“I get it, George,” the big man said. “If you got asthma real bad like that, you probably carry some kind of medicine for it, am I right? An inhaler, something like that?”
“Yes.”
“How slow can you take it out of your pocket, George?”
“Very slow.”
“Go ahead.”
George kept his inhaler in his inside jacket pocket, and now realized that was exactly where a tough guy or a bad guy would keep a gun. Hand trembling, sweat starting to trickle down his face, breath becoming raspy already, he reached into his pocket, grasped the inhaler, lost it through his trembling fingers, grasped it again, jerked his hand back, shuddered the motion to a stop, and slowly and shakily brought the little tube into sight.
The big man seemed pleased. “Good, George,” he said. “Now, if you gave yourself a spray or two with that, you’d be okay for a while, wouldn’t you?”
“I think so,” George said.
“We both think so, George,” the big man said. “Go ahead, take a shot.”
George did. He had so much trouble keeping his right hand steady that he held it with the left hand so he could fit the inhaler into his mouth, lips closed over it, and direct the spray at the back of his throat. He did this twice, and while he did the big man said to the other one, “There’s a lot of asthma around these days, you know? Worse than ever. It comes from mold, a lot of times, and I read someplace, you can get it from cockroach dander. Can you believe it? You try to keep yourself in shape and some fucking cockroach is out to bring you down. You set, George?” George put the inhaler back in his pocket. “Yes.” Hunkered beside him, applying the duct tape, the big man in a friendly manner said, “What I think you should do, now that the working day is done, you got time on your hands, I think you should spend it working on what you’re gonna say to the TV news reporters.”
“And now, in sports”
Hilliard Cathman sighed in exasperation; mostly with himself. He knew he should turn off this “news-radio” station, which was in truth mostly a sports-score-and-advertising radio station, and go to sleep, but lately he was having even more trouble than usual dropping off, and he had this need to know,to know when they did it. He had to know.
It would be a weekend, that much was certain, when the ship would be the most full of gamblers, when the most money would be lost. A Friday or a Saturday night, and soon. Possibly even tonight.
Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Tonight. Get it over with, get this tension behind him at last.
He knew the risk he was taking, the danger he was in. Sitting up in bed past midnight, lights on in half the house, the nightstand radio eagerly rattling off the endless results of games he cared nothing about, Cathman reminded himself he’d known from the beginning the perils in this idea, but had decided the goal was worth it. And it was, and it still was, though these days all Cathman could really see was the expression in that man Parker’s eyes. Which was no expression at all.
Marshall Howell had been different, easier to work with, easier to believe one could win out against. He’d been a tough man, and a criminal, but with some humanity in him. This one, Parker
It will happen, that’s all, and I don’t need to know about it the instant it does. When it happens, I’ll know soon enough, and then one of three things will happen. Parker will come bring me my ten percent, which is the least likely, and I’ll deal with him in the way I’m ready to deal with him. Or he and the rest of them will fade away, and I have his telephone number, and from that I have found his house, and I have seen his wife, none of which he knows, and I can finish it the other way. Or they will get caught, which would be the best thing, and I will be ready for that as well.
“The time is twelve fifty-two. In tomorrow’s weather”
Oh, enough. Cathman reached out and switched off the radio, but left the lights on. He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, and for a long time he didn’t sleep.
Only Ruth was still at her station at the counter, dealing with vacuum canisters as they came down from the cashier’s cage upstairs. George could see the others, Pete and Helen and Sam and Susan Cahill, all seated like him on the floor, backs against the wall, duct-taped into silence and immobility. A degree of background panic gave his own breathing a level of fibrillation that scared him some, but he knew it was under control, that unless something else happened he’d be able to go on breathing through to the end of this.
What was coming down now, from the cashier’s cage, at nearly one o’clock in the morning, was mostly chips being cashed in, and very rarely a purchase of more chips by some diehard loser up above. There wasn’t much activity at all at this point, and it really would be sensible for the robbers to get out of here now, before they lost part of their loot to customers upstairs cashing in, which they seemed to realize. George watched them give one another little looks and nods and hand signals, and then the one who’d slapped Susan Cahill went over and opened the door, the door they’d come through that was never opened and how much better if it never had been opened and headed up the stairs.
George knew there was a guard on duty up there, though he’d never seen him, seated at a desk on the landing in front of the door at the top of the stairs. That guard would have seen this robber with Susan Cahill when they came down, he wouldn’t suspect a thing, somebody coming up the stairs like that, he’d been hired to keep people from going downthose stairs.
Yes. Here he came, a beefy young man in a tan uniform, looking bewildered and angry and scared, hands knitted on top of his uniform hat on his head, holster at his right side hanging empty, the robber now holding two guns, one in each hand, shutting the door with his heel as he came in.
The big one, the one who’d taped George, went smiling over to the guard, saying “Welcome aboard, Jack. You are Jack, aren’t you?”
The guard stared at all the trussed people. He stared at the big man. He burst out, ‘Jesus, you’re not supposed to dothis!”
The big man laughed. “Oh, I know,” he said. “We’re just regular scamps. Put your hands behind your back, Jack.” Then he laughed again and said to the one with the two guns in his hands, “Back Jack; how do you like that?” To the guard he said, “I’m so glad your name isn’t Tim I’m not even gonna punch you in the belly for not having your hands behind your back. Not yet, I’m not.”
The guard quickly moved his arms, like a panicky drowner lunging toward the surface, and when his hands were behind his back the big man duct-taped them, then his mouth, then helped him sit, then did his ankles.
