was outraged. “You, too, Mrs. Kimberly. Yeah, but you better do it. They’ve got the upper hand now.”
Keegan said, “He’s de-fused.” He got to his feet with his own gun in his right hand and Garrison’s revolver in his left. “Only the one gun on him.”
The male clerks were all moving toward the sofa, the woman last and with the most reluctance. At the sofa, one of the male clerks suddenly bolted for the other door. The people around him all looked startled. He yanked the door open and dashed outside.
Keegan. calmly opened the door between the rooms and headed down the window side of the room to cover everybody from the other end.
The clerk who’d made a dash for it backed into the room, hands over his head. In response to an order, he lowered one hand and shut the door. Keegan said something to him, and he sat down on the sofa. The others all joined him.
Parker said, “RG, go next door and stand against the wall between Hal and the others.” He waited till Stevenson was in position, then said, “Okay, Dan, you can get up now.”
Garrison got to his feet. He looked grim and angry. He stared at Parker and seemed to consider saying something, but just shook his head.
Parker said, “Go next door, Dan, and stand to this side of Hal.”
Parker followed Garrison through and went over behind Lavenstein to take the revolver out of his holster and put it in his own hip pocket. Then he said, “Hang up the phone, Beau. Go over and stand with your back to the door your friend ran out of.”
Keegan was down at the other end, back to the filing cabinets, automatic pointed in the general direction of the people along the side wall.
Parker walked over to Hal Pressbury, who was looking cranky and crotchety, and who said, “You people can’t get away with this sort of thing. You think this is the Wild West?”
“Turn around, Hal.”
“So you can shoot me in the back? You’ll have to look me in the eye, you son of a bitch.”
“Hal, you either turn around so I can disarm you, or I’ll have to knock you out.”
“I’ll meet you face to face.”
Parker put the automatic in his left hand, raised his right fist in front of his shoulder, and punched Pressbury between the eyes. Pressbury’s head snapped back, bouncing off the door, and his face went slack. With a hand to his chest, Parker kept him from falling forward and let him slide down the door to a sitting position. Then he took Pressbury’s revolver, patted him briefly to be sure he had no other weapons, and backed away from him.
Garrison said tightly, “That’s something else you’ll pay for.”
“We may pay later,” Parker said, turning his head back and forth so they’d know he was talking to all of them, “but any one of you people who disobeys us will pay now.” He walked over to the sofa, keeping the automatic in his left hand, and stood in front of the clerk who’d tried ducking out the door. “Stand up,” he said.
The clerk was afraid now. “What do you want from me?”
“You’ve disobeyed once. Don’t make it twice. Stand up.”
The woman, sitting beside him, said, “You’d better do what he says, George.”
George, blinking, trying to fit an expression of bravado onto his face, leaned forward to get up and Parker hit him on the nose. George bounced back into the sofa, and Parker waited to see if his nose would start bleeding. The woman said something shocked and angry, everybody stirred, and George put his hand to his face. When he took it away to look at it, his fingertips were red; a drop of blood hit his shirt.
The woman said, “Oh, you’re bleeding!” and started busily to reach into her sleeve.
Parker said, “Nobody touches him. He doesn’t use a handkerchief or a tissue or any cloth. George? You can put your head back, but keep your hands away from your face.”
The woman said, “You people are inhuman!”
“Then you should be very cautious with us,” Parker said. He turned his back on them all and went over to the nearest desk, where he put down the automatic and took the two guards’ guns from his hip pockets. Behind him, he knew they were all watching George, who was in a position none of them would want to be in for himself; not dangerous, but uncomfortable and humiliating. Head back, blood dribbling from his nose, having to gulp and gasp when he breathed. Nobody else would want to wind up like that, so the others would be less likely now to try something stupid.
Keegan kept them all covered. Originally, of course, Berridge would have been the man outside, and Keegan and Briley would both have watched the prisoners, one at either end of the room. There was more menace implicit in being unable to look at all the guns facing you at the same time. But Parker had been making up for that in other ways.
Now he took the blue laundry bag from his pocket, ripped open the outer plastic—it was the toughest thing to do so far, with the work gloves on—and then shook open the bag. He swept all the loose unhanded bills from the desk into the bag, and next emptied the banded stacks of bills from the trays beside the desk. The second desk filled the bag, and he took a rubber band from his side trouser pocket and closed the neck of the bag. Then he carried the bag, which was pretty heavy now, into Stevenson’s office and left it beside the hall door. He picked up the toolkit, carried it into the room, and put it on the first desk, beside the phone. This one was hung up, but the one on Stevenson’s desk was still off the hook, so a call to either of these numbers would produce a busy signal.
Keegan had the second blue bag. He tossed it to Parker, who opened it and filled it with the bills at the third and fourth desks.
Now there was a minor error in the routine, the result of the last-minute change from Berridge. Briley had the third laundry bag, and was in the hall; when they’d made the switch of assignments, nobody’d thought to change that one detail. Which was why normally Parker preferred to let a job go rather than make late changes in the pattern. This time the problems hadn’t seemed very large, and the job itself was tempting, so he’d relaxed a rule for
