Standing in front of the two cars were four men, two uniformed policemen and two bulky men in hats and dark overcoats. They were just standing there, looking over in this direction at Parker. One of the policemen had a long white envelope in his hand, as though he’d just gotten it and had forgotten he was holding it.
Parker was the first to break the tableau. He grabbed the satchel, turned, jumped over the turnstiles, and ran off into Fun Island.
Two
TWO WEEKS ago Parker had come out to look at the operation and see if it was feasible. The man who was selling it to him was named Dent, and a long time ago he’d been in this kind of work himself. But he was an old man now, with blue-white parchment skin, and long since inactive. Partly inactive; he and his wife traveled around the country in a blue Ford pulling a trailer, what was now called a mobile home, and they stopped here and there at trailer camps around the country, and Dent kept his eyes open. His body had aged but his mind was as good as ever, and from time to time he saw jobs that were there to be done, things he would have done himself in the old days. And now he called this man or that man, younger than himself, and told them the job, and if they liked it they paid him for it. A kind of finder’s fee.
Dent had met Parker at the airport, with his blue Ford but without his wife or his trailer. “Good to see you,” he said, in his uncertain old man’s voice, and they shook hands, and Parker sat be,side him in the Ford while Dent drove. Dent drove carefully, maybe a little too slowly, but mostly well.
And he felt like reminiscing. “What do you hear from Handy McKay?” he said.
“Still retired,” Parker said. He wasn’t good at small talk, but he’d learned over the years that most people needed it, to give them a feeling of assurance about who and where they were. Like a dog circling three times before lying down, people had to talk for a while before saying anything.
“You and Handy sure pulled a lot of jobs together,” Dent said, and grinned out the windshield and shook his head.
“Yeah, I guess we did,” Parker said.
“He’s got a diner now someplace in Maine, don’t he?”
“Presque Isle.”
“Maybe I’ll get up there next summer, drop in. Think he’d like that?”
“Sure,” Parker said.
“It’s a pity about Joe Sheer,” Dent said next, talking about somebody else who’d retired and was now dead.
“Yeah, it is,” Parker said. Dent didn’t know the half of it. Sheer had been the only man who could connect Parker with the name he was using in those days for his legal front, and the manner of Sheer’s death, five years ago, had made it impossible for Parker to use that name any more or collect any of the money he had stashed here and there under that name in resort hotel safes. This was Parker’s eighth job in the five years since that had happened, which was more often than he liked to work, but he was still trying to catch up with himself, still trying to rebuild his reserve funds.
Dent was still talking, still going on with his own thoughts. “It’s a pity about a lot of people,” he was saying, and his grin turned sour as he glanced at Parker. “Be a pity about me pretty soon.”
“Why? You feel sick?”
“No, I feel okay. But I got me a haircut at the barber shop last week, and I looked in the mirror, and I saw the back of my head in the other mirror behind me, and the elevens are up. You know what that means, Parker.”
“It means you’re thin,” Parker said.
“It means you’re finished,” Dent said. He sounded grim, but not as though he was complaining.
Parker said nothing, but glanced at the back of Dent’s neck, and the two tendons were standing out there, just as Dent had said. The elevens are up. When the number eleven shows in the tendons on the back of a man’s neck, he’s finished, everybody knew that. Parker didn’t waste time trying to lie to the old man.
Dent got quiet after that, and didn’t have anything else to say until they turned down the road that ran between the ball park and the amusement park, and then he said, “How do you like this for isolated, Parker? Broad daylight, and nobody here.”
“What’s this road used for?”
“In the summertime — I’ve been here in the summertime, and in the summertime you can’t move on this road. Not with the ball park, not with Fun Island. But why come out here in the winter? No reason. Except at rush hour. Four o’clock till maybe six, it’s a steady stream of them headin the same way we are now. In the morning comin the other way, naturally. But all day long, nothin at all. No reason for it.”
“Here comes something,” Parker said.
“It’s what I wanted you to see,” Dent said, and grinned at him.
It came closer, black-looking against the piles of snow mounded on both sides of the road, and Parker saw it was an armored car. It went by, and Parker twisted around in the seat to look out the back window and watch it drive on. He said, still looking back, “Where’s it going?”
“Back to the main branch of the bank,” Dent said. “It goes out to the suburbs, all the different little branches, and picks up money at every branch. And the last one is out this way, so it finishes by comin down this road.”
“That’s the job?”
“You’ll never find a better.”
“Show me some more,” Parker said. So Dent drove Parker around town, and they talked over different escape routes, and different ways to open the armored car, not because Parker felt he needed any help but because this was the way Dent helped himself stay alive, by keeping an interest in things. Then they had lunch together in a place downtown, and Parker said, “You still be around here in a couple weeks?”
“Oh, about a month, I figure. We usually get where it’s warm, this time of year, but this year we don’t either of us feel like doin all that drivin. About a month, though.”
“That’s enough time,” Parker said.
“If you don’t want it,” Dent told him, “drop me a note at Winding Trail Court here in the city.”
“Right.”
After lunch Dent drove Parker back out to the airport, and Parker took a flight to Newark, and drove out to Claire’s house.
The lake was frozen, and people were going by out there on yellow skimobiles. Claire was watering plants on the window sills that faced south. She turned and said, “Did it turn out to be any good?”
“I think so.”
“Tell me about it.”
This was a big change for her. When they’d met, three and a half years ago, the circumstances had gotten bloody and dangerous, and for three years she hadn’t wanted to know anything about anything. But lately a thaw had taken place, and it was interesting in a different way to have somebody to talk things over with. Somebody not a part of the job. He’d been married once — she’d died nine years ago — but Lynn had always been active in the jobs, she’d worked with him. That sort of thing wasn’t for Claire, and Parker preferred it that way. He liked knowing this house was here, in an isolated corner of New Jersey, with Claire in it waiting for him. A completely different life, with no threads attaching it to the life he lived on the outside. It was a different kind of thing having that, and he enjoyed it.
In traveling around the city with Dent it had seemed to him to be a simple job Dent had come up with, and talking it over later with Claire he got it more completely into focus, and he saw that it could be done, quickly and neatly, with three men.
He had no trouble getting the second man: Alan Grofield, an actor who supplemented his stage income this way, and who Parker had worked with four times in the past. The third man, though, was a problem, and he knew he was settling for second best when he took on Laufman, but it was either Laufman or let the job go. There’d been times in his life when he would have let the job go, but that was before the trouble that had stripped him of the name Charles Willis and all the money stashed around the country in the Charles Willis name.