Her face paled, sweat beaded on her forehead, and her eyes glazed. Parker said, ‘Gladys! Don’t let her fall!’
Gladys finally got her wits about her. Scrambling to her feet, tossing onto the desk the money she’d been holding, she leaned toward the cashier, stretching out an arm while she snapped at Parker in a quick harsh voice, ‘Put that gun away! Don’t you know what you’re doing?’
Ashort green vinyl sofa stood against the sidewalk Parker said, ‘Come on, Gladys, help her to the sofa.’ Gladys had to come around the desk to reach the cashier, but she still glared at Parker. ‘She’s from Guatemala,’ she said, as though that explained everything. ‘She saw
‘
The cashier was moaning now, sliding down the desk, the strength giving out in her legs. Parker said, ‘Get her to the sofa, Gladys, and she won’t have to look at the gun.’
‘Maria,’ Gladys murmured, helping the other woman, moving her with difficulty away from the desk and over toward the sofa. ‘Come on, Maria, he won’t do anything, it’s all right.’
That’s right, Parker wouldn’t be doing anything, at least with the Sentinel, not this time. He wanted not to use it unless he absolutely had to, because that, too, could become a pattern, a series of robberies that always began with the wounding of one of the victims.
The two women sat on the sofa, Maria collapsed into herself like a car-crash dummy, Gladys hovering next to her, murmuring, then turning to glare again at Parker and say, ‘Are you robbingus? Is that actually what this is? Are you actually robbingus?’
‘Yes,’ Parker said, and moved around the desk toward the safe.
‘For money?’ Gladys demanded. ‘The traumayou’re giving this poor woman for money?’
‘Keep her calm,’ Parker said, ‘and nobody’s going to get hurt.’
He had brought with him a collapsible black vinyl bag with a zipper, inside his shirt at the back. Now he took it out, put the Sentinel handy on the desk, and stuffed cash into the bag. When it was full, he zipped it shut and put the rest of the money in his pockets.
There was one line in here for both phone and fax. He unplugged the line at the wall and at the phone, rolled it up, and pocketed it, then carried the vinyl bag and the Sentinel over to the two women on the sofa. ‘Gladys,’ he said.
She looked up at him. She was calmer now, and Maria was getting over her faint. Gladys was ready to stop being angry and start being worried. ‘You wouldn’t dare shoot that,’ she said. ‘Not with all the people around.’
‘Gladys,’ Parker said, ‘there’s gunshots going off in the movies all around us. I could empty this into you, and nobody’d even look away from the screen.’
Gladys blinked, then stared at the gun. She could be seen braving herself to stare at it. Maria moaned again and closed her eyes, but wasn’t unconscious.
Parker said, ‘I’ll wait out in the hall for a few minutes. If you come out too soon, I’ll shoot you. You know I will, don’t you?’
She looked from the Sentinel to his face. ‘Yes,’ she whispered.
‘You decide when to come out, Gladys,’ he told her. ‘But take your time. Think what a trauma it would be for Maria, to see you lying in a lot of blood.’
Gladys swallowed. ‘I’ll take my time,’ she said.
10
From a pay phone in Houston, Parker called a guy he knew named Mackey and got his girlfriend Brenda.
‘Ed around?’
‘Somewhere,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he’s looking for work.’
‘I don’t have any. What I want is a name.’
‘Yours or somebody else’s?’
‘Both,’ Parker said. ‘Maybe he could call me at wait a minute two o’clock your time.’
‘You’re in a different time?’
‘Yes,’ he said, and gave her the number of another pay phone, backward.
‘I’ll tell him,’ she promised.
‘How’ve you been keeping yourself?’
‘Busy,’ he said, and hung up, and went away in his dog collar to make today’s cash deposits into his nine bank accounts, and then shift more of that money into the accounts in Galveston.
At three, changed out of the religious clothes, he went to that second pay phone, mounted on a stick to one side of a gas station, by the air hose. He stopped the Taurus in front of the air hose, got out, stepped toward the phone, and it rang.
Ed Mackey sounded chipper, like always. ‘Brenda says you’re looking for a name.’
‘There was somebody you knew, in Texas or somewhere, could give me a name.’
‘I know who you mean,’ Mackey said. ‘I think he specializes in Spanish names, though, you know? People that wanna bring their money north.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ Parker said.
‘Okay. He’s in Corpus Christi, he’s in the phone book there, he calls himself Julius Norte.’ He pronounced the last name as two syllables: Nor-tay.
