Parker16 Butcher's Moon (34 page)

Dalesia said, "What do we do with the money?"

Parker swept the solitaire hand off to a corner of the table. "Put it here. You count it yet?"

"We'll do that now," Mackey said. Rubbing his hands together, grinning his hard grin at everybody, he said, "I just love to count money. Other people's money."

"Our money now," Hurley said.

The dispatch cases were zipped open, the money belts were taken off, and the cash was piled up like a green mountain on the table. The four men began counting, each of them making stacks, and when they were finished they added their four totals together. Dalesia did it, with pencil and paper. "Forty-seven thousand, six hundred," he said.

Mackey said, "That's really nice."

Looking over at the smaller stack of money on the coffee table, Hurley said, "That's from the movie house?"

Parker nodded. "Ten thousand, four hundred and fifty."

Dalesia said, "So far, that's fifty-nine thousand and fifty dollars."

Mackey, laughing, said, "And fifty dollars?"

Hurley gestured at the living room. "We'll leave it for the householders," he said. "As a tip."

Parker said, "Wycza and the others already off on their next
one?"

"Right," Dalesia said. Looking at his watch, he said, "We
better,
too. See you later, Parker."

The
three of them trooped out of the apartment. Parker
went into
the bedroom, glanced at the locked closet door, and
went
over to check dresser drawers. The top one was nearly
empty;
he put the remaining few clothes on top of the dresser,
carried
the drawer into the living room, and lined it with the
cash
from the two robberies. He brought the full drawer back to
the
bedroom, put it away in the dresser, and returned to the
living
room to deal out a fresh hand of solitaire.

It
wasn't yet two o'clock in the morning.

Forty-five

Calesian dreamed of white skis on a black mountainside. He couldn't see the skier, only the black-clad legs, the white skis, the glistening black slope, the featureless gray-white sky. The skier raced at a downward angle, moving very fast, the wind whistling with his passage, rushing on and on and yet never seeming to get anywhere, sailing across a slope like some gigantic pool ball, empty and alone.

The sound of the phone confused his mind, which tried to interpolate it into the dream as church bells. But there was no church, the image broke down, and he awoke, dry-mouthed and disoriented, to hear the phone ring a second time. He didn't need to switch the light on to find the receiver on the bedside table. Lying on his side, hearing the beating of his heart in the ear pressed into the pillow, he held the phone to his other ear and said, "Hello?"

"Calesian?" It was an angry voice, and a voice he recognized, though he couldn't immediately put a name to it. But he knew it was someone of power; the tone of voice alone was enough to tell him that much.

He said, "Yes? Who is it?"

"This is Dulare, you simple bastard. Wake up."

Dulare. "I'm awake," Calesian said, feeling a sudden flutter of nerves in his chest. Lifting his head from the pillow, hiking himself up onto an elbow, he repeated, "I'm awake. What's the problem?" And blinked in the darkness; though the curtains were open at his bedroom window, no moonlight shone in. It seemed black as a closet out there.

"I'll
tell you the problem," Dulare said. "Six guys just knocked over the Riviera."

"Did what?"

"You heard me, goddammit."

"Robbed—"

"It had to be your friend Parker," Dulare said. "There's no
way
it's anything else."

"Good Christ."

"Christ doesn't come into this." Dulare was raging; his
words
were made out of sharp pieces of metal, shaped and
flung.
"No two-bit heist artist is going to take me for fifty
thousand
dollars, Calesian."

"I don't—" Calesian rubbed his face with his free hand,
trying
to think. He was now sitting up completely on the bed, the dream forgotten. "Six of them, you said?"

"He's brought in friends," Dulare said. "The son of a bitch is
Starting
a war, Calesian. You've mishandled this thing every
way you
knew how, you and that goddam moron Buenadella."

"They got away clean?" It was a stupid question to ask and
Calesian
knew it, but he couldn't find anything sensible to say
and silence
would have been even worse.

"I'm
going over to Buenadella's," Dulare said. It was a bad sign
that
he was calling Dutch by his last name. "I don't want
any of
you damn fools here at my place, not with Parker after
your asses.
I'll be there in fifteen minutes, and you be there,
too."

"Of
course," Calesian said, but Dulare had already hung up
on him.

Calesian cradled the phone, then got out of bed and stood
there
for a second in the darkness, reluctant to turn the light on,
face
the reality, start moving.

He should have known. He should have guessed that Parker would pull something like this; it's why the bastard dropped out of sight. The way he'd applied pressure to Lozini last week, hitting the New York Room and the brewery and that downtown parking garage. Only this time, instead of three small annoying stings, taking useless credit-card papers and checks, he'd done one big punch, hitting for fifty thousand dollars.

One big punch? All at once, with the conviction of a revelation, he knew there were going to be more punches than one. Looking toward the window, Calesian thought, He's out there somewhere, right now, hitting again. Where in hell are you, Parker?

Still in darkness, he turned his head toward the phone he couldn't see. Call someone, warn somebody? Who? He had no idea where the hit would come, or even if it would be something his own people, the police, would be able to do anything about. A robbery out at the Riviera would be outside local law jurisdiction anyway, even if they reported it. And if there hadn't been any injuries or too many civilians upset, they probably wouldn't report it at all.

Fifty thousand. And it was only the first.

Calesian moved over to the window, looked out at the dark city under the moonless sky. The spotted streetlights, aping the stars, emphasized the darkness rather than cutting it. Calesian sensed Parker out there somewhere, scurrying in the dark with his army.

He looked up at the sky. Why the hell wasn't there a moon, for Christ's sake? The air would be hot just the other side of the window glass, but the air-conditioning was on in here, and he shivered slightly from the coolness of it. And the unrelieved darkness. A
hell of a night to die,
he thought.

Forty-six

Two stretches inside, before he'd smartened up, had bred in
Ben Pelzer
a taste for orderliness, neatness in everything he did.
The
third-floor walk-up apartment on East Tenth Street where
he
was known as Barry Pearlman was always as neat as a pin,
and
so was his house out in Northglen, where he lived under his
own name
with his wife and his three-year-old twin daughters,
Joanne
and Joette.

Pelzer's life was as neatly organized as his homes, and the
beginning
of his week was Friday, when he would get up in the
house
in Northglen, pack his bag, and take a plane; sometimes
to
Baltimore, or Savannah, or New Orleans, or more rarely New
York.
He never knew ahead of time where it would be, and he
didn
't concern himself. He would simply stop at Frank Schro
der's
real estate office, pick up the tickets and his instructions
and
the bag with the money in it, and be on his way.

In that port city, whichever one it turned out to be, he would
usually
have a phone number to call, though every once in a while there would be an actual physical meet at the airport; New York was mostly done that way. He would turn over the money, receive his stock, and take the next plane back to Tyler. Then he would drive to the house on East Tenth Street, go up to his apartment, and wait for the first knock on the door.

It was never long in coming. Ben Pelzer was the Man's Man, the wholesaler for all the street dealers in Tyler. Frank Schroder had other wholesalers for other territories, but the nickel-dime action on the street, for the pillbox or paper twist you bought downtown in a doorway or on a park bench, was where Ben Pelzer's merchandise changed hands.

And the weekend was the rush season. On Friday night and Saturday morning the retailers would come by Barry Pearl- man's place to stock up, and by Saturday night they'd be coming back again to replenish. They couldn't buy it all at once because this was strictly a cash business, and none of the retailers ever had enough cash on a Friday to buy a full weekend's supply.

On an average week, Pelzer's goods brought in about one hundred thousand dollars on the street. Twenty percent of that stayed with the retailers, the rest coming to the Pearlman apartment. Pelzer's cut was two percent of the weekly cash in hand, averaging about sixteen hundred dollars, which was a very healthy weekly wage indeed. The remaining seventy-five or eighty thousand, Frank Schroder's share from which additional stock was purchased and the law was paid off and the main partnership received their dividends, was amassed all weekend in a suitcase under Pelzer's bed.

That was a lot of cash money to have in one place, particularly when people like Ben Pelzer's customers knew about it, but there'd never been any attempt to steal it. In the first place, everyone who knew about the money also knew whose it was. And in the second place, Pelzer and the cash were never alone in the apartment; two of Frank Schroder's men always sat in, arriving on Friday no more than half an hour after Ben himself took occupancy, and staying with him and the money all through the weekend. The two regular men, Jerry Trask and Frank Slade, were big and tough-looking, a strong contrast with slender, neat Ben Pelzer, and over the last few years the three of them had filled in the idle hours on the long weekends with an endless game of Monopoly. They loaned one another money, forgave one another rents, invented easy new rules, and did everything possible to keep the game going. They were all paper millionaires by now, using the cash from three Monopoly sets for their liquid assets, with hotels on every property, and wholesale swaps of entire complexes. None of them ever got tired of the game, which was permanently set up on a card table in the middle of the apartment living room.

Pelzer's work-week—and his time as Barry Pearlman—
ended
late Monday night. Following the weekend trade, there
was
always one last spurt of buying on Monday, as the retailers
Stocked
up for their daily business, the serious customers as
opposed
to the weekend joy-poppers. By midnight on Monday
that
final rush of business would be completed, but Pelzer
always
kept the shop open until one
a.m
., just to be on the safe
Side.
Finally, at one o'clock on the dot, he would leave the Monopoly game and lock himself in the bedroom while Trask
and Slade
washed the dishes and generally tidied up. If anybody
rang
the doorbell after one o'clock, they were out of luck—no
body
would answer.

In
the bedroom, Pelzer would put the suitcase on the bed,
take
the money out, and slowly count it. This week the total was eighty-two thousand, nine hundred twelve dollars. His two
percent
of that would be sixteen hundred fifty-eight dollars and
twenty
-four cents, but he was supposed to even that off down to
the
nearest hundred, so this week he was exactly making his
average:
sixteen hundred dollars. He took that money in the
Cleanest
bills, mostly in twenties and fifties, and stuffed it away
h) a
money belt he took from the closet, then put on under his
shirt.
He took another five hundred dollars, in tens and twenties,
pu
t it
to one side on the bed, and closed the suitcase. Then he
unlocked
the bedroom door and carried the suitcase and the
extra
five hundred dollars out to the living room.

The
five hundred was his associates' pay: two-fifty apiece.
He had
never discussed his own salary with them, so they were
unaware
of the disparity between his sixteen hundred and their
two and
a half; being unaware of it, they were not made
troubled
by it.

From here on, the routine was that they would leave the apartment and drive in Pelzer's car over to the parking lot behind Frank Schroder's real estate office, where another car would be waiting for them. Trask and Slade and the suitcase would transfer to the other car, and Pelzer would go home, where his wife would be waiting up for him with a midnight snack. They'd eat together, do the dishes, and go to bed, Pelzer then remaining at home, puttering around his garden and his workbench, until Friday morning and the beginning of another week.

It was an easy schedule, clear-cut and relaxed. It gave him four nights and three full days with his family every week, it offered him interesting travel and introduced him to a wide variety of human types, it paid him handsomely, and there had never been a bit of trouble.