“That letter you got,” Stubbs said. “I looked up that Lasker fella in Cincinnati, and he left a forwarding address. I went there and hung around till I saw you.”
“He left a forwarding address,” repeated Parker. He shook his head and kept driving. He didn’t know if this was Handy’s last job, but he knew it was Skimm’s.
PART TWO
Chapter 1
PARKER left the car off Hudson Boulevard in Jersey City and walked two blocks to the office building. There were two elevators, but only one of them was working. An ancient angular Negro with a loose vacant smile operated it. Its metal sides were painted green, and there were grease smears on the doors.
Parker got out on the third floor and tuned left. A sign on the fourth door down read: “Eastern Agency Confidential Investigations.” He pushed the door open and went into a small green reception room. On one wall was a certificate stating that James Lawson was a licenced private investigator.
A bleached blonde, looking secondhand, sat at the grey metal desk, talking on the phone. When Parker came in she said, “Hold on, Marge.” She pressed the telephone to her hard breast and looked at Parker.
“Doctor Hall to see Lawson,” Parker said.
“One moment, please.” She told Marge to hold on again, and got up and went to the door of the inner office. She had stripper’s hips, big and thick and wrapped in a tight black skirt. She went through into the inner office, and in a minute she came back. “Go right on in, Doctor.”
“Thanks,” said Parker.
She went back to her desk and her phone call, and Parker went through to the inner office and closed the door.
James Lawson was small and balding. He looked like the kind of man who was worried about being out of condition, who kept promising himself he’d start going to a gym but never went. He looked across his wooden desk at Parker. “I don’t think I know you.”
Lawson wasn’t a man to trust with the new face. “Parker sent me. Him and Handy McKay.”
“So you can name-drop,” said Lawson. “Doctor Hall, and Parker, and Handy McKay. Parker’s dead.”
“No, he ain’t. Him and Handy and Pete Skimm and me are working on a job. You want to call Skimm?”
Lawson shook his head. “I don’t call anybody,” he said. “Where’d you get the Dr Hall from?”
“Parker. He said I should call myself Doctor Hall, and then you’d know what was what.”
“How come he didn’t come himself?”
“He can’t show himself in the East. He ran into trouble with the Outfit.”
Lawson nodded. “I heard something about that, too. But I also heard he was dead.”
“He wasn’t, the last time I talked to him.”
Lawson chewed on a knuckle. “You look okay,” he said, “and you sound okay. But I don’t know you.”
“Do you think I’m law? If I was law, I wouldn’t play games. I could take your licence away without half trying. I wouldn’t have to fool around with you.”
“Take my licence away for what?”
“For the time you gave Parker three Magnums and the Positive.”
Lawson started. “You know about that?”
“Parker told me. So let’s quit fooling around?”
“Maybe I better call Skimm,” said Lawson. He was suddenly very nervous.
Parker gave him the number, and then sat down in the client’s chair during the phone call. Skimm was home, and Parker had already told him the right answers. Lawson talked with him briefly, and then hung up.
“You ready to deal?”
“Sure.” Lawson grinned, his lips wet. “But I ought to know who I’m dealing with,” he said.
“Flynn. Joe Flynn.”
“I don’t think I’ve heard of you.”
“I’ve always worked out around the Coast before this.”
“And where’s this job? Here in Jersey?”
Parker shook his head. “Youngstown, Ohio,” he said. “You’ll read about it in the papers.”
Lawson opened a drawer and took out a pencil and notepad. “What do you need?”
“Three guns. Medium size — .32’s or .38’s.”
Lawson nodded. “I’ll look around. Anything else?”
“Two trucks. Semis.”
“Tractor-trailers!” Lawson frowned, and tapped his pencil point against the notepad. “That’s a tricky one. There isn’t so much market in those big ones any more. That’ll probably cost you.”
Parker shrugged. “If it costs too much, we’ll steal our own.”
Lawson tapped the pencil faster against the notepad. “You’ve still got the registration to worry about. And the cover.”
“Don’t need them,” Parker said. “Just the trucks.”
“Stripped?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Oh. That isn’t so tough, then. I know one already, if it isn’t sold. Down in North Carolina. I’ll check on it for you.” He wrote on the notepad again. “Anything else?”
“Some place to get some work done on one of the trucks.”
“Engine or body?”
“Body.”
Lawson nodded. “I think I know the place for you. Anything else?”
“No.” Parker got to his feet. “That’s all we need. You can leave messages with Skimm.”
Lawson ripped the top page from the notepad, stuffed it in his side pocket. “You ought to leave something with me. Sort of a drawing account.”
Parker took out his wallet, peeled off four fifties, and dropped them on Lawson’s desk.
Lawson picked them up and grinned. “You want a receipt? You know, for tax purposes?”
“No,” Parker said. “Leave the word with Skimm.”
“Will do.”
Parker went back downstairs in the green elevator and walked back to the Ford. It had a parking ticket on it. He threw the ticket into the gutter and drove away, back to Hudson Boulevard and then to the Pulaski Skyway and down 9. Because of the trooper, and not wanting to be near the diner too soon before the job, he turned on 1 when it branched away to the right. At New Brunswick, he turned left on 18, then right at Old Bridge, heading down towards Spotswood. But before he got there he turned left up a winding dirt road.
The land here was red clay and white sand mixed together, with a fuzz of wild grey grass and here and there thick-trunked trees. The road seemed to end shortly but Parker went up an overgrown slope, and the dirt road angled sharply around a tree and then dropped away down the dip into a kind of cup.
Down in the indentation stood a grey farmhouse, nearly invisible on days the sun didn’t shine. Someone had once tried to make the land grow something beside wild grasses and occasional trees. But the farmhouse was slowly rotting away now, becoming a part of the land. It couldn’t be seen from any road, and most people in the area probably didn’t even know it existed. The dirt road leading in was sometimes used as a lovers’ lane, but those people never even came in very far. They didn’t care what was over the slope; they just wanted not to be seen from the road.
When Parker had first come, the road had been impassable. The turn around the tree at the top of the slope had been choked with underbrush and dead branches. They would not have cleared it until the day before the job, but now there was Stubbs, so Parker had hacked away at it with an axe and cleared enough room for the Ford to just get through. He made it now on the first try and came down the grassed-over double track on the other side.
He drove around to the back of the farmhouse, left the Ford up close against the house — he would have liked to park it in the barn, but that had already fallen in — and went down the steps into the basement. The flooring upstairs was unsafe, so they used only the basement.
It didn’t smell like a basement. The windows were all broken out, and sand had sifted in over the years. It smelled mummified. There were two cots set up along one wall, a card table and three folding chairs on the other side, and a camp stove by the ruins of the furnace so the smoke would go up the chimney.
Parker went over to the door to the fruit cellar and hit it with his fist. “You in there?”