Dalesia nodded. He’d been coasting a bit, waiting for the light at the corner to change to green, and now he gunned across the intersection. Moving briskly down the next block—but not fast enough to attract attention—he said, “Wounded? Will he be able to talk?”
Parker said, “He’s gone.”
“What I want to know,” Hurley said, “what went wrong? How come we suddenly got all those cops?”
“There had to be another alarm,” Parker said. “An internal alarm on that cellar door.”
“We were supposed to buy a clean plan,” Hurley said. He was angry, but it was mostly relief. “Morse guaranteed us a clean plan.”
“These things happen,” Parker said. “That could be a new system, since he knew the place.”
“They don’t happen to me,” Hurley said. “We paid Morse good money for a good plan, and we got our heads on a plate.”
Parker shrugged. They were away, it was over, mistakes happen. They had bought a plan, and a map, and an outline of the alarm protection, and a key to that building in the next block. As to guarantees, nobody could guarantee a thing like this, that was just Hurley spouting off his nervousness through anger.
The fact was, Parker wouldn’t have come into this at all if he hadn’t been strapped for cash. It was a small score, which somebody unknown to him had set up, and he wasn’t in charge of it. This was Hurley’s baby. Hurley and his friend Morse.
They rode a couple of blocks in silence, and then Hurley said, “I’m gonna go see Morse. You want to come? Dee?”
Dalesia said, “Sure. I got nothing else to do.” He spoke casually, not angry, not caring one way or the other.
Hurley twisted around in the seat to look at the two in back. “What about you? Parker?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Parker said.
“Briggs?”
“I guess not,” Briggs said. “I guess I’ll go back to Florida.”
“Well, I’m gonna see Morse.” Hurley faced front again, and sat nodding his head, apparently thinking about his anger.
Briggs said quietly to Parker, “Do you have any idea what you’ll do?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I’m running a streak,” Briggs said. “A very bad streak. I believe I’ll just retire for a while, and wait for it to go away.”
“This is my fourth in a row,” Parker said. “I’ve got a streak of my own running.”
“Anything else on tap?”
“No.” Parker frowned and looked out the side window at the dark storefronts going by. “One thing,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Couple years ago I left some money behind after a job. I think I’ll go back and get it.”
“You want company?”
“I did the job with a guy,” Parker said. “I guess I’ll get in touch with him again.”
Two
Grofield said, “Shouldn’t I have income before I pay income tax?”
The man from Internal Revenue rested his forearm on the briefcase he’d put on Grofield’s desk. Talking slowly, as though explaining something complex to a child, he said, “You
Grofield said, “Have you ever seen a show here?”
“No.”
“The vast majority of your fellow-men could say the same.”
They were having their conversation in Grofield’s office in the theater. At one time the office had been part of a lobby kind of thing at the rear of the theater near the box office, but by running the Coke machine and the candy machine out from the rear wall, and adding a door with its own independent stand-up frame, a more or less private area had been divided off, in which Grofield kept a desk and a filing cabinet and two folding chairs. Occasionally the door or the desk was needed in a set onstage, but most of the time Grofield could think of himself as an actual theatrical producer with an actual office. The candy machine made a hell of a noise next to his ear whenever anybody made a purchase from it, but that was a small price to pay for his own private office.
The Internal Revenue man frowned across the desk at Grofield, apparently trying to work out some sort of problem he was having. Finally he said, “If you lose so much money every year, how do you live?”
”God knows,” Grofield said.
“How do you go on opening the theater every summer?”
“Stupidity,” Grofield said.
