The Man with the Getaway Face: A Parker Novel (Parker Novels) Page 2

  Parker knew about that. Skimm, like most men on the bum, lived from job to job; he spent more in one year than most make in five and was always broke, dressing and looking like a bum. How he did it, where it all went, Parker didn't know.

  He worked it differently, spending the money and time between jobs living at the best resort hotels and dressing himself in the best clothes. There was no overlap between people he knew on and off the job. He owned a couple of parking lots and gas stations around the country to satisfy the curiosity of the Internal Revenue beagles, but never went near them. He let the managers siphon off the profits in return for not asking him to take an active part in the business.

  He came back from the window. The room sported a green leather chair, the rip across the seat patched with masking tape. Parker settled into the chair gingerly.

  “All right. Who else is in it?”

  “So far, only me and Handy McKay. I've got the earie out for Lew Matson and Little Bob Foley. Maybe we'll need more; it's all how we set it up.”

  “You want me to angle for the bankroll, huh?”

  “You got the connections, Parker,” Skimm said. He had watery eyes, of a pale blue. They looked at Parker when Parker was talking, but when Skimm was talking they looked everywhere else—up at the ceiling and over at the window and down at the near-empty pint and over at the pillow and then the other way at the door with the hotel regulations pasted on the back.

  “I've got the connections,” Parker agreed. “Who's the bird dog on this one?”

  “It's a frill.” Skimm looked embarrassed. “She's a busher,” he said, “but she's okay.”

  “If she never worked this route before,” Parker said, “where'd she get the connections?”

  “Through me. I met her one time.” Skimm now looked more embarrassed than before. He was a thin stub end of a man, all bones and skin with no meat. His head was long and thin, set on a chicken neck with a knotty Adam's apple, and his face was all nose and cheekbones. The watery eyes were set deep in the skull, the jaw small and hard. “We get along,” he said, “her and me.” He said it apologetically, as though he knew an off-the-wall like him shouldn't be getting along with any woman. “She works in a diner. In Jersey.”

  Parker dragged his Luckies out of his pocket, shook one out and lit it. “I don't know,” he said.

  “She's straight, Parker. I been in this business long enough.”

  “I don't like it.”

  “I heard about what happened with your woman. That was a tough bit.”

  Parker shrugged. “She got in a bind, that's all. So now she's dead.”

  “Alma is okay, believe me.”

  “It isn't she's a woman,” Parker said. “It's she's new, that's what I don't like. When a new fish does the fingering, most of the time the job goes sour.”

  “Sure,” said Skimm. “I know that. Because they want their piece of the pie, but they got to be covered because they're known. But this time it's different, Alma's going to take off with me after it's over.”

  “We'll see. What's the setup?”

  “Hold on, I'll show you.” Skimm tilted the pint, emptied it, and set it on the night table. Then he went over to the dresser, opened the bottom drawer, and took out a manila envelope. There wasn't any table or writing desk in the room, so he went back and spread things out on the bed. Parker stood beside the bed and watched.

  The first thing Skimm took out of the envelope was an Esso roadmap of New Jersey. “Here it is,” he said. He opened the map and pointed a finger to the right hand side of it, near New York. “Here's where it is here, where it says Perth Amboy. See it? Route 9 comes south here, see, and down here a couple miles below Perth Amboy it splits. See? 9 keeps on south, and 35 heads off to the east and follows the shore.”

  Parker nodded. He could have seen it better if Skimm had kept his fingers out of the way, but he didn't say anything. He wasn't in any hurry, and every man has his own rate and style of telling a story. Try to hurry Skimm or make him talk without covering the map with his fingers and he'd just get confused.

  “Okay,” Skimm was saying. “Now, two miles farther south, 34 takes off. To the east again, same as 35. Right there, see it?”

  “I see it.”

  “Okay. Now, about midway between those turnoffs there's the Shore Points Diner, on the west side of the road. Right in there, see? Between where those two red lines go off to the right.”

  “I've got it, Skimm. And that's where this Alma's a waitress.”

  “Right! Now, down here—” His fingers moved southward down the map. “Here's Freehold, down here, where 9 crosses 33. Now, there's the Dairyman's Trust, this bank, see, it's up here in Elizabeth, and they got a branch in Newark, and they got a branch down here in Freehold, too. Now every other Monday there's this Wells Fargo armored car comes down from the main branch in Elizabeth down to Freehold, see? Down along route 9, here.”

  “And they stop at this Shore Points Diner,” Parker said.

  “That's it! This Freehold, it ain't much of a town, but the Dairyman's Trust is the biggest bank, I mean with branches in Newark and Elizabeth and all, so most of the business accounts all around Freehold are in that bank, see? So when the armored car comes down every other Monday, it carries enough dough to pay off two weeks of payrolls around Freehold, and any other dough the bank needs down there. We figure maybe fifty G, maybe more.”

  Parker frowned. “That's all? The way I read the letter, fifty thousand figured to be my split.”

  Skimm looked up, worried and apologetic and embarrassed. “Oh, no, Parker! I never told Joe nothing like that.”

  “Okay, I read it wrong, that's all.”

  “I mean, fifty G is the minimum figure, you see? It might be seventy, eighty, who knows?”

  Parker dragged on his cigarette, flicking ashes onto the whisky stain on the carpet. “That means if I'm lucky I clear ten. Maybe only eight.” He shook his head. “It isn't worth it.”

  Skimm's eyes flicked toward the empty pint, then looked back at the map. “It's an easy haul,” he said wistfully. “If there was something better on the fire, I'd think that way, too. But I got no other jobs building, and I need the dough.” He looked up at Parker, his mouth opened because of the lifted angle of his head. “You know of anything else?”

  “No.” That was the trouble. He had nothing else on the fire either, and he only had the nine grand. He couldn't pick and choose and plan, the way he'd want to. He had to build a stake, he had to have a money cushion.

  “I'd like to have you in it, Parker,” Skimm was saying, wistful again. “I know your work.”

  “Maybe it doesn't really need five men,” Parker said thoughtfully. “That's a big crowd for an armored car heist. What's the play?”

  “Yeah.” Skimm reached for the envelope. “We figured to do it at the diner,” he said. “Here, let me show you.” He was all activity again, talking in a rush, as though he were afraid Parker would walk out on him before he was done. He pulled more paper out of the manila envelope, and found the sheet he wanted. “Here, here it is. See, this is the diner here, and the highway, and the parking lot.”

  Parker looked in among the pointing fingers. On the sheet of paper was a rough pencil drawing of the diner area, as seen from above. The diner was set back off the highway about six yards, with parking lots on both sides and at the rear. Across the front, between diner and roadway, was a patch marked ‘Grass.’ There was an X scrawled on one of the parking lots at the side, up close against the side of the building.

  “Now they come in,” said Skimm, pointing all over the sheet of paper, “every other Monday morning between ten-thirty and eleven. They never miss. There's the driver, and a guard sitting up in front with him, and the other guard in back. They've all been on this route for years, see? And they've got a pattern, they never change. They come in between ten-thirty and eleven, and they park right there where the X is.” He tapped the X with his finger and looked up at Parker. “See it there?”

/>   “I see it.”

  “Right,” said Skimm. He looked down at the drawing again. “Then, the driver and the guard from in back go into the diner and have coffee and danish and take a leak, see, and then they go back to the car and the other guard comes in. Then when he's done they take off again. Maybe fifteen minutes for the whole thing.”

  Parker nodded.

  Skimm took a deep breath. “Now,” he said, “here's the way we figured it. We need two tractor-trailers, big ones. They trial the armored car down 9, see, hanging back a little so when they get to the diner the first two guys are already inside. They pull in and they park on each side of the armored car, see, they bracket it like, so you can't look into the armored car from either side. Alma works it in the diner so that side is closed to be mopped, see, so there won't be any customers close enough to the windows on that side to be able to see what's going on. And the trailers stick back far enough so you'd have to be right behind the armored car to tumble to anything, you see what I mean? But nobody will anyway because right after the trailers come in our car parks right behind the trailers, facing across them, you see the way it works? Here, I'll show you.” Unnecessarily, he threw a U-shape, and explained.

  Parker waited through it, nodding, beginning to lose his patience. He didn't like the job with an amateur doing the fingering and five guys cutting up a fifty thousand dollar pie after the finger's ten percent and the bankroller's two-for-one were already taken out, and with the job already requiring two tractor-trailers and a car. And Skimm didn't even have them into the armored car yet.

  Skimm finished his explanation and said, “Now, we've got two guys in the head, inside the diner. The driver and the guard always take a leak when they stop off there, it never misses, they're regular as clockwork. So they go in, and the two guys in there tap them and stow them away in a stall, see? And outside we got the other three, from the trucks and the car. They pump tear gas into the air vent on top of the cab—you know what that looks like? They got this thing on top—”

  “I know what it looks like,” Parker said.

  “Okay.” Skimm hurried even faster, sensing Parker's impatience. “That forces the guy out, see? We take the keys off him, tap him, transfer the dough to the car, and we all take off. The one truck goes up 9 here, see? North, up to South Amboy, it's maybe a mile, and cuts back south on 535, this little blue road here. The other truck goes south to 516, that's maybe four miles, and then cuts east. And the car, with the dough, takes this old dirt road—it isn't on this map, it goes from behind the diner across here to this unmarked road, this little one here—and south on the unmarked road to Old Bridge. We all come together at Old Bridge, see, and back off east of the town there's this falling-down old farm. We meet there. We split up the boodle and take off. And see, the thing is, we get vehicles going off in three directions, so they don't know which way to look for us.”

  He looked up at Parker, hopeful and expectant. “What do you think?”

  Parker shook his head and crossed the room to toss his cigarette out the window. When he turned back, he said, “You ever work an armored car job before, Skimm?”

  Skimm's lips twitched. “No, I never did.”

  “That's what I figured. They got two-way radios, boy. You drop tear gas in there, right away he calls. Before he has to take a deep breath, there's state police all over us.”

  Skimm looked down at the map and papers, as though they'd betrayed him. “I didn't know that.”

  “And you don't make a getaway in a semitrailer,” Parker went on. “They'd catch you before you reached fourth gear.”

  “Jesus, Parker—”

  “Who worked up this scheme? Alma?”

  “Most of it was her idea, yeah.”

  “Sure. She spent a lot of time leaning on the counter looking out there at that tin box wishing she could get her hands on the green inside and working it all out in her head, not knowing a thing about heisting or armored cars or anything else except how to draw a lousy cup of coffee.”

  “Aw, now, Parker—”

  “I need cash,” Parker said. “I'm in the job, on one condition.”

  “Name it.”

  “We throw that plan away and start from scratch. She gave us the setup, and it's a good one. Bracketing the wagon with trucks is good, too. From there on, we got to work something out from the beginning.”

  Skimm twitched all over trying not to show his relief. He'd never worked an armored car before, and he hadn't been sure of himself. He'd probably talked himself into a bind with the woman Alma, loud-talking about what an artist he was so he couldn't admit to her he didn't know whether her ideas were any good or not. He'd wanted Parker because he wanted somebody else to take over the operation.

  Parker lit a new cigarette. “We'll do it with three men, not five. The pie's too small for five. You and Handy and me, and we split it three ways even. You and Alma can share your third between you any way you want.”

  “What about her ten percent?”

  “Give it to her out of your third. What the hell, she's traveling with you.”

  “Jesus, I don't know, Parker. I'd have to check with Alma on that.”

  “You two figured to take a third anyway, didn't you? And leave the other two-thirds for a four-man split. So what's the difference? You get the same dough as before, but with a cleaner, safer job.”

  “I guess so,” Skimm said doubtfully. “I'd have to check with Alma.”

  “Check with the finger? Skimm, give me an answer now or the deal's off.”

  Skimm worried it over, staring anxiously at the empty pint. Finally, he said, “Okay, Parker. Three ways, even.”

  “All right. Let me see that map.” Parker came over and took it from the bed. “Newark,” he said. “There's a bar named the Green Rose. It's on Division Street. I'll meet you there next Monday night, ten o'clock.”

  “Okay, sure.” Skimm got up from the bed, his lips twitching again. Parker knew he was anxious to go buy another pint. “Okay, Parker, I'm glad to have you in, I really am. I'll send word to Lew and Little Bob to forget it.”

  “Good.”

  “What you going to do now?”

  “See about bankrolling. I know a couple of people in Baltimore. I'll figure three grand to cover it.”

  “Okay, fine. Listen, you want Handy with me? At the bar I mean?”

  “Sure.”

  “I'm glad to have you in, Parker.”

  “The Green Rose,” Parker reminded him. “Next Monday, ten o'clock.”

  4

  Across the river from Cincinnati, Ohio is Newport, Kentucky. Parker took the bus over and walked to Whore Row. Cincinnati is a clean town, so the Cincinnati citizens in search of action go across the river to Newport, which is a dirty town. Parker wandered around, walking up and down the streets, looking. It was eleven-thirty at night when he got to Newport, and nearly two in the morning before he found what he was looking for.

  Ahead of him, a weaving drunk fumbled with his car keys, trying to get into a car with Ohio plates. The car was a Ford, cream-colored, two years old. Except for Parker and the drunk the block was empty and deserted.

  Parker came along, arms swinging loose at his sides, and when he was alongside the drunk he turned and chopped him in the kidney. That made it impossible for the drunk to cry out. Parker turned him and clipped him, and caught the car keys as they fell from the drunk's hand. The drunk hit the pavement, and Parker unlocked the car door, slid behind the wheel, and drove away.

  He took the bridge back across the river to Cincinnati and parked near the railroad depot. He went into the depot and got the suitcase and typewriter case from the locker where he'd stashed them. Then he went back to the car and drove north through town and out the other side and headed northeast on 22 toward Pittsburgh. It was now three o'clock Thursday morning. He had till Monday night to get to New Jersey and look the situation over for himself. If the setup looked as promising as Skimm had made it sound, fine. Otherwise, Skimm would have a long
wait at the Green Rose.

  Parker covered the three hundred miles between Cincinnati and Pittsburgh in under seven hours, crossing into Pennsylvania at Weirton a little after nine. He circled Pittsburgh, not wanting to go through town, and when he got back to 22 on the other side it was after ten. He slowed down, then, looking for a motel.

  When he found one, he stopped. He slept most of the day, getting up at quarter to seven. He took a shower and shaved and dressed, and then opened the typewriter case on the bed. He counted out three thousand dollars, then closed the typewriter case again. He needed money badly, so he'd decided to bankroll the job himself. So far as Skimm was concerned, the money was coming from the contacts in Baltimore.