“Good Christ.” Sternberg frowned out at the traffic through the moving windshield wiper, as though the answer to some question might be found written on the side of a passing truck.
“We found one guy Griffith was dealing with, in New York. But he’s only interested in six paintings.”
“For how much?”
“Sixty thousand.”
“Twelve thousand apiece.” Sternberg shook his head, his expression bitter. “Well, it wasn’t worth the trip,” he said, “I can tell you that much.”
“It wasn’t for any of us.”
“I came farther.”
Parker shrugged.
Sternberg grumbled a minute, then turned and said, “What about the rest of them? Fifteen of the damn things.”
”We talked it over,” Parker said. “Mackey and Devers and me. We’ve got to give them up.”
Sternberg looked both shocked and disgusted. “Give them up? There’s ninety thousand riding there!”
“Nobody to collect from.”
“What about insurance companies?”
“You want to stick around and deal with them?”
“God damn it,” Sternberg said, and glowered out at the traffic.
“Neither do the rest of us,” Parker said. “I hate insurance companies,”
Sternberg said. “They’re goddam thieves.”
“I know.”
“We’d be lucky to get twenty cents on the dollar.”
“More likely to get picked up in a trap,” Parker said. “Besides, what do we do with the paintings while we dicker?”
“So we give them back.”
“And take our twelve thousand,” Parker said, “and go home.”
“Christ.” Sternberg shook his head. “This has not been a good year for me,” he said. Parker said nothing.
Six
Parker was on a deck chair by the lake, letting the sun dry his body. Summer was nearly here, and the empty houses around the lake were beginning to fill up; motorboats droned most of the time now, and curious faces were starting to be everywhere. Soon it would be time to take Claire and go somewhere else until the fall.
This was Claire’s house, but she’d picked it with Parker in mind. For most of the year, the area around the lake was as good as a ghost town, with the privacy that Parker preferred and had always found before this in resort hotels. Only in the summer did the place take on the look and feel of a normal community, surrounding him with the questions and prying that the straight world thought of as natural.
It was only too bad the art heist hadn’t worked out as well as it should. He and Claire would use up Renard’s twelve thousand and more during their two months away from the house.
Parker heard the sliding door open, and turned to watch Claire walk across the lawn from the house. He enjoyed watching her; she kept being new, and that was a rare thing in a woman.
She said, “There’s someone on the phone for you.”
That would be Mackey. “Thanks.”
As Parker got to his feet and draped the towel over his shoulders, she said, “I took it on the bedroom phone.”
“Right.” He padded barefoot across the lawn to the house, and went through the sliding doors into the bedroom, where the telephone receiver was lying on the bed. He picked it up: “Hello?”
“I’m here.” Mackey’s voice.
“Fine.”
“I called our friend, and he wanted to meet tonight.”
Mackey was in New York with the six paintings for Renard in the back of a stolen pickup truck. The rest of the group had separated, Sternberg to Boston and Devers to Los Angeles and Tommy and Noelle to Cleveland, leaving Parker and Mackey to finish the deal with Renard and send them their cash.
And Renard apparently wanted to make the switch right away, tonight. “That’s good,” Parker said.
“How long will it take you to get here?”
“An hour and a half,” Parker said. Looking through the glass doors toward the lake, he saw Claire walking this way. “Make it two and a half,” he said.
