‘Jesus Christ.” The guy had finished. He dropped the pages on the floor and looked at Parker and said, “He’s a fucking lunatic.”
“Yes, he is.”
“He set you up to do it, so he could turn you in. That isn’t even entrapment, I don’t know what the fuck that is.”
“Stupidity.”
“All right.” The guy was more relaxed now, as though Cathman being an amateur and an idiot had created a bond between the two of them. He said, “So if you didn’t come here to divvy up the money, or anything like that, why did you come?”
“To kill him.”
“Hah. No loose ends.”
“That’s right.”
“I wish I’d done it that way myself, years ago,” the guy said. “All right, Mr. Parker, I want in. I’ve got you, but I don’t want you, I want money. Are your partners dead, too?”
“No. We know each other, we work together.”
“So they’re waiting for you to come back, mission accomplished, the loose cannon dealt with.”
“Right. And we divvy the money and go our ways.”
“So if I kill you,” the guy said, “I can’t find them, and I can’t get any money. But if I let you live, I’ve got to have money. I need money, that’s what it comes down to.”
“I could see that.”
“So what’s your offer?”
“We got over four hundred thousand,” Parker said.
The guy frowned. “The radio said three and a half.”
“I don’t know about that. Usually they estimate high. All I know is, we got over four.” Because, to make his story work, there had to seem to be enough for everybody. “There’s five of us, so that’s eighty apiece, a little more than eighty. You help me in two ways, and”
“Like letting you live.”
Parker shook his head. “You aren’t gonna kill me, because I’m not a threat to you like this, and I’m no use to you dead. Don’t talk as though we’re both ignorant.”
“Well, fuck me,” the guy said, with a surprised laugh. “You talk pretty tough for somebody sitting under my gun. You think I never killed anybody?”
“I think you never killed anybody when you didn’t have a reason for it,” Parker said. “Do you want to listen to my proposition?”
The guy shrugged. “Help you two ways, you said.”
“First, kill Cathman. I need him dead. I can’t do it myself laced up like this, so either you do it or unhook me so I can do it myself.”
“We’ll work on that,” the guy said. “What’s the other?”
“For that, I do need to be unhooked,” Parker said.
“I don’t think so. For what?”
“I’ve got to search in here and in the office. I’ve got to see what else he put on paper that could make trouble for me.”
“I’ll search for you. You tell me what you’re looking for.”
“No.”
The guy looked at him, and waited, and then said, “No? That’s it, no?”
“That’s it. No. Do you want to hear what your side is?”
“This should be good.”
“Why not? If you kill Cathman, or let me do it, and let me run my search in here, that makes you a partner. I won’t have trouble with the others, so neither will you. We’ll each be getting a little over eighty. So we take twelve out of each of us, that still gives us almost seventy apiece, which is still good, and sixty for you. Is sixty enough for you?”
Clearly, the guy would try to figure out how to get it all, how not to have any partners at the end of the day, but just as clearly he’d also try to figure out how to make it look as though he was content with a piece. Should he pretend to think sixty was enough? Parker watched him think it through, and at last the guy grinned a little and said, “If things’d worked out the way I wanted, I’d have it all. Tell me why didn’t you come back to the cabins.”
“Youwere there?” Parker said. “Did you by any chance run into some bikers?”
The guy’s hand moved toward his wounded ear, but then lowered again. He said, “You know about them.”
“We had a guy with a boat,” Parker told him, “for when we left the ship. He sold us out to those people, but when we got in his boat it didn’t feel right, so we made him tell us what he’d done.”
“So where did you go instead?”
“His landing. He’s got a place upstream from the cottages, we went there. He had a whole operation up there, a shack by the water, he grows marijuana in peat moss bags suspended on the water. That’s his link with the bikers, he’s the farmer, they’re the processors.”
“A shack on the water,” the guy said. “I’ve heard about that peat moss business, it’s been tried before. Is that where your partners are, the shack?”
“Yes.”
“Telephone there?”
“Of course not.”
“And where’s the boat guy?”
“In the river.”
The guy thought it over. Parker let him have a minute, but then figured it was time to distract him: “Cathman’s been gone quite a while.”
“What?” Startled, the guy called, “Cathman!” When there was no answer, he strode over to the shut door and hit it twice with the gun butt. Then he pulled open the door and took one step in, and stopped.
Parker said, “Pills?”
The guy stepped back from the doorway. “Well, there’s one from your wish list. Or almost. The color of his face, the sounds in his throat, if we called nine one one right now and got the EMT over here on the double, they just might save him. What do you think?”
“I think,” Parker said, “we should respect his wishes.”
10
Parker thought he was probably a cop. The way he handled himself, some of the things he’d said, turns of phrase. And the shotgun in the truck being from a police department. And that he just happened to be traveling with handcuffs.
Some kind of rogue cop, running away from trouble he’d made for himself, needing a bankroll to start over. Somehow, he’d heard about the ship heist, decided to deal himself in. Wound up at the cottages, same as the three bikers, so all they did was screw up each other’s ambush.
The question was, where was his road in? It seemed as though it had to be one of the other four people in the job, but none of them looked right for the part. It hadn’t been Cathman, who’d had a different agenda, it wasn’t Parker, so who else could it be?
Dan Wycza; Lou Sternberg; Mike Carlow; Noelle Braselle. He couldn’t see this mangled cop cozying up with any of them.
Anyway, if it was one of them, wouldn’t this guy know more than he does? But what else could it be?
Maybe, a little later, he’d get a chance to ask that question. But for now, they still had to negotiate their way through this matter of the search. Parker needed to make that search, because the alternative was to uproot Claire and start all over again somewhere else, and if he did that this time he’d be doing it again, and Claire wouldn’t be happy on the constant go. Claire liked a nest.
“In here,” Parker said, meaning in the bedroom, “you can do it for me. Open drawers, take out anything that’s paper, throw it on the bed, let me look at it, and we take away what I want. In the office down the hall there, we could do it this way. I go first, and stop in the doorway. You undo the cuffs, and I walk forward to the desk, so you’re always behind me. You stay in the doorway with the gun on me. I do my search. Then I walk backward to the door with my wrists behind my back, you cuff me again. Or you could just cuff me in front, then I could”
The guy laughed at him. “Sure,” he said. “Cuff you in front. I could ask you to hold my gun for me, too.”
“Then the other way. You’re behind me, you’re armed, if I try to do something you don’t have to kill me, just wound me. What am I gonna do about you at the desk? Throw a pen at you?”
“I’ll have to search it first,” the guy said. “Maybe you happen to know there’s a gun in one of those drawers.”
“Cathman, with a gun? Search away. You want to help me to my feet?”