bond between the two of them. He said, “So if you didn’t come here to divvy up the money, or anything like that, why did you come?”
“To kill him.”
“Hah. No loose ends.”
“That’s right.”
“I wish I’d done it that way myself, years ago,” the guy said. “All right, Mr. Parker, I want in. I’ve got you, but I don’t want you, I want money. Are your partners dead, too?”
“No. We know each other, we work together.”
“So they’re waiting for you to come back, mission accomplished, the loose cannon dealt with.”
“Right. And we divvy the money and go our ways.”
“So if I kill you,” the guy said, “I can’t find them, and I can’t get any money. But if I let you live, I’ve got to have money. I need money, that’s what it comes down to.”
“I could see that.”
“So what’s your offer?”
“We got over four hundred thousand,” Parker said.
The guy frowned. “The radio said three and a half.”
“I don’t know about that. Usually they estimate high. All I know is, we got over four.” Because, to make his story work, there had to seem to be enough for everybody. “There’s five of us, so that’s eighty apiece, a little more than eighty. You help me in two ways, and”
“Like letting you live.”
Parker shook his head. “You aren’t gonna kill me, because I’m not a threat to you like this, and I’m no use to you dead. Don’t talk as though we’re both ignorant.”
“Well, fuck me,” the guy said, with a surprised laugh. “You talk pretty tough for somebody sitting under my gun. You think I never killed anybody?”
“I think you never killed anybody when you didn’t have a reason for it,” Parker said. “Do you want to listen to my proposition?”
The guy shrugged. “Help you two ways, you said.”
“First, kill Cathman. I need him dead. I can’t do it myself laced up like this, so either you do it or unhook me so I can do it myself.”
“We’ll work on that,” the guy said. “What’s the other?”
“For that, I do need to be unhooked,” Parker said.
“I don’t think so. For what?”
“I’ve got to search in here and in the office. I’ve got to see what else he put on paper that could make trouble for me.”
“I’ll search for you. You tell me what you’re looking for.”
“No.”
The guy looked at him, and waited, and then said, “No? That’s it, no?”
“That’s it. No. Do you want to hear what your side is?”
“This should be good.”
“Why not? If you kill Cathman, or let me do it, and let me run my search in here, that makes you a partner. I won’t have trouble with the others, so neither will you. We’ll each be getting a little over eighty. So we take twelve out of each of us, that still gives us almost seventy apiece, which is still good, and sixty for you. Is sixty enough for you?”
Clearly, the guy would try to figure out how to get it all, how not to have any partners at the end of the day, but just as clearly he’d also try to figure out how to make it look as though he was content with a piece. Should he pretend to think sixty was enough? Parker watched him think it through, and at last the guy grinned a little and said, “If things’d worked out the way I wanted, I’d have it all. Tell me why didn’t you come back to the cabins.”
“Youwere there?” Parker said. “Did you by any chance run into some bikers?”
The guy’s hand moved toward his wounded ear, but then lowered again. He said, “You know about them.”
“We had a guy with a boat,” Parker told him, “for when we left the ship. He sold us out to those people, but when we got in his boat it didn’t feel right, so we made him tell us what he’d done.”
“So where did you go instead?”
“His landing. He’s got a place upstream from the cottages, we went there. He had a whole operation up there, a shack by the water, he grows marijuana in peat moss bags suspended on the water. That’s his link with the bikers, he’s the farmer, they’re the processors.”
“A shack on the water,” the guy said. “I’ve heard about that peat moss business, it’s been tried before. Is that where your partners are, the shack?”
“Yes.”
“Telephone there?”
“Of course not.”
