“In your all-terrain vehicle,” Parker said.
“Oh. I thought you meant something—I don’t know what the hell I thought you meant.”
“I’m here to talk about a robbery,” Parker said.
“Yeah, you’re right, you’re right.” Beaghler turned away toward the table.
Sharon suddenly said, “I think I hear the baby.” With a frightened look toward her husband, she turned and hurried from the room.
The four men sat down at the table again, and Beaghler said, “Where was I?”
Ducasse said, “Staying overnight in the mountains.”
Walheim said, “You said we’d probably hit the armored car around one o’clock.”
“Right.” Beaghler nodded. “That gives us about five hours’ usable daylight. It gets too dark in the woods after six o’clock, you could drive into a canyon and think it was just a shadow.”
Parker said, “So we’d get into King City around noon the next day.”
“That’s the way I figure it, yeah.”
Parker nodded. That was good, to have a place to hole up the first night, and then finish getting out of the area the next day.
Walheim said, “How do you know they won’t track us?”
”Through those mountains? Hell, they won’t know where we are. They’ll figure we’re camping near the road someplace, they won’t look for us thirty miles in.”
Ducasse said, “Thirty miles isn’t very far.”
“Yes it is,” Beaghler said. “Thirty miles on Interstate 80 isn’t very far at all, but thirty miles of forest is one hell of a long distance.”
Parker said, “But this vehicle of yours leaves tracks, doesn’t it?”
“For the first five miles we’ll be on ranger trails. We can leave the trail almost anyplace and cut off into the woods. A lot of people do that and go in a mile or two, so which set of tracks do the cops follow?”
Walheim said, “What if they bring up a helicopter?”
“We’re under the trees,” Beaghler told him. “It’s really dense in there, man, you could hide an army in that forest, you wouldn’t see a thing from the air.”
Parker said, “All right. I’ll want to look at this place, but for now let’s say it can be done. That still leaves the question of the buyer.”
“I’m open to suggestions,” Beaghler said.
Ducasse said, “You want one of us to find the buyer?”
“I’ll tell you the God’s honest truth,” Beaghler said, “I just don’t have that kind of contact. All I’ve ever done is drive.”
Which meant, Parker knew, that he’d driven exclusively small-time operations. A suburban bank, a loan office in a shopping center, places where the take is eleven thousand dollars and if they catch you they’ll put you away for just as long as if you’d been after a million.
Walheim said, “Bob, I know the same people you do.”
Parker said, “You mean it’s up to Ducasse and me.”
“I have the caper,” Beaghler said, “and I have the way to get the thing and get away. But I don’t have anybody to turn it into cash for me.”
“Until you do,” Parker said, “you don’t have anything at all.”
“I know that,’ Beaghler said. “Can you help me?”
Ducasse said, doubtfully, “I can ask around.”
“Give us a name for these statues,” Parker said. “Something a buyer will recognize. We’ll see what we can do.”
“I’ll have to ask my cousin. Can you guys stick around till tomorrow?”
Parker and Ducasse looked at one another, and Parker saw his own feelings reflected in the other man’s eyes. There was a sense of this job as being too loosely assembled, not tightly enough controlled or organized; but on the other hand, there was the need to put something together and make some money. Beaghler’s plan had some crazinesses in it, but most workable plans did.
If he’d been flush, Parker would have walked away from it right there. But he said. “I can stay over.”
Ducasse shrugged and said, “So can I. What can we lose?”
Four
The knocking at the motel-room door was soft but persistent. Parker had been asleep, but he came awake all at once, his eyes opening and staring upward in darkness that was almost total.
The faint rapping sounded again. Parker turned his head slowly, and oriented himself by the slit of light outlining the window draperies. He was in a motel room down near Fremont, the other side of Oakland from Beaghler’s suburb, and Ducasse was in the next room to the left. But there was no connecting door, and in any case, the
