Backflash. Part 6

Parker looked at the ship, out in the center channel. A big shiny white empty box, going upriver to be filled with money. For the first time, he was absolutely sure they were going to do it. Seeing it out there, big and slow and unaware, he knew it belonged to him. He could almost walk over to it, on the water.

TWO.

1.

The same b.u.ms were in the Lido. Parker stood at the street end of the bar to have his beer, then went out to the gray day no sunlight this time to lean against the Subaru for two minutes until Hanzen came shuffling out of the bar and headed this way along the sidewalk. Then Parker wordlessly got behind the wheel, and Hanzen slid into the pa.s.senger seat beside him, and Parker drove on down Warren Street toward the invisible river.

Hanzen said, "Where we going today?"

"Drive around and talk."

"Take it out of town, then," Hanzen advised. "Do your left on Third Street."

There were lights at every intersection, not staggered. When he could, Parker turned left on Third Street, and within a couple of blocks they were away from houses and traffic lights, with scrubby woodland on both sides of the road.

Hanzen, sounding amused, said, "I guess you want me to go first."

"If you got something to say," Parker said.

"I talked to Pete Rudd about you."

"I know you did."

"And I know you know. Pete told me what you do, and I could trust you as long as you could trust me."

"I don't trust your biker friends," Parker said.

Hanzen snorted. "I don't come attached to any bikers," he said. "I do business with those boys, that's all, and I wouldn't trust them around the corner."

Parker said nothing to that. An intersection was coming up, with signs for a bridge across the river, and Hanzen said, "Bear to the left, we'll stay on this side and go south along the river."

Parker did so, and after a minute Hanzen said, "I get the feeling you want me to tell you what your story is."

"If you want."

They were on a two-lane concrete road. There was woodsy hillslope up to their left, and the same down to their right, with the slate-gray river every once in a while visible down there. Nodding at the river, Hanzen said, "There's only one change I know of lately, out there."

"Uh huh."

"It's got a boat full of money."

"Uh huh."

"And here you are."

Parker said nothing to that, so Hanzen said, "Pete probably told you I done time."

"He didn't have to."

"Well, yeah, I suppose he didn't. The thing is, I don't want to do any more."

"Good," Parker said.

Hanzen said, "There's fellas, and you know them, too, that like to be in there. They won't admit it, they probably don't even know it themselves, but they like it. They like not having to be in charge of their own life, not having that chance to f.u.c.k up all the time. Life is regular, simple routines, food not so bad, you can pick some okay guys to be your pals, you don't have to be tense any more."

Parker drove. Traffic was light, mostly pickup trucks and delivery vans. Hanzen said, "You get into a little job with a fella like that, he's just waiting the chance to make that mistake, screw it up just enough so he can say, you got me, officer, and back into the nest he goes. And you with him."

"They exist," Parker agreed.

Hanzen said, "I'm not one of them. I like it out here where I am. So if there's any chance at all, you and whoever you're in with, you're gonna come off that boat in chains, don't even tell me about it."

"Then I'll drive you back to the Lido," Parker told him, but didn't turn around. "Because you ought to know there's always a chance something goes wrong. Pete must've told you, I done a number of things for a while now, and never wound up in chains. But every time, it could've happened."

"Security's gonna be s.h.i.t-tight on that boat."

"Security's tight everywhere there's money."

"That's true. You'd want me to take you out there, after dark, so you can board?"

"No, we'll get aboard our own way."

"So it's when you're coming off. You and the money."

"Right."

"You coming down ropes? Won't they see you?"

"There's a door in the side of the ship, it's what they use themselves when they take the money off. It's five, six feet above the waterline, to be the right level for the dock. There's no windows next to it or under it."

"You've got somebody giving you plans and things."

Parker drove. They went through a little town with a gas station and a blinker light. Hanzen said, "That wasn't a question."

"I know."

"Okay. It don't sound bad. I'm just there in the river, I'm minding my own business, here comes the boat. I see a fuss on that boat, I don't even come over. Don't look to me for no James Bond rescues."

"I don't look to anybody for James Bond rescues," Parker a.s.sured him.

"When you figure to do this?"

"You worried about the chains?"

"Not as long as I'm just some of the traffic out there in the river."

"Then I'll call you," Parker said. "You won't need a lot of advance notice."

Hanzen laughed. "Trust is a wonderful thing," he said.

2.

"It isn't the lap of luxury," the real estate agent said, "but the price is right. And you fellas don't care about fancy stuff, I don't think."

"Not us," Mike Carlow agreed. "We just like to come up from the city, weekends, do some fishing."

"Then this is the place for you," the real estate agent said. He was a jolly round-faced man with bushy white hair over his ears, so that he looked like a beardless Santa Claus. "I'm a fisherman myself, you know," he said.

"Oh, yeah?" Carlow actually looked interested. "What do you go after, mostly?"

"Trout. Not in the Hudson, but in the little streams coming in."

Carlow and the real estate agent continued through the house, talking c.r.a.p about fishing, while Parker looked around, thinking it over. Was this the place for them?

It was just north of a small river town about thirty miles south of Albany, on the east side of the river, the same as Hanzen's mooring, but farther upstream. A dirt road led in from the state highway, past several rundown private houses, to this piece of land on a low bluff about fifteen feet above the water.

Four small cottages had been built here, back in the twenties, and hadn't been taken care of much since. They stood side by side in a row, identical rectangles facing away from the river, with shingle roofs and clapboard siding painted a worn green. They were shabbily old-fashioned, from their rattly and holey screen doors to the lines-and-squares pattern linoleum on their kitchen floors. There was room to park a car beside each, and a screened porch on the back of each one faced the river. Beyond them, at the end of a brief stone path, an old wooden staircase with a log railing led from the bluff down to a mooring and a short wooden pier.

These cottages were rented to vacationers, by the week or the month, but very few vacationers wanted to rough it with this sort of accommodation any more. The real estate agent had told the two of them frankly, driving them out here from his office on the highway, that only the occasional group of fishermen was likely to want to rent any of the cottages, and that at the moment none of them were occupied. "The owners' a couple sisters live away, one in Washington, D.C., and the other over near Boston. They inherited, they don't much give a d.a.m.n about the place, just so it pays the taxes and the insurance and the maintenance. Hunting season, especially deer season, they'll be rented out full, but the rest of the year they're mostly empty."

There was nothing to choose between them; they were identical. Inside, there was a small living room with a fireplace and pine paneling and just enough furniture to get by, a very small kitchen with twenty-year-old appliances in it, a closet of a bathroom with appliances even older, and three small but neat bedrooms, each with a double bed, a dresser, an armoire, one bedside table, one bedside lamp, one ceiling light and no closet.

There were a number of such places up and down the river, left over from a time when upstate New York was a part of New York City's vacation land, before the jumbo jets opened the world. Most tourist accommodations around here had been torn down by now, replaced by housing or farming or light industry, but along the poorest parts of the river there had never been an economic reason to change, since n.o.body was going to come here anymore anyway.

This spot, Tooler's cottages, was the best location Parker and Mike Carlow had seen in the last three days of being two New Yorkers, working men, looking for a cheap place along the river for fishing weekends for themselves and their friends for the next month or so. No other houses were visible from here, and the cottages would be hard to notice from the river.

Coming out, they'd asked their usual question. Would the owner mind if other people were invited along sometimes? Not a bit. "Long as you don't burn the place down," the real estate agent told them, "the Tooler sisters don't care what you do."

He'd said, during their first conversation back in his little cluttered office with the Iroquois Indian memorabilia all over the place, that he had three houses he thought would suit them, but that the Tooler cottages were probably the best, so why didn't they take a look at them first? Fine. Now the question was, would there be any point looking at his other two possibles.

Parker and Carlow had seen almost two dozen rentals the last three days, and there'd been something wrong with every one of them. There were neighbors too close, or the access to the river wasn't simple enough, or the owner would be too inquisitive, or it was right next to a county road. This one had privacy, accessibility from both land and water, and absentee owners.

Parker met up with the other two in the living room, where Carlow was still talking fish. Maybe, when he wasn't driving cars, Carlow was a fisherman; he'd never said, and Parker had never asked.

Now, Carlow said, "What do you think, Ed? Looks good to me."

"Fine," Parker said. He was being Edward Lynch again.

"And the price is right," the real estate agent a.s.sured them, grinning at them both, happy to have some profit out of his morning's work.

Carlow said, "And there's room, some of the other guys want to come up sometime, room for them, too."

The real estate agent said, "Just don't use more than one cottage, okay? The Toolers got a maid comes in once a week, cleans up, makes sure everything's okay. If she tells the Toolers there's two cottages been used, but I only show rent for one, there'll be h.e.l.l to pay."

"Then we'll only use the one," Carlow promised.

Parker said, "What day does she come?"

"Monday. People usually leave after a weekend, so Marie comes in on Mondays."

Not a problem, then; they planned to do their thing on a Friday. Parker said, "Anybody else come here?"

Carlow explained, "Ed wants to know do we have to lock up," which wasn't true, but a good thing to say.

The real estate agent grinned and shook his head. "I don't think you could lock up," he said, "unless you brought your own, and your own hasps. I know there's fewer keys than doors, and there's at least two of these back doors, old wood, shrunk down, you can push 'em open when they're locked."

Parker said, "So n.o.body else comes around."

"The propane gas man makes deliveries. If you boys take the place, I'll call him and tell him, and he'll come by with two fresh bottles. Otherwise, n.o.body else comes out." Grinning again, he said, "You won't get mail here."

"Good," Parker said, and Carlow said, "That's what we want, get away from it all."

"I knew this was the right place for you fellas," the real estate agent said.

Parker said, "I'll pay you the rent and deposit with a money order, if that's okay. Neither of us wants his wife to see this place in the checking account."

The real estate agent laughed hugely. "You boys got it all worked out," he said.

"We hope so," Carlow said.

3.

"I'd vote for him," Wycza said.

He and Parker stood in the international arrivals building of American Airlines at JFK, where the pa.s.sengers from the London flight were just now coming through the wide doorway from Customs and Immigration. Waiting for them out here were some relatives, a lot of chauffeurs holding up signs with names written on them, and Parker and Wycza. Parker had just pointed out the guy they were waiting for, Lou Sternberg, the American heister who lived in London and who was going to be their state a.s.semblyman.