It might be a good idea to find out what Edgars’ normal line was. It just might be that his personal reasons were something that would queer the operation from the start.
There were still too many doubts; Parker wasn’t sure yet whether he wanted to be in this one or not. He didn’t really need the dough yet, not for living expenses, but his cash reserve was low. The main reason he’d decided to come on up here and look this over was that he’d been getting bored
3
He’d been swimming when the call came. Boredom had driven him from the room, and then boredom drove him from the beach. He put his beach robe back on over his trunks, stuck cigarettes and matches in the pocket, and walked through the sand and bodies toward the hotel which was squatting there like a big white birthday cake.
He was a big man, broad and flat, with the look of a brutal athlete. He had long arms, ending in big flat hands gnarled with veins. His face it was his second, done by a plastic surgeon looked strong and self-contained. Women asprawl on the sand in two-piece bathing-suits raised their heads to look at him as he went by; he was aware of the looks but didn’t respond. It didn’t interest him right now.
He knew what the problem was, had known for a couple of weeks now. It had been six months since he’d worked. Inactivity always got to him like this after a while.
He walked on through the sand to the hotel and entered the beach elevator. Two women got on right after him. They were in bathing-suits, with towels draped across their shoulders. They were young and good-looking, with the impatient eyes of northern secretaries on vacation. They looked at him and he looked at the elevator boy and said, “Eight.” Then he faced front.
Riding up, he didn’t think about the women at all, but about the last job. He and Handy McKay had gotten the statuette for Bett Harrow’s father, and a few thousand extra for themselves.* Now Handy was retired again, running a diner in Presque Isle, Maine. Parker wasn’t retired, didn’t want to be retired. But he didn’t have anything lined up either. After that last job, he’d spent a while in Galveston, and then he’d gone to New Orleans for a few weeks, and now here he was in Miami. He’d had one woman in Galveston, a couple in New Orleans, but none here. He didn’t have the interest. (* The Mourner.)
He got off at the eighth floor and walked down the wide hallway to his room. The telephone started ringing as he was unlocking the door. He went in, shut the door, went across the room, and picked up the phone.
It was the switchboard downstairs. “A message, Mr Willis,” she said. His name here was Charles Willis. She said, “A Mr Sheer tried to reach you from Omaha, Nebraska. He would like you to call him at your convenience.”
“All right. Thank you.”
“Shall I place the call for you, sir?”
“No, I’ll call later.”
“Yes, sir.”
He hung up and lit a cigarette and sat down on the bed to think. He knew what the call was all about. It was a job. Whenever anybody wanted to get in touch with him, to offer him a piece of a job, they contacted him through Joe Sheer. Joe Sheer was a retired peterman, an old guy who’d blasted his way into more safes than he could remember and was now living slow and easy in Omaha, with a new face and a fat bank account and a lot of friends like Parker among the boys still working. Joe was the only one who always knew how and where to get in touch with Parker; Parker sent him a postcard every time he moved a to a new address. So did half a dozen others; Joe was a good safe middleman and post office.
So it was a job. His instinct was to grab it right away, but he wasn’t sure. He had a rule. He never took a job unless he needed it. If you let yourself go, work every chance you got, you just left yourself open for heavy time. Every job carried with it the risk of being grabbed by the law, so the fewer the jobs the less the risk.
He got pencil and paper and worked out his finances. He had seven thousand in the hotel safe here, maybe another ten thousand in bank accounts and hotel safes scattered across the country. The seven thousand was plenty to live on for a while, but ten thousand was too low for a reserve fund. He couldlet it slide a few more months, on what he had, but it might be safer in the long run to stoke up the reserve fund now, when he had the chance.
He was making excuses for himself, and he knew it. But he needed to be working, he needed to have something to think about, even more than he needed to build up his reserve cash supply.
He could look into the job, anyway. It might not be any good. Just about half the jobs he was invited on looked good to him. The rest had something wrong with the set-up, or the personnel, or one thing and another, and he stuck around only long enough to hear the story. So there was an even money chance that he wouldn’t be taking this job anyway, but at least he’d have something to think about for a couple of days.
He got to his feet and changed from robe and trunks to slacks and sport shirt, and then left the room again. He took one of the front elevators this time, rode down to the lobby, and left the hotel. A call like this one wasn’t made through a hotel switchboard.
He crossed the boulevard and took a side street away from the beach. The hotels on the inland side of the boulevard were a little smaller and a little grayer than the beach-front hotels; behind them stretched a declining expanse of tourist courts and efficiency apartments and motels. After a while there were supermarkets and liquor stores and bars.
Parker went into a bar and got five dollars in change from the bartender, then went to the phone booth in back to make his call. When he closed the booth door, a little fan went on over his head, but it didn’t do much good. He began to sweat right away.
It took a while to get the call through, and then he had to pump quarters and dimes into the box before he could talk. He said, “Charles Willis here.”
“Good to hear you, Chuck.” Sheer had an old man’s voice, with something cheerful in it. “How’s the weather down there?”
“Hot.”
“Still on vacation, eh?”
“I’d go back to work if anything came along.”
“I was talking to a fella in your line the other day. Paulus, you know him?”
“Sure.”
“Him and Wycza and some others, they’re opening a branch office in Jersey City. Maybe they could use another field man.”
“The main operation going to be in Jersey City?”
“No, I don’t know where the head office is. That’s just a branch, to get organized.”
“I might send them a resume. What’s the address?”
“Three nine nine Crescent, four A.”
“Are they open for business yet?”
“You probably ought to call first and check. The number’s 837-2598.”
Parker was writing it all down. “I wouldn’t call long distance,” he said. “I’d just send them a resume. What do they pay, do you know?”
“That I don’t, Chuck, sorry. Ought to be good wages, though, the way Paulus was talking.”
“Is he the sales manager?”
“No, I don’t think so. There’s some sort of regional manager setting things up, the way I get it.”
“I might look into it. Thanks for thinking of me.”
“Any time, Chuck. Send me a bathing beauty.”
Parker left the booth, had a beer to get rid of some change and to cool off a little, and then walked back to the hotel. He phoned down to have his bill made up, made a reservation on a jet flight to Newark, and packed. He left the hotel room, and five hours later he walked into the hotel room in Jersey City. Then he met Edgars and heard the proposition.
Knock over a city. A whole goddam city.
It was so stupid it might even work. But it would have to be planned right. This one would have to be planned right on down to the shoe leather.
If Edgars wouldn’t louse it up some way.
If they had every communications outlet in town figured.
If they could work out a sensible getaway route to a reliable hideout.
If they could get the rig
ht men.
If they could think of every possibility.
Right now, it was still just an idea, not a job yet. Maybe it never would be a job. He’d sleep on it.
4
“Fire department,” said Parker. “They got to be in touch with other fire departments around the state.”
Edgars frowned around his cigar. “God damn it,” he said. “I forgot about that.”
They were sitting around the dining-room table again, the five of them. Paulus was taking notes. The screen was up, at the far end of the room. The projector stood slightly up-angled on the table like a naval gun, but they weren’t using it right now, so the spaceship ceiling light was on.
Wycza said, “That’s another man. To sit by the phone in the fire house. And now we got firemen to keep on ice. Firemen, policemen, gate guards, telephone girls, the whole goddam town.”
Parker nodded. “There’s too many angles.”
Paulus looked up from his note-taking. “Why not just take the payroll? In and out fast. We five right here could do it, keep it simple and neat.”
Edgars shook his head. “No good at all,” he said. “Don’t you remember that map?” He put his hands down on the tabletop. “Here’s your payroll, with a cliff in back, a cliff on the right, a cliff on the left, and the whole city spread out in front. You couldn’t get through the city in the first place, and if you did there’s still only one road out.”
“Past that goddam state police barracks,” said Wycza.
Edgars said, “That’s right. Nobody’s ever even tried to steal that payroll, because it just can’t be done.”
Parker said, “It’s no good trying for any one thing in that town. The payroll or a bank. You’ve got to hit the whole town, or nothing.”
“What about the fire department?” asked Paulus. “That’s an eleventh man.”
Grofield said, “Not necessarily. Give them a diversion.”
Wycza looked at him. “A what?”
“A fire.”
They all looked at him. Grofield grinned and shrugged, then turned to Paulus, sitting next to him on the right. Still grinning, he drove his left fist at Paulus’s face. Paulus cried out and threw his hands up. Grofield’s left stopped in mid-air, and his right hand dug painfully into Paulus’s ribs. “Feint,” he said. “Feint and attack. Give the boys of the fire brigade a real rip-snorter to think about, in a quiet corner of town where they’ll see no evil, hear no evil, get wise to no evil.”
Paulus said, “You keep your hands to yourself, buddy.” He’d dropped the pencil he was taking notes with, and stooped over to get it.
Grofield grinned at his back. “Just a graphic illustration of the point, dear heart,” he said. “Essence of theater.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” said Edgars.
Parker shook his head. “A six-hour fire? They’ll be done before we are.”
Wycza said, “We need an eleventh man, that’s all.”
“We need one, anyway,” Parker told him. “We need one man loose, to trouble shoot any place something unexpected comes up. If we need another one for the fire department, that’s twelve.” He turned to Edgars. “Where’s the firehouse?”
“Across the street from the police station.”
Paulus said, “So we’ve gotto cover them. Twelve men. We’re going right back up to twenty-five again.”
Edgars took the cigar out of his mouth and looked insulted. “Why? Twelve men, what’s so bad about that? Twelve men to take a whole city.”
“Maybe we’re not done yet,” Paulus told him.
“Night people,” said Grofield, “that’s what we’ve got to think about. Who are the night people? Cops, firemen, telephone girls, we’ve got them. What about milkmen?”
Edgars shook his head. “They’re union, they deliver in the daytime.”
“Post office,” said Grofield. “They’ve got to have somebody around for special-delivery letters. Western Union office. Railroad station. Cabdrivers.”
“You don’t have to worry about cabdrivers,” Edgars told him. “I told you there was a curfew. There’s no taxi customers after midnight.”
“What about emergencies?” Grofield asked him. “Ladies having babies, children swallowing pins, men with appendicitis. Ambulances racing back and forth amid the booming safes.”
Parker said, “That’s right. Hospital. You got a hospital in this town?”
“No. The fire department has an ambulance, to take any emergency cases to the hospital in Madison, fourteen miles away on the highway.”
Paulus said, “So the fire department man covers the ambulance, too.”
Parker asked Edgars, “You know the train schedules? Anything going in or out between midnight and six in the morning?”
“No. It’s just a spur line in. There’s one passenger train a day, and two freight trains. The railroad station is closed between eight at night and eight in the morning.”
“Good,” said Paulus. “That takes care of the railroad station.”
“Western Union,” said Grofield. “Post office.”
“The post office closes,” said Edgars. “I’m sure it does. I don’t know what they do about special delivery letters. Maybe they drive them in from Madison.”
“But Western Union?”
“They’ve got an office on Raymond Avenue. I don’t know if it closes nights or not. I should, but I don’t.”
“We have to know,” Parker told him. “You got a contact in that town?”
“No.”
“If everything else closes down,” said Paulus, “the Western Union office probably does, too. They wouldn’t have much business at night.”
“No business at all,” said Edgars. “Most likely any telegrams that come at night are driven in from the Madison office, the same as special-delivery letters. I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen the Western Union office open at night, but I don’t see why it would be.”
“We have to know,” Parker repeated. “If it’s open, it’s got to be covered, and that means another man.”
“The only way to find out,” Edgars told him, “is to go to Copper Canyon and look for yourself.”
“I know.”
“I’ll write it down,” said Paulus.
“More night people,” said Grofield. “Who can think of more night people? You say there’s no all-night diner?”
Edgars shook his head. “No. No business stays open at all, because of the curfew.”
“That’s a very small-town thing, a curfew,” said Grofield. “Big cities talk about it, but small towns do it.”
Wycza said, “What about a newspaper?”
“A weekly,” Edgars told him. “It comes out on Thursday, for the convenience of the shoppers.”
“No reporters on at night?”
“No. Most of the paper is written by the secretaries of women’s organizations.”
They were all silent, then, all trying to think of other people who might be out and around late at night. After a minute, Paulus said, “That’s it, then. We need another man, to cover the fire department. And we have to find out about the Western Union office.”
Wycza said, “What about the getaway?”
“I got the two maps like Parker suggested.” Edgars answered. “There’s no other way to get out of town except the road, but I think I’ve found the hideout.”
“I don’t like that barracks,” Wycza said.
Grofield said, “An idle thought. What about the mine?”
They looked at him. Edgars said, “What about it?”
“Are there no entrances other than at the back of the canyon? No shafts leading out anywhere else? No emergency exits?”
Edgars shook his head. “I don’t think so. All the shafts go straight down in from the canyon. There’s no reason for any other way in.”
“Just a thought.” Grofield smiled. “I visualized us trundling away on ore carts with the loot, like the seven dwarfs.”
“We have to go past the barracks,” Par
ker said. “There’s no other choice. We space it so we don’t have a convoy go by all at once, and we’ll be all right.” He turned to Edgars. “What about the hideout?”
“Let me get the maps.” He stood up. “More beer?”
They all wanted more beer. He went away and came back with a double handful of beer cans. He set them down on the table, and took two maps out of his hip pocket. He spread them out on the table, covering most of the table’s surface. One was a state roadmap, the other a topographical map.
They were all standing now, leaning over the maps. Edgars pointed to the topographical map, saying, “See, there’s Copper Canyon. That’s a mesa back of it, it gradually levels down again. Out in front, it’s lowland for over a hundred miles. Down in here is one of the coal beds, lignite coal. This is just about the edge of the Badlands here. This whole section here is full of lignite coal. Some of it’s right out on the surface, burning, been burning for years.”
Parker didn’t give a damn about lignite coal, burning or not. He said, “The hideout.”
“I’m getting to it. Like I said, this section here is just about the edge of the Badlands, so it’s away from the tourist areas and it’s away from the mining operations. There was a strip mine working there a few years ago, but they’re gone now; they cleaned out what they could get and left. There’s an eighty-foot-deep ravine there now, where they scraped the topsoil off and took the coal out. There’s nobody there now at all. There’s some kind of sulphur by-product oozes out of the ground, pollutes the water, and stinks the place up, so nobody goes near it. But the mining company built a road into it, and their old sheds should still be there, on the lip of the ravine.”
“What kind of road?” Parker asked him.
“Dirt. But passable. They brought trucks in and out.”
“How do we get to it?”
Edgars switched over to the other map. “See, here’s 22A here, coming out of Copper Canyon. We pick up the highway here and turn left. Then there’s this smaller road, here, goes off to the right. We’d be on the highway maybe three miles. This small road we stay on for five or six miles, and then the mining company road goes off that to the left.”
The Score p-5 Page 3