“He’s out by the airport. Take the Harbor Tunnel. You know Baltimore?”
“Not that good.”
Buster opened a desk drawer, took out a greasy city map, opened it onto his desk, and showed Parker how to get from there to the paint shop. As he was finishing up, the kid came in, carrying a rusty bumper guard. Pointedly ignoring Parker, he said to Buster, “This is the best I could find.”
“You can throw that in the bay,” Buster told him. “I told you clean.”
“This is the best I could find.”
Buster shrugged. Then, grinning, he said, “How come I come in here and the radio’s off? Don’t you like that music no more?”
Parker didn’t like pointless needling. While the kid was trying to find an answer, Parker went over and turned the radio on. Buster looked at him in amused surprise, and the kid just looked baffled.
Outside, the Dobermans watched Parker get into the car, waiting for somebody to tell them to stop him.
The car was full of smoke. Parker rolled a window down and started the engine and drove out of the yard.
Claire said, “Any luck?”
Parker looked at her. “You want to know, or you making small talk?”
“I’m in this, too,” she said. “You don’t have to push me out all the time.”
“We’ve got a truck,” he said. “We come back tonight and take it to where they paint it.”
“How are you going to take it back to Indianapolis? Won’t it look funny, an Indianapolis Power and Light Company truck on the Pennsylvania Turnpike?”
“We dummy it up with a tarp,” he said, and all at once he saw how to do the Diablo Tours wall.
She looked at him and said, “What’s the matter?”
“Matter? Why?”
“You’re smiling,” she said.
He put his hand on her knee. “Because things are good,” he said.
He drove one-handed a while, his other hand still resting on her knee.
Claire said, “Where are we going now?”
“Back to the room.”
Five
AT NIGHT the yard was floodlit, looking like some metallic moonscape where nothing had ever lived. The truck was in total darkness under the trees on the other side of the road.
When Parker stopped the wagon, lights off, near the truck, the two Dobermans came loping out of the yard wreckage to the fence. They did no barking, made no sound at all, but just kept moving restlessly back and forth the other side of the fence, trying to find a way through.
“Those dogs,” Claire said, shivering.
Parker touched her shoulder. “They’re all right. They mind their business, we mind ours.”
“All right.” She smiled nervously and squeezed his hand. “Let’s hurry out of here.”
“Right.”
Parker got out of the car and walked over to the truck. When he opened the door no interior light went on. He fumbled around on the dash, found the light switch, pulled it halfway on, and used the dashlight to help him look for the key. Once he got it, he slid behind the wheel and started the engine. The clutch seemed loose to him, and he was already anticipating bad brakes, but it didn’t matter. The truck had to be a prop for a while, and then it had to carry the goods away, that’s all anybody expected from it. That, and to get back to Indianapolis in the first place.
Claire had already made her U-turn, her headlights flashing over the restless pacing dogs behind the fence, so Parker shifted into first and started along the dirt road, the truck taking the bumps much harder than the wagon had. In the mirror mounted outside the door Parker could see the wagon’s lights jouncing along in his wake.
They went out to Philadelphia Road and headed south. Twenty-five minutes later, Parker took the Airport exit from the Baltimore-Washington Expressway, turned off onto Fort Meade Road, and then went on more slowly, having trouble seeing street signs in the dark. Claire did better than Parker had expected, staying a good distance back, making them less of a caravan.
It was quarter to three when he finally stopped the truck in front of a squat white concrete block building bearing the many-colored sign PALETTE AUTO PAINTING. An overhead garage door in the building front immediately opened, and a short round man in a black suit came out, cigar in the middle of his face, waving his arms frantically for Parker to drive on inside. Parker did, and the round man slid the door down again and came trotting over to say, “They’s a station wagon out there.”
“It’s with me,” Parker said. He shut off the engine and climbed out of the cab.
“Well, they ought to turn off their lights,” the round man said.
“Go tell her yourself.” Parker took out the envelope of pictures, saying, “This is what I want it to look like.”
“Not me,” said the round man, waving his hands back and forth. “Not me, I’m not the man for that.” Raising his voice, he shouted past Parker, “Hey, Wemm!”
Parker turned and saw coming toward him a Negro in green coveralls. He had the self-contained movements of
