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.
He got pencil and paper and worked out his finances. He had seven thousand in the hotel safe here, maybe another ten thousand in bank accounts and hotel safes scattered across the country. The seven thousand was plenty to live on for a while, but ten thousand was too low for a reserve fund. He couldlet it slide a few more months, on what he had, but it might be safer in the long run to stoke up the reserve fund now, when he had the chance.
He was making excuses for himself, and he knew it. But he needed to be working, he needed to have something to think about, even more than he needed to build up his reserve cash supply.
He could look into the job, anyway. It might not be any good. Just about half the jobs he was invited on looked good to him. The rest had something wrong with the set-up, or the personnel, or one thing and another, and he stuck around only long enough to hear the story. So there was an even money chance that he wouldn’t be taking this job anyway, but at least he’d have something to think about for a couple of days.
He got to his feet and changed from robe and trunks to slacks and sport shirt, and then left the room again. He took one of the front elevators this time, rode down to the lobby, and left the hotel. A call like this one wasn’t made through a hotel switchboard.
He crossed the boulevard and took a side street away from the beach. The hotels on the inland side of the boulevard were a little smaller and a little grayer than the beach-front hotels; behind them stretched a declining expanse of tourist courts and efficiency apartments and motels. After a while there were supermarkets and liquor stores and bars.
