Butcher's Moon

wide empty thoroughfare of London Avenue, showing the storefronts across the way but leaving the upper stories of the buildings in total darkness. There was no sound out there at all, not even when a dark sedan moved slowly past from right to left. The big Farrell for Mayor banner flapped in the breeze off to the right. What was the name of Farrell’s opponent? Wain. Parker stood unmoving, looking out through the horizontal slits at the sleeping city. It made no connection with him; he’d grown up in different circumstances.

Grofield said, “Got it.”

Parker turned.

“Midtown Garage,” Grofield said. “It’s a parking building, four stories high, open twenty-four hours. On a Friday night they’ll do a good business, all of it in cash and all of it still there.”

“Where is it?”

Grofield gestured toward the window. “Two blocks from here, on London. We could walk.”

“We’ll drive,” Parker said. “Drive in, drive out. That’s what you do in a garage.”

“Right.” Grofield put the notes away again in the drawer, and hesitated. “The money, too?”

“Why not?”

“Right.” Grofield put the two stacks of bills into the drawer on top of the notes, shut the drawer, and got to his feet.

After they put on their jackets Parker looked around the room to be sure nothing had been left out. “Okay,” he said.

They took the stairs down to the lobby rather than ring for the elevator. At the foot of the stairs a left turn would take them into the quiet lobby, but they turned right instead, down a short hall to a small side exit next to the hotel drugstore. They’d used this route a couple of times already tonight, not seeing any hotel employees at all along the way.

The side exit led to a narrow business street lined with appliance stores and record shops. Down to the left was brightly lit London Avenue, but the side streets were still equipped with dimmer and more widely spaced old- fashioned lighting.

Parker and Grofield walked a block and a half away from London Avenue and the hotel, then stopped next to a Buick Riviera, vaguely maroon in the darkness. There were night lights in the interiors of stores, but no illumination showing in any upper-story windows. No headlights anywhere to be seen, nor any pedestrians other than themselves.

Parker took from his pocket a dozen keys on a circular metal ring and began to run them for the Buick’s door. The fifth one worked; he opened the door and slid in fast, shutting it behind him to switch off the interior light, and reached across to unlock the other door for Grofield.

They took side streets until they were beyond the garage, so they’d be coming at it from the direction opposite the hotel. There was no other traffic at all until they finally dropped back to London Avenue, but then they saw a prowling police car almost at once, plus a couple of other slow-moving cars with two male occupants in each.

Grofield said, “Your friend Lozini organizes himself pretty fast.”

Parker, remembering Lozini in charge of the hoods hunting him down in the amusement park, said, “He isn’t stupid, just too impatient. He gets in a hurry and he gets mad.”

“Then he gets stupid,” Grofield suggested.

“Right.”

The Midtown Garage was a tan-brick building on a corner, square and functional, with broad glassless window areas on each floor. A vertical red neon sign standing out from the second and third stories spelled out the name of the place, with the word PARKING beneath, like an underline. Under the sign, in the center of the London Avenue face of the building, was the entrance, a broad low concrete driveway bisected by a booth where tickets were picked up on the way in and money was paid on the way out.

A slender sleepy black boy of about nineteen was on duty in the booth, keeping himself awake with bad rock music from an imperfectly tuned station on a white plastic radio. He was sitting on a stool, resting his elbows on a high counter and gazing in a befuddled way out the glass window fronting the booth at the street. He reacted slowly and awkwardly when Parker turned the Buick in at the entrance and stopped next to the booth; it took him a long time to separate one ticket from the pile, and even longer to get it punched by the time clock on the counter. Parker, waiting, kept one eye on the rear-view mirror and saw the police car go by again, in the opposite direction. It seemed to him both the faces in there had been turned this way. Watching the strangers, waiting for something else to happen.

Beside him, Grofield was studying the wall to the right. Parker had only had a glimpse of it while turning in, but it seemed likely to contain the office; in a tile wall, a brown-metal door was flanked on one side by a bulletin board covered with required city and state notices and on the other side by a thick glass window showing a yellow-walled interior.

“Here ya are.”

Parker took the ticket, put the Buick in gear, and started slowly up the spiral that formed the interior of the building. There were no separate floors inside, but only a steadily upcurving ramp, leading by gentle gradations from level to level and marked with white lines for parking.

The interior was mostly empty, with only an occasional car parked with its nose to the exterior wall or the central supporting divider. Parker followed the curve of the ramp up and around until they were out of sight of the booth, and then nosed the Buick in against the interior wall and cut the engine. The silence afterward seemed loud and echoing.

Grofield said, “I didn’t like all that action on the street.”

“You want to call this off?”

“No. But we better make damn sure we give ourselves enough time at the other end.”

“We will.”