Plunder Squad

It was night in here. Heavy draperies with an autumn-leaf design covered the window, and the switch Mackey had touched had turned on two table lamps and a floor lamp, showing a motel room like any other, with gold filigree on the dresser front. The air conditioner was going, high in the rear wall, and the air in the room was as cold and dead as a tile floor.

“Jesus, it’s cold!” Mackey said, but he didn’t touch the air conditioner. Standing in the middle of the room, shivering, he peeled off his wet bathing suit, tossed it through the open bathroom doorway, and started to towel himself dry. He was hairy, stocky, just under average height, and about forty years of age. His hair was a little thin on top. There was a puckered scar on his back, high and to the right, just under the shoulder. He said, “Scotch and ice on the dresser there, help yourself.” He kept patting himself with the towel.

“I didn’t eat lunch yet,” Parker said. When you’re maybe going to work with a man, give him reasons for things, don’t be overly curt. Parker went over and sat down in a somewhat Danish chair near the door.

“Yeah? Neither did I, I’ll join you.”

“All right.”

“We’ll leave Brenda here. She never eats lunch anyway. Keeps herself down to fighting weight, you know?”

Parker nodded.

Mackey wadded up the towel, threw it into the bathroom after his bathing suit, and went over to the dresser. He opened the top drawer, pulled out some clothing, and started to dress. “What do you think?” he said.

”You won’t do it where it is now.”

“Don’t I know it?” Mackey grinned, balancing on one foot to put on a sock. “Brenda says this is good for my belly,” he said. “Put on my socks standing up. One of these days I’ll fall over, ram my head through a wall. But I’ll have a great belly. Nobody’s talking about doing it where it is. The whole point is, it’s a road show.”

“There were nine private guards in sight,” Parker said. “Two city cops in a radio car out front. That’s how they protect it when it’s standing still. How do they protect it when it’s in motion?”

“I know what you mean.” In his underwear, Mackey went over to the doorless closet. He took a white shirt off a hanger, put it on, started buttoning it. “But when you come right down to it,” he said, “what we’re talking about here is a simple hijack.”

“Simple?”

Mackey reached for a pair of slacks. “You know what I mean. It’s maybe a tough hijack, but a hijack is all it is.” He stopped, the slacks in his hands, and looked at Parker. “Think about it. Twenty-one paintings in one truck, out on the road.”

It was the San Simeon thing all over again, except that nobody would be taking a truck full of paintings over any roadless mountains. Not even Bob Beaghler. “It won’t be that easy,” Parker said.

“But worth it,” Mackey said.

Parker said, “Three hundred fifty-seven thousand.”

Mackey frowned at him. “Where’d you get a number like that?”

Parker took the mimeographed sheet from his pocket, opened it up. “In here they tell you how much the owners paid.”

“Oh, yeah? But that was a couple years ago, right?”

“Mostly. Why?”

“Griffith told me it’s half a million.” Mackey shrugged, and started putting on his slacks. “Paintings get worth more all the time,” he said, as though it were a field he knew a lot about. “Like stock, you know?”

“How much is ours?”

“A hundred thirty grand, split among however many of us there are.”

Parker frowned. “Where’d you get that number?”

Mackey, his trousers on, reached for a tie and grinned. “Griffith started at a hundred grand, I started at two hundred, and we dickered.”

“Griffith won.”

Mackey’s grin widened. “Yeah, I know.” He carried the tie over to where he could see himself in the mirror over the dresser. “But that’s his business, you know? I steal for a living, he dickers for a living.” He shrugged, watching his hands move with the tie. “You don’t think I worked for that thirty grand?”

“I suppose you did,” Parker said.

Mackey finished with the tie, and turned away from the mirror. “I’ll tell you the truth,” he said. “We spent twenty minutes talking price, and I kept thinking, I got to get this guy up to one-fifty because that’s the middle between where we started. But after a while I began to think, What if there’s five of us do this thing? Then only one dollar out of five that I’m fighting for is mine. We’re up to one-thirty, and I’m sick of all this talk back and forth, all this stuff that he does because he likes to do it, and I hate it. So what am I trying to get out of him? Another twenty grand. But how much of that is for me? Four grand, if there’s five of us doing it. Do I want all this hassle for four grand? So I said okay, one-thirty, the hell with it.” He spread his hands, grinning, and then turned away and went back over to the closet for his sports jacket.

Parker said, “I’ll have to meet him.”

Mackey frowned, shrugging into his jacket. “He wouldn’t like that, Parker,” he said. “He told me he didn’t want a lot of contact back and forth, he was just telling me about the caper and that was it. If I pulled it off, I should bring him the stuff and he’d pay for it.”

Parker said, “If I’m in, I’ll have to meet him.”