“Yes, he did. I want a meeting with you, Parker.”
“No meeting. Just the cash. Seventy-three thousand.”
“I have a problem with that,” Lozini said.
“You want a few days to get it together?”
“I need to talk to you. Goddamn it, I’m not trying to ambush you.”
“We don’t have anything to say to each other.”
“We do! And I can’t do it on the phone. We’ve already said too much.”
“There’s nothing you can say to me,” Parker said, “that I need to hear. You going to give me my money or not?”
“If you won’t come off the dime, goddamn it, neither will I! I’m not saying no to you, I’m saying we have to have a meeting. There’s things to this you don’t know about.”
Parker frowned, brooding out at the sunlight, the speeding traffic, Grofield waiting in the car. Wasn’t this an either-or proposition? Either Lozini would pay off today, or he’d pay off later, after he’d been pushed a little harder. Or whoever took his place would pay off.
“Parker? Goddamn it, man, unbend.”
There was something new in Lozini’s voice, something older and more tired. It was that different tone, that weaker sound, that changed Parker’s mind. Maybe there
“I’ll think about it,” he said. “I’ll call you back in half an hour.”
Twelve
O’Hara spotted the diner up ahead on the right, and nodded to it. “Time we got some coffee,” he said.
His partner, Marty Dean, said, “Good idea. I’m goddam tired.”
They both were. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, meaning they’d both been on duty now for a full twelve hours. Driving around in this patrol car, their uniforms getting itchier by the minute, their guns and cartridge belts a dull weight pressing against their stomachs.
And O’Hara, besides being tired, was in a foul mood. This whole business was connected with that amusement-park mess from two years ago, which O’Hara didn’t like being reminded of in the first place. And he’d gotten the word that one of the guys involved in last night’s robberies was the actual son of a bitch from the amusement park himself, and oh, how O’Hara wanted to be the one to catch up with him. He could taste it, he needed it, he had to even the score or die.
The diner. O’Hara turned the wheel, steered them over into the parking lot, and nosed into a space between a gray pickup and a red Toyota. The two men climbed out of the car, snicking the doors shut in the sunlight, and Dean stretched hugely, arching his back, saying, “Jesus God, it’s good to stand up.”
“Yeah, it is,” O’Hara said. He was trying not to let his bad mood out on the surface, because he had no explanation for it beyond the tiredness and overwork they had in common. He couldn’t very well explain to Dean that two years ago a lousy bandit had forced him to strip out of his uniform, had tied him up, and had used the uniform to make a clean getaway. And that instead of the eighteen thousand dollars he’d been anticipating for helping to run the bastard down in that amusement park, how much had he wound up with? Two grand. That money was long since gone, but the humiliation was as fresh as ever.
O’Hara and Dean walked into the diner together and found a couple seats at the counter. Somehow it was less like being off-duty when you sat at the counter; sitting in one of the booths would be more slothful, more as though you weren’t ready to leap back into action at any second.
They ordered coffee and pastry, and then O’Hara said, “I’ll be right back,” and went off to the men’s room.
He was standing at the urinal, brooding, when the men’s-room door opened, off to his right. He looked over at the new arrival, and his face showed his surprise. “Well, hello,” he said.
“Hello, O’Hara.” The guy smiled and stuck the barrel of a .25 automatic in O’Hara’s eye, and pulled the trigger.
Thirteen
Lozini sat in the back seat of the black Oldsmobile while up front Frankie Faran did the driving as he told the story of the gambling island off the coast of Texas.
It hadn’t been a surprise to Lozini when it turned out Faran knew about Cockaigne Island and what had happened to it. Faran was an amiable drinker, a social drinker in a cocktail-lounge sense, and people of his sort were always full of stray anecdotes. Faran had been out in Las Vegas several times the last few years, and on one or another of the trips he’d been told about Cockaigne.
“A fella named Yancy told me this,” Faran said, driving along. “He was in on it at the beginning. Just the early stages, you know, when they were setting it up.” He sounded and looked better now than he had this morning; probably he’d had a chance to sleep a few hours since the meeting. Or maybe he’d eased himself by drinking lunch. Anyway, his driving was all right, and his voice was clearer and stronger, and he didn’t seem to be distracted any more by an overriding physical discomfort.
“According to Yancy,” Faran was saying, “there was a small island off the Texas coast, down in the Gulf of Mexico. A fella named Baron made a deal with Cuba where Cuba claimed the island and Baron built himself a casino on it. You know, like a gambling ship outside the three-mile limit.”
“Mm.” Lozini, listening, watched out the side windows as they drove out Western Avenue. He wondered at what point Parker would contact him.
