The Green Eagle Score p-10

by Richard Stark

  Fusco opened the door for them and they trooped in, all dressed like Parker in white shirts, black trousers and quiet-soled shoes. Kengle said, “This is the part I don’t like. Just before, you know? When there’s nothing to do but wait.”

  “There might be a deck of cards around here,” said Webb.

  “Sure,” said Fusco. “We can play at the kitchen table. I’ll be right back.”

  Parker sat out, but the other four worked up a poker game to kill the time, most draw and five-card stud. They played for small stakes; it was a superstition that it was bad luck to gamble with money you hadn’t copped yet.

  Parker didn’t gamble. He preferred to sit in the living-room, either doing nothing at all or going over again in his mind each step of what they were supposed to do today, trying to find things that had been overlooked.

  Ellen came back about twenty after two. She looked at the four sitting around the kitchen table, and said to Parker, “How much longer are you all going to be here?”

  “A little while,” he told her.

  She was acting like somebody being calm with a great deal of trouble. She fluttered a bit in the living-room, and then went on out to the bedroom. Parker watched her go, frowning. He didn’t like the way she was acting, hadn’t liked any of the changes she’d gone through the last week and a half.

  It had started with that oddball stupid sexless proposition. It had been a proposition, it couldn’t have been anything else, but it had been delivered in such a way as to make it tough to believe it had ever happened. As though she’d done it against her will, and had just gone through the motions without really meaning it.

  But she’d meant it, he was sure of that. She’d spent a couple of days giving him cow eyes alternating with bad temper as though he’d been the one trying to put the make on her, and then it had been all over, with a new phase coming in.

  The new phase had been hatred, cold silent murderous hatred. Whenever he’d been in the house she was always somewhere around, glaring at him, as though waiting for him to make the one move that would make it all right for her to come after him with a carving knife.

  But that hadn’t lasted either. It seemed as though every time she went off for one of her sessions with the analyst she came back with a different set on the world. The next attitude toward Parker had been studied indifference; she’d ignored him as completely as if he weren’t there at all. But not arrogantly, not like a queen ignoring a peasant, which is ignoring in a way that still acknowledges existence. Parker seemed to have ceased to exist for her, as though she had a blind spot and he was standing in the middle of it.

  That phase had been the easiest to put up with, but it too had changed, and the most recent attitude had been fear, a kind of guilty jumpy fear that had made him almost as nervous in her presence as she was. He’d asked both Devers and Fusco about it, and they’d both assured him she would have done nothing—like talking to the law—to justify her guilt or her fear. “That’s just the way she gets sometimes,” Devers had said. Fusco’s comment had been, “Ellen wouldn’t fink, period.” Parker had had to take their word for it, but he still didn’t like it; when she slunk and jumped and jittered around him like that it made his hackles rise.

  Well, this was the end of it anyway. He’d be leaving this house for the last time this afternoon, and Ellen Fusco could stumble on through life without him.

  But there was one last session with her to be gone through. A little after three she came back into the living-room and sat down on the other end of the sofa. She was smoking, and she kept nervously tapping the cigarette on an ashtray.

  She was going to say something, but she was taking her time. Parker waited, and finally she said, not looking at him, “What if something goes wrong?”

  He turned his head and looked at her. She was studying the ashtray on the coffee table, tapping and tapping the cigarette against it. He said, “Like what?”

  She made a convulsive shrugging movement. “I don’t know. Anything. The alarm goes out too soon. Somebody asks for identification at the wrong time. Anything at all.”

  “We handle it, if we can,” he said.

  “But it could happen.”

  “It can always happen.”

  “Maybe it’s the wrong kind of job,” she said.

  He looked at her, waiting for her to go on. She sat there, tap-tapping, huddled in on herself, clasping her left upper arm with her right hand as though to hug herself, and although the fear of him seemed to be gone now—another change—the nervousness was even worse than before. She was like an old car with an engine that’s falling apart; you can just see the hood vibrating, but underneath there it’s throwing a rod.

  When he kept on being silent, not responding to her comment about the wrong kind of job, she tossed him a quick look—her eyes were large and round and panic-stricken—stared back at the ashtray, and said, “Oh, not for you, maybe. Maybe you like this kind of thing. But maybe it’s wrong for Stan. Or even Marty. But mostly Stan.”

  “It’s his choice,” Parker said.

  “I wish he wasn’t involved.”

  “Talk to him.”

  “I did. A long time ago. The point is—” She stopped, shook her head, frowned at her cigarette, all as though she wasn’t entirely sure what the point was. Finally she said, “The point is, what happens to Stan if something goes wrong? He isn’t a professional, maybe he won’t be able to get away. And it would matter to him, don’t you see? Marty, it doesn’t matter to Marty, he goes to jail, he comes back out, he does the exact same thing again. Jake Kengle was in jail, too, it’s the same thing. But Stan isn’t like that. It would matter to him, if he was in jail.”

  Parker wondered how she could believe there was anyone on earth to whom a jail term didn’t matter. But what he said was, “Maybe Stan thinks he won’t go to jail.”

  “I know. It’s worth the risk, everybody’s sure it’s worth the risk.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  “Why don’t you—?”

  She stopped again, shook her head violently, finally took a drag on the cigarette. With one last tap at the ashtray, she rose in a cloud of expelled smoke.

  Parker said, “Why don’t we what?”

  “Nothing,” she said, turning away.

  “Why don’t we call it off?”

  She shook her head and walked out of the living-room. He knew that’s what she’d been about to say, that while starting to say it the impossibility of it all had come through to her—the costumes were in the closet, the guns in the kid’s room, the bus out at the lodge, the string assembled and playing poker in the next room—and she’d stopped herself before saying the whole thing. But it was what she wanted, that much was obvious. To have it not happen, never be going to happen.

  It wasn’t the first time Parker had seen somebody’s woman get that kind of last-minute jitters, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. It was good to have a woman like Claire, strong enough and secure enough and smart enough to stay out of it entirely. It would be good to get back to San Juan, to see Claire again, to relax beside the ocean, to spend some time in the casino.

  Parker didn’t go to the casino for himself, but for Claire. She did the gambling, if it could be called that.

  The casinos in San Juan didn’t have the desperate greedy urgency of Las Vegas, where the gambling rooms have neither clocks nor windows to remind the fish of the passing of time. In San Juan the casinos were merely entertainment appendages of the tourist industry, along with the beaches and the floor shows and the boat rides to St Thomas for duty-free liquor. The hotel casinos were only open eight hours a day, from eight in the evening till four in the morning, and only three kinds of gambling were available for the idle speculator: roulette, blackjack, craps.

  Claire’s specialty was craps. She invariably, upon entering the casino, bought fifty one-dollar chips and headed for whichever crap table was the least crowded. There she would spend her fifty chips one at a time, exclusively on side bets, alwa
ys passing the dice when they came around to her, and winning about one time in three. She was the most passive of gamblers, but the action exhilarated her, so that as the stack of fifty dwindled slowly away her eyes always got brighter, her movements more electric, her expressions more excited. Every time, she would turn away from the table after the loss of the final chip as vibrant and exuberant as if she’d just broken the bank. Gambling was like a good alcohol high with her, it made her enjoy life more, enjoy herself more. Afterward, they always went from the casino straight back to the hotel and to bed, where she would be at her most inventive and eager.

  Yes. It would be good to get back to San Juan, good to see Claire again.

  It surprised him a little that his thoughts were becoming sexual. That was another change Claire was making in him. The way it used to be, sex was always an urgent, vital, all-consuming thing with him right after a heist, slowly then tapering off until he had no interest along that line at all, and that’s when he would be ready for another job. But now, because of Claire, it was different. Here he was, the day of the heist itself, his mind full of pictures of Claire on white sheets in the semi-dark air-conditioned room in San Juan, the sun bright outside the windows, all the tourists and natives hustling in the outside world while Claire’s arms reached up and folded around him.

  He sat there in the living room and let his mind drift wherever it wanted to go until his watch read four o’clock. Then he got to his feet and went out to the kitchen and said, “Time to go.”

  “Right,” said Webb. He was out of the hand being played, so he got to his feet, took his handful of bills from the table and lucked them away in a pocket, and yawned and stretched, his arms seeming grotesquely long for his stubby body when he spread them out.

  The other three finished the hand, which Kengle won with jacks over threes.

  Raking in the pot, Kengle grinned and said, “Looks like my luck’s changing. It’s about time.”

  Stockton said, “Mine better change before tonight.”

  “How’d you do?” Fusco asked Kengle.

  “Made about eighteen.”

  “I’m ahead three,” Webb said.

  “I took a bath,” Stockton said, getting to his feet.

  Fusco said, “Parker, I’ll be with you in a minute. I’ve got to say so long to Ellen.”

  “Bring the costumes out with you.”

  “Right.”

  Stockton said, “Where’s the armament?”

  “This way.”

  Stockton and Kengle followed Parker down the hall to the kid’s bedroom. She was in bed now for her afternoon nap, all wrapped up in a filthy blanket she carried around with her all the time. Parker opened the closet door and handed out the cartons to the other two, who took them and tiptoed out of the room. Parker shut the door of the closet and followed them.

  Fusco was still in the bedroom with Ellen. Kengle, his arms full of boxes claiming to contain road-racer sets, stood in the middle of the living-room and gestured toward the bedroom with his head, saying, “Marty getting a little off the ex-wife?”

  “No,” Parker said. “He’s just being a good guest, thanking her for all the breakfasts.”

  Kengle made a face and nodded. “That sounds like Marty,” he said. “You should of seen him in stir. Polite to the screws.”

  Webb, his hand on the doorknob, said, “We’ll see you out there, Parker.” “Right.”

  The three went out, Webb leading the way and the other two carrying the cartons. They were put in the back of the station wagon and a minute later the wagon pulled away.

  Parker stood by the open door, waiting. It was three or four minutes before Fusco came out, holding the tunics up by their hangers, a worried expression on his face. “Boy, Parker,” he said. “She’s really nervous. I guess me taking a fall really shook her up.”

  “She’ll survive,” Parker said. “You want to put those things in a bag or something. Somebody’ll see us going out with those things.”

  “Nobody pays any attention in a neighborhood like this,” Fusco said. “Nobody’s looked at either of us any time we came in or out here.”

  “That’s because they can figure us, even if they’re wrong. Ellen’s a divorcee, we’re men. But those are crazy gold pajama tops, and people’ll remember them. We don’t want the law around here tomorrow, asking Ellen where’d the guys go with the gold pajama tops.”

  “And the gold. Okay, you’re right. Just a minute.”

  Fusco got a brown paper bag from the kitchen, took the tunics off their hangers, rolled them one at a time and stuffed them into the bag. When he was done, he and Parker went out to the Pontiac. Parker’s suitcase and sweater and sport jacket were still on the back seat, and Fusco now added the bag of tunics to them. Parker got behind the wheel.

  They drove east out of Monequois, past the air base, and left up Hiker Road. They went past the South Gate and continued on northward another four miles, until they came to a dirt road leading uphill away to the left. They took this and Parker shifted into low. The road climbed steeply, with sharp curves. Never anything more than a track beaten into and scraped out of the mountainside by a bulldozer, it had now been out of use for three years and showed it. Deep meandering grooves showed where the runoff from mountain rains was making paths for itself toward the valley. Here and there tree branches hung low, scraping the roof of the car, and in two spots thick fallen branches lay beside the road where Parker and Devers and Fusco had shoved them out of the way the first time they’d driven up here.

  It was three miles, almost all uphill, all on minimal road, until at last they came to the burned-out lodge. It had been a large building, two storeys high, of stone and log, and it had been almost entirely gutted by fire. A garage behind it, originally large enough for a dozen cars, had been partially burned away, with now only one end of it still intact, enough for three cars. Another out-building, a large work-shed, hadn’t been touched at all.

  Of the original building only the stone walls were left, extending from three to seven feet up at different spots around the perimeter. Inside these walls was a jumble of black lines, the charred remains of beams and walls, made anonymous and smooth by three summers and winters. Grass was growing here and there inside, little areas of green.

  Half a dozen “No Trespassing” signs had been fixed to trees or the remaining stone walls, but there was no sign anyone had been around recently to see if the signs were being obeyed. The garage and work-shed were both stripped and bare, and it was obvious no one was in any hurry to rebuild Andrews’ Lodge. It looked, in fact, suspiciously like the result of somebody’s having burned his business down for the insurance, which doesn’t happen when the business is showing a steady profit. Andrews’ Lodge had probably been losing a lot of its business to Canadian hunting areas, which hadn’t been as extensively hunted, so that game was still plentiful.

  The station wagon was nowhere in sight, but when Parker drove the Pontiac around the corner of the lodge shell Stockton was standing beside an open garage door in the unburned end of the garage, motioning at them to come on. In this setting he looked like a modern-day Ichabod Crane, tall and skinny and stoop-shouldered.

  Parker drove the car into the garage and cut the engine as Stockton shut the two doors. He and Fusco got out of the Pontiac, and Parker got his sport jacket and sweater from the back seat.

  There were no interior walls separating the garage stalls. The Pontiac was the nearest to the burned portion, and next to it on the other side was the Buick station wagon. At the far end was the bus.

  It was a small bus, shorter than usual, the kind of thing frequently used by small private schools to transport their children. It had been that yellow color when Parker had first seen it at the junkyard in Baltimore, but a lot had been done to it since then. It had a different color now, a rich royal blue that looked dark inside the garage here but would look as bright as a swimming pool out in the sunlight. It also had a different engine, much hotter than the original plant
it had had under its hood. The false set of Maryland plates that had brought it up here were in the process of being changed now by Webb to New York plates which were equally false but for which they had faked-up registration. Kengle was in the process of attaching to the near side one of the two cloth banners they’d made, in red letters on white, reading:

  ERNIE SEVEN AND THE FOUR SCORE

  This was where most of Norman Berridge’s money had gone, into this bus and the musical instruments showing conspicuously through the rear windows.

  Parker walked around the Buick and stood looking at the banner for a minute. Kengle grinned at him, saying, “Looks good, don’t it?”

  “Just so it looks real,” Parker said.

  “Then that’s what it looks,” Kengle said. “It looks real.”

  Parker agreed with him. A bus that made itself as conspicuous as this had to lull suspicions.

  Parker carried his sweater and sport jacket into the bus and dropped them on a seat toward the rear. Fusco had followed him aboard, and when he turned round he saw Fusco getting the gold tunics out of the brown paper bag, shaking them out one at a time, smoothing out the wrinkles, and draping each across the back of a bus seat.

  Parker edged by Fusco and stepped down out of the bus again. Kengle was now around on the other side, putting the second banner there. A third, smaller but just as bright was being put on the back by Stockton. Webb, having replaced both license plates, was putting his tools away in the kit in the back of his station wagon.

  They were ready to go at ten to five. They all got aboard the bus except Stockton, who opened the garage doors. The doors had been padlocked shut, but Parker and Fusco had sawn through the padlocks so they could be removed and then replaced to look as though they were still secure.

  Those in the bus slipped on their tunics and settled in seats, all toward the front. Webb got behind the wheel, started the engine, which sounded deceptively ordinary, and backed the bus out into tree-dappled sunlight. Stockton shut the garage doors and replaced the padlock while Webb turned the bus around, then came over and climbed aboard, but didn’t put his tunic on yet.