Parker Read online

  “He gets access to the appraisals,” Melander added, “like anybody else in the business.”

  “He's done other stuff in Palm Beach,” Ross said, “so he knows the place, he knows the routine, he knows everything about it, but he isn't one of the people that looked at this particular bunch of jewels.”

  Melander said, “He's moved in that territory, but on different estates, different evaluations.”

  “If they're looking for an insider,” Ross said, “they won't look at him, because he wasn't inside.”

  “Possibly,” Parker said. “What about the boat?”

  “No boat,” Melander assured him. “I a hundred percent agree with you about boats.”

  “Then how do you get off the island?”

  “We don't,” Ross said.

  “You stay there? Where? You know, you rent a condominium, the cops are gonna look at recent rentals.”

  “Not a condominium,” Ross said.

  “Then where?”

  “At my place,” Melander said, and grinned like a bear.

  Parker tried to see around corners, but couldn't, not quite. “You've got a place there?”

  “It's fifteen rooms,” Melander told him, “on the beach. I think you'll like it.”

  “You've got a fifteen-room mansion on the beach in Palm Beach,” Parker said. “How does this happen?”

  “Well, I looked at it a few weeks ago,” Melander said.

  “But he's just buying it today,” Ross said. “We got the down payment from that bank back there.”

  4

  The motel, and the car Parker would be using, was in Evansville. When they got there, while Melander and Ross counted the money on the bed, Carlson and Parker sat in the room's two chairs, across the round table from one another, and Carlson told him more. “The mansion is cheap. I mean, for a mansion in Palm Beach.”

  “Why?”

  “It was sold maybe eight years ago to this movie star couple, you know, he's a star and she's a star, so when they make a picture, he gets twenty million, she gets ten million—”

  From the bed, Melander said, “Still not equal pay, you see that?”

  Carlson and Parker both ignored him, Carlson saying, “They bought the place, they thought they'd be stars in Palm Beach, but Palm Beach ignored them. They're stars, but they're trash, and in Palm Beach you can't be trash. Or, if you are trash, you hide it, and you spread your money around.”

  “Charities,” Melander said.

  “They love charities in Palm Beach,” Carlson agreed. “But these stars didn't do it right. They thought they were already entitled. They threw big flashy parties, they brought in rock bands, for Christ's sake, and nobody came.”

  “Well, a lot of people went to those parties,” Ross said.

  Carlson said, “Not the right people. Also, the parties were playing hell with the house, messing it up. Then the stars went away to be stars someplace else—”

  “Where stars are looked up to,” Melander said.

  “So the house was abandoned,” Carlson said, “and the alarm systems would break down all the time, and bums would sneak in there from the beach, and they had a couple little fires, and the cops finally said, we can't keep a man on this house twenty-four hours a day, you got to put in your own security patrol, and the stars said fuck it, and put it on the market.”

  Laughing, Melander said, “A fixer-upper for sale in Palm Beach. A do-it-yourselfer.”

  “These stars couldn't do anything right,” Carlson said. “If they do the fix-up, they make a lot more money when they sell the place. But they're not interested, they're off somewheres else, and the house sits there until Boyd comes along.”

  Melander got off the bed and took a stance, shoulders squared, big body relaxed, big smile, big wavy hair framing his head. He said, in a strong Texas accent, “I do like this little town you got here, I'd like to contribute if I could, make it even better. I like that ocean you got, you know, it's bigger than the Gulf, I like the idea of that whole ocean out there and then Europe on the other side, not Mexico. Not that I have anything against Mexicans, hardworking little fellas, most of them.”

  Melander sat down to the money again while a grinning Carlson said to Parker, “Boyd can fit right in. And with all that oil money in his family, he'll fix up that mansion good as new. Better. And when he's got the house all done, he wants to host the big library benefit there.”

  Parker nodded. “All right, he can be plausible,” he said.

  Carlson looked pleased. “So you're in?”

  “No,” Parker said.

  All three were disappointed, gazing at him as though he'd let them down in some unexpected way. Carlson said, “Could I ask why?”

  ‘You've got a place to stay,” Parker said. “If I ask, you'll tell me how the mansion won't trace back to any of you after it's all over.”

  “Sure,” Carlson said.

  “But that isn't the job,” Parker told him. “That's nothing but the safe house. The job is still a whole lot of jewelry, twelve million dollars’ worth of jewelry, completely surrounded by people with weapons who don't want you to get your hands on it. From this idea today—blow up something a little farther out of town as a distraction—I can see you guys like to be gaudy. That's fine, fires and explosions have their place, but I think you mean to be gaudy in Palm Beach, and it won't work out for you any better than it did for the movie stars.”

  Carlson wanted to say something, but Parker held up his hand. “Don't tell me,” he said. “I'm not in this, so I don't want to know what the plan is, and you don't want me to know.”

  The three of them looked at one another. Parker watched them, waiting to see what his move should be, but nobody seemed ready to offer any threat. At last, Carlson said, “How's the count coming?”

  “Done,” Ross said. “Eighty-five and change.”

  “That's short,” Carlson said.

  Melander said, “Well, we knew it could be.”

  Carlson turned back to Parker. “The down payment on the place is a hundred grand. It was higher, but Boyd haggled them down to that, but that's it, rock bottom. Two days from now, this cash here is gonna be an electronic impulse out of a bank in Austin, but it isn't enough. As it is, we're gonna have to borrow black to top it up.”

  Parker waited.

  From the bed, Ross said, “You see how it is. We gotta borrow fifteen, that means we gotta pay back thirty. Man, if we give you your”—he consulted a slip of paper on the bed in front of himself—“twenty-one thousand three hundred nineteen bucks, we're gonna have to borrow almost forty, that's a payback eighty, that begins to cut in.”

  “Also,” Carlson said, being very reasonable about it all, “we still need a fourth man, the way we got it set up, so somebody has to get that fourth share. That's why we want it to be you.”

  “No,” Parker said.

  Again they looked at one another, and again Parker waited for them to make a move, but again it didn't happen. Melander simply said, “He isn't gonna change his mind.”

  “Well, that's a bitch,” Carlson said.

  Melander said, “We knew it could happen.”

  “Still.”

  Meanwhile, Ross was counting out a little stack of money onto the bed while Carlson got to his feet and crossed over to the closet. Opening the closet door, he pulled out two of the three suitcases in there, leaving Parker's. Ross got off the bed and came over to hand the little stack of cash to Parker, saying, “Sorry it didn't work out. We'll catch up with you later.”

  Parker looked at the money, and it wasn't enough, nowhere near enough. He said, “What's this?”

  “Ten percent,” Ross told him. ‘Just over two grand. When we're done in Palm, you'll get the full amount, so this is like interest on the loan.”

  “I'm not loaning you anything,” Parker said.

  Melander and Carlson were stuffing the rest of the cash into the two suitcases. Melander said, “I'm afraid you got to, pal. You don't have a choice, and we d
on't have a choice.”

  Ross showed Parker a pistol but didn't exactly point it at him. “You shouldn't stand up,” he said, “and you shouldn't move your hands off the table.”

  Parker said, “Tom Hurley told me you guys weren't hijackers.”

  “We aren't hijackers,” Ross said with simple sincerity. “You'll get your money. The job goes down two months from now, and then the money's yours. With interest.”

  Melander said, “Pal, I'm sorry we got to act this way, but what's our choice? We thought you'd come in with us, and then everything'd be fine. I'm sorry you feel the way you do, but there it is.”

  Carlson said, ‘You can count on us to pay you. I never stiffed another mechanic in my life.”

  You're stiffing me now, Parker thought, but what was the point talking?

  The three exchanged glances, as though they thought there might be something more to say, and then Melander turned to Parker and spread his hands: “You know where we're going.”

  “Palm Beach.”

  “If we were hijackers, we'd kill you now.”

  The only thing to do, Parker thought, and waited.

  Carlson said, “But that isn't our style.”

  Then you're dead, Parker thought, and waited.

  Melander said, “It's just, we'd like you to stay at home the next couple months. We'll phone you sometimes, we'd like to know you're there.”

  Parker shrugged. There was nothing to say to these people.

  Apparently, they now themselves thought they'd said enough. They moved toward the door, Ross putting the pistol away, and left, not looking back at him.

  Parker sat there, hands palm-down on the table, little stack of bills between his hands. His money was gone, about to become an electronic impulse in Texas. This wasn't what it was supposed to be, and it wasn't what it was going to be.

  He got to his feet, and crossed to the phone, and called Claire, at the house up in New Jersey. When she answered, without identifying himself he said, “You remember that hotel with the shark scare,” meaning a place they'd stayed once in Miami Beach.

  “Yes.”

  “Go there for a couple months, I'll call you.”

  “Now?”

  “You can wait a couple days, till the phone rings, but don't answer,” he said, and hung up.

  5

  He was starting from Evansville, and he had two months to get to Palm Beach. In that time, there would be preparations to make, and preparations cost money. So what he had to do, most of the time, for the next month and a half, was collect money.

  Cash is harder to find than it used to be. There are no cash payrolls. Stadium box offices, travel agents, department stores, all deal mostly in credit cards. An armored car can't be taken down by one man working alone. A bank can be taken by a single-O, but all he gets is what's in one teller's cage, which isn't enough for the risk. So it's hard to find cash, in useful amounts. But it isn't impossible.

  What he had, including the “interest” his three former partners had given him, was a little over three thousand dollars in cash. The car he was driving, a tan Ford Taurus with Oklahoma plates, was clean enough for a traffic stop, not clean enough for an in-depth study of the paperwork. Clipped under the dash of the Taurus, to the right of the steering wheel column, was a .38 Special Colt Cobra, while under his shirt on the left side, in a narrow suede holster, was a Hi-Standard snub-nose Sentinel .22, useless unless the target is within arm's reach. He also had a few changes of clothing of utilitarian type, to make him look like somebody who works with his hands, and that was it.

  What he needed first was better guns, then more money, then better clothing and luggage, then better wheels. He needed to change his appearance, too, not for the three guys he was going to kill but for the Palm Beach police; he needed to be somebody who wouldn't make the law look twice.

  Melander had paid for this motel room with a credit card that would probably self-destruct by tomorrow, so the first thing to do was get out of here. Parker carried his bag, lighter than it should have been, out to the Taurus. Five minutes later he was on Interstate 164, headed south into Kentucky.

  Throughout the South, there are more gun stores out along the state highways than there are in downtowns or shopping malls, and there's a number of reasons for that. The stores need good parking areas, they don't want to have to deal with antsy neighbors or troublesome landlords or the wrong kind of pedestrian traffic, and most of their customers are rural rather than urban.

  So the stores are in the country, but they aren't countrified. They have first-rate security, with solid locks, burglar alarms wired to the nearest state police barracks, shatterproof glass in their display windows, iron bars, and some even have motion sensors.

  Parker chose a place called “A-Betta-Deala—GUNS,” mostly because it didn't have a dog. It was a broad one-story building beside a state road in central Kentucky, with its name in red letters on a huge white sign on the roof. Flanking the barred and gated double front doors were two wide display windows on either side, three of them featuring rifles and shotguns, the fourth showing handguns.

  Two and a quarter miles to the south of the gun shop was the garage and storage lot of the County Highway Department, and four miles beyond that was the nearest state police barracks. Parker left the Taurus at the side of A-Betta-Deala at quarter after three in the morning, where it wouldn't be readily noticed from the road. Then he walked the two and a quarter miles south along the hilly, curvy road through mostly scrub forest. The four times he saw headlights coming, he stepped off the road into the trees until the vehicle went past.

  There was much less security at the Highway Department garage; just a bolted chain to keep closed the two sides of the chain-link gate. First putting on the surgical gloves, Parker climbed over the gate and found his way in the darkness to a yellow Caterpillar backhoe with a four-foot-wide bucket. Briefly using his pencil flash, he found the number painted on the side of the cab, then went over to the garage. The side door had a simple lock and no alarm system; he went through it, and used the pencil flash to find the locked plywood cabinet on the wall where the keys were kept. A nearby shovel made a good lever; he popped the cabinet door open and found the backhoe key. He also picked up a yellow hard hat to wear, to look legitimate, then went back outside.

  The backhoe was loud but powerful. He had to back it out of its parking space, and it went ping ping ping until he shifted into Drive. Then he swung it around, extended the bucket, rotated it so the open part was facing rearward, and drove it through the locked gate.

  The machine's top speed was around twenty miles an hour, and it didn't like to do that much on curves. It took eleven minutes to drive back north to A-Betta-Deala. In that time, one pickup passed, headed south, loud country music trailing from its open windows.

  There were no headlights visible up or down the road when Parker reached the gun shop. Without pausing, he angled the bucket with the maw forward and down, then drove directly into the window displaying the handguns. He rotated the bucket, scooping up the window and everything in it, then backed away from the building while the backhoe pinged some more. Clear of the building, which was now screaming a high-pitched alarm wail, he rotated the bucket to spill everything onto the blacktop parking lot, then shut off the backhoe's motor, took off the hard hat, climbed down from the cab, and picked through the rubble, shining the pencil flash. He chose four pistols, went away to the Taurus, put the handguns under a motel blanket on the back seat, stripped off the gloves, and drove north, away from the gun shop, the Highway Department garage, and the state police.

  6

  Six days later, in Nashville, at eight-thirty in the morning, Parker sat in the Taurus on Orange Street, across the way and up the block from AAAAcme Check Cashing. The place wasn't open yet, so all that showed on the ground floor of the narrow three-story building, one of a row of similar structures along here, was the gray metal of the articulated grille that was drawn down over the facade at night. Once that wa
s raised, the storefront was merely a small-windowed metal door in the middle of a brick wall, with a small wide window high on each side, both windows containing red neon signs that said “Checks Cashed.”

  This was Parker's fourth morning here, and he now was sure of AAAAcme's opening routine. The business hours of the place were nine A.M. to six P.M., Monday through Saturday. At about eight forty-five every morning, a red Jeep Cherokee would pull up to the store with two men in the front seat. The driver, a bulky guy in a windbreaker no matter how warm the weather, suggesting a bulletproof vest underneath, would get out of the Cherokee, look carefully around, and cross to unlock and lift the metal grille. Then he'd unlock and open the front door, and stand holding it open, looking up and down the street. The other man, also bulky and in a wind-breaker, would get out of the Jeep, open its rear door, take out two heavy metal boxes with metal handles on the tops, and trudge them across the sidewalk and into the store. The first man would let the door close, then go back to the Jeep, shut the rear door his partner had left open, and drive half a block to a private parking lot reserved for the bailsmen, pawnshop owners, used musical instrument dealers, liquor store owners, dentists, and passport photographers who ran businesses in the neighborhood. After parking the Jeep in its labeled spot, he'd walk back to the store, knock, and be let in. Fifteen minutes later they'd open for business.

  This was more of a late-night than an early-morning neighborhood. There was almost no traffic at this time of day, rarely a pedestrian until midmorning. The three days Parker'd watched, AAAAcme hadn't had a customer before nine-thirty, so their opening time must be merely a long-standing habit.

  This morning, the routine was the same as ever. Seeing the Cherokee approach in his rearview mirror, Parker got out of the Taurus, made a show of locking it, and walked down the street toward AAAAcme. The Cherokee passed him and stopped at the curb, and he walked by between Cherokee and storefront. He continued to walk, pacing himself to the normal speed of their movements behind him, and the Cherokee passed him again just before he got to the entrance of the parking lot.