was an electric heater on the floor, he’d turned that on before, and in addition to heat it gave off an orange-red glow, enough light to move around by.
He carried the chair from the desk over to the window. Sitting there, he could just see the gates. He rested one elbow on the window sill and waited.
Eight o’clock. Parker was used to the dull red light from the electric heater, it was plenty to see by. He crossed the little office and turned on the radio and waited for the announcer to tell him why nobody had come through those goddam gates yet. But the announcer had no information on that subject. The only news he had about the robbery was that one of the robbers in Schumann Memorial Hospital, the one thought to have been the driver of the getaway car, was not expected to live. The other one was expected to live.
Parker turned off the radio again and went back through the red darkness and sat down in the chair and looked out through the white darkness to the yellow and gray darkness at the main gate. So Laufman was going to die. And Grofield was going to live. Well, Grofield had never been inside the pen, it would be a new experience for him.
Parker had only been inside once, and that was nine years ago, and it had been a simple prison farm in California on a simple vag charge, but it had wound up with his fingerprints on file for the first time in his life, and because of some other things that had happened, those fingerprints were now connected with a couple of murder charges, so even if it was legitimate law he was waiting for here and not hoods, it wouldn’t be very good.
Thinking about Grofield had made him think of prison, and that had made him think of his own single experience that way, and now he went from that to the death of his wife, Lynn, which had been involved in that whole mix-up that time nine years ago, and from that he got to thinking about other people he knew that were dead now, and how few died of old age. Dent, any day now, was going to be an exception.
There was a fellow named Salsa, very pretty but very tough. One time in Galveston when Parker had been staying briefly with a weird girl named Crystal, Salsa had said to him, “Your woman wishes to photograph me unclad.” He’d been asking Parker’s permission, and Parker had said, “What do I care?” That was shortly before Salsa was dead, in a job they were all doing together on an island. A real island, not a fun island.
Now he stirred and sat up and stretched his arms up in the air and shook his head. “I’m getting like Dent,” he said out loud. Sitting here thinking about dead people, as though his own life was over now.
It was having nothing to do. It was stupid that they didn’t come in. They should have come in a long time ago, in daylight. Now they not only had given him time to booby-trap the whole damn park against them, they’d given him darkness to hide in. They were just making it tough. Unless they weren’t coming in? Was that a possibility, any way at all? Parker leaned forward again, his elbows and forearms on the window sill, and brooded out at the silent empty gate, seen at an angle from here, and he thought about it. Possibility one: they were just going to wait out there until he came out again. Possibility two: for some reason, they’d changed their minds and gone away and there was no reason why he couldn’t just pick up the satchel and leave.
Possibility two was a fantasy, and he knew it, and he pushed it to one side. But what about possibility one? Could they really mean to lay siege to him here, just wait outside until he came out?
It seemed unlikely, it seemed damn unlikely. Unless they thought he didn’t know they were there. But even so — All right, say that’s their plan, say they’re waiting, they don’t figure to come in at all. What does that mean, how does it change things?
It doesn’t change them at all. Because he wasn’t going to go out, and sooner or later — sometime tonight it would have to be — they’d understand that he wasn’t going out, and then they’d understand that they were going to have to come in.
Parker nodded to himself, thinking about it. His expression was flat, bleak. He was going to have to be patient, and sit here, and wait for them out there to understand the situation.
He waited.
Ten o’clock. Parker had eaten the crackers from the shelf over the hot plate, and was on his second cup of instant coffee when the headlights flashed over the row of gates. He drained the cup, put it down on the floor behind him, and peered through the window.
Nothing happened for a long minute. The headlights continued to shine on the gates. Then a shadow moved vaguely in front of the lights, and one pair of the gates swung open, pushed by a stocky old man in a long overcoat and a nondescript hat.
The watchman? That’s who it had to be.
Parker waited, following it all through the window. The watchman disappeared again, and a minute later a car drove slowly through the gates and stopped. A dark Volkswagen, blue or green, it was hard to say which.
The watchman got out of the Volkswagen, and three men came through the gates with guns in their hands and handkerchiefs over the lower part of their faces.
The watchman seemed too stunned to understand them at first. Parker watched them make angry gestures with their guns, and finally the watchman slowly lifted his hands up over his head. One of the others frisked him, and brought a long-barreled pistol out of the watchman’s overcoat pocket.
Two of them gestured to him to move, to walk toward the office, and he did so, obviously complaining and arguing, walking along with his hands up over his head. The two followed him, pushing his shoulders with their gun barrels, while the third stood in the open gates, lit by the red glow from the Volkswagen’s tail-lights, and gestured to others outside to come in.
Parker got to his feet. He switched off the electric heater, and as the dim red light in the room faded to black, he opened the office door, stepped out into the darkness, and moved silently away.
PART TWO
One
“LOOK,” CALIATO said.
He’d just given O’Hara the money, and now all four of them stood there and watched a guy throw a suitcase over the locked gates of Fun Island and then climb over them himself. He dropped to the ground on the inside, grabbed the suitcase, and disappeared.
Benniggio said, “I hear a siren.”
