Beckham shook his head, a man bedeviled by gnats. “But why are they gonna just think about me?”
Dalesia said, “Let me tell him that part.”
“Go ahead,” Parker said.
Dalesia said to Beckham, “Parker’s right, the job’s all clouded up because of emotions. Including yours, Jake.”
Beckham reared back on the examination table, his feet floating above the floor. Clutching at his chest, he said, “Mine?”
Dalesia said, “The husband— What’s his name?”
“Jack Langen, the little prick.”
“There you go,” Dalesia said. “You just said it yourself.”
Beckham spread his hands. “Said what?”
“Jack Langen isn’t the little prick,” Dalesia told him. “He’s the angry husband. He knew you were putting it to his wife from the very first.”
“He doesn’t know his ass—”
“That’s why he pressed charges on you the first time,” Dalesia told him. “Overrode his father-in-law, put it to you because he knew you were putting it to the missus. And the minute you got out, he knew when it started up again. Part of this bank merger deal is to get back at the wife and not be the young nobody brought into the family business any more.”
Parker said, “And the second this job goes down, he’ll know it’s you, with her help. He’ll right away start saying your name to the cops, and telling them why it has to be you, and why his own wife has to be the insider. You’re all they’ll look at, and that’s why they’ll see through the doctor alibi in a heartbeat.”
Dalesia said, “Jake, all you wanted was to feel contempt for the husband, like he didn’t matter, like you were that much smarter than him. That’s called underestimating your enemy, Jake.”
“Shit,” Beckham said. “You mean, it still can’t be done?” Turning to Parker, he said, “You said yourself, without the emotions in it the job is good. I really want to do this, Mr. Parker, I need the stake, I need to get my life together. Do you see any way at all we could still pull it off?”
“One way,” Parker said. “I was thinking about it while Nick was telling you things. There’s one way you might get the cops to stop looking at you.”
“I’ll do it,” Beckham said.
“We’ll see.”
“Why?” Beckham looked a little alarmed. “What do you want me to do?”
“Violate parole,” Parker said.
6
Violate—” Beckham stared at Dalesia, then at Parker: “What are you talking about?”
“How often you have to report in?”
“Twice a month. But I don’t see—”
“When’s your next time?”
“Next Tuesday,” Beckham said. “Ten in the morning. But—”
“You don’t show up,” Parker said. “What you do—”
“The hell I don’t show up!” Beckham was so agitated he actually hopped off the examination table and stood with one hand pressed on the table behind him. He wasn’t angry; he was just staggered by the idea. “The whole thing I been doing since I got out,” he said, “is build a record, no violations. Same as when I was in, got full good-behavior time credit.”
Dalesia said, “Listen to him, Jake.”
Beckham didn’t want to. He shook his head, then folded his arms and glowered at Parker, waiting.
“What you do,” Parker told him, “the day you’re supposed to report, you fly to Vegas. That’s Tuesday. Saturday, you turn yourself in to the Vegas cops, you’re a parole violator, you don’t know what came over you, met a woman, got drunk, flew away with her, you know you’re in trouble, nothing like this ever happened before, you just want to get straight with the law.”
“They’ll lock me up,” Beckham said.
“Yes, they will,” Parker said. “By the time they check you out, do a hearing there, bring you back, give you a hearing here, decide what to do with you, it’s three weeks. If the bank move has gone down by then, you get a lawyer, you talk about your good record inside and since, you work your ass off to get time served. If it didn’t go down yet, you’re sullen, you don’t want anybody’s help, you’ll get another thirty days tacked on.”
“Thanks a lot,” Beckham said.
Dalesia said, “Jake, don’t you get it? You couldn’t have had anything to do with the bank job because you were in jail, you were in a cell, the law had you.”
“You were already in a cell,” Parker pointed out, “before you could have known anything about the details of the bank move.”
“But I gotta be there to do it,” Beckham said. “What good is that, I’m in some jail cell? I’m in some jail cell, the job doesn’t happen.”
“We do it,” Dalesia said.
Beckham frowned at Dalesia. The idea had never occurred to him. He said, “You do it without me?”
“You’re still part of it,” Parker assured him. “You brought it to us, so you’re still in it, you get your share. But the law isn’t looking at you.”
“Jake,” Dalesia said, “what Parker’s doing, he’s getting all the emotion out of it, including you. So it’s just us, and anybody else we have to bring in.”
“But—” Beckham couldn’t get his mind around this idea. “I have to be there,” he said. “When it happens, it’s my— I have to be there.”
“If you’re there,” Parker told him, “you’re in jail the next day, you and your lady friend both, in different jails, for the next twenty years.”
“If you’re not there,” Dalesia said, “if you’re already in jail then for some other reason, that’s it, you’re never behind bars again, you’ve got your stake, you wait out your parole, the world is yours.”
Parker said, “Do you want the score, or do you want to make a point? Tell the world off, and go down in flames.”
“Jesus.” Beckham didn’t sit on the examination table again, but he leaned backward against it, brow furrowed like corduroy as he stared at the floor, trying to work out this new situation. “You’re asking me . . .,” he decided, and trailed off.
Dalesia picked up on that. “What, to trust us? You’d never find Parker, Jake, but I couldn’t hide from you. We go back a long way. You never wondered about me before. We’ve been in tents by trout streams up above Quebec, Jake, and we both slept like babies.”
“I know that,” Beckham said, and roused himself. “Jesus, I don’t mistrust you, Nick, and if you say you don’t worry about Parker, I won’t worry about Parker. But this was my baby, it’s been my baby from the beginning. It’s not like I go off with Elaine at the end of it, what I get is the cash, but it’s my cash, my score.”
Dalesia said, “It just happens, Jake, in your score this time, you put the two of us on the send, we come back with the winnings. Meantime, you cover your ass.”
Beckham sighed. “I gotta get used to this,” he said. “All right, if this is what has to happen, what do you want from me?”
Dalesia turned to Parker, who said, “What does Elaine drive?”
“A white Infiniti.”
Dalesia laughed: “So the marriage isn’t all downside.”
Beckham showed him a sour face. “The car’s leased by the bank,” he said. “It’s all scam. She doesn’t get to choose it, and she doesn’t get to keep it.”
Parker said, “Do you have a place to stash the money car, once you’ve got it?”
“Yeah, a good one.” The idea made Beckham smile. “It’s one of those old nineteenth-century factory buildings, old brick, concrete floors, the jobs moved to the South seventy years ago, abandoned ever since, take it a thousand years to rot away.”