Dent got quiet after that, and didn’t have anything else to say until they turned down the road that ran between the ball park and the amusement park, and then he said, “How do you like this for isolated, Parker? Broad daylight, and nobody here.”
“What’s this road used for?”
“In the summertime — I’ve been here in the summertime, and in the summertime you can’t move on this road. Not with the ball park, not with Fun Island. But why come out here in the winter? No reason. Except at rush hour. Four o’clock till maybe six, it’s a steady stream of them headin the same way we are now. In the morning comin the other way, naturally. But all day long, nothin at all. No reason for it.”
“Here comes something,” Parker said.
“It’s what I wanted you to see,” Dent said, and grinned at him.
It came closer, black-looking against the piles of snow mounded on both sides of the road, and Parker saw it was an armored car. It went by, and Parker twisted around in the seat to look out the back window and watch it drive on. He said, still looking back, “Where’s it going?”
“Back to the main branch of the bank,” Dent said. “It goes out to the suburbs, all the different little branches, and picks up money at every branch. And the last one is out this way, so it finishes by comin down this road.”
“That’s the job?”
“You’ll never find a better.”
“Show me some more,” Parker said. So Dent drove Parker around town, and they talked over different escape routes, and different ways to open the armored car, not because Parker felt he needed any help but because this was the way Dent helped himself stay alive, by keeping an interest in things. Then they had lunch together in a place downtown, and Parker said, “You still be around here in a couple weeks?”
“Oh, about a month, I figure. We usually get where it’s warm, this time of year, but this year we don’t either of us feel like doin all that drivin. About a month, though.”
“That’s enough time,” Parker said.
“If you don’t want it,” Dent told him, “drop me a note at Winding Trail Court here in the city.”
“Right.”
After lunch Dent drove Parker back out to the airport, and Parker took a flight to Newark, and drove out to Claire’s house.
The lake was frozen, and people were going by out there on yellow skimobiles. Claire was watering plants on the window sills that faced south. She turned and said, “Did it turn out to be any good?”
“I think so.”
“Tell me about it.”
This was a big change for her. When they’d met, three and a half years ago, the circumstances had gotten bloody and dangerous, and for three years she hadn’t wanted to know anything about anything. But lately a thaw had taken place, and it was interesting in a different way to have somebody to talk things over with. Somebody not a part of the job. He’d been married once — she’d died nine years ago — but Lynn had always been active in the jobs, she’d worked with him. That sort of thing wasn’t for Claire, and Parker preferred it that way. He liked knowing this house was here, in an isolated corner of New Jersey, with Claire in it waiting for him. A completely different life, with no threads attaching it to the life he lived on the outside. It was a different kind of thing having that, and he enjoyed it.
In traveling around the city with Dent it had seemed to him to be a simple job Dent had come up with, and talking it over later with Claire he got it more completely into focus, and he saw that it could be done, quickly and neatly, with three men.
He had no trouble getting the second man: Alan Grofield, an actor who supplemented his stage income this way, and who Parker had worked with four times in the past. The third man, though, was a problem, and he knew he was settling for second best when he took on Laufman, but it was either Laufman or let the job go. There’d been times in his life when he would have let the job go, but that was before the trouble that had stripped him of the name Charles Willis and all the money stashed around the country in the Charles Willis name.
It took two weeks to get organized, to get the equipment they needed, to have the right moment of the right kind of day. They arrived in town separately the day before, stayed in separate hotels, and Parker went out to Winding Trail Court that evening to see Dent and his wife, a short thin woman who had aged into a clean white doll caricature of her younger self.
Parker gave Dent an envelope with a thousand dollars in it, and Dent said, “Good luck to you.”
“Now you can go south,” Parker said.
Dent gave him a quick look. “Saw through me, did you?”
“The only reason you’d stay in the cold,” Parker told him, “.was if you needed cash to pay your tab.”
“In the old days,” Dent said, “I’d have gone down the fire escape with a suitcase in my hand. You can’t take one of these damn house-on-wheel contraptions down a fire escape.”
“I know.”
Dent glanced toward the kitchen end of the trailer, where his wife was making them a pot of tea. “Don’t say anything to the missis,” he said. “She’s afraid she’s a drag on me, you know.”
“I won’t.”
Parker stayed through one cup of tea, for Dent’s sake, and then left, and the next day he and Grofield and Laufman went and opened the armored car, just the way they’d planned it, and then Laufman blew up and soured the job completely, leaving Parker on foot outside the entrance to the amusement park. There was nothing else for it; under the eyes of two cops and two black-coated civilians, he went over the gate and in.
Three
