apologetic smile on his face, he said, “I don’t have the keys for these. When Mr. Joseph comes around, he—”
“That’s okay,” Parker said. “We’re going out of here now.”
The man looked stunned. “What? I thought you’d take the . . .” He gestured with both money boxes.
“You’ll carry them to the car,” Parker told him. “We’ll go out of here, you ahead of me, and you’ll walk up the ramp. Don’t look back at me, don’t try to give any sign to the boy in the booth, and don’t talk.”
“Listen,” the man said. He was concentrating himself to explain something very important, as though Parker were an examiner from Internal Revenue. “I’m not sure I can do it,” he said.
“You can do it,” Parker told him. He put the Colt in his jacket pocket, kept his hand in there with the gun, and reached with his other hand for the doorknob.
“I don’t know,” the man said. Droplets of perspiration edged his hairline all across his forehead. “My legs give out, I can’t always, I don’t know if I can—”
“Move,” Parker said, and pushed the door open.
Blinking, trembling, stumbling a bit, the man moved forward past Parker and out the door. Parker followed, letting the spring pull the door closed again behind him.
Nothing had changed outside: somnolent boy, raucous music, nobody else around. Parker kept a few paces back, and followed the man with the money up the ramp. They walked past the Buick and on up, and at a Volvo one level higher, Parker said, “Stop right there.”
The man stopped.
“Put the boxes down. Go over and open the passenger door.”
The man put the metal boxes down; they made sharp little clangs on the concrete. Parker strode quickly up behind him as he moved to the right side of the Volvo. The man reached for the door handle, and Parker took the Colt from his pocket, reversing it. “It’s locked,” the man said, and Parker clipped him behind the ear.
It wasn’t enough. The man sagged forward against the car, air puffing out of his mouth as though he were a balloon, but he didn’t fall. Holding him in place with a hand pressed against his back between the shoulder blades, Parker hit him again, and this time he slumped in a boneless way, sliding down the side of the Volvo, Parker easing him to the floor. At this point he didn’t want anybody dead; robberies could be kept basically a simple matter between himself and Lozini, but murder would complicate the situation.
Carrying the metal cases, Parker walked back down the curving ramp to the Buick, where he found Grofield waiting for him, looking edgy. “Police car went by again,” he said. “I couldn’t stand out there, so I came in.”
“We’re all right,” Parker told him.
They got into the Buick, the metal boxes on the floor at Grofield’s feet, and Parker drove back down to the booth, where he gave the boy the parking ticket and a dollar. “Keep the change,” he said, and drove out, having to wait a second to let a slow-moving dark sedan go by. The two men inside glanced at the garage and kept going.
Ten
When Lozini walked into the office at nine-fifteen in the morning, the other four were already there. They’d damn well better be.
Two of them had been his guests night before last: Jack Walters, Lozini’s personal attorney, stout and uncomfortable and phlegmatic, and Frankie Faran. The third man, rusty-haired, well-built, casually dressed, fortyish, wearing squared-off glasses with gold-colored frames, was Ted Shevelly, Lozini’s assistant. And the fourth man, slender and dapper in a dark gray linen suit, was Harold Calesian, a plainclothes detective working out of the Organized Crime Squad downtown and Lozini’s principal liaison with the Police Department.
They all said hello. Lozini grunted, walked around to sit behind his desk, and stared each man in the face. Wide windows all along the wall to his right let in glaring sunlight and a broad view of richly blue sky. This office was on the seventeenth floor of the Nolan Building, the tallest office structure in the city, in which Lozini and some of his friends had a minority real estate interest. The sign on the corridor door, past the unstaffed receptionist’s office, said
Lozini’s stare got to Ted Shevelly last, and held there. He said, “All right. Ted. What the fuck happened?”
“He hit us three times,” Shevelly said. “Bing bing bing. Nobody knew it was coming. He just hit hard, and took off.” Shevelly seemed calm about the whole thing, even a little admiring of the bastard who’d done it all, but that was good. That was what made him so right to be Lozini’s assistant; he was strong and tough, but he still kept an evenness of disposition that put the brakes on Lozini’s own impetuousness. He wasn’t as good as Caliato, who’d had more of Lozini’s aura of power about him, but he was good.
Lozini said, “Took off where? You don’t know where he is?”
Shevelly shook his head. “Wherever he is,” he said, “he’s a loner. He has absolutely no local contacts, I’ll guarantee it.”
“He has a guy working with him,” Faran said. His voice sounded muffled; his brow was furrowed as though he were pouting. His skin looked bad, and he kept shifting around in his chair.
“Not anybody local,” Shevelly said. “The two of them came in together, and nobody in town knows them.”
Lozini said, “You’re sure.”
“We did a lot of leaning the last twelve hours,” Shevelly said. “We shook this town pretty good last night, and nothing fell out. They’re on their own.”
Lozini turned to Jack Walters. “What’s the damage?”
Walters grunted as he struggled an envelope out of his suitcoat pocket. He was a fat man who’d never figured out how to be graceful in the role; his pockets were always too hard to get at, chairs were always positioned wrong, doorknobs were a constant problem. It was impossible to imagine him dressing himself.
