d used in renting the car should be good for at least another week, giving them a mobile base of operations; later today, if necessary, they could find another spot to settle down for the night.
This phone booth was on a corner of Western Avenue, nearly out to the city line. The street was wide, lined with used-car lots and discount furniture stores. A supermarket the size and shape of an airplane hangar was a block away. Traffic went by fast, sensing the suburbs, but this was still a local in-town phone call.
“Parker?”
Parker recognized the rasping voice of Lozini. He said, “I still want my money.”
“I called Karns,” Lozini said.
“Good,” Parker said. “He told you to give me my money.”
“Yes, he did. I want a meeting with you, Parker.”
“No meeting. Just the cash. Seventy-three thousand.”
“I have a problem with that,” Lozini said.
“You want a few days to get it together?”
“I need to talk to you. Goddamn it, I’m not trying to ambush you.”
“We don’t have anything to say to each other.”
“We do! And I can’t do it on the phone. We’ve already said too much.”
“There’s nothing you can say to me,” Parker said, “that I need to hear. You going to give me my money or not?”
“If you won’t come off the dime, goddamn it, neither will I! I’m not saying no to you, I’m saying we have to have a meeting. There’s things to this you don’t know about.”
Parker frowned, brooding out at the sunlight, the speeding traffic, Grofield waiting in the car. Wasn’t this an either-or proposition? Either Lozini would pay off today, or he’d pay off later, after he’d been pushed a little harder. Or whoever took his place would pay off.
“Parker? Goddamn it, man, unbend.”
There was something new in Lozini’s voice, something older and more tired. It was that different tone, that weaker sound, that changed Parker’s mind. Maybe there was something more to know.
“I’ll think about it,” he said. “I’ll call you back in half an hour.”
Twelve
O’Hara spotted the diner up ahead on the right, and nodded to it. “Time we got some coffee,” he said.
His partner, Marty Dean, said, “Good idea. I’m goddam tired.”
They both were. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, meaning they’d both been on duty now for a full twelve hours. Driving around in this patrol car, their uniforms getting itchier by the minute, their guns and cartridge belts a dull weight pressing against their stomachs.
And O’Hara, besides being tired, was in a foul mood. This whole business was connected with that amusement-park mess from two years ago, which O’Hara didn’t like being reminded of in the first place. And he’d gotten the word that one of the guys involved in last night’s robberies was the actual son of a bitch from the amusement park himself, and oh, how O’Hara wanted to be the one to catch up with him. He could taste it, he needed it, he had to even the score or die.
The diner. O’Hara turned the wheel, steered them over into the parking lot, and nosed into a space between a gray pickup and a red Toyota. The two men climbed out of the car, snicking the doors shut in the sunlight, and Dean stretched hugely, arching his back, saying, “Jesus God, it’s good to stand up.”
“Yeah, it is,” O’Hara said. He was trying not to let his bad mood out on the surface, because he had no explanation for it beyond the tiredness and overwork they had in common. He couldn’t very well explain to Dean that two years ago a lousy bandit had forced him to strip out of his uniform, had tied him up, and had used the uniform to make a clean getaway. And that instead of the eighteen thousand dollars he’d been anticipating for helping to run the bastard down in that amusement park, how much had he wound up with? Two grand. That money was long since gone, but the humiliation was as fresh as ever.
O’Hara and Dean walked into the diner together and found a couple seats at the counter. Somehow it was less like being off-duty when you sat at the counter; sitting in one of the booths would be more slothful, more as though you weren’t ready to leap back into action at any second.
They ordered coffee and pastry, and then O’Hara said, “I’ll be right back,” and went off to the men’s room.
He was standing at the urinal, brooding, when the men’s-room door opened, off to his right. He looked over at the new arrival, and his face showed his surprise. “Well, hello,” he said.
“Hello, O’Hara.” The guy smiled and stuck the barrel of a .25 automatic in O’Hara’s eye, and pulled the trigger.
Thirteen
Lozini sat in the back seat of the black Oldsmobile while up front Frankie Faran did the driving as he told the story of the gambling island off the coast of Texas.
It hadn’t been a surprise to Lozini when it turned out Faran knew about Cockaigne Island and what had happened to it. Faran was an amiable drinker, a social drinker in a cocktail-lounge sense, and people of his sort were always full of stray anecdotes. Faran had been out in Las Vegas several times the last few years, and on one or another of the trips he’d been told about Cockaigne.