“I’ve worked my particular line for eighteen years,” he told them. “In that time, I’ve worked with about a hundred different men. Among them, they’ve worked with just about every pro in the business. There’s you people with your organization, and there’s us. We don’t have any organization, but we’re professionals. We know each other. We stick with each other. And we don’t hit the syndicate. We don’t hit casinos, or lay-off bookies, or narcotic caches. You’re sitting there wide open, you can’t squeal to the law, but we don’t hit you.
“If you don’t give me my money I write letters, to those hundred men I told you about. I tell them: ‘the syndicate hit me for forty-five G. Do me a favour and hit them back once, when you’ve got the chance.’
“Maybe half of them will say the hell with it. The other half are like me they’ve got a job all cased. A lot of us are like that. You organized people are so wide open. We walk into a syndicate place and we look around, and just automatically we think it over, we think about it like a job. We don’t do anything about it, because you people are on the same side as us, but we think about it. I’ve walked around for years with three syndicate grabs all mapped out in my head, but I’ve never done anything about it. The same with a lot of the people I know. So all of a sudden they’ve got the green light, they’ve got an excuse. They’ll grab for it.”
They weren’t sure whether it was bluff or not, but they agreed to pay. Parker was causing them too much trouble anyway. He’d killed Carter, one of the two men in charge of the New York area, and then managed to get a gun on the surviving boss, Fairfax. With Parker standing over him, Fairfax telephoned Bronson, head of the national organization, and Bronson came to terms. He put the forty-five thousand in a trap, and Parker walked through the trap and came out on the other side with the money. Knowing that the Outfit and Bronson personally would now try to hunt him down and kill him, Parker had gone to a plastic surgeon who worked outside the law, and came out with a new face.
But now the Outfit knew about the new face. And they also knew about his cover name, Willis.
It was time to bring it to an end, time to write the letters, and time to talk to Bronson. He was somewhere in the country. Parker would find him, and make an end to it.
PART TWO
1
THE WOMAN WITH orange hair sat on the porch and watched Parker come walking down the rutted road towards the house. This was in the middle of the Georgia scrub country, west of Cordele, about thirty miles north of Albany. The land was brown and dry; the ruts in the road rock-hard. The house was grey frame, two storeys high, a narrow, tall, rectangular box in the middle of a dead land, with blind uncurtained windows and an afterthought of a porch stuck askew on the front. A barn stood back of the house to one side; there was a long garage on the other side. Rusting automobile parts were scattered on the baked clay between house and garage. A lone dead tree stood grey and naked in front of the house with a rusty pulley arrangement fixed to a thick lower branch. Except for the woman with orange hair, the place looked deserted.
Yesterday, after checking out of the hotel, Parker had taken a plane to Atlanta, and then doubled back, taking a bus south to Macon, and another bus farther south to Cordele. A bus headed for Columbus had taken him west of Cordele along an empty blacktop road to the twin-rut turnoff, and carrying his suitcase, he’d walked the three miles in to the house.
It was November, but the land was still dry and the air was hot. After three miles, the suitcase got heavy. The rutted road made walking difficult. It would have been easier if he’d left the suitcase in Cordele, but he didn’t want to go through there again.
As he walked past the dead tree with the pulley on it, a lean mongrel rose up on the porch next to the chair the woman was sitting in. The hound stretched and yawned, then looked up at the woman and looked out at Parker. He watched Parker and waited, not barking or moving or doing anything.
Parker stopped where he was and dropped the suitcase on to the ground. He said, “Chemy around?”
The woman asked, “Who wants him?”
“Parker.”
“Parker, you say?”
“Parker.”
She lifted her head and called, “Elly!”
A boy of about fourteen, as lean and silent as the dog, came out of the house and stood there. The woman said to him, “Go on over to the garage see if Chemy ain’t there. Fella name of Parker lookin’ for him.”
Parker said, “Tell him I got a new face.”
The boy turned his head and gazed at him, the same way the dog gazed. The woman frowned and said, “What the hell kind of talk is that?” She was very fat, forty or forty-five, with a fat white face under the orange hair. She was wearing a dark-blue dress with pink flowers on it.
“Plastic surgery,” Parker told her. “He’ll have to recognize me by voice and build and what I know.”
The woman shook her head. “Go on, Elly,” she said. To Parker she said, “You can wait right there.”
The boy came down off the porch and walked around to the garage. He was wearing dungarees and nothing else. He was tanned as dark as an Indian, and his sun-faded blond hair was shaggy and long. He opened a door in the side of the garage and went inside, closing the door after him. The door squealed loudly in the silence, and seemed to affect the light oddly. Instead of a shaft of sunlight angling through the opening and lighting the interior of the garage, it was as though a shaft of darkness pooled out on the ground outside the door when it was opened.
Parker asked, “You want a cigarette?”
“Thank you, no.”
“I think I’ll have one,” he said.
He had wanted her to know what he was reaching for. She nodded, and he slowly took cigarettes and matches from his pocket. Then he stood smoking in the hot, dry air. The dog watched him, unwinking.
The squealing door opened again, and the boy stood in the pool of darkness, gazing at him. Then he turned and said something to somebody inside. Parker waited.
The boy came into the sunlight again, and a short, skinny man in overalls came out after him. The man had dry black hair and a narrow face. His bare shoulders were pale and covered with freckles. He came walking over and stood studying Parker for a minute.
Then he said, “Well, I’ll be darned. Got yourself a new face, eh?”
“It’s your brother I wanted,” Parker told him.
The skinny man frowned. “What’s that you say?”
“I asked for your brother.”
“The hell,” said the skinny man. “You asked for Chemy.”
“And you’re Kent.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Go tell your brother I want to buy a car. Like the Ford with the bullet holes in the trunk.”
The skinny man scratched his head. “You sound like Parker,” he said. “You sure as hell act like Parker. And you know the right stuff to beParker. But you don’t look like Parker.”
“Plastic surgery. I told your wife.”
“Lemme see if Chemy’s here.”
“I’ll come along. It’s hot out in the sun.”
The skinny man frowned and said, “You got all Parker’s brass, I’ll give you that much. What would you do if that dog there took to leap at you?”
Parker glanced at the dog. “Break its neck,” he said.
“Yuh. And what if I was to whip out a pistol and start shooting down on you?”
“I’d take it away like Handy McKay did that time.”
The skinny man flushed, and on the porch the woman started to laugh. She had a high Betty Boop sort of giggle, completely different from her speaking voice. The skinny man turned to her and said, “Shut your face!” She stopped immediately. He spun back to Parker. “I think you’re a phony, mister,” he said. “I think you better get off this property.”