Butcher's Moon

and now he was going to enter air-conditioning again. He stooped and slid into the back seat, and pulled the door shut.

Parker was on the other side, his shoulder against the side window. He was half turned toward Lozini, facing him. Just looking at him; no words, no expression.

“Hello, Parker,” Lozini said. He was thinking that Parker didn’t look quite as vicious as his memory had made him. He looked like an ordinary man, really; a little tougher, a little colder, a little harder. But not the ice-eyed robot of Lozini’s memory.

Parker nodded. “You wanted to talk,” he said.

“I got a problem,” Lozini said, and spread his hands expressively. “I don’t want trouble with you, but I don’t know how to get around it. That’s why I want to talk.”

“Go ahead.”

Lozini looked away, out across the front seat and the steering wheel and through the windshield at the empty road curving away behind a stand of trees up ahead. It was colder in here than in the Olds, and Parker was one of those people who almost never blink. Looking out at the road, Lozini said, “I called Karns. He told me about your trouble with Bronson, and he told me about Cockaigne. He said if I owed you money, I ought to pay you.”

“That’s right.”

Lozini turned and looked at Parker full-face. Now he, too, didn’t blink; he wanted Parker to know he was hearing the truth, the bottom line. “My trouble is,” he said, “I don’t have your money.”

Parker shrugged, as though it was a minor matter. “You want time?”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean I never had it. I didn’t find it in the amusement park.”

“It isn’t there,” Parker said. “Where I left it.”

“I didn’t get it,” Lozini told him. “I have never had your money.”

“Some of your people got it, and kept it for themselves.”

“I don’t think so.” Lozini shrugged and shook his head. “It’s possible, but I don’t think they’d try it. Not any of the people I had in there with me.”

Parker said, “Nobody else would find it. Where I left it, no maintenance man would go near it, nobody else would stumble across it. The only way it’s gone is because somebody was looking for it and found it. That’s you and your people, nobody else.”

“Maybe that’s what happened,” Lozini said. “I don’t say it couldn’t have been that way, somebody holding out on me. All I say is, I’m not the one who got the money. I never had it and I don’t have it now.” He leaned closer to the other man, put his hand out as though to touch his knee but didn’t quite complete the gesture, and said, “Listen, Parker, I’m on the level. Maybe ten years ago I wouldn’t have given you the time of day, I would have just put every one of my people on the street to hunt you down, and not care how long it took or how much noise it made or how many times you scored against me before I got to you. That’s ten years ago, when things were different.”

Parker waited, watching him, still without expression.

“But right now,” Lozini said, “I can’t do that. Things have been quiet around here for a long time, I’m not even organized for that kind of war any more. I don’t have enough of the right kind of people now; most of my people these days are just clerks. And right now this town is in an election campaign.”

“I saw the posters.”

“It’s a tough campaign,” Lozini said. “My man may be in trouble. The election’s Tuesday, and the one thing I don’t want is blood in the streets the weekend before election. This is the worst possible time for me, things are very shaky anyway and you could make them a lot worse. So that’s another reason I don’t want a war with you. Besides what Karns told me. All of that, it all adds up to me wanting to get along with you, work something out, figure out some kind of compromise.”

“I left seventy-three thousand here,” Parker said. “Half of it belongs to my partner.” He made a head gesture toward Green back in the other car. “Neither one of us wants ten cents on the dollar, or a handshake, or a compromise, or anything at all except our money. Our full take, everything we took out of that armored car.”

“Then you’ve got to look somewhere else,” Lozini said. At that moment a farm pickup truck with an old refrigerator standing up in the back passed them, the first traffic since they’d stopped here. Lozini pointed at it through the windshield as it went bumping away, disappearing around the stand of trees. “If you went to that farmer,” he said, “and told him you left seventy-three thousand dollars in Tyler two years ago and you want it back, he’d tell you you’re at the wrong door because he doesn’t have it and doesn’t know where it is. And I’m telling you the same thing.”

Parker shook his head, betraying his impatience by a tightening of the lips at the corners of his mouth. “The farmer isn’t connected,” he said. “You are. Don’t waste my time.”

Lozini cast around for something else. “All right,” he said. “I’ll look into it. Maybe it was one of my people —”

“It was.”

“All right. I’ll check them out, and let you know what I come up with.”

Parker nodded. “How long?”

“Give me a week.”

The small sign of impatience again. “I’ll call you tomorrow evening, seven o’clock.”

“Tomorrow! That isn’t enough.”

“They’re your people,” Parker said. “If you’re in charge, run them. It won’t take long. I’ll call you at seven.”