Parker had been playing cards at the dining table by the front door. He stood up, leaving the incomplete hand spread out, and said, “Any problems?”
“Simplicity,” Wiss said. Walking deeper into the room, he put his bag on the sofa, and then he and Elkins emptied money from the bag and their pockets onto the coffee table. “All very nice,” Wiss said.
Parker looked at the stacks of bills. “Did you count it?”
Elkins said, “Ten thousand, four hundred and fifty dollars.”
“A little more than we figured.”
Elkins grinned. “I thought maybe I’d palm a couple hundred, who’d know? But it isn’t worth it.”
“You’ll all do good tonight,” Parker told him. “You won’t need to nickel-dime.”
Wiss said, “You hear from anybody else?”
“Everything’s okay at the burglary-alarm place. The manager out at the Riviera called a while ago, checking on Mr. Flynn’s credit.”
“Lovely,” Wiss said. He poked around in his bag for stray bills, found none, and closed the bag. “So we’ll be off,” he said.
“I’ll call Webb.”
They walked to the door. Elkins said, “See you later.”
Parker nodded. They left, and he called Philly Webb, the driver at Vigilant. “Wiss and Elkins are on the way,” he said, and went back to finish the game.
Ten minutes later Mackey and Hurley and Dalesia came in. carrying the full dispatch cases. Mackey was grinning his hard aggressive grin, and he said, “Parker, you should of been there.”
Parker left the cards again. “No trouble?”
“Piece of cake,” Mackey said. “Goddam piece of cake.”
Hurley said, “That big baldheaded monster, what’s his name?”
“Wycza,” Parker said.
“Yeah, Wycza. Him and Florio got to be buddies. You never saw anything like it.”
Dalesia said, “What do we do with the money?”
Parker swept the solitaire hand off to a corner of the table. “Put it here. You count it yet?”
“We’ll do that now,” Mackey said. Rubbing his hands together, grinning his hard grin at everybody, he said, “I just love to count money. Other people’s money.”
“Our money now,” Hurley said.
The dispatch cases were zipped open, the money belts were taken off, and the cash was piled up like a green mountain on the table. The four men began counting, each of them making stacks, and when they were finished they added their four totals together. Dalesia did it, with pencil and paper. “Forty-seven thousand, six hundred,” he said.
Mackey said, “That’s really nice.”
Looking over at the smaller stack of money on the coffee table. Hurley said, “That’s from the movie house?”
Parker nodded. “Ten thousand, four hundred and fifty.”
Dalesia said, “So far, that’s fifty-nine thousand and fifty dollars.”
Mackey, laughing, said, “And fifty dollars?”
Hurley gestured at the living room. “We’ll leave it for the householders,” he said. “As a tip.”
Parker said, “Wycza and the others already off on their next one?”
“Right,” Dalesia said. Looking at his watch, he said, “We better, too. See you later, Parker.”
The three of them trooped out of the apartment. Parker went into the bedroom, glanced at the locked closet door, and went over to check dresser drawers. The top one was nearly empty; he put the remaining few clothes on top of the dresser, carried the drawer into the living room, and lined it with the cash from the two robberies. He brought the full drawer back to the bedroom, put it away in the dresser, and returned to the living room to deal out a fresh hand of solitaire.
It wasn’t yet two o’clock in the morning.
Forty-five
Calesian dreamed of white skis on a black mountainside. He couldn’t see the skier, only the black-clad legs, the white skis, the glistening black slope, the featureless gray-white sky. The skier raced at a downward angle, moving very fast, the wind whistling with his passage, rushing on and on and yet never seeming to get anywhere, sailing across a slope like some gigantic pool ball, empty and alone.
The sound of the phone confused his mind, which tried to interpolate it into the dream as church bells. But there was no church, the image broke down, and he awoke, dry-mouthed and disoriented, to hear the phone ring a second time. He didn’t need to switch the light on to find the receiver on the bedside table. Lying on his side, hearing the beating of his heart in the ear pressed into the pillow, he held the phone to his other ear and said, “Hello?”
“Calesian?” It was an angry voice, and a voice he recognized, though he couldn’t immediately put a name to it. But he knew it was someone of power; the tone of voice alone was enough to tell him that much.
He said, “Yes? Who is it?”
“This is Dulare, you simple bastard. Wake up.”
Dulare. “I’m awake,” Calesian said, feeling a sudden flutter of nerves in his chest. Lifting his head from the pillow, hiking himself up onto an elbow, he repeated, “I’m awake. What’s the problem?” And blinked in the darkness; though the curtains were open at his bedroom window, no moonlight shone in. It seemed black as a closet out there.
”I’ll tell you the problem,” Dulare said. “Six guys just knocked over the Riviera.”
“Did what?”
“You heard me, goddammit.”
“Robbed—”
“It had to be your friend Parker,” Dulare said. “There’s no way it’s anything else.”
“Good Christ.”
“Christ doesn’t come into this.” Dulare was raging; his words were made out of sharp pieces of metal, shaped and flung. “No two-bit heist artist is going to take me for fifty thousand dollars, Calesian.”
“I don’t—” Calesian rubbed his face with his free hand, trying to think. He was now sitting up completely on the bed, the dream forgotten. “Six of them, you said?”
“He’s brought in friends,” Dulare said. “The son of a bitch is starting a war, Calesian. You’ve mishandled this thing every way you knew how, you and that goddam moron Buenadella.”
“They got away clean?” It was a stupid question to ask and Calesian knew it, but he couldn’t find anything sensible to say and silence would have been even worse.
“I’m going over to Buenadella’s,” Dulare said. It was a bad sign that he was calling Dutch by his last name. “I don’t want any of you damn fools here at my place, not with Parker after your asses. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes, and you be there, too.”
“Of course,” Calesian said, but Dulare had already hung up on him.
Calesian cradled the phone, then got out of bed and stood there for a second in the darkness, reluctant to turn the light on, face the reality, start moving.
He should have known. He should have guessed that Parker would pull something like this; it’s why the bastard dropped out of sight. The way he’d applied pressure to Lozini last week, hitting the New York Room and the brewery and that downtown parking garage. Only this time, instead of three small annoying stings, taking useless credit-card papers and checks, he’d done one big punch, hitting for fifty thousand dollars.
One big punch? All at once, with the conviction of a revelation, he knew there were going to be more punches than one. Looking toward the window, Calesian thought, He’s out there somewhere, right now, hitting again. Where in hell are you, Parker?
Still in darkness, he turned his head toward the phone he couldn’t see. Call someone, warn somebody? Who? He had no idea where the hit would come, or even if it would be something his own people, the police, would be able to do anything about. A robbery out at the Riviera would be outside local law jurisdiction anyway, even if they reported it. And if there hadn’t been any injuries or too many civilians upset, they probably wouldn’t report it at all.