Ahead was the ramp. To the left was a wide fire door leading to concrete stairs. Parker went up these at a run, came cautiously through the door on the second floor, and saw French ahead of him, walking down the ramp. French didn’t have anything in his hands and wasn’t trying to get down to the first floor unseen.
Parker called, “French!”
French turned, halfway down the ramp, saw Parker, and spread his hands. “I’m clean,” he said.
“Why?” Parker asked him. “Why not throw down on me?”
French shook his head. “I can’t do it alone,” he said. “A quiet heist I could do, but this got noisy. You think on your feet, you’ll get out of this. Your fence is dead now, but I’ve got one. We can help each other.”
Did it make sense? Or did French have something cute in mind? Parker said, “Why muscle in on somebody else’s proposition?”
“I thought you were out. I thought Lebatard wouldn’t be able to get anybody but amateurs, and I figured I could take them. And I told you, I was into my stake. And I figured to take Lempke in with me. I figured he’d come, if the takeover was done anyway, then there’d be two of us to move the stuff.”
Parker could see how it might have looked to French, but maybe what he was getting was only something in the vicinity of the truth. He said, “All right. You keep the kid cool downstairs, I’ll stay with the truck.”
“The broad’s flaked out.”
“All right. I’ll take care of it.”
French said, “We scratch each other’s backs?”
“Deal,” Parker said.
Two
CLAIRE WAS standing beside the truck, looking puzzled. When Parker came along she said, “I have to go home now.”
“Snap out of it,” he said. “We don’t have any more time for that.”
Calm and reasonable, she said, “We must never speak of that. Will you promise me?”
“I promise,” he said. She was still crazy as a loon, but she was being quiet crazy so it was all right. “Sit down in the truck again,” he said.
“But I have to go home,” she said.
“They want to talk about it there,” he told her. “Better stay here.”
“Oh,” she said. “Then I’ll stay for a while.”
She climbed back into the cab and sat there, knees primly together, hands folded in her lap. She gazed out through the windshield.
French had put the truck way in a corner of the third floor, out of sight from the top of the ramp. This floor was about half full of cars, all with the keys in them, and Parker went walking around looking for the best vehicle to switch to.
He heard a siren and went to the front part of the building to look. The outer concrete wall was chest-high, and then was open to the air above that. Parker leaned out, looked over the edge, and saw a police car go screaming by, headed toward the hotel. He could hear other sirens now, too, in other parts of town.
It was bad, it was very bad. They’d have the city sewed up in half an hour, and there was no place arranged inside the city to hole up. As to French, Parker thought he could trust him until they were clear, and then he’d have to be taken care of. If they got clear.
He left the wall, walked around some more, and finally found a Volkswagen Microbus down on the second floor. He drove it upstairs, parked it next to the truck, and got out to find Claire collapsed over the truck’s steering wheel, crying quietly but desperately.
She looked up when Parker opened the truck door. The madness was out of her eyes, and in its place was pain. She shook her head and whispered, “I didn’t know what it was.”
“We’re in deep now,” Parker told her. ‘We’ve got trouble.”
“It’s all because of me.”
“No. French tried a takeover. It’s a tough thing to pull off, and he didn’t quite make it.”
“But Billy’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“That’s my fault.”
He shrugged. “If you want it,” he said, “You want to go turn yourself in?”
She shook her head. “No. I don’t want to go to jail.”
He was relieved, but didn’t show it. If she’d said yes he would have had to kill her, here and now. It would have bothered him; but it would have been necessary, so he would have done it. He said, “You won’t be able to go home.”
“Why not?”
“They’ll identify Billy. Somebody has to know Billy was hanging around you, so the cops’ll get to you. Then somebody looks at you and says, ‘She’s the one was at the hotel’.”
“Oh,” she said. “You mean, I can’t go back at all.”
“That’s right,” he said, watching her.
