“Why?” Parker asked him. “Why not throw down on me?”
French shook his head. “I can’t do it alone,” he said. “A quiet heist I could do, but this got noisy. You think on your feet, you’ll get out of this. Your fence is dead now, but I’ve got one. We can help each other.”
Did it make sense? Or did French have something cute in mind? Parker said, “Why muscle in on somebody else’s proposition?”
“I thought you were out. I thought Lebatard wouldn’t be able to get anybody but amateurs, and I figured I could take them. And I told you, I was into my stake. And I figured to take Lempke in with me. I figured he’d come, if the takeover was done anyway, then there’d be two of us to move the stuff.”
Parker could see how it might have looked to French, but maybe what he was getting was only something in the vicinity of the truth. He said, “All right. You keep the kid cool downstairs, I’ll stay with the truck.”
“The broad’s flaked out.”
“All right. I’ll take care of it.”
French said, “We scratch each other’s backs?”
“Deal,” Parker said.
Two
CLAIRE WAS standing beside the truck, looking puzzled. When Parker came along she said, “I have to go home now.”
“Snap out of it,” he said. “We don’t have any more time for that.”
Calm and reasonable, she said, “We must never speak of that. Will you promise me?”
“I promise,” he said. She was still crazy as a loon, but she was being quiet crazy so it was all right. “Sit down in the truck again,” he said.
“But I have to go home,” she said.
“They want to talk about it there,” he told her. “Better stay here.”
“Oh,” she said. “Then I’ll stay for a while.”
She climbed back into the cab and sat there, knees primly together, hands folded in her lap. She gazed out through the windshield.
French had put the truck way in a corner of the third floor, out of sight from the top of the ramp. This floor was about half full of cars, all with the keys in them, and Parker went walking around looking for the best vehicle to switch to.
He heard a siren and went to the front part of the building to look. The outer concrete wall was chest-high, and then was open to the air above that. Parker leaned out, looked over the edge, and saw a police car go screaming by, headed toward the hotel. He could hear other sirens now, too, in other parts of town.
It was bad, it was very bad. They’d have the city sewed up in half an hour, and there was no place arranged inside the city to hole up. As to French, Parker thought he could trust him until they were clear, and then he’d have to be taken care of. If they got clear.
He left the wall, walked around some more, and finally found a Volkswagen Microbus down on the second floor. He drove it upstairs, parked it next to the truck, and got out to find Claire collapsed over the truck’s steering wheel, crying quietly but desperately.
She looked up when Parker opened the truck door. The madness was out of her eyes, and in its place was pain. She shook her head and whispered, “I didn’t know what it was.”
“We’re in deep now,” Parker told her. ‘We’ve got trouble.”
“It’s all because of me.”
“No. French tried a takeover. It’s a tough thing to pull off, and he didn’t quite make it.”
“But Billy’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“That’s my fault.”
He shrugged. “If you want it,” he said, “You want to go turn yourself in?”
She shook her head. “No. I don’t want to go to jail.”
He was relieved, but didn’t show it. If she’d said yes he would have had to kill her, here and now. It would have bothered him; but it would have been necessary, so he would have done it. He said, “You won’t be able to go home.”
“Why not?”
“They’ll identify Billy. Somebody has to know Billy was hanging around you, so the cops’ll get to you. Then somebody looks at you and says, ‘She’s the one was at the hotel’.”
“Oh,” she said. “You mean, I can’t go back at all.”
“That’s right,” he said, watching her.
She thought about it, looking at the dashboard, and then looked back at Parker, saying, “Will you take me with you?”
“For how long?”
She managed a wan smile. “Until one of us gets bored, I suppose.”
“Will you break down anymore, like you did tonight?”
“No. That was just a surprise, that’s all. The same thing won’t surprise me twice.”
“Maybe something else’ll surprise you.”
“I don’t think so.”
Parker looked at her, and he didn’t think so either. He wanted to believe her, because if he believed her he could take her along, but if he couldn’t trust her to stay reliable he’d have to shut her now, and he didn’t want to have to do that. He said, “All right. We travel together.”
“There’s one thing,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“What I told you, about needing seventy thousand dollars. It was a lie.”
Parker ‘said, “You mean, you didn’t need it for a debt?”
“I didn’t need it at all. I didn’t need it.”
“You wanted to build a stake.”
“Yes.”
Parker grinned. “You work hard,” he said.
She smiled uncertainly. “It doesn’t change anything?”
“Why should it? I wasn’t in this for you, I was in it for me.”
“Of course.” She smiled more naturally, saying, “I guess I just felt I had to confess something to somebody.”
“That’s a bad feeling. Don’t get it anymore.”
“I won’t.”
“All right,” he said. “French is going to be with us for a while. We can use him. Until he feels safe, we can trust him. But you’ve got to help me watch my back.”
“I will.”
“Good. Come on, let’s switch the goods.”
Three
HE HEARD sirens again, coming this way. “Keep working,” he told her, and went up front again to take a look. They’d been at the job of transferring the cases about five minutes now, and were not quite half done.
Parker looked over the edge. The street was filling up with cops, both in cars and on foot, for several blocks in both directions. Somebody must have seen the truck make a left into this street. Cops were checking alleys, side streets, driveways. As Parker watched, a police car turned slowly and nosed into this building, disappearing from his view.
He trotted back to Claire and said, “Keep it quiet a minute. We’ve got company. Listen at the head of the ramp. If you hear them coming up, give me the high-sign.”
“All right.”
He went to the front and looked over the edge again, waiting for them to come back out. If they did come up here he’d have to run for it. Down the stairs if they drove up, or drive down if they came up on foot. There was a blue Porsche parked up there, he’d take that.
If he was taking the car, he’d be able to bring Claire along, but if he had to clear out on foot she’d slow him too much. She’d have to be put out of the way. He didn’t think about that, didn’t want to think about it, but if the time came he’d do it.
Cops were moving around down there like black models in an electric game. The temptation came to start plinking, to hit every moving shape, to make the street silent and empty again, but he knew the temptation for what it was, an emotional, irrational reaction to being in a tight spot. He kept watching It lasted nearly five minutes, and then the dark nose of the police car came turning out into sight again, moving slowly. Parker watched the dark bump of the flasher on the car roof, watched the car turn to the right and drive slowly away.
He waited a minute more, but that was apparently the end of it. The main body of the search had moved farther down the street by now, and the last few cops going by on foot did nothing more than glance into the garage entrance on the way by.
Parker went back over to Claire and said, “All right, it’s clear. Let’s finish up.”