keep in touch with him. We’ll call him, time to time, let him know we’re still gonna pay him, let him know it’s gonna be all right.’
‘And make sure he’s in place,’ Carlson said.
‘That, too,’ Melander agreed.
When Tom Hurley had bowed out of the bank job and suggested Parker to take his place, he’d given them a way to make contact, if they had to. There was a phone number, and they should ask for Mr Willis. But they shouldn’t start off with that call, they should wait for him to make the first move, to let them know he was interested. As it happened, he’d done everything with that first move, so they hadn’t had to use the Mr Willis number, but now they could.
Except, four days later, with their freshly installed telephone at the estate in Palm Beach, when they tried that number there was no answer. They had a go at it on and off for three days, and then Carlson said, ‘He’s following us.’
Melander didn’t like that. He walked around the empty living room, with the out-of-tune piano shoved into a corner, and he glared out at the terrace and the ocean and all the beautiful weather he was supposed to be enjoying instead of that icy northern shit, and he didn’t like it at all. ‘We left the son of a bitch alive,’ he complained.
‘Like I been saying,’ Carlson pointed out.
‘We left the son of a bitch alive,’ Melander insisted, ‘so he’d know we were good for it, he can count on us, we’ll come through. Not so he could follow us around and make trouble. We’re busy here, we got a lot on our minds, we don’t need this shit.’
‘Like I been saying,’ Carlson said.
‘Jesus, Hal,’ Melander said, ‘what made you so fucking bloodthirsty all of a sudden? You never wanted to go around popping people before.’
‘I don’t want to this time,’ Carlson said. ‘It just seems to me, before we did what we did, we should have thought it through a little more.’
‘Well, we didn’t,’ Melander said, ‘and I don’t see what more fucking thoughtwas gonna do about it. We did what we had to do, what we agreed we had to do, and we did it and it’s done and I swear to God, Hal, I want you out of my fucking face on this topic.’
‘I’m just saying,’ Carlson said.
‘I hearyou saying, and I’m tired of hearing you fucking saying, you follow me?’
Ross, speaking quietly as though in a room with some possibly dangerous dogs, said, ‘Maybe what we should do is go there.’
They stopped glaring at each other to frown at Ross. Melander said, ‘Go where?’
‘Where that phone number is,’ Ross said. ‘With a phone number, you can always get an address.’
Melander, feeling belligerent toward everybody, said, ‘Go there and do what? What’s the purpose?’
‘Maybe there’s something there tells us where he is,’ Ross said, still being very mild. ‘Or how to get in touch with him. And he’s supposed to have a woman there, too, maybe she knows where he is. Or maybe she should come stay with us awhile to make sure Parker doesn’t get to be too much.’
‘The woman,’ Melander said, nodding, losing his belligerence. ‘That’s a good idea.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Carlson said. ‘Maybe that just makes it worse. First we rob him, then we kidnap his lady friend, maybe he’s gonna’
Exasperated, Melander said, ‘Why do you keep worrying about how he’sgonna take it? Whose side are you on?’
‘Mine,’ Carlson said.
Ross said, ‘Let’s go take a look at the house.’
So they did, driving up the east coast to the still-icy North, and the house was in northwest New Jersey, seventy miles from New York, on a lake where most of the houses were seasonal, still shut up for the winter. The house the Mr Willis phone number led to, behind a rural mailbox that said “Willis” on the side, was small, part gray stone and part brown shingles, with an attached two-car garage. It was surrounded by trees and brush, and it was empty.
People lived here. There was much evidence of the woman, less evidence of the man, who had to be Parker. They found three guns stashed in the house, one clipped under the living room sofa, one clipped under the bed, and one in a sliding wood panel in the garage, next to the kitchen door, just above the button to operate the overhead garage door. That last was the one that got to Carlson. He could see it: the guy makes an innocent turn to push that button, open or close the overhead door, and turns back with an S&W Chiefs Special .38 in his hand.
They could see that the woman had packed, and probably for an extended stay. But there was nothing to show where she’d gone, no travel agent’s itinerary, no notes about airline connections, nothing. There was nothing at all about Parker; his footprint was not deep in this house.
They stayed four days in the house, finding a couple of diners and a supermarket not too many miles away, waiting to see if anybody showed up or if there was a phone call. If Parker phoned, looking for his woman, they’d talk to him, see if they could cool him out, discuss it with him.
But nothing happened, no calls, no visits, and after four days Melander couldn’t stand it anymore. ‘And it’s fucking cold,’ he said. ‘This isn’t where I was gonna be right now,’
Carlson said, ‘We aren’t doing anything here except act like jerk-offs.’
Melander, who’d been thinking the same thing, didn’t like the thought when he heard it expressed. ‘Jerk-offs? What are you talking about?’
‘We’re sitting around here,’ Carlson told him; ‘waiting for people who aren’t here and aren’t gonna be here and in fact are probably themselves in Palm Beach.’
