Parker did his barking laugh. “He isn’t chasing a fifteen-year-old girl,” he said, “he’s chasing a boat full of money. And he wants ten percent. Ten percent.”
“It’s a finder’s fee. You’ll bedoing all the work.”
“Why isn’t he greedier? Why doesn’t he want more? Why isn’t he afraid we’ll stiff him? Why does he have to tell me his thoughts about politics and gambling?”
“He’s new to this,” she suggested. “He’s nervous, so he keeps talking.”
“Well, that’s another thing that’s wrong. He says he’s got a perfect rep, nobody would think twice he could be linked up to something like this. So why is he? Why is he taking thirty years of straight arrow and tossing it in the wastebasket for ten percent of something that might not happen? If he never thought this way before, how can he think this way now? What’s different in him?”
“Maybe he lied to you,” she said. “Maybe he’s not as clean as he says.”
“Then the cops will be on him the day after we pull the job, and what he has on me is a name and a phone number.” He stopped his pacing to look around the porch, and then at Claire. “You want to move from here?”
“I like this house.”
He paced again, looking at nothing. “I was thinking, when I was there, yesterday. There was an access road there, went down to the water, right next to the station, with a ramp at the bottom where you could launch a boat. I was thinking, there’s nobody around, nobody even looking at the river, it’s too early in the season. This guy knows two things about me, I could launch him right now, and come home, and forget it. All done.”
She winced a little at the idea, but said, “Why didn’t you?”
“Because he makes no sense,” he told her. He paced the porch as though he were in the cell he’d said he didn’t like. “I want to figure him out. I want to know what’s behind him, what he’s doing, I want to know who he is, what he is, why he moves the way he does. Then I’ll decide what to do about him.” He stopped in front of her, frowning down at her, thinking. “You want to help?”
She blinked, and looked tense. “You know,” she said, “I don’t like … there’s things I don’t like.”
“Nothing with trouble,” he promised. “I’ve got the guy’s calling card. You just spend some time in the library, spend some time on the phone. He’ll have a paper trail. Get me a biography.”
“I could do that,” she agreed. “And what will you be doing?”
“I’ll go talk to a few guys,” Parker said.
6
“Edward Lynch,” Parker said, and extended a credit card with that name on it.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Lynch,” the desk clerk said. She had a neat egg-shaped head with straight brown hair down both sides of it, like curtains at a window, and nothing much in the window. “Pleasant trip?”
“Yes,” he said, and turned away from her canned chatter to look at the big echoing interior of the Brown Palace, Denver’s finest, built around a great square atrium and furnished to let you know that you were in the western United States but that good taste prevailed. On the upper floors, all the rooms were on the far side of the halls, with a low wall on this side, overlooking the lobby. Here and there in the big space, groups of people sat in the low armchairs and sofas, leaning toward one another to talk things over, their words disappearing in the air. But a shotgun mike in any of the upper halls could pick up every conversation in the room.
“Here you are, Mr. Lynch.”
Parker signed the credit card slip and took the plastic key. “I think I have messages.”
She turned, as neatly articulated as a Barbie, and said, “Yes, here we are. Two messages.” She slid the envelopes across the desk toward him. “Will you want assistance with your luggage?”
“No, I’m okay.”
His luggage was one small brown canvas bag; he’d be here only one night. Picking the bag up, stuffing the message envelopes into his jacket pocket, he crossed to the elevators, not bothering to look out over the groups in the lobby. Mike and Dan wouldn’t be there, they’d be waiting for his call, in their rooms.
You don’t meet where you’re going to pull the job, nowhere near it. And you don’t meet anywhere that you’ve got a base or a drop or a contact or a home. Three days ago, just after his conversation with Claire, Parker had started making phone calls, and when he made contact with the two guys he wanted he did a minimum of small talk and then said the same thing both times: “I ran into Edward Lynch the other day. Remember him?” Both guys said yeah, they remembered Edward Lynch, what’s he doing these days? “Salesman, travels all over the country. Said he was going to Denver, meet Bill Brown there on Thursday, then on and on, travel every which way. I’d hate that life.” Both guys agreed that Edward Lynch sure had it tough these days, and they did a little more nonsense talk, and hung up, and now it was Thursday and Parker was here as Edward Lynch, and he had the two messages in his pocket.
The room was a room, with a view of Denver, a city that’s flat and broad. From a high floor like this, it looks tan, unmoving, a desert where people once used to live.
After Parker threw cold water on his face and unpacked his bag, he spread the two messages on the table beside the phone. Both gave him numbers here in the hotel. One was from Jack Strongarm and the other from Chuck Michaels. Jack Strongarm would be Dan Wycza, a big burly guy who was known to work as a professional wrestler when times were tough; the Strongarm moniker was what he used in the ring. Chuck Michaels would be Mike Carlow, a driver who was also a race-driver on the professional circuit; a madman on the track, but otherwise solid and reliable and sure.
Parker had no idea yet if this boat thing could be made to work, but if there was anything in it he’d need good pros to help put it together. He’d worked with both Wycza and Carlow more than once, and the best thing was, the last two times out with each of them everybody’d made a profit. So Wycza and Car-low would have good memories of Parker and reason to want to work with him again.
He called both message numbers, and both were answered by wary voices. “Is this four twenty-nine?” he asked each time, since his room was 924, and both said no. He apologized twice, hung up, carried the bucket away to get ice, and when he was headed back he saw Mike Carlow coming the other way. A narrow rawboned guy in his forties, Carlow was a little shorter than medium height; good for fitting into those race cars. He had the leathery
