Parker said nothing to that, so Hanzen said, “Pete probably told you I done time.”
“He didn’t have to.”
“Well, yeah, I suppose he didn’t. The thing is, I don’t want to do any more.”
“Good,” Parker said.
Hanzen said, “There’s fellas, and you know them, too, that liketo be in there. They won’t admit it, they probably don’t even know it themselves, but they like it. They like not having to be in charge of their own life, not having that chance to fuck up all the time. Life is regular, simple routines, food not so bad, you can pick some okay guys to be your pals, you don’t have to be tense any more.”
Parker drove. Traffic was light, mostly pickup trucks and delivery vans. Hanzen said, “You get into a little job with a fella like that, he’s just waiting the chance to make that mistake, screw it up just enough so he can say, you got me, officer, and back into the nest he goes. And you with him.”
“They exist,” Parker agreed.
Hanzen said, “I’m not one of them. I like it out here where I am. So if there’s any chance at all, you and whoever you’re in with, you’re gonna come off that boat in chains, don’t even tell me about it.”
“Then I’ll drive you back to the Lido,” Parker told him, but didn’t turn around. “Because you ought to know there’s alwaysa chance something goes wrong. Pete must’ve told you, I done a number of things for a while now, and never wound up in chains. But every time, it could’ve happened.”
“Security’s gonna be shit-tight on that boat.”
“Security’s tight everywhere there’s money.”
“That’s true. You’d want me to take you out there, after dark, so you can board?”
“No, we’ll get aboard our own way.”
“So it’s when you’re coming off. You and the money.”
“Right.”
“You coming down ropes? Won’t they see you?”
“There’s a door in the side of the ship, it’s what they use themselves when they take the money off. It’s five, six feet above the waterline, to be the right level for the dock. There’s no windows next to it or under it.”
“You’ve got somebody giving you plans and things.”
Parker drove. They went through a little town with a gas station and a blinker light. Hanzen said, “That wasn’t a question.”
“I know.”
“Okay. It don’t sound bad. I’m just there in the river, I’m minding my own business, here comes the boat. I see a fuss on that boat, I don’t even come over. Don’t look to me for no James Bond rescues.”
“I don’t look to anybody for James Bond rescues,” Parker assured him.
“When you figure to do this?”
“You worried about the chains?”
“Not as long as I’m just some of the traffic out there in the river.”
“Then I’ll call you,” Parker said. “You won’t need a lot of advance notice.”
Hanzen laughed. “Trust is a wonderful thing,” he said.
2
“It isn’t the lap of luxury,” the real estate agent said, “but the price is right. And you fellas don’t care about fancy stuff, I don’t think.”
“Not us,” Mike Carlow agreed. “We just like to come up from the city, weekends, do some fishing.”
“Then this is the place for you,” the real estate agent said. He was a jolly round-faced man with bushy white hair over his ears, so that he looked like a beardless Santa Claus. “I’m a fisherman myself, you know,” he said.
“Oh, yeah?” Carlow actually looked interested. “What do you go after, mostly?”
“Trout. Not in the Hudson, but in the little streams coming in.”
Carlow and the real estate agent continued through the house, talking crap about fishing, while Parker looked around, thinking it over. Wasthis the place for them?
It was just north of a small river town about thirty miles south of Albany, on the east side of the river, the same as Hanzen’s mooring, but farther upstream. A dirt road led in from the state highway, past several rundown private houses, to this piece of land on a low bluff about fifteen feet above the water.
Four small cottages had been built here, back in the twenties, and hadn’t been taken care of much since. They stood side by side in a row, identical rectangles facing away from the river, with shingle roofs and clapboard siding painted a worn green. They were shabbily old-fashioned, from their rattly and holey screen doors to the lines-and- squares pattern linoleum on their kitchen floors. There was room to park a car beside each, and a screened porch on the back of each one faced the river. Beyond them, at the end of a brief stone path, an old wooden staircase with a log railing led from the bluff down to a mooring and a short wooden pier.
These cottages were rented to vacationers, by the week or the month, but very few vacationers wanted to rough it with this sort of accommodation any more. The real estate agent had told the two of them frankly, driving them out here from his office on the highway, that only the occasional group of fishermen was likely to want to rent any of the cottages, and that at the moment none of them were occupied. “The owners’ a couple sisters live away, one in Washington, D.C., and the other over near Boston. They inherited, they don’t much give a damn about the
