“What? What?”
“Walk.”
“I was asleep, I—” He cleared his throat, coughed, cleared his throat again. He was waking up now, at least a little. He put one foot in front of the other, urged on by Parker’s hand holding his arm, and walked shakily out of the bedroom and around the short hall to the living room.
The people there woke him up for good. There must have been a dozen of them, ranging in age from mid-twenties to late forties and in size from small and narrow to huge and heavily muscled, but every one of them had the same tough cold self-sufficient look as Parker. They gave him those flat emotionless stares, classifying him, deciding about him, and he stood there blinking and licking his lips, terrified beyond the call of rational argument, as frightened as a bird in a den of snakes.
And the pile of pistols on the big table by the front door didn’t help either.
Parker stayed beside him, and he had to give his order twice before Faran heard it: “Tell them your name.”
“My n— What? My name.” He hurried to obey. “Frank Faran.”
“What do you do for a living, Frank?”
The use of his first name might have been meant to reassure him, but the cold impersonality in the sound of it had just the opposite effect. Striving to be calm, trying to be capable of instant accurate response to any question that might be put him, he said, “I manage the New York Room. It’s a—it’s a local nightspot.” The word “nightspot” echoed in his ears, sounding foolish and limp, and he was horrified to feel himself blushing.
Parker had more questions. “What else do you do, Frank?”
”Well, I’ve still got— I used to be heavily in union management, I’ve still got a few posts, minor, uh—”
“Local union executive?”
“Yeah, uh— Yeah, that’s right.”
“Sweetheart unions?”
“Well, we, uh, mostly have, uh, good understandings with the employers.”
“What else are you connected with, Frank?”
Faran tried to think of anything else, but there wasn’t any more. “Nothing,” he said. “That’s all.”
“You’re not thinking, Frank.” There was a small threat shimmering in the words. The dozen men sitting on sofa and chairs, standing leaning against walls, continued to watch him. Parker said, “Who do you work for, Frank?”
“Oh, Mr. Lozini. I mean, I did, but he’s dead. So I guess now it’s, uh, Dutch Buenadella or Ernie Dulare. Or both, maybe.”
Parker pointed, and Faran saw that on the coffee table in the middle of the living room papers were spread: the blueprints and notes Parker had taken last night during the question-and-answer session. Parker said, “You told me all that, didn’t you, Frank?”
“Yes,” Faran said. “Right, yes.”
“And it’s all straight goods, isn’t it, Frank?”
Faran tried for a joke, a laugh, a bit of human contact. “I’m not going to lie,” he said.
No change in the faces in front of him, except that one of them said, “How can we be sure of him?”
“Because,” Parker said, “he knows we don’t let him go until after we’ve checked out everything he told me. And he knows that if he lied to us we’ll kill him. Don’t you, Frank?”
Faran nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.
There was a little silence. He looked no one directly in the eye, looked only at the spaces between them, but felt them all staring unblinking at him. Trying to decide about him. His throat ached, felt raspy, as though he’d been shouting at the top of his lungs for half an hour.
Parker said, quietly, “You want to change anything you told me, Frank?”
Faran shook his head, but at the same time he was trying to think, trying to remember everything he’d said. Could he have made any mistakes? No, it wasn’t possible. Parker had made him go over every detail again and again. “I told you the truth,” he said. “I swear I did.”
Faran turned to look at Parker, and saw Parker looking at the dozen men, waiting for them to say whether they were satisfied or not. Faran couldn’t face front again, he had to keep blinking at Parker. His left cheek, the one toward the men, prickled, felt pins and needles.
One of them said, “Okay. You made your point.”
Parker nodded. “Anybody want to ask Frank anything?”
None of them did. Faran was grateful for that, and grateful, too, when Parker said, “All right, Frank, let’s go back.”
The two of them walked back to the bedroom. Faran entered it, and Parker remained in the doorway. Faran turned around and said, “You can trust me, Parker. I won’t cause any trouble.”
“That’s right, Frank,” Parker said. He switched off the light and shut the bedroom door.
Forty-one
Parker put Faran on ice and went back to the living room, where the eleven men had formed themselves into small groups and were talking things over. He let them talk, waiting it out, knowing sooner or later they’d all decide to come in with him.
One of the groups was Devers and Wycza and Ducasse; they’d never met before, but they’d all flown in on the same plane from New York, Devers and Wycza connecting in New York, the two of them realizing that Ducasse was also a part of this once they’d landed in Tyler. Clustered around the sofa to talk were Wiss and Elkins, who always worked together as a team, plus Nick Dalesia, who’d done the driving on the busted jewelry-store job, and Tom Hurley. Handy McKay was listening to an opinion from Philly Webb, and both Ed Mackey and Mike Carlow were sitting off by themselves, thinking about it.
Parker had moved one of the chairs from the dining table to the end of the room nearest the door so he could face the entire group. He sat down now, saw by his watch that it wasn’t yet ten p.m., and waited for things to quiet down.
But they didn’t quiet, not exactly. Instead, Tom Hurley, who finally seemed to have forgotten his grudge against Morse, at least for a while, got to his feet and pointed at the papers scattered on the coffee table and called across the room, “Parker, where are you going to be while we’re running all this other stuff?”
The others all stopped talking and looked at Parker, who said, “Right here. I hold Faran, I keep this place for everybody to get back to, and I’m the phone drop you’re gonna need.”
Hurley pointed at the papers again. “So you’ve got these capers here,” he said. “We go do them, we hit all at once, that’s sensible, I like that. Keeps us clean of cops. You’re back here, you keep the coffee and the doughnuts.”
Quietly, Handy McKay said, “And he set them up. Every score is worked out there.”
Parker, jabbing a thumb back at the pistols piled on the dining table, said, “And I got you hardware from a gun store last night. All new pieces, with ammunition. I couldn’t test-fire them, but you shouldn’t need to shoot them.”
“That’s okay,” Hurley said. “That’s all very nice. My question is, what’s your piece?”
“No cash,” Parker said.
They all looked at him. Ed Mackey said, “Parker? You don’t want any cut?”
“There’s eleven of you,” Parker said. “You go out, you pull the action, you come back, you put all the take in one pile and split it eleven ways. So everybody gets the same piece.”
Hurley, frowning as though looking for the butcher’s thumb, said, “Except you?”
“That’s right.”
Fred Ducasse said, “What’s in it for you?”
“I want you to do a piece of work for me,” Parker said. “Tomorrow, after all this other stuff is done and you’ve all made your money.”
Hurley, looking satisfied, as though he thought maybe he finally did see that thumb resting on the scale after all, said, “What kind of a piece of work, Parker?”
Parker got to his feet, took the small white box from his pocket, took the top off it, and put the box on the coffee table amid the papers. Then he stood back and let them study it.