Briggs followed, holding his tool kit tight to his chest, and Parker said to the guard, “Walk over to your chair. Take your time and don’t look back.”
“Oh, I won’t,” the guard said. He carried a gun, but he knew he hadn’t been hired to do anything with it. “Now?” he said.
“Now. I’ll be watching through the glass.”
The guard walked off, staring at the building directory on the rear lobby wall. Parker shoved the pistol back in his pocket, moved quickly across the sidewalk, slid into the back seat beside Briggs. Hurley was up front, next to Dalesia. The engine was running.
“Go,” Parker said.
They rolled, and Dalesia said, “Michaelson?”
Hurley said, “He won’t be coming.”
“He got shot,” Briggs said.
Dalesia nodded. He’d been coasting a bit, waiting for the light at the corner to change to green, and now he gunned across the intersection. Moving briskly down the next block—but not fast enough to attract attention—he said, “Wounded? Will he be able to talk?”
Parker said, “He’s gone.”
“What I want to know,” Hurley said, “what went wrong? How come we suddenly got all those cops?”
“There had to be another alarm,” Parker said. “An internal alarm on that cellar door.”
“We were supposed to buy a clean plan,” Hurley said. He was angry, but it was mostly relief. “Morse guaranteed us a clean plan.”
“These things happen,” Parker said. “That could be a new system, since he knew the place.”
“They don’t happen to me,” Hurley said. “We paid Morse good money for a good plan, and we got our heads on a plate.”
Parker shrugged. They were away, it was over, mistakes happen. They had bought a plan, and a map, and an outline of the alarm protection, and a key to that building in the next block. As to guarantees, nobody could guarantee a thing like this, that was just Hurley spouting off his nervousness through anger.
The fact was, Parker wouldn’t have come into this at all if he hadn’t been strapped for cash. It was a small score, which somebody unknown to him had set up, and he wasn’t in charge of it. This was Hurley’s baby. Hurley and his friend Morse.
They rode a couple of blocks in silence, and then Hurley said, “I’m gonna go see Morse. You want to come? Dee?”
Dalesia said, “Sure. I got nothing else to do.” He spoke casually, not angry, not caring one way or the other.
Hurley twisted around in the seat to look at the two in back. “What about you? Parker?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Parker said.
“Briggs?”
“I guess not,” Briggs said. “I guess I’ll go back to Florida.”
“Well, I’m gonna see Morse.” Hurley faced front again, and sat nodding his head, apparently thinking about his anger.
Briggs said quietly to Parker, “Do you have any idea what you’ll do?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I’m running a streak,” Briggs said. “A very bad streak. I believe I’ll just retire for a while, and wait for it to go away.”
“This is my fourth in a row,” Parker said. “I’ve got a streak of my own running.”
“Anything else on tap?”
“No.” Parker frowned and looked out the side window at the dark storefronts going by. “One thing,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Couple years ago I left some money behind after a job. I think I’ll go back and get it.”
“You want company?”
“I did the job with a guy,” Parker said. “I guess I’ll get in touch with him again.”
Two
Grofield said, “Shouldn’t I have income before I pay income tax?”
The man from Internal Revenue rested his forearm on the briefcase he’d put on Grofield’s desk. Talking slowly, as though explaining something complex to a child, he said, “You have to have income, Mr. Grofield. You can’t operate a theater at a loss five years in a row, it isn’t possible.”
Grofield said, “Have you ever seen a show here?”
“No.”
“The vast majority of your fellow-men could say the same.”
They were having their conversation in Grofield’s office in the theater. At one time the office had been part of a lobby kind of thing at the rear of the theater near the box office, but by running the Coke machine and the candy machine out from the rear wall, and adding a door with its own independent stand-up frame, a more or less private area had been divided off, in which Grofield kept a desk and a filing cabinet and two folding chairs. Occasionally the door or the desk was needed in a set onstage, but most of the time Grofield could think of himself as an actual theatrical producer with an actual office. The candy machine made a hell of a noise next to his ear whenever anybody made a purchase from it, but that was a small price to pay for his own private office.
The Internal Revenue man frowned across the desk at Grofield, apparently trying to work out some sort of problem he was having. Finally he said, “If you lose so much money every year, how do you live?”
”God knows,” Grofield said.
“How do you go on opening the theater every summer?”
“Stupidity,” Grofield said.
The Internal Revenue man made an impatient gesture. “That isn’t an answer,” he said.
“Of course it is,” Grofield said. “Almost always.”
“You must have a source of income,” the Internal Revenue man said.
“I couldn’t agree more,” Grofield said. “In fact, I’d say it’s imperative.”
The office had its door at the moment; Grofield’s wife, Mary, opened it and said, “Phone, Alan.”
Grofield glanced at the phone on his desk. It was an illegal extension from the box-office phone, which he’d put in himself to avoid the monthly charges. “Right,” he said.
“At the house,” she said.
“Oh.”
Since the house phone was also an illegal extension from the box office, meaning that even if Mary had answered at the house he could still pick up this one and have his conversation here, her phrase suggested the caller was somebody he’d want to talk to in private. He stood up, therefore, giving the Internal Revenue man a bright smile and saying, “You will excuse me, won’t you?”
“We’ll want to see your books again,” the Internal Revenue man said, showing bad temper.
“God knows I don’t,” Grofield said, and left the office. Mary walked with him, and as he passed the head of the aisle he looked down toward the stage to where two actors in bathing suits were attacking a set with hammers. Frowning, he stopped and said, “What are they taking it down for?”
“They’re putting it up,” Mary said.
“Oh.”
The two of them walked outside, and Grofield stood for a moment on the wooden platform at the top of the stairs, looking out over the wooded hills of Mead Grove, Indiana. The only sign of human habitation in this direction was the gravel parking lot. The formerly gravel parking lot, lately turning to mud. “We need more gravel,” Grofield said.
”We need more everything,” Mary said. “That was Parker on the phone.”
“Ho ho,” Grofield said. “Maybe he has more gravel.”
“That would be a blessing,” Mary said. She’d played three consecutive landladies in three consecutive rustic comedies recently and hadn’t yet gotten rid of the speech habits.
Grofield trotted down the steps and went around the side of the barn toward the farmhouse. The words MEAD GROVE THEATER were stretched in giant white letters along the side of the barn facing the county road. There was no traffic at the moment to see it.
Sometime in the late forties some unremembered genius had first decided to convert this old barn to a summer theater, tucked away here in this remote corner of Indiana. He’d put in a stage at one end, and had arranged seating for an audience on a series of platforms, with the first four rows of seats on the original barn floor, the next four on a platform two steps up, the next four two more steps up, and so on, until he had twenty-four rows of ten seats each, with a center aisle. Two hundred forty seats, and rarely had anybody seen them all full at once.