Footsteps clattered, receding, somebody running away along the blacktop.
Parker ran over that way, flattened himself against a wall, and edged slowly around the corner till he could see into the driveway. At the far end the driveway split, going to left and right behind the apartment buildings. There was a wall at the far end, with a light attached to it. There was no one moving in the alley between Parker and the light. Whoever he was, he’d already made the turn, one way or the other, and was gone. Even the sound of his running footsteps was now gone.
But he’d left something behind, a bulky bundle lying against one of the side walls.
Parker approached it cautiously, but it didn’t move. He bent and rolled it over. It was a man. It was the clown in the mackinaw, the follower, the one who wanted his thirty-seven dollars from Dan Kifka.
He’d been shot in the side of the head by a gun of too large a calibre for the job. Kifka now owed thirty-seven dollars to the clown’s estate.
It had been the clown who had shouted. The voice had rung with familiarity, but at the time Parker hadn’t been concerned with wondering who it was. Now he thought back and remembered it, and it had been the voice of the clown here.
None of it made sense. The clown had been alone before, and had obviously had nothing to do with anything but his own thirty-seven bucks. But now he’d been here with somebody else, and he’d obviously been involved in a lot more than thirty-seven dollars.
Parker’s shot hadn’t killed him. He’d been shot from close range, not from across the street.
The way it looked, the two of them had been waiting here for Parker to come out. When he did, the second man was going to kill him. But the clown here shouted a warning, and the second man shot him instead and then tried to get Parker anyway and missed.
That told what happened, by an educated guess, but not why.
Why was the clown here? Why did he shout? Why was he killed? And who was the second man?
Maybe it was an outsider after all. There was too much that made no sense; maybe it would start making sense if the guy who now had the cash wasn’t one of the seven who’d worked the heist after all.
One thing was sure. This changed the plans.
Parker recrossed the street and went back upstairs to Kifka’s apartment and knocked on the door. When the girl opened it this time she was wearing just the sweatshirt again and she looked a little flushed. Also irritated.
Parker went in and shut the door. ‘Tell Dan I’m sleeping on the sofa,’ he said. ‘If you heard the shots out there, that’s why. I’ll talk to Dan again in the morning.’
She said, ‘Sure you don’t want to come in and watch?’
‘I already know how.’
Parker sat down on the sofa and ignored her. He hadn’t bothered to take his topcoat off yet because he was thinking. If the hijacker wasn’t one of the original group, then where did he connect? There had only been seven of them in on the operation from the beginning, on equal shares …
Four
The job had been set up within the last month. Parker had come north on the run, leaving years of careful work in ruins behind him. He’d needed a fresh stake, and when a slot in this operation was offered him he’d grabbed at it.
Parker was a heister by profession, an institutional robber who stole from banks or jewellery stores or armored cars. He worked only as a member of a team, never as a single-o, and he’d been at this profession nineteen years. For most of that time he’d had a false name and a cover identity within which he lived while spending the profits of his work and out of which he moved once or twice a year to replenish the kitty. But all of that had gone to hell now. As a result of trouble on a piece of work over a year ago his fingerprints had gone on file with the law for the first time, and more trouble just two months ago had connected those fingerprints with the cover identity. Parker had had to leave fast, abandoning bank accounts, abandoning a way of life, everything.
When he’d come north at the wheel of a stolen car, with less than a hundred bills to his name, he’d contacted a few of the men he’d worked with in the past, letting it be known he was available for any job in the offing. He’d holed up in a place outside Scranton called the Green Glen Motel, run by an old hooker named Madge, and a week later a telephone call had come from Dan Kifka.
It was a strange conversation. In the first place, neither of them wanted to say anything specific over a machine as public and leaky as a telephone and in the second place, Kifka didn’t really believe he was talking to Parker.
He referred to that immediately after identifying himself, saying, ‘This is a new number for you, isn’t it?’
Parker knew what he meant. In the past no one had ever been able to contact him direct. Anyone who wanted to talk to Parker about business had to send a message through a guy named Joe Sheer, a retired jugger living outside Omaha. But Joe was dead now, a part of the trouble that had cost Parker everything but his neck.
He said, ‘I just moved. You hear about Joe?’
‘Hear what?’
‘He died. I went to the funeral.’
‘Oh. I tried calling you there, but no answer.’
‘That’s why.’
Kifka hesitated, and then said, ‘Well, I just called to say hello, see how things are going. You working?’
‘Looking for an opening,’ Parker told him.
‘Good luck.’
‘Thanks.’
‘If you see Little Bob Negli out your way, tell him hello for me.’
‘I will,’ Parker said, knowing Kifka meant he wouldn’t be coming out to Scranton himself but would be sending Little Bob. He said, ‘He knows about my face, doesn’t he?’ He’d had plastic surgery done last year, and hadn’t met up with Little Bob since then.
‘He knows,’ Kifka said.
Little Bob came out two nights later. Parker was lying fully clothed on the bed in his motel unit, watching television with the sound off, when the knock came at the door. He got to his feet, switched on the light and off the television set, and unlocked the door.
It was Madge, who owned the place. In her sixties now, she was one of the few hookers in the history of the world who really did save her money. When age retired her she’d bought this motel, it being the closest she could get legitimately to her old profession. She was too talkative and too nervous to be a madam, but she could run a motel where the rooms were rented mostly by the hour. She could also be trusted, so people in Parker’s line of work occasionally used her place for meetings or cooling off.
She came in now and shut the door, saying, ‘Little Bob Negli’s here. You want to talk to him?’ She was still bone-thin, which once had been her main selling point. Her white hair was harsh-looking and brittle, chopped short in an Italian cut. Curved black lines had been drawn on her face where the eyebrows had been plucked, and her long curving fingernails were painted scarlet, but she wore no lipstick; her mouth was a pale scar in a thin, deeply lined face.
She always dressed young, in bright sweaters and stretch pants, with dangling Navaho earrings and jangling charm bracelets. Inside the young clothing was an old body, but inside the old body was a young woman. Madge would hold onto 1920 until the day she died; she’d never had a better year and wasn’t likely to.
Now she said, ‘Little Bob’s in my room behind the office. You want to go there, or have him come here, or what?’
‘I’ll go there.’
‘I’ll fix drinks,’ she said.
Parker didn’t want drinks, but he said nothing. Madge had to turn everything into a party. Every day was old home week.
They left Parker’s room and walked down the sidewalk in front of the units toward the office. ‘It’s good to have the old bunch around,’ Madge was saying, and told him who’d been here last month, and two months ago, and six months ago. This was the one thing Parker couldn’t take about her, her gossiping. She never opened her mouth to the wrong people, but she never shut it with insiders. Parker walked along besi
de her now and let her chatter wash off him like rain.
They went into the office, where Ethel was sitting at the desk. Ethel was about twenty-five, mentally retarded, Madge’s cleaning girl and general assistant. Madge told her, ‘I’ll be in back with the boys,’ and she nodded without saying anything.
Little Bob Negli was sitting on the green leatherette sofa in the back room, smoking a cigar half as tall as him. He was a shrimp: four feet eleven and one-half inches tall. He had the little man’s cockiness, standing and moving like the bantamweight champion of the world, chomping dollar cigars, wearing clothes as fancy as he could find, sporting a pompadour in his black hair that damn near brought his height up to normal. He looked like something that had been shrunk and preserved in the nineteenth century.
He got to his feet when Madge and Parker walked in and frowned up at Parker’ as though he had a really tough decision to make and the civilised world hung on his answer. He said to Madge, ‘That’s really Parker?’
‘It really is,’ she said. ‘He traded one sour puss for another. Wait’ll you spend five minutes with him, you’ll see. He hasn’t changed a bit, still the same old Cheery Charlie, life of the party.’
Parker said, ‘Maybe Bob wants to talk business.’
Madge grinned. ‘See what I mean? What do you want to drink, Parker?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Maybe that’s your trouble. Bob, you want a refill, just holler.’
‘Will do, Madge.’
She went out, and Negli said, ‘I wouldn’t call it an improvement exactly.’
‘That’s enough about the face,’ Parker told him. He pulled a foam-rubber chair over in front of the sofa and sat down.
Negli stayed on his feet a few seconds longer. He seemed to be trying to make up his mind about something, maybe whether he should be insulted or not. But then he sat down arid said, ‘Business, then. You interested in a score?’
‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
‘The take, the risk, and who I’m supposed to be working with.’
‘Of course. That’s to be expected. But if the take is good and the risk is low and the people are known to you, you’re interested?’
Parker nodded.
‘All right.’ Negli put the long cigar in his mouth and talked around it. ‘The take,’ he said, ‘is between a hundred and a hundred fifty G. The risk is practically nil. The people, so far, are Dan Kifka and Arnie Feccio and me.’
‘So far,’ Parker echoed. ‘How many you figure all told?’
‘The details aren’t all worked out yet. We figure six or seven.’
‘That’s a big string.’
Negli shrugged. ‘We want risk low, we got to have enough men.’
That’s fifteen to twenty G a man, depending on how much and how many.’
‘Sure. Figure fifteen minimum.’
‘What’s the job?’
‘Gate receipts. College football gate receipts.’
Parker frowned. ‘How do you figure low risk?’
‘It all depends on the plan. We’ve already got a way in, and we ought to be able to make some kind of advantage out of the traffic jam after the game. There’s always a traffic jam after a football game.’
‘All you’ve got,’ Parker said, ‘is a way in and an itch.’
‘You ever hear a job start with more?’
‘It better have more before it’s worked.’
‘So come in and see Dan; you know where he lives. He’ll give you everything we got.’
‘Anybody asking ace shares?’
‘No. Equal divvy, share and share alike.’
Parker considered, and then nodded. ‘I’ll come in and talk,’ he said. ‘I don’t promise any more than that.’
‘Of course not.’ Negli got to his feet, the cigar at a jaunty angle in the corner of his mouth. ‘You’ll like this operation,’ he said. ‘It’s neat and clean. And profitable.’
They left the room, and out in the office Madge said, ‘Done so soon? Slick around, we’ll talk, it’s a slow night.’
‘Got to be going, Madge,’ Negli said. ‘Wish I could stay, but that’s how it is.’ To Parker he said, ‘Tomorrow night, nine o’clock.’
‘I’ll be there.’
Madge started talking again, urging them to stay and that. Parker assumed she was talking to Negli instead of him, and went straight back to his room. He switched the television on without the sound, left the room lights off, and lay on the bed to watch and think.
Sometimes there was an advantage in doing a job in the middle of a crowd, and if Negli and Kifka actually did have a way into this stadium, there was no reason why they couldn’t figure a way out again. It all depended on the details.
The next night, at nine, he was in Kifka’s apartment. There was no cheerleader there that time. Instead, there was Little Bob Negli and Arnie Feccio. Feccio was a florid moustachioed type with a beer-barrel torso and oily black hair. He looked more Greek than Italian, and whichever nationality he looked he had to be a restaurant owner. He’d tried to substantiate his looks a few times, but his restaurants always went broke and he always had to go back to his regular profession to get himself out of debt.
The four of them sat around a table in Kifka’s living room, and Kifka, with the help of maps and diagrams, told Parker what they had:
‘It’s Monequois Stadium, just outside town on Western Avenue. Monequois’s one of them hoity-toity Ivy League colleges, nothing but money, and this is their new stadium. Saturday, the sixteenth of November, is their big game against Plainfield, the big deal for the whole-season. And the nice thing, it’s what they call inter-conference - it don’t count in their regular season, they play in different conferences.’
Parker said, ‘What makes that nice?’
‘The gate receipts are different,’ Kifka told him. ‘It ain’t a regular season game, so the gate receipts go to some charity or fund or something, and season tickets don’t count. Also, no mail orders, no advance sales at all. It’s a big deal, see what I mean? Like the World Series. The box office opens at six in the morning the day of the game, and there’s always these clowns that stay up all night to buy the first tickets.’
Little Bob Negli said, ‘You see the beauty, Parker? Except for student tickets, student passes, whatever they call them, every seat in the house is paid for cash on the barrelhead the day of the game. And all that cash has to be right there in the stadium when the game starts.’
Parker nodded. ‘So it’s a big score,’ he said. ‘If we can get at it.’
‘We can get at it.’ Kifka spread out a diagram on the table, facing so Parker could see it best. ‘This is the stadium. They got three box offices where they sell tickets, North Gate, East Gate, and South Gate. These squares here with the X’s in them. About once an hour the cash is collected and brought around to the stadium building here at the west end of the stadium. All your offices and locker rooms and everything are in this building. Now, your finance office is on the second floor, and that’s where the money’s delivered.’
Parker said, ‘How?’
‘Armed guards in pairs. They walk it along a corridor under the stands. They wouldn’t be that tough to hit, but they never carry more than a couple grand at a time anyway.’
Parker nodded.
‘Now,’ Kifka said, ‘in the finance office the cash is counted and stacked and banded and put in money boxes to go to the bank. They get it done by the time the last quarter is starting so the armored car can get out of there before the traffic jam starts. The armored car doesn’t come till they phone for it, so it isn’t there very long, just long enough to fill up and take off. It’s bracketed by municipal police in riot cars all the way to the bank. The bank has a special deal where it has people down there even though it’s Saturday, and the money goes in and gets checked all over again right away.’
Parker said, ‘What sort of guard in the finance office?’
‘You got four armed men in there, pr
ivate police, plus six employees. The way in, you pass through a locked guarded door into a corridor and along the corridor is the finance office. You knock there and they check you with a peephole before they open up.’
Parker nodded. ‘What about the size of it? It’s going to he mostly small bills.’
Arnie Feccio answered, saying, ‘We figure two big suitcases ought to do it.’
‘That’s a lot of weight.’
Negli smiled and said, ‘We don’t want to have to run with it anyway, Parker.’
Parker said, ‘We’ll see.’ To Kifka he said, ‘I understand you’ve got a way in.’
‘A beauty,’ Kifka told him. ‘A natural.’
‘Let’s hear it.’
‘We go in on Friday.’ He stopped and grinned at Parker, waiting for Parker to do cartwheels. When Parker just sat there and looked at him, Kifka belatedly went on with it: ‘We go in Friday afternoon,’ he said. ‘We get into the finance office then and we spend the night there. Saturday we collar every employee the minute he walks through the door. We’re on top of the situation from the beginning. The cash is brought in; we have the employees stow it right in our suitcases.’
Feccio said, ‘What do you think, Parker?’
‘I don’t know yet. How do you get in?’
‘At the entrances,’ Kifka told him, ‘they got these ornamental gates, you know? With the spear points on top and all that jazz. So they don’t quite reach to the top of the entranceway. I can get Bob up high enough, and he can squeeze through.’
‘Like an eel,’ said Negli. He demonstrated by wriggling his hand through the air.
‘There’s doors here and there in the wall,’ said Kifka, ‘besides the gates themselves. They’re kept locked, but you can unlock them easy from inside.’
‘What if somebody sees you and Bob at the gate?’
Kifka grinned. ‘Early birds. First ones on line at the North Gate. We got this all worked out, Parker, believe me. The South Gate is where the newspaper photographers always take the pictures of the nuts, and the East Gate is right on the main drag, so we do it around at the North Gate. Monequois Park is across the road there, and if anybody drives by what are they going to see?’
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