“Yes, sir.”
To Gonor Parker said, “What about the side alleys? Can you get to the back through them?”
“There are iron gates at the rear corners of the building,” Gonor said. “They are usually kept locked.”
“Can you get me blueprints of the building?”
“Naturally.”
“And floor plans showing where the displays are.”
“We have those, yes.”
“Good.” Parker frowned out the window a minute, then turned back to Gonor and said, “You know you’re going to have to kill.”
“Not necessarily,” Gonor said.
“Yes,” Parker said. “There are four brothers up there. You won’t get in without killing at least one, and that means you have to kill all four. And the wife.”
Smiling bleakly from the front seat, Formutesca said, “We already knew that, Mr Parker. We weren’t sure you knew it. Or what your attitude would be.”
“It just means you’ve got to look out for the local law too,” Parker said.
“Anything that occurs,” Gonor said, “will occur in our building. We are unlikely to make a complaint.”
“Then noise is a problem too,” said Parker.
Formutesca, smiling, said, “We can be quiet.”
Manado said, “The white Corvair is no longer following us.” He sounded proud of himself.
“Good,” Parker said. “Take me back to my hotel.”
3
Lying on his back on the floor, Parker fixed the holster to the underside of the bed. A .22-caliber High Standard Sentinel fit in there snugly, but would slide out without trouble. With the pistol in place, Parker got to his feet and saw Claire frowning at him. She said, “You’ve never done that before.”
“I do it when I’m working.” He hadn’t told her about the Corvair.
“We’re at a different hotel,” she said. “We’re using a different name.”
“I like to be careful,” Parker said. His other gun, a Browning .380 automatic, was on the bed. He picked it up and put it on the shelf in the closet, under the extra blanket. The Terrier he’d bought the last time he was in New York he’d gotten rid of as soon as he’d left the city. It was cheaper and safer in the long run to buy your guns as you needed them and get rid of them as soon as they were no longer necessary.
Watching him, Claire said, “Are they back again?”
Parker carried a chair over to the hall door and leaned it so it would fall over if the door was opened. “Who?” he said.
“Those three men. The ones we saw first.”
“I haven’t seen them,” he said. He went into the bathroom, came out with a glass, put it on the windowsill, and leaned against the window.
Claire had lit a cigarette. She was moving nervously around the room, studying Parker and shaking her head. “There’s something,” she said. “You don’t do all this every time. You think they might come after us.”
Parker turned and looked at her. “Sure they might,” he said. “There’s a country they used to run and now they don’t. They want to run it again, and to run it they need to put their front man Goma in power, and to do that they need money, and that means the diamonds, and that means they don’t want me involved. So they might come around.”
She bit her lip. “You want me to leave,” she said.
“Yes. I was going to tell you in the morning.”
“You want me to go back to Miami?”
“No. In the morning you take a cab out to Kennedy Airport. Then you take another cab back, and you take a room at a different hotel under some other name. We’ll work out what hotel, what name.”
“Why?” she said.
“Your shopping trip. You can go on”
“No,” she said. “You don’t give a damn about my shopping trip.”
He hesitated, then said, “All right. I don’t want them to lean on me through you.”
“All you had to do was say so,” she said. “I guessed it a long time ago.”
He shrugged. “What hotel do you want to stay at?”
“The thing is,” she said, smiling at him now, “you worry about me, and you don’t like it that you worry about me. You don’t want me to see it.”
Parker shrugged again, irritated. “Whatever you say.”
“So why don’t I shop in Boston?” she said. “Do you know the Herridge House there?”
