Kifka was never going to get healthy with Janey around. But then, maybe he didn’t care. Parker went on out and shut the apartment door.
He went downstairs and outside and started down the exterior steps to the sidewalk when a voice shouted from across the street, ‘Hey!’ and then there was the sound of a shot.
Parker dove the last four steps, rolled across the sidewalk, and came up against a parked car. A second shot sounded, and the side window of the car shattered, raining glass down on him.
Parker got to hands and knees and crawled hurriedly around the rear of the car. Across the way there was a narrow blacktop driveway hemmed in on both sides by the sheer walls of apartment buildings. With the third shot, Parker saw a muzzle flash in the darkness within that driveway. He dragged a gun out of his topcoat pocket, braced his arm on the bumper of the car, and fired at the muzzle flash.
Footsteps clattered, receding, somebody running away along the blacktop.
Parker ran over that way, flattened himself against a wall, and edged slowly around the corner till he could see into the driveway. At the far end the driveway split, going to left and right behind the apartment buildings. There was a wall at the far end, with a light attached to it. There was no one moving in the alley between Parker and the light. Whoever he was, he’d already made the turn, one way or the other, and was gone. Even the sound of his running footsteps was now gone.
But he’d left something behind, a bulky bundle lying against one of the side walls.
Parker approached it cautiously, but it didn’t move. He bent and rolled it over. It was a man. It was the clown in the mackinaw, the follower, the one who wanted his thirty-seven dollars from Dan Kifka.
He’d been shot in the side of the head by a gun of too large a calibre for the job. Kifka now owed thirty-seven dollars to the clown’s estate.
It had been the clown who had shouted. The voice had rung with familiarity, but at the time Parker hadn’t been concerned with wondering who it was. Now he thought back and remembered it, and it had been the voice of the clown here.
None of it made sense. The clown had been alone before, and had obviously had nothing to do with anything but his own thirty-seven bucks. But now he’d been here with somebody else, and he’d obviously been involved in a lot more than thirty-seven dollars.
Parker’s shot hadn’t killed him. He’d been shot from close range, not from across the street.
The way it looked, the two of them had been waiting here for Parker to come out. When he did, the second man was going to kill him. But the clown here shouted a warning, and the second man shot him instead and then tried to get Parker anyway and missed.
That told what happened, by an educated guess, but not why.
Why was the clown here? Why did he shout? Why was he killed? And who was the second man?
Maybe it was an outsider after all. There was too much that made no sense; maybe it would start making sense if the guy who now had the cash wasn’t one of the seven who’d worked the heist after all.
One thing was sure. This changed the plans.
Parker recrossed the street and went back upstairs to Kifka’s apartment and knocked on the door. When the girl opened it this time she was wearing just the sweatshirt again and she looked a little flushed. Also irritated.
Parker went in and shut the door. ‘Tell Dan I’m sleeping on the sofa,’ he said. ‘If you heard the shots out there, that’s why. I’ll talk to Dan again in the morning.’
She said, ‘Sure you don’t want to come in and watch?’
‘I already know how.’
Parker sat down on the sofa and ignored her. He hadn’t bothered to take his topcoat off yet because he was thinking. If the hijacker wasn’t one of the original group, then where did he connect? There had only been seven of them in on the operation from the beginning, on equal shares …
Four
The job had been set up within the last month. Parker had come north on the run, leaving years of careful work in ruins behind him. He’d needed a fresh stake, and when a slot in this operation was offered him he’d grabbed at it.
Parker was a heister by profession, an institutional robber who stole from banks or jewellery stores or armored cars. He worked only as a member of a team, never as a single-o, and he’d been at this profession nineteen years. For most of that time he’d had a false name and a cover identity within which he lived while spending the profits of his work and out of which he moved once or twice a year to replenish the kitty. But all of that had gone to hell now. As a result of trouble on a piece of work over a year ago his fingerprints had gone on file with the law for the first time, and more trouble just two months ago had connected those fingerprints with the cover identity. Parker had had to leave fast, abandoning bank accounts, abandoning a way of life, everything.
When he’d come north at the wheel of a stolen car, with less than a hundred bills to his name, he’d contacted a few of the men he’d worked with in the past, letting it be known he was available for any job in the offing. He’d holed up in a place outside Scranton called the Green Glen Motel, run by an old hooker named Madge, and a week later a telephone call had come from Dan Kifka.
It was a strange conversation. In the first place, neither of them wanted to say anything specific over a machine as public and leaky as a telephone and in the second place, Kifka didn’t really believe he was talking to Parker.
He referred to that immediately after identifying himself, saying, ‘This is a new number for you, isn’t it?’
Parker knew what he meant. In the past no one had ever been able to contact him direct. Anyone who wanted to talk to Parker about business had to send a message through a guy named Joe Sheer, a retired jugger living outside Omaha. But Joe was dead now, a part of the trouble that had cost Parker everything but his neck.
He said, ‘I just moved. You hear about Joe?’
