“No good,” Parker told him. “If anybody does see us, we’ll stick out like a sore thumb. Four cars in a row on an empty highway, all turn off together. All it needs is one trooper to see us.”
Wycza said, “What about a truck? A big-ass tractor trailer. We stash it outside of town and switch to it when the job’s done.”
“Too much loot to be transferred.”
Grofield said, “We bring the tractor trailer into town with us. Instead of loading two cars along the main drag, we load the tractor trailer. Then we have a car at the plant, the way we figured, and another car parked near the town line for a lookout. We leave that one, and just take the tractor trailer and the other car. They space five minutes apart, and it doesn’t look so bad. You see tractor trailers all hours.”
Wycza said, “All right, that’s even better.”
“It would work,” said Edgars. “It would sure work all right.”
Parker stood looking at the two maps and thinking it over. Twelve men. In at midnight, out by six in the morning. Everything covered, if they’d thought of everything, and if Edgars had his facts straight.
It was a job. It would work. The thing looked like idiocy at first, but it would work.
He nodded. “All right,” he said. “Who’s financing?”
Edgars looked blank. “Financing?”
“This is going to cost,” Parker told him. “Walkie-talkies, the truck, the cars. Transportation out there. Food and water stashed at the hideout ahead of time. Guns. It’ll cost dough to get this thing set up.”
Edgars still looked blank, and now a little worried besides. Paulus explained it to him. “Every job has to be financed,” he said. “Whoever puts up the dough gets it back doubled if the job works out.”
“You mean, one of us?”
Parker shook his head. “No. It’s better to get your financing done by somebody outside the operation. Otherwise the man who put the money in tries to run things.”
“This is all new to me,” Edgars told them.
“I’ll go over to New York tomorrow,” Grofield said. “I’ve got a couple contacts over there. How much you figure?”
Parker frowned, thinking it out. “Four thousand,” he said.
Edgars said, “Four thousand! “
“I told you, it’s going to cost. The truck, the cars, the”
“Why not just steal the truck?”
“You want to leave Copper Canyon in a hot truck on every state trooper’s list for a thousand miles around?”
“You mean, you just go to a used-truck dealer and buy a truck?”
“No, not that either. Then you got problems with registration. There’s outlets where you can pick up a mace pretty cheap.”
Edgars couldn’t seem to get the bewildered look off his face. “A mace? What’s a mace?”
“A car with papers that look good and license plates that look good.”
“But they aren’t really?”
“They aren’t really.”
Edgars sat down, shook his head, and drank some beer. “I didn’t know there was this much to it,” he said. “How many people have to know about this deal?”
“Just the ones in on it. Twelve men.”
“But Grofield’s going to go talk to somebody about financing, and you’re going to buy a stolen truck
.”
“The man that finances doesn’t know what the job is. Just that there’s a job, and it needs so much to get set up, and it should be done by such and such a date.”
“How you going to get a man to put money into a deal without knowing what it is?”
“He relies on the men in the deal. If he knows them, knows they do good work, he takes a chance on them.”
“What about where you buy the truck? You don’t tell him anything either?”
“Why should we?”
Edgars shrugged and spread his hands. “All right,” he said. “You people know what you’re doing.”
“We rather hope so,” said Grofield. He turned to Parker. “Come along with me tomorrow, okay? I know one guy in particular, he knows you. If he sees you’re in he’ll cover us with no trouble.”
“All right.”
“Now,” said Paulus. “About personnel.”
They all sat down at the table again, and Edgars cleared away the maps. Parker said, “We need three jug men. You’re one, Paulus. You work one side of Raymond Avenue, and Wycza can carry for you. Grofield, you’d be a good man for the phone company, keep the ladies from getting too scared.”
