Knowing that, being sure not to forget it, he had studied the proposition, the possibilities, the dangers, the rewards, and at last he had made up his mind. An opportunity like this wouldn’t be coming his way twice. He’d be a fool to let this one slip by. Tonight.
Dr Godden looked at Roger and Ralph. His mob. They would have to do.
He took a deep breath, “I taped Mrs Fusco’s session just now,” he said. “She’s given us their plans from beginning to end. We’ll listen to them first, and then go over our own plans once more.”
Ralph and Roger looked alert, Dr Godden pressed the switch and the voice of Ellen Fusco, faintly metallic, began once more to drone.
Part Three
1
The Phone rang. Parker awoke at once, put the receiver to his ear, and the operator said, “Eleven o’clock, Mr Lynch.”
“Thank you.” It was Wednesday. The heist was tonight.
Parker got out of bed and padded nude to the bathroom. He showered and shaved, then dressed in black rubber-soled oxford shoes, black trousers, white shirt open at the collar. He left the room, locked it after him, and went across the highway to the diner where he’d had breakfast every day of his stay here. He knew now what was safe to order and what was not.
The waitress knew him, too. She came over smiling when he sat down, saying, “Good morning, Mr Lynch. Getting a late start this morning.”
“Leaving today,” he said. He would have preferred a waitress who minded her own business, but this was a cheery gregarious stocky woman and there was nothing to be done about it. Rather than have her remember him specifically as the customer who’d been surly to her, he’d maintained a small conversation with her every day, allowing himself to be just another salesman passing through, spending a couple of weeks at the motel across the way. He would be much less specific in her mind then, and if the law did come around in a day or two her description of him would be that much more vague.
Now, “Sorry to lose you,” she said. “What’ll it be this morning?”
He ordered scrambled eggs, bacon, orange juice, black coffee, then sat and looked out the window at the trucks going by on the highway. He ate his food when it came, left an ordinary tip, paid the cashier at the door, and walked back across the road to the motel.
He went into the motel office and the woman at the desk looked at him brightly. “Yes, sir?”
“I’m checking out.”
“Yes, sir. What room number, please?”
“Eleven.”
“Do you have your key?”
“I’ll leave it in the room. My luggage is still there.”
“Very good.”
She opened a file drawer and got out his bill. “Any charges this morning? Phone calls, anything like that?” “No.”
“Very good.”
She slid the bill across the counter to him. One hundred forty dollars. He took out his wallet, began to slide some of Norman Berridge’s bills on to the desk.
“Cash?” she said in surprise.
This was a bad moment, and he knew it, but there was no way around it. To skip out on the bill would have the cops looking for him a day early. Have them looking for Devers’ Pontiac, which had been here often enough to be known in the last three weeks. But he couldn’t carry credit cards or a checkbook, at least not legitimately, and it was bad business to kite checks in the neighborhood of a score. Got the law on your trail too soon and too easy. So he was going to have to pay this motel bill, and the only way to do it was with cash.
He shrugged at the woman’s surprise, therefore, and said, “That’s what the company accountant says we have to do from now on. It’s something to do with taxes. I liked it better the old way. Hand over an American Express card and that’s it.”
“You’ll want a receipt,” she said.
“It’s the only way I get reimbursed,” he said. She stamped the bill paid, gave it to him, and scooped the bills off the desk. “Thank you for staying with us, sir. Do come again.”
Parker went back outside. It was a good day, sunny but with a bite in the air. He walked down the row to his unit and unlocked the door. The cleaning girl’s cart was two doors farther along. He went inside, left the door open, and packed his one suitcase, leaving out only a long-sleeve high-neck black pullover sweater, a dark gray sport jacket and a quiet blue-and-black tie. He put the tie in the side pocket of the sport jacket, set the closed suitcase on the floor and lay down on the bed with his eyes closed to wait.
He sensed when the light changed, meaning there was someone standing in the doorway. He opened his eyes and it was the cleaning girl. “I’ll be out of here by twelve-thirty,” he said, and she went away.
It was quarter past twelve when he heard the tires grate on gravel in front of his room. He sat up, saw the Pontiac coming to a stop out there, and got off the bed again.
It was Devers, on his lunch hour. He got out of the car as Parker stepped out into the sunlight, carrying his suitcase in his right hand, his sport jacket and sweater in his left.
Devers said, “You want to drive?”
“Why?”
Devers laughed and shook his head. “I’ll tell you the truth, it’s because I’m a nervous wreck. I’m really shaky today.”
Parker nodded. “I’ll drive,” he said. He put his gear in the back seat and got behind the wheel as Devers trotted around and came in on the passenger side.
Devers had left the engine running. Parker put it in reverse, backed it around in a tight half-circle, switched into drive and joined the thin stream of westbound traffic on the highway.
Devers said, “You get used to it after a while?”
“After a while,” Parker agreed. “Some guys always get flutters before. Some always get them after.”
“When do you get yours?”
“I don’t.”
He wasn’t boasting, it was the truth. The situation they were going into tonight would only make him colder and colder, harder and harder, surer and surer. He knew everything was organized, he knew the way it was supposed to come off, the step-by-step working out of the prepared script, and he was like a cold-blooded stage manager on opening night; no jitters, just a hard determination that everything would happen the way it was supposed to happen. He knew that the others, the actors, were all atremble, but that wasn’t for him. Stage managers don’t tremble.
Not even when something goes wrong. That was what he was there for tonight, just as much as his pre-planned actions. He was there also to be ready for the unexpected, to improvise if anything went wrong, to keep the production safe and moving no matter what. So he couldn’t get the flutters before or during, and it didn’t make any sense to get them after. So he just didn’t get the flutters.
Devers wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Boy, I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how you go about getting used to something like this.”
“You keep doing it,” Parker told him.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Just this side of North Bangor there was a white clapboard house with a sign hanging from a tree out front reading: TOURISTS. Behind the house were half a dozen cabins, miniature versions of the house. A black Buick station wagon was parked next to one of the cabins. Devers gestured a thumb at it as they drove by, saying, “They haven’t left yet.”
“They’ll be along,” Parker said.
“They” were the other three men, Jake Kengle and Philly Webb and Bill Stockton, all of whom had come into town on Monday, had listened to the outline of the caper, and had elected to be dealt in. The station wagon was Webb’s, and the only constant about it was its brand; it never stopped being a Buick. But it hadn’t been black more than a week or two, and would be some color other than black by the end of this week. And the Maryland license plates it sported now were only one of the many sets it had known in the past and would know in the future. Webb prided himself out loud on having attained the untraceable car, but Parker thought it likelier that Webb just liked to have something to play with.