Parker nodded. He could have seen it better if Skimm had kept his fingers out of the way, but he didn’t say anything. He wasn’t in any hurry, and every man has his own rate and style of telling a story. Try to hurry Skimm or make him talk without covering the map with his fingers and he’d just get confused.
“Okay,” Skimm was saying. “Now, two miles farther south, 34 takes off. To the east again, same as 35. Right there, see it?”
“I see it.”
“Okay. Now, about midway between those turnoffs there’s the Shore Points Diner, on the west side of the road. Right in there, see? Between where those two red lines go off to the right.”
“I’ve got it, Skimm. And that’s where this Alma’s a waitress.”
“Right! Now, down here—” His fingers moved southward down the map. “Here’s Freehold, down here, where 9 crosses 33. Now, there’s the Dairyman’s Trust, this bank, see, it’s up here in Elizabeth, and they got a branch in Newark, and they got a branch down here in Freehold, too. Now every other Monday there’s this Wells Fargo armored car comes down from the main branch in Elizabeth down to Freehold, see? Down along route 9, here.”
“And they stop at this Shore Points Diner,” Parker said.
“That’s it! This Freehold, it ain’t much of a town, but the Dairyman’s Trust is the biggest bank, I mean with branches in Newark and Elizabeth and all, so most of the business accounts all around Freehold are in that bank, see? So when the armored car comes down every other Monday, it carries enough dough to pay off two weeks of payrolls around Freehold, and any other dough the bank needs down there. We figure maybe fifty G, maybe more.”
Parker frowned. “That’s all? The way I read the letter, fifty thousand figured to be my split.”
Skimm looked up, worried and apologetic and embarrassed. “Oh, no, Parker! I never told Joe nothing like that.”
“Okay, I read it wrong, that’s all.”
“I mean, fifty G is the minimum figure, you see? It might be seventy, eighty, who knows?”
Parker dragged on his cigarette, flicking ashes onto the whisky stain on the carpet. “That means if I’m lucky I clear ten. Maybe only eight.” He shook his head. “It isn’t worth it.”
Skimm’s eyes flicked toward the empty pint, then looked back at the map. “It’s an easy haul,” he said wistfully. “If there was something better on the fire, I’d think that way, too. But I got no other jobs building, and I need the dough.” He looked up at Parker, his mouth opened because of the lifted angle of his head. “You know of anything else?”
“No.” That was the trouble. He had nothing else on the fire either, and he only had the nine grand. He couldn’t pick and choose and plan, the way he’d want to. He had to build a stake, he had to have a money cushion.
“I’d like to have you in it, Parker,” Skimm was saying, wistful again. “I know your work.”
“Maybe it doesn’t really need five men,” Parker said thoughtfully. “That’s a big crowd for an armored car heist. What’s the play?”
“Yeah.” Skimm reached for the envelope. “We figured to do it at the diner,” he said. “Here, let me show you.” He was all activity again, talking in a rush, as though he were afraid Parker would walk out on him before he was done. He pulled more paper out of the manila envelope, and found the sheet he wanted. “Here, here it is. See, this is the diner here, and the highway, and the parking lot.”
Parker looked in among the pointing fingers. On the sheet of paper was a rough pencil drawing of the diner area, as seen from above. The diner was set back off the highway about six yards, with parking lots on both sides and at the rear. Across the front, between diner and roadway, was a patch marked ‘Grass.’ There was an X scrawled on one of the parking lots at the side, up close against the side of the building.
“Now they come in,” said Skimm, pointing all over the sheet of paper, “every other Monday morning between ten-thirty and eleven. They never miss. There’s the driver, and a guard sitting up in front with him, and the other guard in back. They’ve all been on this route for years, see? And they’ve got a pattern, they never change. They come in between ten-thirty and eleven, and they park right there where the X is.” He tapped the X with his finger and looked up at Parker. “See it there?”
“I see it.”
“Right,” said Skimm. He looked down at the drawing again. “Then, the driver and the guard from in back go into the diner and have coffee and danish and take a leak, see, and then they go back to the car and the other guard comes in. Then when he’s done they take off again. Maybe fifteen minutes for the whole thing.”
Parker nodded.
Skimm took a deep breath. “Now,” he said, “here’s the way we figured it. We need two tractor-trailers, big ones. They trial the armored car down 9, see, hanging back a little so when they get to the diner the first two guys are already inside. They pull in and they park on each side of the armored car, see, they bracket it like, so you can’t look into the armored car from either side. Alma works it in the diner so that side is closed to be mopped, see, so there won’t be any customers close enough to the windows on that side to be able to see what’s going on. And the trailers stick back far enough so you’d have to be right behind the armored car to tumble to anything, you see what I mean? But nobody will anyway because right after the trailers come in our car parks right behind the trailers, facing across them, you see the way it works? Here, I’ll show you.” Unnecessarily, he threw a U-shape, and explained.
Parker waited through it, nodding, beginning to lose his patience. He didn’t like the job with an amateur doing the fingering and five guys cutting up a fifty thousand dollar pie after the finger’s ten percent and the bankroller’s two-for-one were already taken out, and with the job already requiring two tractor-trailers and a car. And Skimm didn’t even have them into the armored car yet.
Skimm finished his explanation and said, “Now, we’ve got two guys in the head, inside the diner. The driver and the guard always take a leak when they stop off there, it never misses, they’re regular as clockwork. So they go in, and the two guys in there tap them and stow them away in a stall, see? And outside we got the other three, from the trucks and the car. They pump tear gas into the air vent on top of the cab — you know what that looks like? They got this thing on top—”
“I know what it looks like,” Parker said.
“Okay.” Skimm hurried even faster, sensing Parker’s impatience. “That forces the guy out, see? We take the keys off him, tap him, transfer the dough to the car, and we all take off. The one truck goes up 9 here, see? North, up to South Amboy, it’s maybe a mile, and cuts back south on 535, this little blue road here. The other truck goes south to 516, that’s maybe four miles, and then cuts east. And the car, with the dough, takes this old dirt road — it isn’t on this map, it goes from behind the diner across here to this unmarked road, this little one here — and south on the unmarked road to Old Bridge. We all come together at Old Bridge, see, and back off east of the town there’s this falling-down old farm. We meet there. We split up the boodle and take off. And see, the thing is, we get vehicles going off in three directions, so they don’t know which way to look for us.”
He looked up at Parker, hopeful and expectant. “What do you think?”
Parker shook his head and crossed the room to toss his cigarette out the window. When he turned back, he said, “You ever work an armored car job before, Skimm?”
Skimm’s lips twitched. “No, I never did.”