Can you remember the last time a job was simple?”
“A long time ago.”
“It sounds like a good set-up.” Handy reached for his cigarettes. “The way you talked about it, it sounds fine. But there’s this Alma.” He lit the new cigarette, lipping it. “There’s always an Alma. Every damn time. Why can’t we put together a job without an Alma in it?”
“I don’t know,” Parked said. He was thinking of a guy named Mal, the reason he’d had to change his face.
Handy sat for a while, thinking. “This is the last one for me.”
“Uh huh,” said Parker. There was an Alma in every job, an Alma or a Mal or whatever the name was. And there was a Handy in every job, too. There was always one that was ready to quit; this was the last job and he was going to buy a chicken farm or something and settle down. There was a Handy in every job, and he always showed up for a job again a year or two later.
Thinking about it, it surprised him that there were always the same people in every job. There was always one that had to be watched, like Alma. There was always one who was quitting after this grab, and this time it was Handy. And there was always one who had probably a hundred thousand dollars to his name, buried in fields and forests here and there across the country in tin cans and metal boxes, and this one was probably Skimm. Skimm always looked and acted like a bum, so he was probably the kind that buried it, buried it all.
Parker had known others like that, there was one in almost every operation. They took their share and peeled off of it two or three thousand, just enough to carry them for a while, and then they went off by themselves somewhere and buried the rest of it. They figured to dig it up again some day, but they never did. The day never got rainy enough and that was why bulldozer operators working on new housing developments every once in a while turned up a metal box with thirty or forty thousand dollars in it.
After a while, Handy said, “You turn right the next corner.”
They turned right, and the car behind them turned right, too.
Parker watched it in the rear-view mirror and said, “Son of a bitch.”
It didn’t make any sense, and that bothered him.
The next street was one way the wrong way, but the one after that Parker made a left. So did the car behind him. He went two blocks and made a right and then another right and then a left. The car stayed with him. He drove along until he saw a “Dead End Street” sign and turned into it. He slowed down to almost a crawl, going around the corner, and stayed slow like that, so the car behind him came around the corner and was all of a sudden a lot closer.
It was a short street, with a railroad embankment crossing it at the end. The street was a kind of valley, with the houses on high land on either side, stone or concrete steps leading up from the sidewalk to the house level.
Parker turned into a driveway on the right, going very slowly, the Ford straining against going up the steep slope of the driveway so slowly. The other car went on by, down towards the embankment. Parker pushed the clutch in suddenly, and the car rolled back down the embankment and out across the street. It was a narrow street; with the parked cars, the Ford blocked it completely.
“Back me,” Parker said.
He left the motor running, and pulled the emergency brake on. Then he got out of the Ford and walked down to the end of the street, where the other car was stopped facing the embankment. It was a black Lincoln. Looking through the rear window as he walked forward, Parker could see the driver alone in the car. He came around the left-hand side, and opened the door.
Stubbs was wearing his chauffeur’s costume, complete with hat, and he was holding a -45. He pointed it at Parker, and said, “Hold it right there!”
Parker stood where he was, with his hand still on the door handle.
Stubbs said, “I got to know where you was Saturday.”
Parker kept looking at Stubbs, not to the right where Handy was crawling along the pavement, coming up alongside the car, keeping low out of Stubbs’s range of vision.
“What for?” Parker asked.
“The Doc was killed Saturday,” Stubbs said. “One of you bastards did it.”
“I was here in Jersey,” said Parker, as Handy reached up and plucked the automatic out of Stubbs’s hand. Parker leaned in and clipped him on the side of the neck. While Stubbs was getting over that, Handy got to his feet pointing the automatic. “Get out of the car.”
Stubbs got out, holding his neck. “You better not kill me,” he said. “If May don’t hear from me, she sends letters about your new face.”
It irritated Parker, another useless complication. He slid in behind the wheel of the Lincoln and parked it in an open slot by the embankment. Then he came back and said to Handy, “Your place?”
“It’s the closest.”
They put Stubbs in the front seat of the Ford, next to Parker, who was driving. Handy sat in the back seat, watching Stubbs, the automatic in his lap. He gave Parker directions the rest of the way to his place.
Handy had a room in a building that had started out as a private home and then become a boarding house and now was just a place with furnished rooms. But the furniture was clean, and not quite as ugly as at Skimm’s place.
The phone was out in the hall. They stood there, Handy holding the automatic in Stubbs’s back, while Parker dialled Skimm’s place. The ring came in his ear three times, and then Skimm answered, sounding sleepy. Parker told him who it was. “Alma there?”
Skimm hesitated. “Yes. She was just leaving.”
“Sure. I got somebody here I want her to talk to. He’ll ask her when she saw me in the diner. It’s okay for her
