you just goof around instead. Wait. Strongarm! You’re Jack Strongarm.”
“Miss Braselle,” Wycza said, “you got a convert.”
“Well, if that isn’t something else,” she said, and shook her head at Wycza, and grinned. “Nice to meet you.”
“And you. Believe me.”
She turned to Parker to say, “You were gonna show me what I’m doing. Or should I get rid of my pack first? Which room is mine? What’s with the wheelchair?”
“You’re gonna be in it,” Parker told her.
“I am.”
“Every night, starting tomorrow, after we get you the right clothes, Mike’s gonna be in his chauffeur suit, pushing you in the wheelchair, and you’re gonna be the brave but broken debutante. You’ll be six hours on the ship, Albany to Albany. You’ll gamble a little, you’ll watch a little, you’ll do little brave smiles here and there.”
‘Jesus, I despise myself,” she said. ‘What am I playing this poor little rich girl for?”
Parker slid open the box under the seat, with the white plastic bowl in it. “See this?”
“Oh,” she said. “Don’t tell me, let me guess.”
“This is a wheelchair for people who don’t get out of it for anything.”
“I get the concept,” she said.
“Security’s tight on that ship,” Parker told her. “When you board, they’ll look in there.”
“So what?”
“It won’t be empty. You’ll see to that.”
She made a disgusted face and said, “Parker, what are you doing to me? That’s going to be under me all night?”
“Six hours. It’s airtight, no smell, nothing. But they’ll look in it when you come aboard, and they may look in it when you go ashore. And they may the next night, and they may the night after that.”
She began to smile. “And one of these nights they won’t,” she said, “because they knowwhat’s in there.”
“That’s right.”
“So that’s how the guns get on.”
“No,” he said, “we’re getting them on another way, that’s what Lou’s working on now. What you’re doing is, you’re taking the cash off.”
She looked around, and pointed, and said, “That’s what the other wheelchair’s for.”
Wycza said, “We’re adapting it a little, the seat on that one’s gonna be higher, so that night you hunker down some.”
“I can do that,” she said. She looked around at the three men and the two wheelchairs and the old-fashioned cottage and said, “A new experience. I never hatched money before.”
7
Parker rode the Spirit of the Hudsonjust once before the night. Since, when it all went down, he’d be in disguise, this time he went open, alone, in jacket and tie. He bought some chips, and he noticed that most of the other people buying chips were using hundred-dollar bills. That was a good sign.
Because this was a new operation, nobody knew yet what the take would be. The ship was medium to small, holding just over eight hundred paying passengers, and if they on average dropped a hundred dollars apiece, including the twelve-dollar fare to come aboard, that would mean eighty thousand dollars in the money room by the end of the night. If the average loss was five hundred dollars, which some area newspapers had estimated, that would be four hundred thousand waiting for them. It was an acceptable range, and from what Parker was seeing, the result would most likely be toward the higher end.
It wasn’t true that no credit cards at all were in use on the Spirit of the Hudson.Chips you could only buy with cash, but you could pay for your dinner or souvenirs with credit cards. The little bit of cash that came in from those sources didn’t go to the casino money room, so Parker didn’t think about it.
The casino ship took two runs a day, from noon till six P.M. and from eight P.M. till two in the morning. Every trip began and ended in Albany, with one midway stop at Poughkeepsie, where a few passengers would board or depart and more supplies would be taken on. The money only left the ship, though, at Albany.
Parker chose a Friday night trip, the same as the night they’d be taking it down, to get a feel for the place. The ship was full, action in the casino was heavy, and the people having dinner in the glass-walled dining rooms to both sides of the casino as it sailed past the little river towns were dressed up and making an occasion of it. The sense was, and it was palpable through the ship, this was a fun way to spend money. Good.
From time to time, Parker saw Carlow and Noelle in the distance, but made sure to steer clear of them. Noelle, with a little pale makeup and dark gray filmy clothing that made her seem even more slender than she was, looked mostly like a vampire’s victim. Car-low, pushing the wheelchair in his dark blue chauffeur’s uniform and cap, leaning on the handles when it was at rest, looked wiry and tough, as though he were as much bodyguard as chauffeur.
People smiled at Noelle, who smiled wanly back. People touched her for luck, or asked her to blow on their dice, and whenever she played a little blackjack or shot craps for a while she was surrounded by people cheering her on.
Noelle and Carlow had been at this game for four nights now, and the security people still looked in the bowl every night coming aboard, not going ashore but Noelle was making sure they had a good variety to look at and they were beginning to get embarrassed, and also to recognize her, and to ease up. Parker figured by the middle of next week they’d just be waving her aboard.
