“That’s right.”
Lozini turned and looked at Parker full-face. Now he, too, didn’t blink; he wanted Parker to know he was hearing the truth, the bottom line. “My trouble is,” he said, “I don’t have your money.”
Parker shrugged, as though it was a minor matter. “You want time?”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean I never had it. I didn’t find it in the amusement park.”
“It isn’t there,” Parker said. “Where I left it.”
“I didn’t get it,” Lozini told him. “I have never had your money.”
“Some of your people got it, and kept it for themselves.”
“I don’t think so.” Lozini shrugged and shook his head. “It’s possible, but I don’t think they’d try it. Not any of the people I had in there with me.”
Parker said, “Nobody else would find it. Where I left it, no maintenance man would go near it, nobody else would stumble across it. The only way it’s gone is because somebody was looking for it and found it. That’s you and your people, nobody else.”
“Maybe that’s what happened,” Lozini said. “I don’t say it couldn’t have been that way, somebody holding out on me. All I say is, I’m not the one who got the money. I never had it and I don’t have it now.” He leaned closer to the other man, put his hand out as though to touch his knee but didn’t quite complete the gesture, and said, “Listen, Parker, I’m on the level. Maybe ten years ago I wouldn’t have given you the time of day, I would have just put every one of my people on the street to hunt you down, and not care how long it took or how much noise it made or how many times you scored against me before I got to you. That’s ten years ago, when things were different.”
Parker waited, watching him, still without expression.
“But right now,” Lozini said, “I can’t do that. Things have been quiet around here for a long time, I’m not even organized for that kind of war any more. I don’t have enough of the right kind of people now; most of my people these days are just clerks. And right now this town is in an election campaign.”
“I saw the posters.”
“It’s a tough campaign,” Lozini said. “My man may be in trouble. The election’s Tuesday, and the one thing I don’t want is blood in the streets the weekend before election. This is the worst possible time for me, things are very shaky anyway and you could make them a lot worse. So that’s another reason I don’t want a war with you. Besides what Karns told me. All of that, it all adds up to me wanting to get along with you, work something out, figure out some kind of compromise.”
“I left seventy-three thousand here,” Parker said. “Half of it belongs to my partner.” He made a head gesture toward Green back in the other car. “Neither one of us wants ten cents on the dollar, or a handshake, or a compromise, or anything at all except our money. Our full take, everything we took out of that armored car.”
“Then you’ve got to look somewhere else,” Lozini said. At that moment a farm pickup truck with an old refrigerator standing up in the back passed them, the first traffic since they’d stopped here. Lozini pointed at it through the windshield as it went bumping away, disappearing around the stand of trees. “If you went to that farmer,” he said, “and told him you left seventy-three thousand dollars in Tyler two years ago and you want it back, he’d tell you you’re at the wrong door because he doesn’t have it and doesn’t know where it is. And I’m telling you the same thing.”
Parker shook his head, betraying his impatience by a tightening of the lips at the corners of his mouth. “The farmer isn’t connected,” he said. “You are. Don’t waste my time.”
Lozini cast around for something else. “All right,” he said. “I’ll look into it. Maybe it was one of my people—”
“It was.”
“All right. I’ll check them out, and let you know what I come up with.”
Parker nodded. “How long?”
“Give me a week.”
The small sign of impatience again. “I’ll call you tomorrow evening, seven o’clock.”
“Tomorrow! That isn’t enough.”
“They’re your people,” Parker said. “If you’re in charge, run them. It won’t take long. I’ll call you at seven.”
“I don’t promise anything by then.” Parker shrugged and looked away.
Lozini was reluctant for the meeting to be over. He wanted an understanding he could live with, and he didn’t feel he had one. He said, “You want to take it a little easy, you know.”
Parker faced him again, and waited.
“I go for the easy way,” Lozini said. “That’s the situation I’m in right now, I go for the easy way. As long as the easy way is to cooperate with you, that’s what I’ll do. You lean too hard, you make it easier to fight back, then that’s what I’ll do.”
Parker seemed to think that over. “I can see that,” he said. “I’ll call you at seven.”
Fourteen
From a street-corner phone booth, Parker put in a call to Claire. Usually she would be at their house on a lake in northern New Jersey, but for privacy they rented the place out to summer people in July and August, spending that time in a Florida resort hotel instead; she was waiting for him now at the hotel.
She was in the room. When she answered, he said, “It’s me,” knowing she would recognize his voice.
She did. “Hello,” she said, the one word filled with all her warmth. Neither of them expressed their feelings much in words.
“I’ll be here a few more days,” he said.
“All right,” she said; meaning not that it was all right, but that she understood he had no choice.
“It might be a week,” he told her. “I don’t know yet.”
“Any chance of my coming there?”
“It could get pretty loud,” he said.
There was a small hesitation, and then, in a fainter voice, she said, “All right.”
He knew what that was. Three times since they’d known one another his violent world had gone pushing in at her—during the coin convention robbery when they’d first met, and later when some people had kidnapped her to force Parker to help them in a diamond robbery, and finally when two men had broken into the house at the lake looking for him—and she wanted no more of it. Which was fine with him. “Good,” he said.
He was about to hang up, but she said, “Wait. Handy McKay called.”
Handy McKay was a retired thief, running a diner in Presque Isle, Maine. He was a sort of messenger service between Parker and some other people in Parker’s business, and his calling meant somebody wanted to invite Parker in on a score somewhere. He said, “Tell him I was busy?”
“It wasn’t like that,” she said. “He was calling for himself. He said he wants to talk to you.”
“All right.”
“He didn’t sound good,” she said. “In what way?”
“I don’t know. He sounded—unhappy, I think. Or worried about something. I’m not sure.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Parker said.
“Fine.”
“I’ll get back when I can.”
“I know you will,” she said.
He broke the connection, and called Handy McKay. Waiting for the call to go through, he remembered old Joe Sheer, another retired safecracker, who used to handle the messages for Parker until he’d got himself killed in some local stupidity, costing Parker an entire legitimate front in the process. Was the same thing going to happen again?
Handy’s gravelly voice came on at last, saying, “McKay’s Diner.”
Without preamble Parker said, “Claire said you wanted to talk to me.”