about it.”
“Good.” Parker handed over a hundred and fifty of Billy’s dollars, and the round man said, “You want a receipt?”
“No,” Parker said.
“Of course not,” said the round man. “That was a dumb question, you know that?”
“Yes,” Parker said.
He gave the round man the name of the motel in Towson, and then went out to the car. Claire had already moved over, and when Parker slid in she said, “How’d it go?”
“Good. They’ll deliver it tomorrow night.”
“You don’t want me to drive you down?”
“You can go back now, everything’s set. And I’ll take longer in the truck than you in this.”
She said, “You want me to go back now?”
“Why not?”
“Tonight, you mean?”
He looked at her, and finally understood what she was driving at. His mood of exhilaration from this afternoon had worn off by now, he was back to concentrating on the job, but she had no way to know that.
There were times when you had to push yourself a little to keep somebody else in the string content, and this was one of the times. In a way Lempke had been right, after all; Claire was valuable, if only to keep Billy in line.
Parker squeezed her knee. “Not tonight,” he said. “Tomorrow morning’s soon enough, isn’t it?”
The look she gave him was knowing. “Tomorrow morning’s fine,” she said, a touch of irony in her voice.
Six
THE TRUCK was delivered at one-thirty in the morning, driven by a skinny young kid in T-shirt and glasses. He was full of repressed excitement, a kid in the middle of a game of cops and robbers.
What Parker could see of the paint job looked good, but he couldn’t see much. The entire body was covered with a dirty gray tarp, tied down along the sides. The pieces of cardboard on the doors said, in black letters on white, THE WEMM CORPORATION.
Parker looked the truck over by the light from the motel sign, and told the kid, “It’s okay.”
“Mister Reejus said you’d give me cabfare.”
“He did, huh.” Parker gave the kid a five, and the kid took off at a half-trot, looking over his shoulder, on his way fast to tell somebody about his adventure. Parker just hoped he’d been brought in after the truck was already masked.
His bag was packed, the room all paid for. He preferred to do as much of his driving as possible at night, since the plates on the truck were probably no good, and in any case he had no papers for it. They were D.C. plates; he could replace them with Indiana plates the day of the job.
Parker took Interstate 83 up to Harrisburg, then headed west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The truck was a little better than he’d expected. Above fifty-five it had a bad front-end shimmy, but right on fifty-five it seemed ready to roll forever. He made good time, all things considered, and didn’t mind the cars that streamed by him on his left.
It was just noon when he arrived in Indianapolis. Because it was Sunday, he got involved in church-leaving traffic, and it took him forty-five minutes to get across town and into Mars Hill. The station wagon was gone from Billy’s driveway, so Parker drove on in, turned around the back of the house, and left the truck in the backyard, near the barbecue.
Billy came out the kitchen door as Parker came walking away from the truck, carrying his suitcase. Billy said, “That’s gonna leave marks in the lawn. Tire marks.”
“You want to leave it out front? Raise questions?”
Billy looked pained. He gazed at the new tire marks in the grass and shook his head. “If it has to be—”
“It has to be,” Parker said, and went on by him and into the house.
Billy followed him in, saying, “Lempke had to go away. To see somebody named Mainzer. He said he’d be back Tuesday. And we’re supposed to meet a man named Mike Carlow at the airport tomorrow afternoon at three- thirty.”
“Where’s Claire?”
Billy’s face clouded. “Home, I guess,” he said, suddenly sullen.
“Call her. Tell her to come pick me up.”
“She doesn’t like me to wake her.”
“She won’t mind this time,” Parker said. He opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of beer. “Where’s the opener?”
“On the wall there. See it?”
Parker uncapped the beer and went on into the living room. He sat on a chair arm and watched nothing happening out on the street. From the kitchen he could hear Billy’s whining voice as he spoke on the telephone.
A few minutes later Billy came in and said, “She says she’ll be here in half an hour.”
