with Rico, two with Parker. The $17,000 that was his share of the first job he had been on bought him papers proving he was an American citizen, born in Baltimore, a veteran of the Korean War. He had a high school diploma, a driver’s licence, a Social Security card, an Army discharge form everything he needed.
The money from the next two jobs went into setting up his new home on the north shore of Long Island. Salsa had purchased a large house, half-a-century old, on five-and-a-half acres with frontage on Long Island Sound. He owned a Ford Thunderbird and a Cadillac he was a proud, chauvinistic citizen who wouldn’t buy foreign cars or anything else made outside the good old USA and a Chriscraft. His friends were mostly in television and advertising, and, among them, it was rumoured that he had inherited wealth. He took a job whenever the larder was low, and the rest of the time was the proverbial playboy, the one the gentlemen’s magazines describe so aptly.
It was a lucky accident that he found out about Maury and the money in the gas-station safe. He was aware of the lay-off system and how it worked, and knew that commission houses had men stationed around every major race track throughout the season. It just happened that he had stopped at that gas station to feed the Thunderbird one afternoon when a phone call had come from Maury.
Salsa had been driving south, in response to a party invitation which had been tendered him two days before by long-distance. While the attendant was pumping gas into the car, he went into the station office to buy cigarettes. There was a stocky, indolent man sitting at the desk, his feet up on the top. He was smoking a cigar. Salsa, discovering he didn’t have any change, produced a dollar bill and asked the stocky man to change it. The stocky man said, “Jeez, Mac, I only got about eight cents change on me.” He patted his pockets.
Salsa, confused, motioned at the cash register. “But surely”
“I don’t work here, Mac.” Willy disliked and distrusted Maury, so he wouldn’t let him open the cash register. “Willy! Hey! Guy here wants change.”
Willy had come in from the work area and given him change. Salsa had got cigarettes from the machine and gone back to the car, wondering what the story was. A lazy man, feet up on the desk, but he didn’t work there. Then Salsa looked up and noticed the stands farther down on the other side of the highway. He asked the attendant at the gas pump, “What’s that?”
“Race track.”
And then Salsa had understood. He hadn’t needed the rest of it. Just as he was pulling away, he saw Willy answer the phone in the office, then give the phone to the other man. He saw Willy crouch down near the safe, and nodded to himself. A lay-off man with the capital in the gas-station safe. He filed the information away in the back of his mind for a very rainy day and drove on southward.
It would be an easy job to knock over, he thought, one man could do it alone. But Salsa had always worked on lays that somebody else had set up and planned, and he really didn’t see himself as the kind of guy who ran a job from beginning to end. Besides, it was kind of an unwritten rule to leave syndicate operations alone. If he was ever really strapped for cash, he’d break that rule now that he knew about this setup, but until then he would forget it.
Salsa had forgotten till the letter came from Parker. Then he remembered and smiled in anticipation. It would be a pleasure to knock that place over. His first solo job ought to be something easy, anyway.
He had driven down the same day and scouted the territory. There was an additional piece of luck he hadn’t counted on, which came in handy. Next door to the gas station was a roadhouse which had burned down. The insides were gutted but the outer walls still stood. A lot of cheap skates who didn’t want to pay at the race track parking lot left their cars in the parking lot beside the roadhouse, so Salsa simply parked his car among them. He could look straight across at the gas-station office and through the plate glass to the desk where the stocky man sat every afternoon. Salsa had the Thunderbird, decked out in false plates, and he’d worked out his getaway route. All he needed was for the stocky man to get a phone call.
That, he’d decided, was the only way to do it, to wait until a phone call came so the safe would already be open when he went in. In daylight, it would be too chancy to make somebody open the safe during working hours. Better let them open it first and thengo in.
But over a week had gone by, and nothing. Either he was wrong, which was unlikely, or the commission houses were having a long spell of clear weather. So he’d wait till the end of this week, and then the hell with it.
He was just repeating that to himself when he saw Willy go into the office and answer the telephone. It was a wall phone, near the door, and Salsa could see him standing there through the glass of the door. He saw Willy turn away and say something to the other man, saw the stocky man suddenly jump to his feet, and dash to take the phone. Before Willy had even turned towards the safe, Salsa had dropped the binoculars on to the seat and started the engine.
He didn’t even have to go out on to the highway. A line of low scrub separated the blacktop of the roadhouse parking lot from the blacktop of the gas station. Salsa shot through the scrub driving one-handed while he slipped the mask on over his head with his other hand. It was a green Frankenstein mask he’d picked up in a five-and-ten. He clapped a hat on over the mask, and pulled the Thunderbird to a stop in front of the office. He jumped out of the car and strode in, pulling a gun from inside his jacket.
Maury was already off the phone. “Five on Flossie Billy. Five on Flossie Billy.” Willy was counting five thousand out of the green metal box in the safe, hundred-dollar bills in stacks of ten bound with strips of paper.
“Move away from the safe. Shut it, and you’re a dead man,” Salsa said.
Maury spun around, and saw Frankenstein, with a hat and a gun. Willy was skittering back away from the safe, ashen-faced, and Maury screamed, “Shut it, Willy! Shut it!”
Then Frankenstein took a step towards him and swung the gun. It hit Maury’s cheek and he fell backwards over the desk, landing in a heap on the floor. He saw things dizzily, through a red veil. He saw the masked man clout Willy with the gun. Then he saw him reach into the safe, stuff the hundreds back into the green metal box, shut it, and stand up with it tucked under his arm.
“Stay down,” Frankenstein warned. “The first head that comes up, I’ll shoot at through the window.”
Then he backed out of the office and Maury heard a car engine start and the squeal of tyres.
Willy was the first one up. he ran out of the station, leaving Maury there alone. Maury climbed up the desk and finally got his feet under him. He came staggering out, still feeling dizzy and terrified, and bumped into Willy who was coming back in.
“I couldn’t get a look at the damn plates,” Willy said. “It was a cream Thunderbird, but I couldn’t see the
