Parker16 Butcher's Moon (33 page)

"Drill," Wiss decided.

Elkins nodded. "Sure."

Wiss brought an empty film can over, set the flashlight on it so that it shone on the face of the safe, and sat on the floor directly in front of the safe with his black-leather bag at his side. As he opened the bag, Elkins said, "I'll go on downstairs."

Wiss was involved in his own head. "Uh huh," he said, taking things out of the bag, and didn't look around when Elkins left the room.

Elkins made his way downstairs in the dark, entered the cashier's booth, and sat on the stool there with his elbows on the counter. He could look out diagonally through the cashier's window and the glass doors at the street, where absolutely nothing at all was happening.

After a minute he heard the faint whirring of an electric drill from upstairs.

At Vigilant, the four guards and one of the ready-room men
were
tied and gagged and locked in one of the smaller rooms downstairs. Handy McKay and Fred Ducasse and Philly Webb
were
upstairs, playing pinochle. The other ready-room man was
tied
to a chair and blindfolded, so that the three men wouldn't
have
to wear their hoods. They needed the ready man present in
case
the phone should ring. As Handy had told him, "If it rings,
you'll
do the talking. If you say the right things, there won't be any problem. But if you say something that brings trouble
here
—guess who'll be the first one in the line of fire?"

"I'm not crazy," the man said. He had gotten over being annoyed that Handy and Ducasse weren't crazy either.

"That's fine," Handy told him, and then made a phone call himself to Parker. "Everything's fine here," he said.

"Good."

Handy gave him the phone number at Vigilant and said,
"See
you later."

"So long," said Parker.

Flynn stood in the vault doorway, lips pursed in disap
proval,
watching Dalesia and Hurley stuff wads of bills into two
flat
black dispatch cases they had been carrying beneath their
shirts.
When both soft leather cases were bulging with bills, the
two
men brought out money belts from around their waists and
began
packing the compartments of those as well.

Next door, Mackey sat at Flynn's desk, the phone to his ear, occasionally exchanging a word with Wycza. Mackey had his
feet
up on the desk and was smoking a cigar from Flynn's humidor. He had considered putting Wycza on hold long enough
to
call Brenda, waiting for him at the Holiday Inn, but decided
he
shouldn't fool around like that. Besides, she was probably
asleep
by now.

Downstairs, Wycza and Florio talked health food. Wycza, like most professionals, believed in keeping the civilians as calm as possible, since nervous people tend to insist on getting themselves shot, so he had tried several conversational openings with Florio, talking about the boxing world and the nightclub world and the gambling world, until he got around to physical exercise, care of the body, and health food. That turned out to be Florio's subject; the floodgates opened, and out it came. "Now, Adelle Davis—"

"Carlton Fredericks—"

"Natural sea salt," Wycza insisted, "is a fake. That's one case where it doesn't matter, salt is salt."

"The processing plants." Florio, forgetting Mike Carlow's gun, forgetting the robbery going on upstairs, leaned over the table, gesturing, talking emphatically and learnedly.

Wycza, too, was a health nut, and had almost himself forgotten the reason they were all here. He rode his hobby-horse just as hard as Florio did, the two men finding broad areas of agreement and occasional bumps of deep disagreement of a depth that was almost religious.

Carlow stayed out of the conversation completely. His own hobby-horse was racing cars, which had nothing to do with health or with proper care of the human body. He simply sat where he was, right hand under the table, watched the action around the room, and let the words wash unheeded over him.

Stan Devers did get into it from time to time. He himself was in good physical shape and always had been, but had never worried about it or adjusted his eating habits or life style to suit some physical ideal, and his belief was that Florio and Wycza were both crazy. He kept this opinion to himself most of the time, but every once in a while he would hear them agree on some piece of raving lunacy and he would just have to jump in and tell them he thought they were wrong. Then they'd team up on him, Wycza reeling off statistics, Florio telling horror stories about boxers and wrestlers and other great physical specimens who had ruined themselves with smoking or carbohydrates or improper sleeping habits, and Devers would retire again, overwhelmed but unconvinced.

It was turning into a grand social evening for everybody.

At twenty minutes to one Ralph Wiss drilled his sixth hole in the front of the safe, heard the snap of the mechanism inside, turned the handle down, and the safe door slowly opened. "Good," he said to himself, packed his tools away in his leather bag, and got to his feet. He was stiff all over, but particularly in the knees and the back, and his mouth was incredibly dry. His mouth always became dry when he was working on a safe, but it
was
the result of his unconscious S whistling and not of any nervousness.

There were paper cups with the water cooler. He drank two
cups
of water, crumpled the cup and threw it away, and went
out
by the men's room to call down the stairs, "Frank."

"Coming."

Wiss held the flashlight so Elkins could see to come up the stairs. Elkins had been half dozing in the cashier's booth, and he
came
up yawning and stretching and scratching the back of his neck. At the top of the stairs, he said, "You got it?"

"Sure."

They went back into the office and took the money out of
the
safe, and it totaled ten thousand, four hundred fifty dollars.
About
half of it went in their pockets and the rest into Wiss'
leather
bag with his tools. Then they took out handkerchiefs and
gave
a brisk rubdown to the few surfaces they'd touched, and
went
downstairs and out of the theater and walked to the car.

The phone said to Wycza, "We're all set, now. Coming
down."

"Huh? Oh, right."

He and Florio had been talking about polyunsaturates. Wycza, feeling a slight embarrassment, as though he were an Insurance salesman pretending to be on a social call, hung up
the
telephone and said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Florio, but it's back to business."

Florio looked startled for just a second. Then he glanced at
Devers
and Carlow, looked back at Wycza, and gave a sour grin.
"You
had me going there for a while," he said.

"I wasn't conning you, Mr. Florio," Wycza said. "I wish we could keep talking."

Florio studied him skeptically, then grinned again, not quite as sourly. "Yeah, r guess you do," he said. "Well, I'll tell you one thing, pal. You didn't pick yourself a job that's too good for your health."

"I hope you're wrong," Wycza said. "But anyway, you'll have to walk us outside now."

Florio nodded. "I figured that much. Do I get hit on the head later? I'm worried about concussions."

"We'll work something out," Wycza promised.

"Thanks."

"Now," Wycza said, and got to his feet.

Upstairs, Mackey was having a little more trouble with Flynn. "If I go out with you people," Flynn was saying, "how do I know I won't get shot down in the parking lot?"

"Because we're not crazy people," Mackey told him.

Dalesia said, "Why should we get ourselves wanted for murder?"

But it was Hurley who put in the clincher. "If we were going to shoot you, you asshole," he said, "we'd do it right here, in the privacy of your office. So shut up and walk."

Flynn shut up and walked. He and Mackey and Hurley and Dalesia walked out to the main gaming area, Mackey and Flynn side by side in front, Hurley and Dalesia carrying the dispatch cases behind them. George, the man on duty at the door, looked startled when they came out, but Flynn did his job well, talking to the man just the way Mackey had explained it. "Keep an eye on things, George," Flynn said. "We have to go downstairs for a few minutes."

George, plainly surprised and curious, said, "Okay, Mr. Flynn."

"If anything comes up before we get back, I'll be with Mr. Florio."

"Yes, sir."

They went downstairs, and found Florio and the other three standing in a tight conversational grouping near the front door. The two groups combined, and all eight men went outside and walked around to the parking lot, which now had about half the cars that had been there an hour earlier; Monday was an early night.

The parking lot was illuminated by floodlights mounted on high poles. As they all walked along, Wycza said to the others, half apologetically, "I promised Mr. Florio nobody'd get hit on the head. Why don't we just take them a mile down the road or something? That'll still give us the time we need."

There was no objection. Shrugging, Mackey said, "Fine with me. Okay with you, Mr. Flynn?"

Flynn had nothing to say. Florio said to Wycza, quietly, "Thanks. I appreciate that."

"It's the least I can do," Wycza said.

Forty-four

There wasn't anything on local television after one o'clock,
so
Parker put Faran away again in the closet, found a deck of
cards,
and spent the time with some solitaire.

When he'd first taken over this apartment he'd gone
through
all the drawers in the place and found a spare set of
keys
for both the front door downstairs and the apartment door
In a
night table in the bedroom. He'd had four more sets made
up, and
had given them out to Elkins and Mackey and Devers
and
McKay, so the different groups could move in and out
without
ringing apartment bells in the middle of the night.
Elkins
used his key now as he and Wiss came in, Wiss carrying
his
black-leather bag and both of them looking moderately
pleased
with themselves.

Parker had been playing cards at the dining table by the
front
door. He stood up, leaving the incomplete hand spread out,
and
said, "Any problems?"

"Simplicity," Wiss said. Walking deeper into the room, he
put
his bag on the sofa, and then he and Elkins emptied money
from
the bag and their pockets onto the coffee table. "All very
nice,"
Wiss said.

Parker looked at the stacks of bills. "Did you count it?"

Elkins said, "Ten thousand, four hundred and fifty dollars."

"A little more than we figured."

Elkins grinned. "I thought maybe I'd palm a couple hun
dred,
who'd know? But it isn't worth it."

"You'll all do good tonight," Parker told him. "You won't need to nickel-dime."

Wiss said, "You hear from anybody else?"

"Everything's okay at the burglary-alarm place. The manager out at the Riviera called a while ago, checking on Mr. Flynn's credit."

"Lovely," Wiss said. He poked around in his bag for stray bills, found none, and closed the bag. "So we'll be off," he said.

"I'll call Webb."

They walked to the door. Elkins said, "See you later."

Parker nodded. They left, and he called Philly Webb, the driver at Vigilant. "Wiss and Elkins are on the way," he said, and went back to finish the game.

Ten minutes later Mackey and Hurley and Dalesia came in, carrying the full dispatch cases. Mackey was grinning his hard aggressive grin, and he said, "Parker, you should of been there."

Parker left the cards again. "No trouble?"

"Piece of cake," Mackey said. "Goddam piece of cake."

Hurley said, "That big baldheaded monster, what's his name?"

"Wycza," Parker said.

"Yeah, Wycza. Him and Florio got to be buddies. You never saw anything like it."