particular.
Parker said, ‘England comes back in here, I disarm him. That’s easy. The three of us go out, we flag a cab. None of your troops follows because there’s two of you and one of me so they figure I’m well covered. Ten blocks away I shoot you and England and the cabby, drive the cab to Houston, take a plane. Any problems?’
Carey said nothing.
Parker walked back across the room and put the revolver down on the table. ‘That’s your guarantee,’ he said. ‘I could do that, and I won’t. I need this operation, and if you and your friends don’t screw it up I’ll run it off as scheduled.’
Carey picked up his revolver, looked at it a second, then put it away. His voice mild, distracted, he said, ‘I’m not a specialist in people like you.’
‘You’re lucky,’ Parker told him.
Carey studied Parker as though making up his mind whether or not to buy him. ‘Maybe I will,’ he said. ‘When this is over, when we’ve got Von Altstein and you go off your own way, maybe I’ll put in for a transfer. Maybe we’ll meet each other again some other time.’
Parker doubted it, but he knew why Carey was saying it. It was a way to get some of his pride back. So Parker just shrugged and sat down at the table and said, ‘Maybe so.’
England came back a couple minutes later. ‘They want some sort of assurance,’ he said.
Carey said, ‘It’s all right. We’ve got the assurance.’
‘We do?’
‘Mr. Parker just took my gun away, held it on me, and explained how he could kill the two of us and a passing cabdriver and get himself out of this situation, if he wished to do so. It was plausible, particularly with him holding my gun on me while he explained it all.’
England was frowning, looking back and forth at the two of them. He said, ‘Then what?’
‘Then he gave the gun back to me,’ Carey said.
England said, ‘I don’t get it.’
‘I do,’ Carey said. He got to his feet. ‘It’s all yours, Mr. Parker,’ he said. ‘You won’t see us again till you come back to shore with Von Altstein.’
Not even then, Parker thought. Aloud, he said, ‘I’ll see you then.’
5
‘IF the deal is queer,’ said Grofield, ‘it’s queer. I say we get the hell out while the getting is good.’
‘Anything they’ll make on you,’ Parker told him, ‘they’ve already made. From now till the job’s done they’ll keep their distance.’
Salsa said, ‘What about after the job?’
‘It’s a big coastline.’
The fourth man in the room, Ross, said, ‘Up to now they haven’t made me at all, is that right?’
Parker nodded. ‘That’s right.’
Ross was the boatman; Salsa had turned him up. He was big, stocky, florid, with heavy pale eyebrows and thick pale hair and thick freckled hands. He said, ‘I could leave this building right now, the way away I came in, just as careful, and they’d never make me at all.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But if I stay, it’s fifty thousand dollars guaranteed minimum.’
‘That’s right.’
‘If I stay,’ said Ross deliberately, ‘I’ll be very careful they never do make me.’
Parker nodded. ‘That’s sensible.’
‘Even if it complicates the work,’ Ross said. ‘I want you to know that. This adds another element, this makes the situation tricky. If I agree to do something, and then it turns out I can’t do that something without tipping my mitt to your friends, you’re just gonna have to count me out.’
‘I already figured that,’ Parker told him.
Ross said, ‘I just wanted to make it clear.’
Grofield said, ‘Parker, I’ve never seen you anything but cautious. How come you’re still in this? The job is tipped to the Federal law, why aren’t we all the hell out of here?’
Parker told him, ‘About this job, this island thing, from a law standpoint they don’t give a damn. It’s not their jurisdiction, not their fight. That island is Cuban territory, so it’s up to the Cuban cops to get after us, and right now the Cuban cops and American cops don’t get along too good. About anything else, anything they might have on me or you from the past, they aren’t interested because it isn’t their department.’
Grofield said, ‘They can send an interoffice memo.’
Parker nodded. ‘I know that. That’s why we say we’ll play along but when the job is done we find some other piece of coast to land at.’
Grofield said, ‘They’ve got helicopters, they’ve got a whole goddam Navy, not to mention the Coast Guard and the Air Force. Why should they let us go there and come back without them watching?’
Parker said, ‘No reason. They’ll be tailing us the best they can.’
