“You’ll have to see the kid for yourself,” Fusco said. “If you don’t think you can work with him, naturally you don’t stick around. But like I told him, what we need is an organizer. Neither of us could set this thing up right, and I don’t ever again go into a job that isn’t set up right. That’s what happened the last time, and it isn’t going to happen again. I told Stan I’d try to get you, I told him you were the best blueprinter in the business. He’s the one sprang me for me flying down here, a hundred twenty bucks. He’s a good kid, and he’s serious, and this thing can work.”
Parker said, “Why do you need him?”
“He’s the inside on the thing,” Fusco explained earnestly. “He’s a clerk in the base finance office, and—”
“Wait a second. The base finance office?”
Talking fast, Fusco said, “Parker, they got five thousand men on that base, they pay twice a month, they pay cash, the whole thing’s—”
Parker broke in, saying; “Wait a while. This is the job you came down here to offer me? Go steal an army payroll right off the post?”
“It isn’t Army, Parker, it’s Air Force. And besides, they—”
“What do you mean it isn’t Army? Have they got a fence around the post?”
“Base, they call it a base.”
“Have they got a fence around it? And gates? And armed sentries on the gates?”
“Parker, it can be
“Yours for the taking,” Parker told him. “I don’t take money away from five thousand armed men.”
It isn’t five thousand armed men, Parker. Christ, you know what Stan calls the Air Force? The saluting civil service, he says. You know what they carry on their practice alerts? Empty carbines. They don’t even get bullets, for Christ’s sake.”
“Somebody’s got bullets,” Parker told him. “Somewhere on that post, base, whatever they call it, somewhere there’s somebody doesn’t want us to take that four hundred grand. I’ll leave that somebody alone.”
“Parker, we got an
“That’s right. So if we do go in, and we do get back out again with the cash, who’s the first guy the law talks to? Your pal.”
“I told you,” Fusco said urgently, “Stan’s okay. He’d carry it off, Parker, I know he would.”
“You don’t know anything about him,” Parker said, “until he’s gone through it. That’s what the word amateur is for. It means somebody you don’t know about because he hasn’t gone through it before and you can’t tell what a guy’s going to do until he’s done it once.”
Fusco spread his hands. “Parker, what can I say? I’m convinced.”
Parker looked at him. Fusco was convinced, all right, but what did it mean? Was it the pro in him that was convinced, or was he locked into the kind of desperation that hits a lot of men, even the good solid pros, when they first make the street after a stretch on the inside? Lack of money has something to do with it, because most men fresh from stir have spent whatever they used to have on lawyers, but there’s also the need they feel to get back on the horse, to prove to themselves they can still operate, the fall they took was nothing but a fluke, a one-in-a- million shot that can’t possibly happen again. So they get impatient and they take the first thing that comes their way and they wind up back inside.
But Parker wasn’t impatient. He had a stake, and reserves stashed here and there, and no need to prove anything to himself, and he could wait till the right thing came along. His reserve fund wasn’t deep enough to satisfy him, particularly with Claire along now, and that’s why he was looking for work, but the search had in it no overtones of urgency.
Claire was responsible for a lot of the absence of urgency. For the last few years before her, he’d been finding himself moving more and more in the direction of work-for-work’s sake, work to relieve the boredom of being alive and not involved in a job, and that was a habit of mind just as dangerous as the ex-con’s desperation. It was on a job that he’d taken in spite of knowing it was bad, a job set up like this one of Fusco’s by a recent ex-con and an amateur inside man, that he’d met Claire. The job had gone sour in a lot of different ways, but at least out of it he’d gotten her, and calmness, and the ability to look at this thing Fusco was offering him, and decide whether or not it was something he wanted to get involved in.
Parker finished his drink, got to his feet, walked over to where the ice and gin were on the dresser, and made himself another. When he sat down again he said, “Tell me about your inside man.”
“A kid,” Fusco said. “Maybe twenty-four. College boy. Got kicked out of ROTC for some reason, that’s why he’s an enlisted man. Works in the finance office, clerk there.”
“He’s got keys?”
“Sure. He isn’t supposed to, you know, but he got himself a set.”
“Who knows he has them?”
“Me and Ellen. Now you.”
Parker shook his head. “What about his buddies on the base?”
“He ain’t that kind,” said Fusco. “He’s a loner, Parker. He’s got a couple buddies he drinks with sometimes, but he wouldn’t tell them nothing.”
“You sure? Maybe he wants them in on it.”
“Hell, no.” Fusco was very emphatic. “Parker, I tell you the kid’s sharp, he knows you get professionals to do a professional job. He already told me, the string we put together doesn’t look good we can forget it, he’s out.”
Parker said, “What about when the law leans on him afterward? They will, you know.”
