is like interest on the loan.’
‘I’m not loaning you anything,’ Parker said.
Melander and Carlson were stuffing the rest of the cash into the two suitcases. Melander said, ‘I’m afraid you got to, pal. You don’t have a choice, and we don’t have a choice.’
Ross showed Parker a pistol but didn’t exactly point it at him. ‘You shouldn’t stand up,’ he said, ‘and you shouldn’t move your hands off the table.’
Parker said, ‘Tom Hurley told me you guys weren’t hijackers.’
‘We aren’t hijackers,’ Ross said with simple sincerity. ‘You’ll get your money. The job goes down two months from now, and then the money’s yours. With interest.’
Melander said, ‘Pal, I’m sorry we got to act this way, but what’s our choice? We thought you’d come in with us, and then everything’d be fine. I’m sorry you feel the way you do, but there it is.’
Carlson said, ‘You can count on us to pay you. I never stiffed another mechanic in my life.’
You’re stiffing me now, Parker thought, but what was the point talking?
The three exchanged glances, as though they thought there might be something more to say, and then Melander turned to Parker and spread his hands: ‘You know where we’re going.’
‘Palm Beach.’
‘If we were hijackers, we’d kill you now.’
The only thing to do, Parker thought, and waited. Carlson said, ‘But that isn’t our style.’
Then you’re dead, Parker thought, and waited.
Melander said, ‘It’s just, we’d like you to stay at home the next couple months. We’ll phone you sometimes, we’d like to know you’re there.’
Parker shrugged. There was nothing to say to these people.
Apparently, they now themselves thought they’d said enough. They moved toward the door, Ross putting the pistol away, and left, not looking back at him.
Parker sat there, hands palm-down on the table, little stack of bills between his hands. His money was gone, about to become an electronic impulse in Texas. This wasn’t what it was supposed to be, and it wasn’t what it was going to be.
He got to his feet, and crossed to the phone, and called Claire, at the house up in New Jersey When she answered, without identifying himself he said, ‘You remember that hotel with the shark scare,’ meaning a place they’d stayed once in Miami Beach.
‘Yes.’
‘Go there for a couple months, I’ll call you.’
‘Now?’
‘You can wait a couple days, till the phone rings, but don’t answer,’ he said, and hung up.
5
He was starting from Evansville, and he had two months to get to Palm Beach. In that time, there would be preparations to make, and preparations cost money. So what he had to do, most of the time, for the next month and a half, was collect money.
Cash is harder to find than it used to be. There are no cash payrolls. Stadium box offices, travel agents, department stores, all deal mostly in credit cards. An armored car can’t be taken down by one man working alone. A bank can be taken by a single-O, but all he gets is what’s in one teller’s cage, which isn’t enough for the risk. So it’s hard to find cash, in useful amounts. But it isn’t impossible.
What he had, including the “interest” his three former partners had given him, was a little over three thousand dollars in cash. The car he was driving, a tan Ford Taurus with Oklahoma plates, was clean enough for a traffic stop, not clean enough for an in- depth study of the paperwork. Clipped under the dash of the Taurus, to the right of the steering wheel column, was a .38 Special Colt Cobra, while under his shirt on the left side, in a narrow suede holster, was a Hi-Standard snub- nose Sentinel .22, useless unless the target is within arm’s reach. He also had a few changes of clothing of utilitarian type, to make him look like somebody who works with his hands, and that was it.
What he needed first was better guns, then more money, then better clothing and luggage, then better wheels. He needed to change his appearance, too, not for the three guys he was going to kill but for the Palm Beach police; he needed to be somebody who wouldn’t make the law look twice.
Melander had paid for this motel room with a credit card that would probably self-destruct by tomorrow, so the first thing to do was get out of here. Parker carried his bag, lighter than it should have been, out to the Taurus. Five minutes later he was on Interstate 164, headed south into Kentucky.
Throughout the South, there are more gun stores out along the state highways than there are in downtowns or shopping malls, and there’s a number of reasons for that. The stores need good parking areas, they don’t want to have to deal with antsy neighbors or troublesome landlords or the wrong kind of pedestrian traffic, and most of their customers are rural rather than urban.
So the stores are in the country, but they aren’t countrified. They have first-rate security, with solid locks, burglar alarms wired to the nearest state police barracks, shatterproof glass in their display windows, iron bars, and some even have motion sensors.
Parker chose a place called ‘A-Betta-Deala GUNS,’ mostly because it didn’t have a dog. It was a broad one- story building beside a state road in central Kentucky, with its name in red letters on a huge white sign on the roof. Flanking the barred and gated double front doors were two wide display windows on either side, three of them featuring rifles and shotguns, the fourth showing handguns.
Two and a quarter miles to the south of the gun shop was the garage and storage lot of the County Highway Department, and four miles beyond that was the nearest state police barracks. Parker left the Taurus at the side of A-Betta-Deala at quarter after three in the morning, where it wouldn’t be readily noticed from the road. Then he walked the two and a quarter miles south along the hilly, curvy road through mostly scrub forest. The four times he
