Something was screwed up somewhere, something was wrong. Parker had no idea yet what it was, but something just wasn’t right. But if it meant he could get out of his box after all, he didn’t care what the answer was. And from the looks of things, that was what it meant.
He hurried back to get the satchel. The building he’d left it against was clapboard, like most of the structures in Fun Island, this one painted a bluish gray. There was a door in this rear wall with a hasp lock on it. The satchel was under a window, a small double-hung window with small panes of glass, and when Parker bent to pick up the satchel he glanced inside and saw a small office in there, a desk and a chair, a radio and an electric clock. The clock said twenty minutes past four.
He picked up the satchel and went back to the gates, still moving cautiously but now in more of a hurry, wanting to get out of here before the goof-up, whatever it was, was discovered by somebody and fixed.
He was about to toss the satchel over the gate when the door of the little building across the way opened and a guy stepped out. Parker ducked back as the guy glanced this way. He wasn’t one of the men in overcoats Parker had seen before, he was a tall heavy-set guy in a black-and-white-checked hunting jacket and a brown-billed cap. He stood in the open doorway for a second, looking over toward the gates, then turned to say something to somebody inside the building. Parker heard him laugh, and a second later he shut the door and walked around the building to where the two cars were parked. He opened a rear door of the Dodge and got out something about a yard long and very thin, wrapped in a faded pink blanket. He shut the car door and carried the thing around and went back inside the building over there.
Parker waited and watched. On this side, facing the street, the building had tollbooths on each corner for parking-lot customers and one window in the middle of the street-side wall, where there was apparently some kind of office. The rest rooms were at the other end of the structure, inside the parking lot. Parker stayed where he was, watching, and after a minute he saw movement behind that window in the middle of the wall.
He turned and carried the satchel away from the gate.
Four
PARKER SWITCHED off the radio and sat at the desk to try to think things out. What he’d heard was bad news, maybe even worse than if the law was going to be coming in here after him.
Where he was now was in the gray building he’d left the satchel against before. The hasp lock had been easy to break. When he’d seen the clock through the window, giving the right time, he’d known the electricity was turned on at least in this building, if not throughout the park, and it seemed to him the radio he’d noticed in here would confirm for him the suspicion he now had about what was going on.
It had. He’d found a local station with a four-thirty news broadcast, and naturally the armored-car job had been their top news story. “At least one of the gunmen is still at large,” the announcer said, and went on to say that two others were in a local hospital as a result of an accident with their getaway car. “The accident was seen by officers in a police patrol car, who saw at least one man flee from the wreck and commandeer a second automobile. The officers gave chase, but lost the fugitive ‘in the North Hill section.” The fugitive was said to have the loot, seventy- three thousand dollars, in a suitcase with him.
The second news item had been about the war. Parker turned it off and sat at the desk to think.
This office seemed to be in current use, with a hot plate on a table behind the door, instant coffee and other items on a shelf above the table, and a small John through a narrow door opposite the desk. A sweater, a dark gray cardigan, hung from a hook on the back of the John door, and an old pair of black leather gloves lay with curled fingers on the desk.
The way it looked, there was a night watchman on regular duty here. He would be showing up sometime after dark, and he would be a further complication.
But not the main one. The main one was the cops who’d seen him when he came in, and the people in the tollbooth building across the street. They were obviously on guard, making sure Parker didn’t escape before dark, or before their buddies the cops could get back.
It was a clear-cut case of private enterprise, a couple of cops going into business for themselves. Parker remembered now the envelope one of the cops had been holding when he’d first seen I hem, and in thinking about that envelope and the circumstance of a police car and a black Lincoln parked in an out-of-the-way spot like that, it seemed to him it was easy to figure what had been going on. A payoff of some kind, between local hoods and a couple of tame cops.
The idea had been a natural for them, of course, once they’d seen him go over the gate with his satchel and once they’d tuned into the radio in the police car. They had watched a heist artist carry seventy-three thousand dollars over a gate and into a box. Should the cops be heroes, with their picture in the paper, and should the two in the Lincoln quietly fade out of sight? Or should they get together and maybe call in a couple of friends in a Dodge station wagon and wait around till dark — or till the cops were off duty, maybe — and then go into that box and get the seventy-three grand for themselves?
An easy question to answer.
In one way, though, the complication was a help. Those two cops had done a song and dance about Parker getting away in a second car, and as a result they’d shifted the official search away from this area. So far as running into regular law was concerned, Parker was now pretty safe, he was no longer being looked for by them anywhere around here.
But in another way, the situation was now a hell of a lot worse. The authorities wouldn’t have wanted to do anything but get their hands on Parker and shove him in a cell, but these people, the hoods on watch across the road and their cop friends, they couldn’t afford to have Parker around and able to talk about them afterward. They would have to kill him, for their own good, and they surely knew it.
When would they come in? Any time, any time at all. The hoods were probably over there waiting for the cops to come back, and as soon as they did they’d all come in, half a dozen of them or more. The four Parker had seen before, the one he’d seen just now, and whoever else had maybe showed up in that Dodge wagon. They had the numbers, so they wouldn’t wait for darkness if they could help it, they’d have an easier job smoking him out in daylight, and it would be cleaner to do it and get it over with before the night watchman showed up.
So Parker knew he probably didn’t have very much time, and the first thing he was going to have to do was find somewhere to stash the money. He couldn’t tote that satchel around with him all the time, it would slow him down and get in the way.
In here? No, this little office was too functional and bare, there was no place to hide anything in it. There’d be a better spot somewhere else in the park.
