Parker16 Butcher's Moon (27 page)

Ed Mackey and his girl Brenda drove north from New Orleans in a yellow Jaguar Mackey owned under his Illinois name of Edwin Mills. Hairy, stocky, just under average height, Mackey was about forty years of age and had an aggressive, pushing, cocky manner like a good club fighter. Though his chest and shoulders and back were covered with curly black hair, he was beginning to thin on top, a fact he usually hid, like now, with a cloth cap at a jaunty angle down over his eyes. He drove with his head back a bit, looking out from under the bill of his cap and through the narrow windshield of the Jaguar at the road unwinding toward Tyler.

Brenda said, "This fellow in Tyler. Isn't he one of the people in that hijacking last year? Those paintings?"

"Parker, yeah," Mackey said. "You remember him, the mean-looking one."

"We went to that party with him."

Mackey grinned at her. He really liked Brenda, she was okay. "That's the one," he said.

"He didn't exactly turn me on," Brenda said. A slender girl in her mid-twenties, Brenda was good-looking in a no-nonsense way, and had a lot of leg. She was the best woman Mackey had ever gone with, because she was easy in her mind; she knew who she was, and she liked who she was, and she was very easy to get along with. Most people, men and women, weren't like that; most people didn't know who they were, didn't like who they thought they were, and weren't at all easy to get along with.

"You're okay, Brenda," Mackey said.

She nodded, agreeing with him without making an issue of it, because she was thinking of other things. She said, "Do you think this one will work out?"

"It better," Mackey said. "You know how nervous I get when I start wallpapering."

"I don't see why," she said. "I never have any trouble at

all."

"Well, you always go to some guy behind the counter," he told her. "He's so busy looking at you, it don't matter what you write on the check. You could put Fuck You down for your signature, they'd still cash it."

"Don't talk dirty," Brenda said.

"In the car," Mackey amended.

She smiled at him, with a sidelong look. "In the car," she said.

It had been six years since Mike Carlow had worked with Parker; he was looking forward to seeing him again. Parker had been square the last time, when they'd knocked over that coin convention in Indianapolis, and it wasn't too often you worked with somebody you could trust.

What had happened, Carlow had wound up in custody after the robbery, but Parker had gotten away with the coins. Another guy in on it, a Nazi named Otto Mainzer, had also been picked up by the law, and the only thing that had saved Carlow's skin was Mainzer's obnoxious personality. Mainzer had made the cops hate him so much that they offered Carlow a free ride out of town if he would put Mainzer on ice for them. Hating Mainzer himself, Carlow had sung like the Andrews Sisters and had come out of it all clean and clear and safe, and when he'd gotten home to San Diego, damned if Parker hadn't sent him his quarter of the profits: fifty thousand dollars.

That had turned into the JJ-2. Three wins, two third places, and one spectacular crash at Ontario Speedway. A good car, the old JJ-2.

A car, to Mike Carlow, was something that took you from Point A to Point B in one second flat, regardless of the distance in between. That was the ideal, anyway, striven for but not as yet reached in either Detroit or Europe; or in the workshop of Mike Carlow. He was a racing driver, in his early forties now, who'd been at it since high school, when he'd started by pushing one clunker after another around the stock-car tracks. While still a teenager he'd designed a racing car with a center of gravity guaranteed to be unaffected by the amount of fuel left in the tank, because there wasn't any tank; the car was built around a frame of hollow aluminum tubing, which would hold the fuel supply. When someone he showed the idea to objected that it might be a little dangerous to surround the driver with gasoline, he'd said, "So what?"

Racing cars would probably be his death, but until then they were his life. And if they didn't cost so damn much to design and build and care for, he never would get involved in jobs with people like Parker, taking them safely and quickly away from the scene of a score. But they did cost, and he did refuse to simply become a hired hand for one of the major companies, so here he was again, back on the road, pushing his modified Datsun 240Z toward Tyler. And considering the different guys he'd driven for over the years in jobs like this, he was pleased that this time it was a score set up by Parker.

Frank Elkins and Ralph Wiss took 4urns driving their Pontiac down from Chicago. They'd worked together for fifteen years, they owned homes in the same Chicago suburb, their families visited back and forth, and it was beginning to seem that in a few years Elkins' daughter Pam and Wiss' son Jason would be getting married. Both wives knew what Elkins and Wiss did for a living, but the children and the cousins and the nieces and all the rest were kept in the dark. "We do specialty promotions," Frank Elkins would say, if asked, and Ralph Wiss would nod. Specialty promotions.

Wiss was a safe man, a jugger, a man whose specialty was opening safes by whatever means was most appropriate. He was comfortable with liquid nitro and with plastic explosive, he was expert at peeling, he could drill out a combination lock or cut a circular hole in the top of a solid steel safe. He had helped to tunnel into vaults, to by-pass time locks and to remove wall safes entirely, so they could be worked on at leisure somewhere else. A small narrow man with a concentrated look, Wiss was a skilled craftsman, as devoted to his work as any fine jeweler.

Elkins was a general purpose man, a utility infielder. He would hold the gun, or carry the duffel bag full of cash, or keep an eye out the front window. He was the eyes and the muscles, complementing Wiss' brain. They knew one another completely by now, trusted one another, and worked together with no waste motion.

The last time these two had seen Parker was in Copper Canyon, the time the whole town had been cleaned out. Before that, they'd worked with him in St. Louis, hitting a syndicate operation, a place where the local bookies' comeback money was collected. Normally, people like Wiss and Elkins left syndicate places alone, but at the time Parker had had some sort of feud on with a boss named Bronson, and since it was bound to be a safe and profitable score, Wiss and Elkins had been happy to work it with him.

They didn't talk much on the drive, being too comfortable with one another to need to force conversation. They did both wonder aloud about the score they were coming down to, but they didn't worry about it. Elkins said, "If it's Parker, it's all right."

"He gets gaudy sometimes," Wiss said. He was a man with no taste for melodrama at all.

"But safe," Elkins said.

Wiss shrugged. He was always guarded, always kept a little in reserve. "It's worth the drive," he said.

Philly Webb drove the Buick west from Baltimore. The new blue paint job sparkled at him from the hood, the new license plates were a complementary blue from Delaware, and the new identification in the glove compartment and his hip pocket said that the Buick was registered to one Justin Baxter of Wilmington and that he himself was the same Justin Baxter."

Webb was a driver, like Mike Carlow, but he never had anything to do with racing. Robbery was his only profession, partying and gambling was where the money went, and the Buick was his single hobby.

This was his fifth Buick. He bought one every few years, buying it new and legit, straight out of a dealer's window. But within a week a new car in his possession had completely lost its original identity and would never find it again. He switched engines so as to switch motor numbers, he altered serial numbers, he changed the paint job, he bought false registration and fake license plates. And after he'd had the car for a few months he would do the same thing all over again, changing things around, re-establishing yet another new identity. By the time he'd owned a car for three years, it would probably have operated under ten or twelve registrations, colors, and sets of license plates.

In addition to the periodic face lifts done mainly for the hell of it, Webb also completely redid his current Buick immediately after working a score. The blue paint on this car was less than three weeks old, but the car would be some other color within twenty-four hours of his returning to Baltimore. He prided himself on having attained the absolutely untraceable car, but in truth most of the changes he put his cars through were unnecessary, done more as a hobby than for any real reason.

Short and chunky and olive-complexioned, Webb had the chest and arms of a weight lifter, giving him a vaguely apelike look. He fit behind the wheel of a car with the naturalness of a cabdriver, and always seemed a little awkward when forced to walk. He had last worked with Parker in the air-base robbery with Stan Devers in Upstate New York. He'd come away with forty-two thousand out of that, every dollar of it long since spent, and he was looking forward to working with Parker again.

Forty

A murmur of voices woke Faran. He was very uncomfortable and he had a lousy cottony headache, and at first he couldn't remember where he was or what was going on. Then he tried to shift on the bed, and realized his wrists were tied behind him, and it all came back.

Parker. The son of a bitch had kidnapped him last night, just as he was closing the club. Standing there in the street, cool and calm and taking his time, he'd tied Faran's wrists and put some sort of bag over his head and then walked him to a car and drove him here—wherever here was.

In an apartment building, he knew that much. They had driven for a while, not long enough to be out of the city, and just before the car stopped, it had dipped down some sort of short incline. An apartment building with a basement garage. And an elevator, in which they rode up together, his head still inside the bag, silent Parker's hand on his elbow. Then along a Corridor until Parker stopped him and withdrew his hand for a few seconds. The grate of a key in a lock. He was led into the apartment, the door was closed, and the bag was taken away.

The apartment was a surprise. He'd expected a grubby room somewhere, but it wasn't like that at all. It was a pleasant middle-class apartment, sofa and chairs and TV and lamps and tables. Green drapes covering windows in the far wall. Carpeting, with a bit of dark-stained wood flooring showing around the edges of the room.

Near the entrance door was a dining area: an oval table and four chairs, tucked into the corner. Parker sat Faran down there, produced pen and paper, and started asking questions. At first Faran wouldn't answer, and he expected to be threatened and maybe punched around, but Parker didn't do anything like that at all. He just took a small white box out of his pocket and put it on the table where Faran could see the severed finger lying inside it. Then he asked the questions again, and after a short hesitation Faran started answering.

The questions went on till long after sunup, till Faran was so exhausted he could barely keep his head vertical and his eyes open. But Parker kept pushing, wanting to know more, demanding details, writing it all down on sheet after sheet of paper. Doing sketches and blueprints and insisting that Faran study them, tell him where the details were wrong. What kind of window is this? How many people work in that office? What time does this place open?

Till at last it was finished. Faran fell asleep at the table while Parker read through his notes once more, to be sure there wasn't anything else he needed to know. Then Parker had to thump him and shout at him and yank him by the hair to wake him up enough so he could stand and be marched into a bedroom and locked away in a closet. It was wide enough so he could lean his back against one side wall and stretch his feet out to the other, and that was the way he slept, until midafternoon. At any rate, he thought it was probably midafternoon, since there hadn't been any direct sunlight on the closed drapes in the morning but there was when Parker unlocked the closet door and let him out.

Parker had obviously slept in the bed, and looked rested and hard. Faran felt cramped, stiff, and logy, and his stomach was acting up again. He couldn't keep from breaking wind all over the place, even after Parker untied his wrists and let him use the john. For the next hour or so Faran remained untied, but the way Parker looked at him, he knew better than to try anything. The two of them had a silent meal together, made out of cans from the kitchen closet, and then Parker let him sit in the living room for an hour or so. They watched television, and it seemed to Faran that Parker didn't care what program he watched. It was as though he wasn't really watching television at all, but was concentrating on things inside his own head and found it restful to fill the time with the flittering shadows and piping voices from the TV set.

Then the doorbell rang, and at once Parker turned off the TV, tied Faran's wrists again, and marched him to the bedroom. In the bedroom he pointed at Faran's face and said, "Those teeth in the front. They caps?"

"On the top, yeah."

Parker nodded toward the window. "If I come back in and that shade is up," he said, "I'll take those caps out of your head."

Faran just nodded. He didn't want to open his mouth to say anything.

Then Parker left him, and he sat on the bed, and gradually the light against the window shade dimmed. From time to time he heard the doorbell ring again, and after a while he could make out several male voices. He was having trouble believing it, but it had to be true: Parker was going to start a war. He was supposed to be a loner, an orphan without true connections, but he was bringing in people from somewhere, and he was honest to God going to start a war against Dutch and Calesian and Ernie Dulare. Especially Ernie Dulare, who was the most vulnerable to the kind of war Parker apparently intended to wage.

If they found out, if Ernie and Dutch and Calesian ever found out where Parker had gotten his information, Faran knew they would kill him. No question, no bullshit about this being the bloodless new order, they would flat kill him.