“No, I don’t.”
“You’ve got to get one. You’re from out around there, aren’t you?”
“I was.” His voice was bitter.
The personal reasons again. Parker didn’t give a damn about. them. He said, “You get a state map, a couple of them. A roadmap and a topographical map. You look at them till you find a spot we can hole up. If we leave there at six, we’ve got maybe an hour before the alarm’s out. You find us a place fifty miles away or less, that we can get to without being noticed and without leaving tracks, and that the law wouldn’t come in after us.”
Edgars nodded. “All right, I’ll do it.”
Wycza said, “What about that goddam trooper barracks? Edgars, ain’t there any side road, dirt road, anything at all to take us aroundthat barracks?”
“Nothing,” Edgars told him.” Flat dead countryside, that’s all.”
Wycza got to his feet and stretched. His knuckles scraped against the ceiling. He said, “I just don’t like that barracks there, that’s all.”
“Neither do I,” Parker told him. “Edgars, switch off that projector, we don’t need that map right now. Paulus, give us some light.”
When they had light, Parker said, “I don’t like four cars going intotown past that state police barracks, and I don’t like them coming out again past the barracks.”
Grofield said, “What about holing up inside the town? The old double feint. I’ve seen you use that a dozen times, Parker.”
“It’s no good here,” Parker told him.
Edgars said, “What is it?”
“It works in some jobs, not this one. You do the job, then make like you’re going to run for it. You run maybe two blocks, and hole up. They throw out roadblocks all over the state and wait for you to show up. You don’t, so they figure you must of holed up in town. They take the roadblocks down and start looking for you in town, and that’s when you leave town.”
Edgars laughed. “You’re in when they’re looking for you out, and out when they’re looking for you in.”
“Right.”
Grofield said, “What’s wrong with doing it here?”
“Too small a town, number one. Only one road out, number two. They could put up one dinky roadblock and leave it there for thirty years, till we showed our faces.”
Grofield shrugged. “So we have to go past the troopers, that’s all.”
Paulus said, “Going in’s no problem. We can slip in over a couple days.”
“So half the townspeople can make you in the rogue’s gallery. No good, Paulus. We go in the night it happens and go back out the same night.”
“These are details we can work out,” Edgars told them.
“We work them out soon,” Parker said, “or there’s no job.”
Edgars said, “Tomorrow morning I’ll get the maps. We can meet back here again tomorrow night, Nine o’clock?”
Nine o’clock was all right with everybody. Edgars said, “This thing will work, I know it will. The town’s wide open for it, and you people have the knowledge to do it.”
“We’ll see,” Parker told him.
They left one at a time. Wycza went first, and Parker second. Parker walked back to the hotel and went up to his room. He lay down on the bed in darkness and stared at the ceiling, thinking about the job.
It was a crazy one. It broke practically every rule there was. But if the remaining loose ends could be tied up, it just might be workable.
A lot depended on the men. Wycza was all right, steady and fast. Grofield acted sometimes like he didn’t take anything seriously, but he knew when to cut that out and get down to work. Paulus was a fidgety type, but first-rate on safes and bank vaults.
But what about Edgars? He had some sort of grudge against somebody in that town, and that wasn’t good. Also, he was an amateur at this kind of thing. But in some ways he wasn’t an amateur at all. The way he’d reacted to the news about Owen, for instance. Sore at first, but after a while catching on, and then not bringing the subject up again. He was a tough man to figure. First he tried to bluff his way, and then he put all his cards on the table, but there was always the impression there were still a few cards left up his sleeve.
It might be a good idea to find out what Edgars’ normal line was. It just might be that his personal reasons were something that would queer the operation from the start.
There were still too many doubts; Parker wasn’t sure yet whether he wanted to be in this one or not. He didn’t really need the dough yet, not for living expenses, but his cash reserve was low. The main reason he’d decided to come on up here and look this over was that he’d been getting bored
3
He’d been swimming when the call came. Boredom had driven him from the room, and then boredom drove him from the beach. He put his beach robe back on over his trunks, stuck cigarettes and matches in the pocket, and walked through the sand and bodies toward the hotel which was squatting there like a big white birthday cake.
He was a big man, broad and flat, with the look of a brutal athlete. He had long arms, ending in big flat hands gnarled with veins. His face it was his second, done by a plastic surgeon looked strong and self-contained. Women asprawl on the sand in two-piece bathing-suits raised their heads to look at him as he went by; he was aware of the looks but didn’t respond. It didn’t interest him right now.
He knew what the problem was, had known for a couple of weeks now. It had been six months since he’d worked. Inactivity always got to him like this after a while.
He walked on through the sand to the hotel and entered the beach elevator. Two women got on right after him. They were in bathing-suits, with towels draped across their shoulders. They were young and good-looking, with the impatient eyes of northern secretaries on vacation. They looked at him and he looked at the elevator boy and said, “Eight.” Then he faced front.
Riding up, he didn’t think about the women at all, but about the last job. He and Handy McKay had gotten the statuette for Bett Harrow’s father, and a few thousand extra for themselves.* Now Handy was retired again, running a diner in Presque Isle, Maine. Parker wasn’t retired, didn’t want to be retired. But he didn’t have anything lined up either. After that last job, he’d spent a while in Galveston, and then he’d gone to New Orleans for a few weeks, and now here he was in Miami. He’d had one woman in Galveston, a couple in New Orleans, but none here. He didn’t have the interest. (* The Mourner.)
He got off at the eighth floor and walked down the wide hallway to his room. The telephone started ringing as he was unlocking the door. He went in, shut the door, went across the room, and picked up the phone.
It was the switchboard downstairs. “A message, Mr Willis,” she said. His name here was Charles Willis. She said, “A Mr Sheer tried to reach you from Omaha, Nebraska. He would like you to call him at your convenience.”
“All right. Thank you.”
“Shall I place the call for you, sir?”
“No, I’ll call later.”
“Yes, sir.”
He hung up and lit a cigarette and sat down on the bed to think. He knew what the call was all about. It was a job. Whenever anybody wanted to get in touch with him, to offer him a piece of a job, they contacted him through Joe Sheer. Joe Sheer was a retired peterman, an old guy who’d blasted his way into more safes than he could remember and was now living slow and easy in Omaha, with a new face and a fat bank account and a lot of friends like Parker among the boys still working. Joe was the only one who always knew how and where to get in touch with Parker; Parker sent him a postcard every time he moved a to a new address. So did half a dozen others; Joe was a good safe middleman and post office.
So it was a job. His instinct was to grab it right away, but he wasn’t sure. He had a rule. He never took a job unless he needed it. If you let yourself go, work every chance you got, you just left yourself open for heavy time. Every job carried with it the risk of being grabbed by the law, so the fewer the jobs the less the risk.