Backflash

Backflash

By

RICHARD STARK

Copyright Š 1998 by Richard Stark

This is for Walter and Carol, who got married tomorrow.

ONE

1

When the car stopped rolling, Parker kicked out the rest of the windshield and crawled through onto the wrinkled hood, Glock first. He slid to the left, around the tree that had made the Seville finally jolt to a stop, and listened. The siren receded, far upslope. These woods held a shocked silence, after the crash; every animal ear in a hundred yards was as alert as Parker’s.

Nobody came down the hill, following the scar through the trees. There was just the one car in pursuit up there, federal agents of some kind, probably trying right now to make radio contact with the rest of their crew, and still chasing the truck with the rockets, figuring they’d come back to the wrecked car later.

Later was good enough for Parker. He eased around the tree and bent to move down the less-battered right side of the Seville, where he’d been seated next to the driver. The glass from that window was gone; he looked in at Howell at the wheel, and Howell looked back, his eyes scared, but his mouth twisted in what was supposed to be an ironic grin. “They clamped me,” he said, and shook his head.

Parker looked at him. The firewall and steering column and door had all folded in on him, like he was the jelly in the doughnut. He’d live, but it would take two acetylene torches four hours to cut him out of there. “You’re fucked,” Parker told him.

“I thought I was,” Howell said.

Parker moved on and tried to open the rear door, which still had its glass, but it was jammed. He smashed out the window with the barrel of the Glock, reached in, grabbed the workout bag by the handle, and pulled it out through the new hole. Bag in left hand, Glock in right, he moved over again to look in at Howell, and Howell hadn’t moved. He was still looking out, at Parker. Howell was mostly bald, and his head was streaked with bleeding cuts and hobnailed with hard drops of sweat. He breathed through his open mouth, and kept looking at Parker. His legs and torso and left arm were clamped, but his right arm was free. His pistol was on the seat by his right hip. He could reach it, but he left it there, and looked at Parker, and breathed through his open mouth, and more blood and more sweat oozed out onto his bald head.

Parker hefted the bag, and the Glock. Howell shook his head. “Come on, Parker,” he said. “You know me better than that.”

Parker considered him. He didn’t like to leave a loose end behind, sometimes they followed you, they showed up later when you were trying to think about something else. He moved the Glock slightly, rested the barrel on the open window.

Howell said, “You knowme, Parker.”

“And you know me.”

“Not anymore.” Howell smiled, showing blood-lined teeth, and said, “This crash knocked my memory loose. I don’t even know who Iam, anymore. It’s all gone.”

“They’ll try to make it worth your while, bargain you down.”

“Not worth mywhile,” Howell said. “Not with you out there. I’ll catch up on my reading.”

Parker thought about it. He knew Howell, he trusted him on the job, they’d watch each other’s back, they’d give each other a straight count when the jackpot was in. But for the long haul?

Howell nodded at the bag. “Have a beer on me,” he suggested.

Parker nodded, and made up his mind. “See you in twenty years,” he said, and turned away, to head downslope.

“I’ll be rested,” Howell called after him.

2

It was a house on a lake called Colliver Pond, seventy miles from New York, a deep rural corner where New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania meet. A narrow blacktop road skirted the lake, among the pines, and the house, gray stone and brown shingle, squatted quiet and inconspicuous between road and shore. Now, in April, the trees not yet fully leafed out, the clapboard houses on both sides could clearly be seen, each of them less than fifty feet away, but it didn’t matter; they were empty. This was mostly a resort community, lower-level white-collar, people who came here three months every summer and left their “cottages” unoccupied the rest of the year. Only fifteen percent of the houses around the lake were lived in full-time, and most of those were over on the other side, in the lee of the mountain, out of the winter wind.

For Parker, it was ideal. A place to stay, to lie low when nothing was going on, a “home” as people called it, and no neighbors. In the summer, when the clerks came out to swim and fish and boat, Parker and Claire went somewhere else.

Late afternoon, amber lights warm in the windows. Parker turned in at the driveway, at the wheel of a red Subaru, two days and three cars since the Seville had gone off that mountain road and he’d left Howell behind. The Subaru was a mace, a safe car, not in any cop’s computer, so long as nobody looked too closely at the paperwork and the serial numbers. Parker steered it down the drive through the trees and shrubbery that took the place of the lawn here, and ahead of him the left side door of the double attached garage slid upward; so Claire had seen him coming. He drove in and got out of the car as the door slid down, and Claire was in the yellow-lit rectangle of doorway to the kitchen. “Welcome home, Mr. Lynch,” she said.

Claire had jokes, and that was one of them; they were all wasted on Parker. She’d known him as Lynch when they’d first met, so she liked to greet him with that name, because it showed they had a history. She wanted to believe they had a history, in both directions.

“Hello,” he said, and crossed out of the garage, carrying the workout bag. He stopped in the doorway to kiss her, and in that move opened himself again to all the warmth he’d shut out since he’d gone away. The homecomings were always good, because they were a kind of coming back to life.

After the kiss, she smiled at him and took his hand and nodded at the workout bag: “Not the laundry,” she suggested.

“A hundred forty thousand,” he told her. “Supposed to be. I didn’t count it yet.”

“I like it that you save the fun parts for me,” she said.

What she meant was, she didn’t want any part of it at all, what happened when he was away. They’d met in the first place because her ex-brother-in-law, an idiot named Billy Lebatard, had involved her in a robbery at a coin convention that had gone very sour. At the end of it, Billy was dead, there was blood everywhere, and Parker had dragged Claire into safety at the last second. She’d been married once, earlier, to an airline pilot who’d died in a crash; with that, and the mess Billy’d made, she wanted no more. Once, a couple of hard-edged clowns had broken in here, but Parker had dealt with it, and now he and Claire were together most of the time, warming themselves at each other’s fire, liking the calm. When Parker went away, as he sometimes did, she wanted to know nothing about it. She was willing, at the most, while he showered, to count the money and leave it in stacks on the coffee table in the living room for him to see when he came in, wearing a black robe and carrying a glass. She sat on the sofa without expression and said, “A hundred forty thousand exactly.”

“Good.”

‘Just like the paper said.”

He sat on the sofa beside her and cocked his head. “The paper?”

“You haven’t read any newspapers?”

“I’ve been moving.”

“Before you went away,” she said, “a man named Howell phoned you.”

“Right.”

“A man named Howell is dead.”

That surprised him. “Dead? How dead?”

“Injuries from an automobile accident. While escaping, the car he drove crashed down a mountainside. The other three people, and a small truck with anti-tank rockets, all escaped. Arrests are expected.”

“They killed him,” Parker said.

“Who killed him?”

“The law. Feds or local. Let me see the paper.”

She got up and crossed to the refectory table near the stone fireplace, and brought back a day-old newspaper turned to the national news page. Handing it to him, sitting again beside him, she said, “Why would they kill him?”

“They were in a hurry,” Parker told her. “They wanted names, they wanted to know where we’d be. Especially because they lost the rockets. Howell was hurt, but he wouldn’t tell them anything. We talked about it before I left, and he said he wouldn’t tell them anything, and I believed him, and it turns out I was right. And they were in such a hurry, they didn’t wait to see how much he was wounded, maybe hurt inside, before they leaned on him, and he died.”

“Poor Mr. Howell,” she said.

“He wasn’t really much of a reader anyway,” Parker said, and turned to the newspaper, which told him several things he knew and nothing he didn’t. Three rogue Marines had been trading with a terrorist group, selling them weapons stolen from a military depot. There was to be an exchange, rockets for cash. The two groups didn’t know there were two other groups involved as well; the Feds, who’d got wind of the thefts at the depot and were trying to follow the trail, and the four professional thieves who showed up at the transfer point meaning to take everything from everybody. Which they did, at the cost of one of their own, a man named Marshall Howell. The Feds expected to round up the other three momentarily.

Parker put the paper down and said, “That’s the end of it. The other two keep the rockets, sell them to somebody else. I keep this.” And he nodded at the money.

Claire pointed at the newspaper. “That could have been you.”

“It always could,” he said. “So far, it isn’t. I go away, and I come back.”

She looked at him. “Every time?”

“Except the last time,” he said.

She put her arms around him, touched her lips to the spot where the pulse beat in his throat. “Later,” she said, “let’s have a fire.”

3

The best place to hide money is in somebody else’s house. The morning after he got back, Parker filled seven Ziploc bags with ten thousand dollars each, put them in the pockets of his windbreaker, and went for a walk along the lakefront.

There were five houses along here he’d previously set up for himself, both as drops and as potential backup sites if trouble ever came too close. He’d made simple clean access to each house and prepared banks for himself in all of them. A false joist in a crawlspace; an extra ceiling in a closet; a new pocket in the wall behind a kitchen drawer. These people all liked their summer houses just the way they were, but it would pay them, though they didn’t know it, to remodel.

He was gone not quite an hour, a householder taking a long casual walk along the lake in the thin spring sunlight, and when he got back to the house Claire said, “Mr. Howell called.”

Parker looked at her, and waited.

She smiled slightly. “Mr. Marshall Howell.”

“Did he.”

“He left a number where you could call him.”

He made a bark of laughter. “That must be some number,” he said, and took off the windbreaker and read the phone number on the pad in the kitchen, then opened the phone book to see where that area code was. 518. Upstate New York, around Albany.

He used the kitchen phone to make the call, and after four rings a recorded woman’s voice, sounding like somebody’s secretary, announced the number he’d just dialed, then crisply said, “Please leave a name and number after the tone. Thank you.”

No. Parker waited for the tone, then said, “Mr. Howell will phone at three o’clock,” and hung up, and at three o’clock he stepped into the phone booth at the Mobil station out on the highway to New York, the only enclosed phone booth within eight miles, and dialed the number again.

One ring, and the man who answered sounded fat, middle-aged, wheezy. “Cathman,” he said.

“Not Mr. Howell,” Parker said.

A wheezy chuckle. “Not really possible,” Cathman said. “That’s Mr. Parker, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know anybody named Cathman,” Parker said.

“We’re meeting now, in a way,” Cathman pointed out. “The fact is, Mr. Howell was going to be doing something for me, but he told me he had this other project with you first, and then we could get together to plan our own enterprise. Unfortunately, he didn’t survive that earlier obligation.”

Parker waited. Was he supposed to be responsible for this fellow’s plans coming apart?

Cathman said, “I don’t want to sound forward, Mr. Parker, but I believe you share much of the expertise I found so valuable in Mr. Howell.”

“Possibly.” If this was an entrapment call, it was the flakiest on record.

“I expect,” Cathman said, “you’re not particularly looking for work at the moment, since I believe your part of the activity just completed was rather more successful than our friend Howell’s.”

“Oh,” Parker said. “You want me to take Howell’s place.”

“If,” Cathman said. “If you’re interested in further work in, well, not the same line. A similar line. If you’d prefer to rest, take time off, of course I’ll understand. In that case, if you could recommend someone

“

This fellow, whoever he was, was recruiting people for some sort of criminal undertaking over the telephone.Had Howell really taken this clown seriously? Or had Howell been interested in something else, that Cathman didn’t realize? Parker said, “I don’t make recommendations.”

“But would you be Well, would you care to meet? There are things, you understand, one doesn’t say on the phone.”

Well, he knew that much, though he didn’t seem to understand the concept in its entirety. Parker said, “A meet. For you to tell me what Howell was going to do for you.”

“Just so. You could come here, or if you prefer I could go to you. I’m not exactly sure where you are

“

Good. Parker said, “Howell gave you this phone number?”

“His wife did. I presume she’s his wife.”

“I’ll come to you,” Parker decided, because Cathman sounded more dangerous than interesting. He had no sense of self-preservation, and he was walking around with knowledge that could hurt other people. If he turned out to have something interesting, Parker might go along with it, take Howell’s place. If not, Parker might switch him off before his broadcasting interfered with anybody serious.

“Oh, fine,” Cathman said. “We could do lunch, if you”

“A meet,” Parker said. “Your territory. Outside. A parking lot, a farmer’s market, a city park.”

“Oh, I know,” Cathman said. “The perfect place. Amtrak comes up the Hudson. Could you take the train, from Penn Station? In New York.”

“Yes.”

“It’s less than two hours up, the stop is called Rhinecliff. Wait, I have the schedule here. What would be a good day?”

“Tomorrow.”

“That’s wonderful. All right, let me see. Yes, you take the train at three-fifty tomorrow afternoon, you’ll get to Rhinecliff at five twenty-eight. I’ll come down from Albany, my train gets there at four fifty-one, so I’ll just wait on the platform. You’ll find me, I’m heavyset, and I have about as much hair as our poor friend Howell, and I’ll be wearing a gray topcoat. Oh, and probably a gray hat as well, so the baldness doesn’t help, does it?”

“I’ll find you,” Parker said.

4

Amtrak was new, but the station at Rhinecliff was old, one end of it no longer in use, rusted remains of steel walkways and stairs looming upward against the sky like the ruins of an earlier civilization, which is what they were. At the still-working end of the platform, a long metal staircase climbed to a high enclosed structure that led above the tracks over to the old station building. The land here was steep, coming up from the river, leveling for the tracks, then continuing sharply upward.

A dozen people got off the train with Parker, and another two or three got on. He came down to the concrete last, the only passenger without luggage, and stood on the platform while the rest of them trudged up the stairs and the train jerked forward behind him. In his dark windbreaker and black chinos and heavy black shoes, he looked like some sort of skilled workman, freelancing, brought in by a contractor to do one specific job. Which he was.

The stairs were to his right, with the people slowly receding upward. Along the platform were three or four backless benches, and on one of them, down to the left, sat a dumpy man in a pearl-gray topcoat and hat, his back to the train now leaving as he gazed out and down at the river.

When the train was gone, Parker turned to look across the track at a chain-link fence, and a parking lot, and a steep hillside, and a curving steep street, and some old houses. One passenger, having climbed up this set of stairs, was now thudding down a second staircase over there, headed for the parking lot. He was rumpled, in his forties, wearing an anorak that was too heavy for this season, and carrying a thick heavy briefcase. He seemed to be muttering to himself.

Parker watched that fellow descend, and the man never looked in this direction. At the foot of the stairs, he turned and hurried along between the rows of cars, fishing his keys out of his pocket as he went. He hit his electronic opener and a Saab over there went beepand flashed its amber lights. The man reached his car, tossed the briefcase in the back, got behind the wheel, and drove out of there. In the car, his lips were still moving. He didn’t show interest in anything at all outside his own head. So there must be a college around here somewhere.

The Saab drove up the steep street and made the turn, and went out of sight. Then Parker walked along the platform to Cathman, who looked up and smiled and nodded. “Good afternoon,” he said.

The bench was long enough so they could both be on it with some space between. Parker sat next to Cathman and said, “You aren’t in the same business as Howell.”

Cathman laughed, self-conscious. “Heavens, no. Not at all. That’s why I neededMr. Howell. Or you. Or whoever it might be.”

“You just go around talking to people? In bars, and here and there?”

“Certainly not,” Cathman said, and gave Parker a sudden keen look. He said, “Mr. Parker, I don’t know your world very well, or your

business. But that doesn’t mean I’m a fool.”

“Uh huh.”

“I am not going to talk to an undercover policeman, believe me.”

“Maybe you are right now,” Parker told him.

Cathman smirked, and shook his head. “I was sure of Mr. Howell,” he said, “and I’m sure of you. Mr. Parker, do you gamble?”

“Not with people I don’t know.”

Cathman made a sudden irritated hand-gesture, sweeping away a misunderstanding. “I don’t mean that,” he said. “I mean gambling, legal gambling. Lotteries, betting parlors. Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Foxwood.”

Parker looked at him: “Foxwood?”

Cathman’s hand-wave this time was airy, dismissive. “Over in Connecticut,” he said. “On the Indian reservation, so state laws don’t apply. The casino there makes millions.”

Parker nodded. “So the Indians finally found a way to beat the white man.”

“My question was, do you gamble?”

“No.”

“May I ask why not?”

What did this have to do with anything? But Parker had learned, over the years, that when somebody wants to tell you his story, you have to let him tell it his own way. Try to push him along, speed it up, you’ll just confuse him and slow him down.

So the question is, why not gamble? Parker’d never thought about it, he just knew it was pointless and uninteresting. He said, “Turn myself over to random events? Why? The point is to try to control events, and they’ll still get away from you anyway. Why make things worse? Jump out a window, see if a mattress truck goes by. Why? Only if the room’s on fire.”

That was apparently the right answer. Cathman beamed like a man who’d won the turkey at the raffle. He said, “The reason you feel that way, Mr. Parker, if I may presume, and the reason Ifeel that way, is, we are not in despair. We are not bored and miserable with our own lives. We don’t pay twenty dollars every week for a cluster of numbers in the state lottery, in hopes we’re buying a new car, a new house, a new job, a new wife, better children and a firmer stomach. Gambling preys on misery, Mr. Parker, misery and discontent. Where the people are comfortable and confident, gambling does not flourish.”

Parker was beginning to see that Cathman was not a man with a job, he was a man with a cause. So why did he need a Howell, or a Parker? He said, “Tell me where you’re going with this.”

“Let me first tell you who I am,” Cathman said, and reached inside his topcoat. Parker tensed, looking at the Adam’s apple he’d hit, but what Cathman brought out was a small flat leather case. Opening it, he took out a business card and handed it over. Parker took it:

HILLIARD CATHMAN

Hilliard Cathman Associates

14-162 State Plaza, Suite 1100 Albany, NY 12961

Urban & Policy Planning

Resource Apportionment Consultants

518 828-3344 fax 518 828-3388

“Since I retired from state government,” Cathman explained, “I’ve been able to use my contacts and expertise in a broader and more satisfying way. Not limited to New York State any more, nor to one administration.”

Parker extended the card, but Cathman waved it away: “No, keep it. I want you to understand. I am knowledgeable, and I am reliable. In my area. As Mr. Howell was in his, and as he led me to believe you are in yours.”

“I still don’t see where we’re gong,” Parker said.

Cathman looked out at the river, apparently to gather his thoughts. The river was wide here, and moved briskly. It was a hundred miles from here to the harbor and the sea.

Cathman said, “Gambling fever has struck the politicians, I’m afraid. They see it as a safe form of taxation, a way to collect money from the people without causing discontent or taxpayer revolt. The lottery does it, and OTB does it, and casino gambling can do it. Three resort areas in New York State have been designated by the state legislature for legalized gambling. This area is not one of them.”

“Then they’re lucky,” Parker said.

“Yes, they are, but they don’t know it. Foxwood in particular has driven them wild. It’s so close, and it’s so profitable. So a new bill has worked its way through the legislature, and will be signed before the end of the month, which adds a fourth gambling district in New York State.” He gestured outward: “The river.”

“A casino boat?”

“Yes. There are any number of them around America, and they tend to be migratory, as laws change, state by state. The boat which will be used on the Hudson, between Poughkeepsie and Albany, which is at this moment steaming up the Atlantic coast toward its new assignment, was until recently called the Spirit of Biloxi.But there are so many casinos in the Biloxi area now, the competition is so fierce, that the owners of the boat had no problem with the idea of changing its name to the Spirit of the Hudson.”

“Loyalty,” suggested Parker.

“They have nailed their colors to a weathervane,” Cathman agreed. “At this point,” he went on, “because there is a strong anti-gambling faction in the legislature or, that is, several anti-gambling factions, some religious, some practical, some spiteful approval has been given only for a four-month trial period. And, since they have learned from OTB and elsewhere that people will, if given the chance, spend far beyond their income when the gambling bug strikes, for this four-month trial period only, no credit will be allowed.”

Parker frowned. “They can’t do it. It doesn’t work that way.”

“Nevertheless, that is the compromise that has been struck. If the four-month trial is considered a success, and the boat continues to be the Spirit of the Hudson,then credit wagering will be permitted. But during the trial period, no. No credit cards, no checks, no letters of credit.”

“Cash,” Parker said.

Cathman nodded. “A boat swimming in cash,” he said. “Through my access to various government departments, I can obtain virtually any information you could possibly need. Blueprints of the boat, details of security, employee backgrounds, locations of safes, schedules, security arrangements at the two ports where the ship will touch land, being Albany and Poughkeepsie, the turnaround points. The details of any robbery that might take place on the boat, of course, are your concern.”

“And what do you want for this?”

Cathman shrugged inside his expensive topcoat. “I’m a little tired,” he said. “I would like to live in a state with less severe winters, pick and choose my clients with more freedom. If you proceed, and if you are successful, I would like ten percent.”

“You’re gambling,” Parker told him.

Cathman’s smile was wan. “I hope not,” he said. “If I am dealing with professionals, and I know myself to be professional in my own line of work, is that gambling? I don’t think so. You’ll have no reason to begrudge me my ten percent.”

“You’re the inside man,” Parker pointed out. “The law will be looking for the inside man.”

Now Cathman laughed outright. “Me? Mr. Parker, no one in New York State government would suspect me of so much as taking paper clips home from the office. My reputation is so clear, and for so long, that no one would think of me as the inside man for a second. And there would be dozens of others who might have been the ones who helped with inside information.”

Parker nodded. He thought about it. On the river, a black barge full of scrap metal was pushed slowly upstream by a tug, the water foaming white across its blunt prow. Parker said, “When does this boat get here?”

5

Claire said, “What are you going to do?”

“Find out some things,” Parker told her. “Talk to some people who might maybe like to come along. Take my time. It’s at least three weeks before the boat opens for business.”

“There’s something you don’t like about it,” Claire said.

Parker got to his feet and started to pace. They were on the screened porch on the lake side of the house, the chitter of a light spring rain filling the silences around their words. The lake surface was pebbled, with little irruptions where the breeze gusted. Usually the lake was quiet, glassy, reflecting the sky; now it was more like the river he’d been looking at yesterday.

“I don’t like boats,” he said, pacing, looking out at the lake. “To begin with. I don’t like anything where there’s one entrance, one exit. I don’t like a cell. A boat on the water is a cell, you can’t just get up and go away.”

“But the money,” she said.

“Cash.” He nodded. “Cash is the hardest to find and the easiest to deal with. Anything else, you have to sell it, it’s two transactions, not one. So the idea of the cash is good. But it’s still cash on a boat. And besides that, there’s Cathman.”

“What about him?”

“What does he want? Why is he doing this? There’s something off-key there.”

“Male menopause.”

Parker did his barking laugh. “He isn’t chasing a fifteen-year-old girl,” he said, “he’s chasing a boat full of money. And he wants ten percent. Ten percent.”

“It’s a finder’s fee. You’ll bedoing all the work.”

“Why isn’t he greedier? Why doesn’t he want more? Why isn’t he afraid we’ll stiff him? Why does he have to tell me his thoughts about politics and gambling?”

“He’s new to this,” she suggested. “He’s nervous, so he keeps talking.”

“Well, that’s another thing that’s wrong. He says he’s got a perfect rep, nobody would think twice he could be linked up to something like this. So why is he? Why is he taking thirty years of straight arrow and tossing it in the wastebasket for ten percent of something that might not happen? If he never thought this way before, how can he think this way now? What’s different in him?”

“Maybe he lied to you,” she said. “Maybe he’s not as clean as he says.”

“Then the cops will be on him the day after we pull the job, and what he has on me is a name and a phone number.” He stopped his pacing to look around the porch, and then at Claire. “You want to move from here?”

“I like this house.”

He paced again, looking at nothing. “I was thinking, when I was there, yesterday. There was an access road there, went down to the water, right next to the station, with a ramp at the bottom where you could launch a boat. I was thinking, there’s nobody around, nobody even looking at the river, it’s too early in the season. This guy knows two things about me, I could launch him right now, and come home, and forget it. All done.”

She winced a little at the idea, but said, “Why didn’t you?”

“Because he makes no sense,” he told her. He paced the porch as though he were in the cell he’d said he didn’t like. “I want to figure him out. I want to know what’s behind him, what he’s doing, I want to know who he is, what he is, why he moves the way he does. Then I’ll decide what to do about him.” He stopped in front of her, frowning down at her, thinking. “You want to help?”

She blinked, and looked tense. “You know,” she said, “I don’t like … there’s things I don’t like.”

“Nothing with trouble,” he promised. “I’ve got the guy’s calling card. You just spend some time in the library, spend some time on the phone. He’ll have a paper trail. Get me a biography.”

“I could do that,” she agreed. “And what will you be doing?”

“I’ll go talk to a few guys,” Parker said.

6

“Edward Lynch,” Parker said, and extended a credit card with that name on it.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Lynch,” the desk clerk said. She had a neat egg-shaped head with straight brown hair down both sides of it, like curtains at a window, and nothing much in the window. “Pleasant trip?”

“Yes,” he said, and turned away from her canned chatter to look at the big echoing interior of the Brown Palace, Denver’s finest, built around a great square atrium and furnished to let you know that you were in the western United States but that good taste prevailed. On the upper floors, all the rooms were on the far side of the halls, with a low wall on this side, overlooking the lobby. Here and there in the big space, groups of people sat in the low armchairs and sofas, leaning toward one another to talk things over, their words disappearing in the air. But a shotgun mike in any of the upper halls could pick up every conversation in the room.

“Here you are, Mr. Lynch.”

Parker signed the credit card slip and took the plastic key. “I think I have messages.”

She turned, as neatly articulated as a Barbie, and said, “Yes, here we are. Two messages.” She slid the envelopes across the desk toward him. “Will you want assistance with your luggage?”

“No, I’m okay.”

His luggage was one small brown canvas bag; he’d be here only one night. Picking the bag up, stuffing the message envelopes into his jacket pocket, he crossed to the elevators, not bothering to look out over the groups in the lobby. Mike and Dan wouldn’t be there, they’d be waiting for his call, in their rooms.

You don’t meet where you’re going to pull the job, nowhere near it. And you don’t meet anywhere that you’ve got a base or a drop or a contact or a home. Three days ago, just after his conversation with Claire, Parker had started making phone calls, and when he made contact with the two guys he wanted he did a minimum of small talk and then said the same thing both times: “I ran into Edward Lynch the other day. Remember him?” Both guys said yeah, they remembered Edward Lynch, what’s he doing these days? “Salesman, travels all over the country. Said he was going to Denver, meet Bill Brown there on Thursday, then on and on, travel every which way. I’d hate that life.” Both guys agreed that Edward Lynch sure had it tough these days, and they did a little more nonsense talk, and hung up, and now it was Thursday and Parker was here as Edward Lynch, and he had the two messages in his pocket.

The room was a room, with a view of Denver, a city that’s flat and broad. From a high floor like this, it looks tan, unmoving, a desert where people once used to live.

After Parker threw cold water on his face and unpacked his bag, he spread the two messages on the table beside the phone. Both gave him numbers here in the hotel. One was from Jack Strongarm and the other from Chuck Michaels. Jack Strongarm would be Dan Wycza, a big burly guy who was known to work as a professional wrestler when times were tough; the Strongarm moniker was what he used in the ring. Chuck Michaels would be Mike Carlow, a driver who was also a race-driver on the professional circuit; a madman on the track, but otherwise solid and reliable and sure.

Parker had no idea yet if this boat thing could be made to work, but if there was anything in it he’d need good pros to help put it together. He’d worked with both Wycza and Carlow more than once, and the best thing was, the last two times out with each of them everybody’d made a profit. So Wycza and Car-low would have good memories of Parker and reason to want to work with him again.

He called both message numbers, and both were answered by wary voices. “Is this four twenty-nine?” he asked each time, since his room was 924, and both said no. He apologized twice, hung up, carried the bucket away to get ice, and when he was headed back he saw Mike Carlow coming the other way. A narrow rawboned guy in his forties, Carlow was a little shorter than medium height; good for fitting into those race cars. He had the leathery face and pale eyes of a man who spends a lot of time outdoors. His nose was long and narrow, lips thin, Adam’s apple prominent. He got to 924 before Parker, and when Parker arrived he nodded and said, “Hello, Parker. A long time since Tyler.” That was the last place they’d worked together. They’d all done well in Tyler, better than twenty-five thousand dollars a man. The memory gleamed in Carlow’s pale eyes.

Parker unlocked them into the room. “There’s a bottle there, and the glasses, and here’s ice.”

Looking at the glasses, Carlow said, “Three of us.”

“Dan Wycza.”

“For the heavy lifting. Good.” Wycza had also been along in Tyler.

Carlow put an ice cube in a glass and poured enough bourbon to float it, then looked over at Parker, held up the bottle, and said, “You?”

“The same,” Parker said, and someone knocked with a double rap. “Make it two,” he said, and crossed to open the door.

Dan Wycza was a huge bald man with a handsome, playful face and heavy shoulders that he automatically shifted to an angle when he walked through doorways. He looked out at the world with amused mistrust, as though everybody he saw was an opponent in the wrestling ring who maybe couldn’t be counted on to stick to the script. There was a rumor he was dead for a while, but then he’d popped up again. He was also known to be a health nut, which wouldn’t keep him from accepting a glass of bourbon. He came in now, squared his shoulders, nodded a hello to Parker and said, “Mike. Long time.”

“Tyler,” Carlow said, and brought Parker and Wycza their drinks.

“I spent that money,” Wycza said. Before drinking, he looked at Parker: “We gonna get some more?”

“Maybe. Sit down, let me describe it.”

There were two chairs in the room. Parker sat on the windowsill and said, “It’s cash. It’s all in one place for several hours. I’ve got an inside man to give me the details. But there are maybe problems.”

Carlow said, “Is the inside man one of the problems?”

“Don’t know yet. Don’t have him figured out. My woman’s checking into him, his background, see what his story is.”

Wycza said, “What does he say his story is?”

“Retired from state government, New York. Consultant to governments. Gave me his card.”

Wycza smiled in disbelief. “He has a card?”

“He’s legit, his whole life long. Got a reputation you could hang your overcoat on.”

Carlow said, “So why’s he giving you this score?”

“That’s the question. But if it turns out he’s all right, there’s still problems, and the first one is, it’s a boat.”

Carlow said, “On the ocean?” The question he meant was: What do you want with a driver?

“On a river,” Parker told him. “A gambling casino boat, a trial period, no gambling on credit, all cash, they take the cash off every six hours.”

“Not easy to leave a boat,” Wycza suggested, “if all at once you want to.”

“That’s part of the problem.”

Carlow said, “How much cash?”

“The boat isn’t running yet,” Parker said. “So nobody knows what the take is. But a Friday night, five hours between ten P.M. and three A.M., it should be enough. I don’t think the money’s the problem, I think the boat’s the problem.”

Wycza said, “The boat isn’t on that river now?”

“It’s heading there. It used to be in Biloxi.”

Wycza grinned and said, “The Spirit of Biloxi?”

“It’s going to be the Spirit of the Hudsonnow. You know the boat?”

“You’re giving me a chance to get my money back,” Wycza said. “But, you know, they do heavy security on that boat. I did an automatic case when I was aboard, decided not to try it. They got rent-a-cops in brown everywhere you look. Cash goes straight down through a slot into some safe room down below. When you cash in your chips, they got a vacuum tube with little metal-like rockets in it, to send up just your money.”

Parker said, “How about security when you’re getting aboard?”

“Airport,” Wycza told him. “You go through a metal detector. No X-ray, but they eyeball bags.”

“So no way to bring weapons aboard,” Carlow said. “Unless

” He looked at Wycza. “Could you bring your own boat alongside?”

“Not without being seen. The dining rooms and other stuff is along the outside of the boat, gambling rooms inside. No windows when you gamble, windows all over the place when you eat a meal or have a drink or just sit around.”

“So that’s the second problem,” Parker said. “Guns. And the third problem is, getting the stuff off the boat.”

“And us,” Wycza said.

“That’s the fourth problem,” Parker said.

Carlow said, “The money’s easy. Throw it overboard, in plastic. You got a boat trailing. That’s me. I do boats as good as I do cars.”

Doubtful, Wycza said, “They light up that boat pretty good.”

“A distraction at the front end,” Parker suggested. “Maybe a fire. Nobody likes fire on a boat.”

Wycza said, “Idon’t like fire on a boat. And I also don’t jump in a river in the dark and wait for Mike to come by and pick me up. Nothing against you, Mike.”

“I don’t want people,” Carlow told him. “Not with a boat. Plastic packages I can hook aboard and take off the other way.”

“We don’t have this money yet,” Parker reminded him. “To get it, we need a way to get guns aboard. We need a way to get into the room where they keep the money.”

Wycza said, “This source of yours. Can he give us blueprints?”

“When I told him I’d think about it,” Parker said, “he gave me a whole package of stuff. Blueprints, schedules, staffing, I got it all.”

Carlow said, “What does it say about guards? I’m wondering, are weguards, is that how we get the guns on board?”

“You mean, hijack some guards,” Wycza said, “take their place. That’s possible, it’s been done sometimes.”

“I don’t think so,” Parker said. “You’ve got two security teams. Those rent-a-cops you saw when you were on the boat, they’re hired by the private company owns the boat. They’re regulars, they know each other. Down in the money room, the guards and the money counters are hired by the state government, they’re a different bunch entirely. The way it’s gonna work, a state bus picks them up, on a regular route, takes them to the boat all in a bunch, takes them home again the same way. They bring food from home, they don’t get food on the boat. They’re locked in at the start of their tour, unlocked again at the end when the money on their shift comes off the boat, surrounded by the money room crew plus armored car company guards.”

Carlow said, “Maybe it isn’t a boat job, maybe it’s an armored car job.”

“My inside man can only help me with the boat,” Parker said. “In Albany, that’s where the money comes off, it’s like a three-block run from the dock to the bank, all city streets, heavily guarded.”

“Forget I said anything,” Carlow said. “Anybody else want another?”

They did. Carlow distributed more ice and more bourbon, sat back down and said, “We can’t do a switch with the guards, the outer guards, the rent-a-cops. It wouldn’t help us. Anyway, the big thing is, how do we get into the money room.”

“Parker’s fire,” Wycza said. “Set the fucking boat on fire, they’ll open that door in a hurry.”

“I don’t want to be on a burning boat,” Parker said. “That wasn’t the idea, about the fire, I just meant something small, to keep everybody looking forward when we do something at the back.”

“Three questions we got,” Carlow said. “How do we get on, with the guns? How do we get into the money room? How do we get off again?”

Wycza said, “Who can carry a gun onto the boat? Legit, I mean. The guards. Anybody else?”

“A cop,” Parker said. “An off-duty cop, he could be carrying, they’d probably leave him alone.”

“Maybe,” Wycza said. “Or maybe they’d be very polite, thank you, sir, if you don’t mind, sir, we’ll just check this weapon for you until you leave the boat, sir. They’re not gonna let people carry guns unless there’s a reason.”

“Bodyguards,” Carlow suggested, and turned to Wycza to say, “Does this boat have entertainment? Shows? Would celebrities come aboard?”

“They got shows,” Wycza said, “but not what you’d call headliners. Not people you been reading about in the National Enquirer.”

“Bodyguards,” Parker said. “There might be something there. Wait, let me think.” He turned his head to look out the window at tan Denver.

Wycza said to Carlow, “You been racin much?”

“I totaled a Lotus at a track in Tennessee,” Carlow told him. “Broke my goddam leg again, too. I need a stake to build a new car.”

“I gotta quit wrestlin for a while,” Wycza said. “I get tired of bein beat up by blonds. In capes, a lot of them.”

Parker turned back. “Either of you know a guy named Lou Sternberg?”

Wycza frowned, then shook his head. Carlow said, “Maybe. One of us?”

“Yes.”

“Lives some funny place.”

“London.”

“That’s it.”

Wycza said, “An Englishman?”

Parker told him, “American, but he lives over there. Only he never works there, he always comes to the States when he needs a bankroll.”

“He was on a bank thing I drove,” Carlow said. “In Iowa. Jeez, seven, eight years ago. I came in late, the guy they had first got grabbed on a parole violation, so I didn’t get to know the rest of the string very much. Just the guy, Mackey, that brought me in.”

“Ed Mackey,” Wycza said. “Him we all know. Him and Brenda.”

Carlow said to Parker, “What about Sternberg?”

“Remember what he looks like? How he talks?”

“Sure. Heavyset, sour most of the time, talks like a professor.”

“Can you see him,” Parker said, “as a state legislator? One of the anti-gambling crowd, coming for an inspection.”

Wycza laughed. “And we’re his fucking bodyguards! ” he said.

Carlow said. “An assemblyman, with bodyguards? Are you sure?”

“He’s had death threats,” Wycza explained. “Cause he’s such an uncompromising guy. So he’s got us to guard him.”

“Armed to the teeth,” Parker said.

7

“Hello?”

“I’m looking for Lou Sternberg.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, he’s gone out. May I tell him who rang?”

“Ed Lynch.”

“Does he know the subject, Mr. Lynch?”

“Not yet, not until I tell him.”

“Does he know you, Mr. Lynch?”

“We were in the art business together one time. Buying and selling art.”

“Oh, I believe he’s mentioned that. It wasn’t a very profitable business, was it, Mr. Lynch?”

“No profit at all.”

“And are you still in the art business, Mr. Lynch?”

“No, I gave that up.”

“Probably just as well. What business are you in now, Mr. Lynch?”

“Politics

Hello?”

“You surprise me, Mr. Lynch.”

“Things change.”

“So I see. May I ask Forgive me, but I know Mr. Sternberg will ask me,so I should know the answers.”

“That’s okay. I thought he might like to run for state assemblyman.”

“Mr. Sternberg?”

“Yes.”

“But Mr. Sternberg lives in London.”

“That’s where I’m calling him.”

“Wouldn’t he have to be resident in the United States?”

“For a little while.”

“Oh, I see. This wouldn’t be a full term, then. Completing someone else’s term, something like that.”

“Something like that. My friends and me, we think Mr. Sternberg has the right look, he could inspire confidence in people.”

“Probably so. Well, I have no idea if Mr. Sternberg would be interested. May I have him ring you when he gets in?”

“When would that be?”

“I expect him, oh, in ten minutes.”

“I’m calling from the States.”

“Yes, I assumed that.”

“The number here’s two oh one five five five nine nine one three.”

“And is that a business or residence?”

“It’s a gas station.”

“Ah. Petrol, we call it here. If Mr. Sternberg is interested, he’ll ring you within fifteen minutes. If he doesn’t ring back by then, you’ll know he isn’t interested.”

“We say ‘call back’ here.”

“Yes, I know. Goodbye, Mr. Lynch.”

Parker sat in the car next to the phone booth and watched the customers pump their own gas, then pay the clerk in the bulletproof glass booth. Nine minutes later, the phone rang.

8

Claire made meals for herself when Parker was away, but when he was at home they always ate out. “You wouldn’t want what I eat when I’m here by myself,” she told him once. “No man would think it was dinner.” So they’d drive somewhere and eat.

Tonight’s place was competent and efficient and, like a lot of country restaurants, too brightly lit. Claire waited until the waitress had brought their main courses, and then she talked about Cathman: “He’s a bureaucrat. He’s exactly what he says he is.”

“Then he doesn’t make any sense,” Parker said, and carved at his steak.

Claire took a small notebook from her bag and opened it on the table beside her plate. “He’s sixty-three,” she said. “He has an engineering degree from Syracuse University, and his entire adult life he’s worked for state government in New York. He was in some sort of statistical section for years, and then he moved on to fiscal planning. Two years ago, he retired, though he didn’t have to. I think what it is, he disagreed with state policy.”

“About what?”

“Gambling.”

Parker nodded. “That’s where it is,” he said. “Whatever’s thrown him out of whack, the gambling thing is where it is.”

“You mean that would make him change his spots.”

“Change the whole coat.”

Claire sipped at her wine, and said, “Maybe he needs money after all. A mid-level civil servant, retired early, maybe it’s rougher than he thought it would be.”

“What about this consultant business?”

Claire shook her head. She sliced duck breast, thinking about it, then said, “I don’t think it’s doing all that well. Mostly I think because he’s advising state governments against gambling and they’re all in favor of it.”

“He told me about that,” Parker agreed. “The pols see it as painless taxes.”

“People don’t want you to consult with them,” Claire said, “if you’re only going to advise them not to do what they’ve already decided they’re going to do. So what jobs he gets, mostly, have to do with fund allocation for mass transit and highways and airports. Here and there, he gets a job doing research for anti-gambling groups in state legislatures, but not that much.”

The music in here was noodling jazz piano, low enough to talk over but loud enough for privacy. Still, when the waitress spent time clearing the main course dishes from the next table, Parker merely ate his steak and drank some of his wine. When she left, he said, “But he isn’t in it for the money, I don’t think. The thing with me, I mean.”

Claire nodded, watching him.

Parker thought back to his dealings with Cathman. “It doesn’t feellike it,” he said, “as though money’s the point. That’s part of what’s wrong with him. If it isn’t money he wants, what doeshe want?”

“You could still walk away,” she said.

“I might. Bad parts to it. Still, it’s cash, that means something.”

“The boat isn’t even here yet,” she pointed out. “You still have plenty of time to be sure about him, learn more about him.”

“You do that,” Parker told her. “His home life now. Wife, girlfriend, children, whatever he’s got. People bend each other; is anybody bending Cathman?”

“You want me to do that?”

“Yes.”

Claire nodded. “All right,” she said, and ate a bit, and then said, “What will you be doing?”

“The river,” Parker said.

9

It was called the Lido, but it shouldn’t have been. It was an old bar, a gray wood cube cut deep into the ground floor of a narrow nineteenth-century brick house, and at two on a sunny afternoon in April it was dark and dry, smelling of old whiskey and dead wood. The shirtsleeved bald bartender was tall and fat, looking like a retired cop who’d gone to seed the day his papers had come through. At the bar, muttering together about sports and politics other people’s victories and defeats were nine or ten shabbily dressed guys who were older than their teeth.

Not looking at any of them, Parker went to the corner of the long bar nearest the door, sat on the stool there, and when the barman plodded down to him like the old bull he was, he ordered beer. The muttering farther along the bar faltered for a minute, while they all tried to work out what this new person meant, but Parker did nothing of interest, so they went back to their conversations.

Parker paid for his beer, drank it, and left, and outside the sunlight seemed a hundred percent brighter. Squinting, he walked down the half block to the Subaru he was still driving no reason not to, and he’d dump it after the job, if the job happened and leaned against its trunk in the sunlight.

He was in Hudson today, a town along the river of the same name, another twenty miles north and upstream from Rhinecliff, where he’d met Cathman at the railroad station. The town stretched up a long gradual slope from the river, with long parallel streets lined like stripes up the hill. At the bottom was a slum where there used to be a port, back in the nineteenth century, when the whalers came this far up the Hudson with their catch to the plants beside the river where the whale oil and blubber and other sellable materials were carved and boiled and beaten out of the cadavers, to be shipped to the rest of America along the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes and the midwest rivers.

The whalers and the whale industry and the commercial uses of the waterways were long gone, but the town was still here. It had become poor, and still was. At one point, early in the twentieth century, it was for a while the whorehouse capital of the northeast, and less poor, until a killjoy state government stepped in to make it virtuous and poor again. Now it was a drug distribution hub, out of New York City via road or railroad, and for the legitimate world it was an antiques center.

The Lido was just about as far from the water as it could get and still be on one of the streets that came up from the river. Where Parker waited in the sunlight he couldn’t see the river at all, just the old low buildings in two rows stretched away along the upper flat and then downslope. Being poor for so long, Hudson hadn’t seen much modernization, and so, without trying, had become quaint.

About two minutes later, one of the shabby guys came out of the Lido, looked around, saw Parker, and walked toward him. He looked to be about fifty, but grizzled and gray beyond his years, as though at one time he’d gone through that whale factory and all the meat and juice had been pressed out of him. His thin hair was brown and dry, his squinting eyes a pale blue, his cheeks stubble-grown. He was in nondescript gray-and-black workclothes, and walked with the economical shuffle Parker recognized; this fellow, probably more than once in his life, had been on the yard.

Which made sense. To find this guy, Parker had made more phone calls, saying he wanted somebody who knew the river and could keep his mouth shut. Most of the people he’d called were ex-cons, and most of the people they knew were ex-cons, so why wouldn’t this guy be?

He stopped in front of Parker, reserved, watchful, waiting it out. He said, “Lynch?”

“Hanzen?”

“That’s me,” Hanzen agreed. “I take it you know a friend of mine.”

“Pete Rudd.”

“Pete it is,” Hanzen said. “What do you hear from Pete?”

“He’s out.”

Hanzen grinned, showing very white teeth. “We’re all out,” he said. “This your car?”

“Come on along.”

They got into the Subaru, Parker pulled away from the curb, and Hanzen said, “Take the right.”

“We’re not going to the river?”

“Not in town, there’s nothing down there but jigs. Little ways north.”

They drove for twenty minutes, Hanzen giving the route, getting them out of town onto a main road north, then left onto a county road. Other than Hanzen’s brief directions, there was silence in the car. They didn’t know one another, and in any case, neither of them was much for small talk.

From the county road, Hanzen told Parker to take the left onto a dirt road between a crumbled barn and a recently plowed field with some green bits coming up. “Corn later,” he said, nodding at the field; his only bit of tour guiding.

This dirt road twisted downward around the end of the cornfield and through scrubby trees and undergrowth where the land was too steep for ready plowing. Then it leveled, and they bumped across railroad tracks, and Parker said, “Amtrak?”

“They always yell when they’re comin,” Hanzen said.

Just beyond the tracks, the road widened into an oval dirt area where a lot of cars had parked at one time or another and a number of fires had been laid. Low ailanthus and tall maples crowded in on the sides, and the river was right there, at the far end of the dirt oval. Its bottom was mud and stone, quickly dropping off. To the left, downstream, three decayed and destroyed small boats lay half in and half out of the water. One of them was partly burned. About ten feet from the bank a gray outboard motorboat pulled at its mooring in the downriver current. A rough-made low windowless cabin painted dark blue covered the front half of the boat.

Parker and Hanzen got out of the car. Hanzen took off his shoes, socks and pants, rolled them in a bundle and put them on the ground. He wore white jockey shorts that bagged on him, as though they’d been washed too many times. He waded out into the water, grabbed the anchor line, and pulled the boat close, then untied the line from the float and used the line to tow the boat to shore, saying as he came in, “I got to keep it out there or the kids come and shoot up in it.” Pointing, “Set it on fire, like that one.”

“Nothing’s easy,” Parker said.

“Amen,” Hanzen said. He waded out of the water, pulling the boat after him until the prow scraped on dry land, then pulled on the side of the boat until it came around far enough that the deck behind the cabin was reachable from the bank. “Climb aboard,” he said.

Parker stepped over the gunwale. The interior was recently painted, gray, and very neat. Two solid wood doors were closed over the cabin, with a padlock.

“Take this stuff, will you?” Hanzen said, holding out the roll of his clothes, and Parker took them and put them on the deck next to the cabin door, while Hanzen pushed the boat off again from shore until it floated, then climbed over the side. “Give me a minute,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

Hanzen unrolled his pants, found a ring of keys, and unlocked the padlock on the cabin. He pulled the doors open, and Parker got a look at a narrow lumpy bunk under a dark brown blanket, some wooden boxes and cardboard cartons used as shelves and storage, and Playboy bunnies on the inside of the cabin doors. Then Hanzen stooped inside, found a towel, dried his legs, tossed the towel in on the bunk, shut but didn’t lock the doors, and dressed himself. Only then did he go to the wheel beside the cabin doors, put the key in the ignition, and start the motor.

By then they’d drifted a ways south and out into the stream. There was no place to sit, so Parker stood on the other side of the cabin doors from Hanzen and the wheel, put one forearm on the cabin top, and looked at the bank. As they floated farther from shore, he could see other landings north and south, a few old structures, some small boats at anchorage. There was no apparent commerce, and he didn’t see anything that looked like vacation settlements or estates.

Hanzen said, “It’s north you care about, right?”

“Yes.”

Hanzen turned the wheel, and goosed the motor, and their slow drift backward became a steadily increasing push forward. Wake hissed along the sides. “We’ll go up this bank, down the other,” Hanzen said. He had to speak a little louder now.

They rode in silence for about five minutes. There were no boats around at all, though Parker knew there was still some barge traffic sometimes along here, and in summer there would be the pleasure boaters, both sail and motor. But off-season the river wasn’t used much.

They were keeping close to the east bank, and it stayed pretty much the same until they passed another river town, smaller than Hudson, and looking poorer, its clapboard houses climbing above one another back up the hill from the water. Hanzen steered farther away from shore at that point, out closer to the middle of the river, which was very wide here, the other bank visible but not clear, just a blur of green and the colors of structures.

North of that town, Hanzen steered closer to the bank again and said, “You don’t mind, I got some stuff of my own to look at along here.”

“Go ahead.”

“First we see if my alarm’s okay,” Hanzen said, and steered abruptly leftward, toward the middle of the river, so that Parker had to press his forearm down on the cabin top to keep his balance. Hanzen drove out a ways, then swung around in a wide half-circle, looking toward the shore, and smiled in satisfaction. “There it is,” he said. “You see the big branch bent down?”

Parker shook his head. “Just so you do,” he said.

Hanzen grinned at him. “That’s right, I guess. We know what we have to know, and we see what we have to see.”

Parker said, “What is this branch?”

“I’ve got some stuff in there,” Hanzen said. “Nobody’s gonna bother it except law. If the law finds it, they’re gonna touch it, probably pull it outa there. The minute they do, the minute they touch it at all or come at it the wrong way, that big tree branch I got tied so it bends down, it’ll release and go right back up. I come here, I don’t see my branch bent down, I just drive on by. Happened to me once, three years ago. Not here, another place.”

What Hanzen was doing here, Parker knew, was showing his credentials, his qualifications, should it be that Parker might have further use for him and want to know what sort of man he was. Because all they had between them so far was that Parker would give him three hundred dollars for a tour of the river north of Hudson up toward Albany, and more money if he was needed for anything else later. The subject of this trip was not for Hanzen to worry about, and the trip was not for him to talk about with anybody else. But of course he had to know something was being planned here, and wonder if maybe they could use a trustworthy river man later on.

Maybe. Time would tell.

As they neared shore, Hanzen slowed the boat to an easy glide, so the prow was no longer lifted and they left barely a ripple of wake. Ahead of them was a stretch of undeveloped bank, tangled with undergrowth. Large tree branches reached out over the water. It would be almost impossible to get to the bank anywhere along here, and probably just as tough to get to the water from the other side. Whatever Hanzen was hiding, he’d picked a good spot for it.

“There they are. My babies.” Hanzen grinned with fatherly pride. “See?”

There were about a dozen of them, widely spaced along the shoreline, under the overhanging branches, and it took Parker a minute to figure out what they were. Fifty-pound sacks of peat moss. Facing upward, they hung just barely above the water, suspended from strong-test fishing line fastened to all four corners of each bag and to strong tree limbs above. In each bag, two long slits had been cut along the upper side, and marijuana planted in the peat moss through the slits. The young leaves were bright acrylic green, hardy and healthy. The bags and their crop received filtered sunlight through the trees, but would be invisible from just about anywhere, including low-flying aircraft. You’d have to steer in here from the river to see them, and even then you pretty well had to already know they existed or you probably wouldn’t notice.

“We’re a long way from the ocean,” Hanzen said, steering slowly along beside his babies, looking them over, “but we still get the tidal effect. Twice a day, they get a good long drink of water.”

“Nice setup,” Parker agreed.

“My only problem is, if somebody steals a boat,” Hanzen said. “Then you got deputies in their launch, poking in places like this, looking for the goddam boat, and finding all this. Happened once, could happen again. In the fall, maybe, a fisherman might anchor in here, do some fly-casting out into the current, but by then I’m harvested and out of here.”

“You got much of this?”

“Sixty bags, up and down the river. Little farther on, there’s one more batch I want to check, that’s all in this direction.” Hanzen smiled out at the empty river. “You can really be alone out here, if you want,” he said. “If you know what you’re doing out here, the world’s your oyster.”

“I suppose so.”

Hanzen studied Parker. “You don’t like rivers,” he decided. “Water, whatever. But you’re doing something, and right now you need the river, so I guess what you’re looking for’s a place to go out from the bank, or come ashore, or both. I’d be happier if you didn’t use my place down there.”

“I need to be farther north,” Parker told him.

“Closer to Albany,” Hanzen suggested, “but not all the way to Albany.”

“Right.”

“And you’d like to mark it, and not tell me which spot you picked.” Hanzen grinned. “That’s okay, I understand. Only it won’t work.”

“No?”

“Things look different from the land,” Hanzen explained. “From out here, you could pick the spot you want, but when you get on shore you’ll never find it.”

“Not without you, you mean,” Parker said.

“Not without somebody knows the river,” Hanzen said.

“Somebody I trust,” Parker said.

Hanzen grinned again; things didn’t bother him much. “You’re already trusting me,” he said, “out here on my boat, even though that’s a little .22 under your shirt. Come on, let’s head upriver, and you sing out when you see something you like.”

10

They spent three hours on the river, and there were four spots along the way that Parker thought he might be interested in, three on the east shore and one on the west. Hanzen had road maps in his cabin that showed this part of the river, and he pointed out to Parker where each potential spot was, so he could see what road access he’d have, and what towns were nearby.

From time to time, as they moved, long low barges went slowly past, upriver or down, piled with boxed cargo or with trash. The crews waved, and Hanzen waved back, and each time their smaller boat rocked from side to side in the long slow undulations of the barge’s wake, no matter how far off to the side they were.

They also saw, at one point on the way back, as they hugged the more thickly settled western shore, a fast speedboat, white with blue trim, heading downriver across the way, close to the opposite bank. A police launch. “Stay away from my babies, now,” Hanzen told it.

Parker said, “They patrol much?”

“Not at all,” Hanzen said. “Not enough activity on the river to keep them out here regular. They’ll come out for the fun of it, sometimes, in the daylight, but at night they only come out if there’s a problem.” Nodding at Parker, he said, “You can count on it, though, if there’s a problem, they will come out.”

“All right,” Parker said.

A while later, Hanzen said, “Seen enough?”

Parker looked around. “We’re back?”

“That’s my mooring,” Hanzen said, pointing across the river, where nothing specific could be seen. “I don’t think you care about anything south of this.”

“No, you’re right.”

“You might as well pay me now.”

Parker took the envelope out of his hip pocket and handed it over. Hanzen squeezed it enough so the slit opened and he could see the edges of the twenties. Satisfied, he pulled open one cabin door long enough to toss the envelope onto the bunk. “Nice doing business with you, Mr. Lynch,” he said. “Maybe we’ll do it again sometime.”

“Maybe,” Parker agreed.

As Hanzen steered them across the wide river, Parker held the map down on the cabin top and studied the possibilities. If it seemed like the job would work out, Mike Carlow would come here and look over the routes, see which one he liked best, which one fitted in with whatever way they decided to work it.

When they were more than halfway across, with the current slapping hard at the left side of the boat, Parker could begin to see the dark red color of the Subaru straight ahead, parked just up from the water. He could see people, too, three of them, in dark clothing. And two or three motorcycles. “You’ve got visitors,” he said.

Hanzen nodded. “Friends of mine. And you’re just Mr. Lynch, a man looking for a place to put a restaurant with a river view.”

“Here’s your map,” Parker said.

“Put it in the cabin,” Hanzen told him, so Parker opened a cabin door and dropped the map in onto the bunk next to the envelope of twenties, then shut the door again.

Hanzen slowed as they neared the shore, and Parker looked over at the three of them waiting there. Bikers. Two were heavyset middle-aged men with heavy beards and mean eyes and round beerguts; the third was younger, thinner, cleanshaven. All were in leather jackets and jeans. The two older ones sat on the ground, backs against their motorcycles, while the third, jittery, hopped-up, kept walking this way and that in the little clearing, watching the approaching boat, talking to the other two, looking back up the road they’d all come down. Finally one of the older men spoke to the young one, who agreed and came down to the water’s edge to wait for the boat.

Hanzen steered carefully forward, and the young biker leaned way out over the water to grab the prow. As he pulled the boat partway up onto the bank, Hanzen again stripped out of shoes and socks and pants, and rolled them in a ball. “Ernie!” he called, and the young biker, who had a face like a white crow with smallpox, looked alert. “Catch!”

Hanzen tossed his bundle of clothes, and Ernie caught it like a football, with both forearms and belly. The other two bikers laughed, and Ernie turned around, jumpy, with a twitchy grin, to pretend to throw a forward pass. One shoe fell out of the bundle onto the ground, near the water.

Hanzen, sounding more bored than irritated, called, “Don’t fuck around, Ernie, you don’t want to get my shoe wet. Pull the boat round sideways so Mr. Lynch can get off.”

Ernie hustled to pick up the shoe, carry it and the bundle farther from the water, put them down, and hurry back to pull the boat around at an angle to the bank.

Parker said, “See you around.”

“Anytime,” Hanzen said. “You know where I am.” He stuck out his hand and Parker shook it, then climbed over the side onto the bank.

The older bikers watched with slow interest as Parker walked toward the Subaru. Behind him, at Hanzen’s continuing orders, Ernie pushed the boat free of the shore, apparently getting his own feet wet in the process, and that was good for a general laugh.

Parker got into the Subaru. Offshore, Hanzen was tying the anchor line to the float. Parker started the Subaru, backed in a half-circle, shifted into drive, and saw that one of the bikes, with its owner seated leaning against it, was in his way. He drove forward and put his foot on the brake, and the biker pretended not to see him, to be interested in watching Hanzen wade ashore.

Parker leaned his head out the Subaru window: “You care about that bike?”

The biker turned his head. He contemplated Parker for a long minute, unmoving, and just as Parker took his foot off the brake he grunted and struggled to his feet and wheeled the bike out of the way.

Hanzen was on shore now, drying his legs with a towel Ernie had brought him from his own bike’s saddlebag. Parker completed his turn to the dirt road and jounced over the railroad track.

They all watched him go.

11

Claire had her own car, a gray Lexus, legitimately registered in her name at the Colliver Pond address. She’d driven off in it three days ago, to look into Hilliard Cathman’s private life, so when Parker heard the garage door opener switch on at three that afternoon it was probably Claire coming back. But it didn’t have to be Claire coming back.

Parker had been seated in the living room, looking at maps of New York State, and now he reached under the sofa to close his hand on the S&W .32 revolver stored there. He tugged, and the clip holding the revolver gave a small metallic click, and the .32 nestled into his hand.

He rose, crossed the living room and hall and the kitchen, looked through the hole he’d drilled a long time ago at eye level in the door between kitchen and garage, and saw the Lexus drive in, this side of the Subaru already parked in there. Claire was alone in the car, and didn’t seem troubled by anything. He watched her reach up to the visor to lower the garage door behind her.

When Claire walked into the living room, Parker was again studying the maps. The revolver wasn’t in sight. He looked up and said, “Welcome back.”

She nodded at the maps. “Planning a trip?”

“You tell me.”

“Ah.” She smiled and nodded. “You can keep them open, I guess. After I shower and you bring me a drink, I’ll tell you all about it.”

It was nearly six when they got around to talking, the long spring twilight just starting to stretch its fingers outside the house. Claire sat up in bed, back against the headboard, a sheet partly over her. Her drink, the ice cubes long gone, she held on her up-bent knee, the tan skin looking browner against the clear glass. Parker, in black trousers, paced as he listened.

She said, “Cathman’s a widower, his wife died of cancer seven years ago. No girlfriends. Three grown daughters, all married, living in different parts of the northeast. Everybody gets along all right, but they’re not a close-type family. At Christmas he’ll go to a daughter’s house, that’s about it.”

“He’s alone?”

“He lives alone. In the two-room office he’s got for his consulting business, he has a secretary, an older woman named Rosemary Shields, she worked with him for years when he was with state government, she retired when he did, kept working for him. She’s one of those devoted secretaries where there’s never been sex but she’d kill for him and he wouldn’t know how to live without her.”

“He has to know other people,” Parker said. He frowned out the window at the lake, where it now reflected the start of sunset, as though a lot of different pastel paints had been spilled on it. “He isn’t a loner,” he said.

“Not by choice,” Claire agreed. She sipped at her drink and said, “He’s always been a bureaucrat, his friends have always been other bureaucrats. They all got older together, retired, died off, moved away. He’s in correspondence with a couple of people in Florida, one in California. He still knows a few people around Albany, but doesn’t hang out with them much. When he wants to see somebody in his office on business, the guy is usually in for him.”

Parker touched the window glass; it was cool. He said, “Money?”

“His retirement. The consulting business brings in a little, not much. He’s lived in the same house for thirty-four years, in a suburb called Delmar, paid off the mortgage a long time ago.”

“Protégés? Young bureaucrats coming up?”

“He’s on the wrong side of the issue,” she said. “Or he’s got the wrong issues. And he was never important enough to cultivate. I think basically people are ready to forget him, except he’s still around here and there. Comes to the testimonial dinners and the news conferences.”

“Brothers, sisters?”

“Two older brothers, both dead. Some cousins and nephews and nieces he never sees. He comes from two old New England families, his first name, Hilliard, was his mother’s maiden name. Anglican ministers and college professors.”

Parker nodded, then turned to offer Claire his thin smile. “That’s why the anti-gambling.”

“His forebears would turn in their graves.”

“Armed robbery,” Parker said. “They’d spin a little for that one, too, wouldn’t they?”

“I’d think so,” Claire agreed.

Parker turned back to the window. The spilled paint on the lake was getting darker. He said. “He’ll think about those forebears, won’t he? He’ll want to make it right, not upset them a lot.”

Claire watched his profile and said nothing.

After a minute, Parker shook his head in irritation. “I don’t like wasted motion,” he said. “But I just have the feeling, before this is over, I’m gonna have to put Cathman out of his misery.”

12

Rosemary Shields was as Claire had described her: a rotund older woman with iron-gray hair in an iron arrangement of tight coils close to her head. She escaped an air of the maternal by dressing in browns and blacks, and by maintaining a manner of cold clerical efficiency. When Parker entered her office through the frosted glass door that read:

1100

Hilliard Cathman Associates

in gold letters, she was briskly typing at her computer keyboard, making sounds like crickets in the walls. She stopped the crickets and looked up with some surprise; not many people came through that door. But Parker had dressed for the part, in dark suit and white shirt and low-key striped tie, so she wouldn’t be alarmed.

“Yes?” she asked, unable to hide the surprise, and he knew she mostly expected to hear he’d come to the wrong office.

Parker shut the door. The hall had been empty, the names on the other frosted glass doors along here describing law firms, accountants, “media specialists” and “consultants.” Camp followers of state government. “Cathman,” Parker said.

Surprise gave way to that natural efficiency: “Yes, of course,” as she reached for the phone. “Is Mr. Cathman expecting you?”

Was Cathman expecting anybody? Parker went along with the fiction that business was being done here, saying, “Tell him it’s Mr. Lynch. Tell him I’m with the Parkers.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and tapped the intercom button on the phone.

While she murmured into the phone, not quite studying him out of the corners of her eyes as she spoke with Cathman, Parker looked around at the office. It was small and square and without windows, the walls lined with adjustable bookshelves full of law books and technical journals. The one clear area of wall space, behind Rosemary Shields’ desk, contained a pair of four-drawer filing cabinets and, above them, a large framed reproduction of Ben Shahn’s Sacco and Vanzetti poster. So Cathman was not a man to give up a cause just because it was dead.

Rosemary Shields hung up: “He’ll be right out.”

“Thank you.”

And he was. Parker turned toward the inner door, and it opened. Cathman stuck his head out, like a mole out of his hole in the ground, not sure what he was going to see, and relief showed clearly on his face when he saw it was Parker out there. Fortunately, his Rosemary had gone back to her computer keyboard and didn’t see her boss’s face. Or was she in on it, along for Cathman’s U-turn into crime? Parker doubted it, but there was no way to be sure.

“Oh, yes,” Cathman said. “Mr. Lynch, of course. Come in, please.”

Parker followed him into the inner office, and Cathman shut the door, his manner switching at once to a fussy indignation. “Mr. Parker,” he half-whispered, in a quick high-pitched stutter, “you shouldn’t come here like this. It’s too dangerous.”

“Not for me,” Parker told him, and looked around at Cathman’s lair. It was a larger office than the one outside, but not by much. One wall was mostly window, with a view out and down toward the huge dark stone pile of the statehouse, a turreted medieval castle, outsize and grim, built into the steep slope and now surrounded by the scuttle of modern life. From here, you saw the statehouse from an angle behind it and farther up the hill and from the eleventh floor and the steep city in a tumble of commercial and government buildings on down to the river.

Inside here, Cathman had made a nest for himself, with an imposing partner’s desk inset green felt top, a kneehole and drawers on both sides so the partners could sit facing one another angled into a corner, where Cathman could look out the window and still face the door. There were more bookcases in here, but better ones, freestanding, with glass doors that closed down over each shelf. Framed diplomas and testimonials and photos were spaced around the walls. An L-shaped sofa in dark red and a dark wood coffee table filled the corner opposite the desk.

Cathman, calmed by Parker’s indifference, but still feeling wronged, came forward, making impatient brushing gestures at the sofa. “Yes, well, at least you used a different name,” he said. “Sit down, sit down, as long as you’re here. But I already told you, I repeatedly told you, I’ll be happy to meet you anywhere, anywhere at all, answer any questions you have, just phone me and”

“Sit down,” Parker said.

They were on opposite sides of the coffee table. Cathman blinked, looked at the sofa, looked at Parker, and said, “My secretary”

“Rosemary Shields.”

Cathman blinked again, then thought, and then nodded. “Yes, you do your research. You probably know all there is to know about me by now.”

“Not all,” Parker said.

“Well, the point is,” Cathman said, “Miss Shields will expect me to offer you a cold drink. We’re not equipped to do coffee here, but we have a variety of soft drinks and seltzer and so on in the refrigerator under her desk. Business meetings begin with that, she’ll expect it. What would you like? I can recommend the Saratoga water, it’s a New York State mineral water, very good.”

The local politician to the end. Parker said, “Sure, I’ll try it.”

“Pleasesit down.”

Parker sat on the side of the sofa where the light from the window would be behind him. Easier then to see Cathman’s face, harder for Cathman to see his. Meanwhile, Cathman went back to the door, opened it, murmured to Miss Shields, shut the door, and returned. “She’ll bring it, in just a moment.”

“So this is the time we talk about the weather, right?”

Cathman smiled, apparently surprising himself when he did it. “I doubt that,” he said, “though it would be usual, yes. But we won’t want to discuss Ah, Miss Shields. Thank you.”

They waited and watched her in silence as she brought in a small silver tray, on which faintly jingled two bottles of mineral water and two glasses with ice cubes. She didn’t speak, but continued her performance of being in a world where her efficiency mattered. She put the tray on the coffee table, nodded to Cathman, and left, closing the door firmly but quietly behind her.

Cathman actually wanted water; he poured himself some as he said, “Is there really any reason for this urgency?”

“No urgency,” Parker told him. “I wanted to talk to you, and I wanted to see your place.”

“And now you’ve seen it. Will you need to see it again?”

“I hope not.”

Cathman sipped his bubbly water, put the glass down, and gave Parker a curious look. “That was some sort of threat, wasn’t it? What you meant was, the only reason you’d come back here is if you intended to do me harm.”

Parker said, “Why would I want to do you harm?”

“Only if I’d done you some.” Cathman smiled. “And I’m not going to, so that’s an end to that. Mr. Parker, I do understand what sort of man you are, I really do. I knew what sort of man our late friend Marshall Howell was. I am no threat to you, nor to anybody at all except the gambling interests in New York State.”

“That’s nice,” Parker said.

“You wanted to”

“Talk to you about those gambling interests,” Parker told him, “and the people opposed to them. There’s some state legislators against it, right?”

“In a minority, I’m afraid.”

“That’s a list you’ll have.”

Cathman was startled. “You want a list of anti-gambling legislators? But, why would you want to You don’t mean to approachthem.”

“Cathman,” Parker said, “get the list.”

Cathman didn’t know what to do. He needed reassurance, but if Parker were to consult with him once, give him explanations, then Cathman would want explanations and reassurances all the time. Stop it now, and it’s dealt with.

When Cathman couldn’t stand the silence any more, he put down his glass of New York State mineral water, with a clickon the coffee table, louder than he’d intended, and said, “I’ll get But Of course, it can’t leave Well.”

Parker watched him. Finally Cathman got to his feet and hurried from the room.

There was a second door in here, narrower, in the other corner, farthest from the desk. A way out, or a bathroom? Parker rose and crossed over there, and it was a bathroom, small and efficient, with a shower. Towels were hung askew, the soap in the shower was a smallish stub, hotel shampoos were on the shelf in there; so it was used, from time to time.

As Parker headed back toward the sofa, Cathman returned, a thick manila folder in his hand. He saw Parker in motion, looked quickly at his desk, then realized Parker was coming from the other direction, and stopped worrying; about that, anyway.

When they were both seated, Cathman put the folder on his lap, rested a protective hand on it, and said, “If you could tell me what you want

“

“An anti-gambling legislator. Not from this part of the state. Short and fat. Sour expression.”

Cathman looked alert, ready to be of help. “Do you know his name?”

“You’re going to tell me,” Parker said. “He should be an obscure guy, somebody most people wouldn’t know very much.”

“Oh, I see,” Cathman said, and shook his head. “I’m sorry, I was confused, I thought you meant one specific person, but you want a type,someone to match a Well, it would have to be an assemblyman, not a state senator, if you want someone obscure. There are many more assemblymen than senators.”

“How many assemblymen?”

“One hundred and fifty.”

“That’s a good herd,” Parker said. “Cut me out one. Short and fat. Sour expression. Most people don’t know him, or wouldn’t recognize him.”

“Let me see.” Cathman opened the folder, riffled through the sheets of paper in there, then found it was more comfortable to put the folder on the coffee table and bend over it. After a minute, he looked up and said, “Would New York City be all right?”

“Wouldn’t they be well known?”

“Not at all. There are sixty assemblymen from New York City alone. And assemblywomen, of course.” Cathman shrugged. “And to tell the truth,” he said, “the rural people and the people in towns are likelier to know their assemblyman than the people down in the city.”

“What have you got?”

“His name is Morton Kotkind, from Brooklyn. His district has hospitals and colleges, a lot of transients. It always has among the lowest percentage of eligible voters who actually cast the ballot. Nobody actually likesKotkind, he’s just a good obedient party man who does the job, and it’s a safe seat there, where nobody will ever notice him.”

“Sounds good.”

“He’s a lawyer, of course, they’re all lawyers. He has a practice in Brooklyn, and devotes most of his time to that, so he consistently has one of the worst absentee records in the assembly. Basically, he shows up only when the party needs his vote.”

“Do you have a picture?”

“No, I don’t have any photos here, but he’s as you described. Short and quite stout, and verysour in expression.” Cathman smiled faintly. “He’s a contrarian, which I think is the only reason he’s come out against gambling. Of course, a number of the city legislators object because the city and Long Island have been excluded as gambling locations.”

“But he’s known to be against gambling.”

“Oh, yes,” Cathman said. “His name is on all such lists. He’s spoken out against it, and he votes against it if he happens to be around.”

“You got a home address there?”

Again Cathman looked startled and worried. “You’re not going to What are you going to do?”

“Look at him,” Parker said. “Does he have letterhead stationery? Not as a lawyer, as an assemblyman.”

“Oh, yes, of course.”

“Get me some,” Parker said. “And write down his address for me.”

Cathman dithered. He said, “Nothing’s going to

happento him, will it? I mean, the man is

inoffensive, he’s on our side, I wouldn’t want

“

Slowly, Cathman ran down. He gazed pleadingly at Parker, who sat waiting for him. There was a notepad on the coffee table, and after a while Cathman pulled it close and copied the address.

13

Parker was the first to arrive. “Lynch,” he said, and the girl in the black ball gown picked up three menus and the red leather-covered wine list and led him snaking through the mostly empty tables in the long dim room to the line of windows across the rear wall. Most of the lunchtime customers were clustered here, for the view. Parker sat with his left profile to the view, where he could still see the entrance, then looked out at what the other lunchgoers had come here to see.

First week in May. Sunlight danced on the broad river. Across the way, the Palisades made a vertical curtain of dark gray stone, behind which was New Jersey. This restaurant, called the Palisader and catering mostly to the tourist trade, was built on the eastern shore of the river, just above the city of Yonkers, New York City’s neighbor to the north. That was the northeast corner of New Jersey over there, behind the Palisades, with New York State beginning just to the right, leading up toward West Point. A few sailboats roamed the river today, sunlight turning their white sails almost to porcelain. There were no big boats out there.

Parker looked away from the view, and saw Mike Carlow come this way, following the same hostess. He nodded at Parker, took the seat across from him, then looked out at the view. “Nothing yet, I guess,” he said.

“Not yet.” Cathman had said it would happen between one and three, and it was now just twelve-thirty.

“I’ve got a sister in Connecticut,” Carlow said. “If we’re gonna do this thing, I might bunk in with her for a while, save all this flying around.”

“Well, it’s looking real,” Parker said, and the girl came swishing back through the tables, this time with huge Dan Wycza in her wake. She gestured toward Parker and Carlow with a slender hand and wrist that only emphasized Wycza’s bulk, smiled at them all impersonally, and sailed away.

Wycza looked at the remaining places at the table; he could sit with his back to the view or to the door. “Never be last,” he announced, and pulled out the view-facing chair. Settling carefully into it, the chair creaking beneath him, he said, “So we’ll do it?”

“Unless something new happens,” Parker told him. “I called Lou Sternberg again this morning, he’ll come over next week.”

“Good.” Wycza picked up his menu, but then looked out at the river and said, “What we need’s somebody that can walk on water.”

Carlow grunted. “They don’t play on our team,” he said.

Wycza shrugged. “If the price is right,” he said, and studied the menu.

Their order was taken by a skinny boy wearing a big black bow tie that looked as though somebody was pulling a practical joke on him. After he left, Parker said, “We need a woman. Not to walk on water.”

“What about yours?” Wycza asked him.

Parker shook his head. “Not what she does.”

Carlow asked, “What do we need?”

“Young, thin, good-looking. That could look frail maybe.”

Grinning, Wycza said, “Like the little lady led me here.”

“Like that,” Parker agreed. “But one of us.”

Carlow said, “There was a girl with Tommy Carpenter like that. You know Tommy?”

“We worked on something together with Lou Sternberg once,” Parker said. “What was her name? Noelle.”

“Noelle Braselle,” Carlow said, and smiled. “I always thought that was a nifty name.”

Parker said, “But she comes with Tommy, doesn’t she? That’s two more slices, not one.”

Shaking his head, Carlow said, “Tommy got arrested or something. Well, they both did.”

“That’s the job,” Parker said. “The same job, with Lou. Some paintings we took. Those two got grabbed, but then they got let go, they had a good lawyer.”

“Well, it scared Tommy,” Carlow said. “You wouldn’t think he’d be a guy to spook, but he did. He quit, right then and there.”

Wycza said, “Do I know these people?”

“I don’t think so,” Parker said.

“You’d remember Noelle,” Carlow told him.

Parker said to Carlow, “Where’s Tommy?”

“Out of the country. Went to the Caribbean somewhere, doing something else. Nothing bent, he doesn’t want the arm on him ever again. Left Noelle without a partner, but the last I heard, she’s still around.”

Parker said, “Can you find her? I’d have gone through Tommy’s contact, but that can’t be any good now.”

“I’ll ask,” Carlow said.

Wycza said, “I smell my money.”

They looked at him, and he was gazing out the window, and when they turned that way the ship was just sliding into view from the left. On the gleaming blue-gray water, among the few sailboats, against the dark gray drapery of the Palisades, it looked like any small cruise ship, white and sparkly, a big oval wedding cake, except in the wrong setting. It should be in the Caribbean, with Tommy Carpenter, not steaming up the Hudson River beside gray stone cliffs, north out of New York City.

“I can’t read the name,” Carlow said. “You suppose they changed it already? Spirit of the Hudson?”

“They changed that name,” Wycza assured him, “half an hour out of Biloxi.”

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 bums 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 passenger 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 Iwouldn’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 meto tell youwhat 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 liketo 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 fuck 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 alwaysa 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 shit-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 assured 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 crap about fishing, while Parker looked around, thinking it over. Wasthis 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 damn 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 nobody 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 assured 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 hell 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 couldlock 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 nobody 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, nobody 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 passengers 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 assemblyman.

Short and stout, with thick black hair and a round face wearing a habitual expression of grievance, Lou Sternberg was in a rumpled brown suit and open Burberry raincoat, and he walked with slow difficulty, twisted to one side to balance the heavy black garment bag that weighed down his right shoulder. A smaller brown leather bag dangled from his left hand. He looked like a businessman escaping a war zone, and pissed off about it.

“Travels light,” Wycza commented.

“He likes to be comfortable,” Parker said.

“Yeah? He don’t look comfortable to me.”

Sternberg had seen them now, so Parker turned around and walked out, Wycza with him, and Sternberg trailing. They went out past the line of people waiting for taxis, and the inner roadway full of stopped cars at angles with their trunks open, and paused at the outer roadway, where Wycza pushed the traffic-light button.

Before the light changed to green, Sternberg caught up with them, huffing and red-faced. He was known for dressing too warmly for any climate he was in, so he was sweating now, rivulets down his round cheeks.

Parker said, “Dan, Lou.”

Wycza nodded. “How ya doin.”

“Miserable,” Sternberg told him, looked him up and down, and said, “You look big enough to carry this bag.”

“So do you,” Wycza told him, but then shrugged and grinned and said, “But what the hell.” He took the garment bag and put it on his own shoulder, and it seemed as though it must be much lighter now.

The light was green for pedestrians. They walked over into the parking lot and down the row toward the car Wycza was using, a large forest-green Lexus, big enough so Wycza could ride around in it without feeling cramped. Unlocking the Lexus, they put Sternberg’s bags in the trunk and Sternberg in the back seat, where he sat and huffed like a long distance swimmer after a tough race.

Wycza drove, Parker beside him, and as they headed out of the airport Parker turned partway around in the seat to tell Sternberg, “The guy you’ve got to look at is in Brooklyn, but there aren’t any hotels in Brooklyn, so we’re putting you in one in Manhattan, but way downtown, so it won’t take you long to get over there.”

Sternberg had taken out a large white handkerchief and was mopping his face. He said, “Who’s financing?”

“We’re doing it ourselves, as we go,” Parker told him. “There isn’t that much for the setup.”

“So I must be here legitimately,” Sternberg said. “I know, I’m looking at art.”

“Then that’s why you’re downtown,” Parker told him. “Near the galleries.”

“I think of everything,” Sternberg agreed. Then he said, “I don’t know our driver here, Dan thank you, Dan, for carrying that goddam heavy bag but I take it he’s a good friend of yours. Who else is aboard? Anyone I know?”

“Two you know,” Parker told him. “Talking about art. Remember that painting heist went wrong?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

There was a girl in it, Noelle Braselle.”

“Oh, yes,” Sternberg said, brightening up. “A tasty thing. Tommy Carpenter’s girl, isn’t she?”

“Was. He’s off the bend, she’s still on.”

“I liked looking at her, as I recall. So that’s a plus. Who else?”

“Our driver’s Mike Carlow, he says he worked with you in Iowa once, with Ed Mackey.”

“I do remember him,” Sternberg said. “He came in at the last minute, something happened to the first driver, I forget what. He seemed all right. Anybody else?”

“I got a river rat to run the boat we need,” Parker told him. “He isn’t one of us, isn’t a part of the job, he’s just the guy with the boat. So we don’t tell him a lot, don’t hang out with him.”

“Where’d you get him?”

“A fella named Pete Rudd, that’s reliable.”

“I don’t think I know any Rudds, but I’ll take your word for it. Does this river rat get a full share?”

“No.”

Sternberg smiled. “Does he get anything?”

Parker shrugged. “Sure, why not. If he does his job, and lets it go at that.”

4

All-City Surgical and Homecare Supply occupied an old loft building in the east twenties of Manhattan, among importers, jobbers, restaurant equipment wholesalers, and a button manufacturer. Because there are petty thieves always at work in the city, every one of these buildings was protected at night by heavy metal gates over their street-level entrances and display windows, plus gates locked over every window that faced a fire escape.

Because none of the businesses on this block did much by way of walk-in trade, they all shut down by five or six in the afternoon, so when Parker and Car-low drove down the block at quarter after six that Wednesday evening nothing was open. One curb was lined with parked cars, but there was very little moving traffic and almost no pedestrians.

They stopped in front of All-City Surgical and Homecare, and got out of the van they’d lifted earlier today over in New Jersey. On both sides, the van said, TRI*STATE CARTAGE, with a colored painting of a forklift. Carlow stood watching as Parker bent over the padlock holding the gate and tried the half-dozen keys in his palm, one of which would have to work on this kind of lock.

It was the third. Parker removed the padlock, opened the hasp, and shoved the gate upward. It made a racket, but that didn’t matter. It was full daylight, they were clearly workmen doing a legitimate job, they had a key, they weren’t trying to hide or sneak around, and what would they find to steal, anyway, in a place full of wheelchairs and crutches?

The fourth of another set of keys opened the entrance door, and as they stepped inside Parker was already taking the small screwdriver from his pocket. Right there was the alarm keypad, just to the left of the door, its red light gleaming in the semi-darkness. While Carlow lowered the gate and shut the door, Parker unscrewed the pad and pulled it from the wall. He had either thirty or forty-five seconds, depending on the model, before the pad would signal the security company’s office; plenty of time. He didn’t know the four-digit code that would disarm the system, but it would work just as well to short it across these two connections back here.

Done. He put the pad back in the wall, screwed it in place, and Carlow said, “There’s some over here.”

Wheelchairs.

It was a deep broad dark shop, with a counter facing forward near the back, and two doors in the wall beyond it leading to what must be storage areas. Here in the front part, there were shelves and bins down both sides, behind lines of wheelchairs, motorized and not, plus scooters for the handicapped and wooden barrels with forests of crutches standing in them.

Parker found a switch for the overhead fluorescents, turned it on, and they went over to see what was available. A lot of different kinds, it turned out, but what they wanted was a non-motorized wheelchair with handles that extended back so someone could push it. There were different kinds of those, too, so next they were interested in what was under the seat of each kind.

“Take a look at this,” Carlow said.

He’d found one with an enclosed black plastic box built in beneath the seat, curved across the front and angled where the sides met the back. There was a chrome handle in the middle of the back, and when Carlow had tugged on it the whole box slid back. It had no top except the seat, against which it made a tight fit, though the seat didn’t move with the box, and the inside was filled almost completely by a white plastic bowl with an arced metal rod attached to it. When stashed, the metal rod lay flat in a grove on top of the bowl, but when the box was pulled out the rod could be lifted into a carrying handle, and the bowl would lift out.

They looked at this thing. Carlow lifted the bowl out of the box and looked at the blank black space inside it, shaped to fit the bowl. He put the bowl back. Meantime, Parker looked at the seat and saw the cushion was a donut, with a hole in the center, and a round panel in the plastic seat itself could be swiveled out of the way, revealing a hole above the bowl. “It’s so whoever’s in the wheelchair can go to the can,” he said. “There’s probably tubes and such, somewhere around here.”

“Jesus,” Carlow said. He pushed the box back under the seat, where it clicked into place. “What a life,” he said.

“You’d get used to it,” Parker told him. “People get used to everything but being dead.”

Carlow went on to look at other wheelchairs, but Parker stayed with the one with the bowl. He studied the way the parts were put together, the wheels and the frame and the seat and the back and the foot supports and the handles.

After a while, Carlow came over again. “This one, you think?”

“Is there another one like it?”

“Yeah, same gray. Over there.”

“We’ll take them both,” Parker said.

“What do we need two for?”

“Because I want the second box. If we walk out of here with two wheelchairs, no signs of entry, nothing fucked up, they’ll think their records are wrong. And if they don’t, the cops will. But if we take just the box and leave the chair, they’ll knowsomebody was in here. I don’t want a lot of cops looking for a hot wheelchair.”

“Okay.” Carlow gave the wheelchair a critical look. “You sure that’s big enough down there?”

“We can move the seat up, dick around with it a little. There’ll be room.”

Carlow was still not sure, although Parker was already walking one of the wheelchairs toward the door. Carlow called after him, “Won’t they pull that handle? Won’t they look in there?”

“Not twice,” Parker said over his shoulder, and Car-low laughed and went to get the other wheelchair.

5

Normally, Parker would stay as far as he could from any civilian that might be involved with a piece of work, and he’d prefer to stay away from Cathman, too, but he couldn’t. The man bothered him, he rang tin somehow. Was he a nutcase all of a sudden, after all those years running in the squirrel cage, liking it? If so, what kind of nutcase was he, and how much trouble could he cause if he flipped out the rest of the way? And if not, if Cathman actually had some sort of idea or plan behind what he was doing, Parker needed to know that, too. No civilian agendas allowed.

According to Claire, Cathman had owned his home, a single-family house in an Albany suburb called Delmar, for twenty-seven years. Mortgage all paid up, his free and clear. His three daughters grew up there and married and moved out. His wife died there, seven years ago. He was still in the house. It ought to know everything about him by now.

Parker drove the Subaru down that block at three-thirty in the afternoon. Small two-story clapboard houses dating from the late forties’ building boom lined both sides, each with a neat lawn in front and a neat driveway to one side. They’d started out looking all the same, cookie-cutter tract houses, but owners had altered and adapted and added to them over the years, so that by now they looked like relatives but not clones.

Cathman’s was number 437, and his additions had been an attached garage at the top of the driveway and the enclosing of the front porch with windows that bounced back the spring sun. Shades were drawn over those windows and over the front windows upstairs.

Parker took the next left and drove two blocks back out to the main shopping street, where there was a supermarket on the near right corner. He left the Subaru there, put on the dark blue jacket that read Niagara-Mohawk Electricacross the back, picked up the clipboard from the passenger seat, and walked away down the sidewalk, the only pedestrian in miles.

In front of Cathman’s house, he stopped to consult the clipboard, then walked up the driveway. A narrow concrete path went around the garage, and he followed it to the back yard, which was weedy and shaggy and uncared for. Chain-link fence separated it from the better-kept yards to both sides, and a tall wooden fence had been built for privacy by the neighbor at the rear. Some kids were playing with toy trucks in a yard half a block down to the right; they never glanced Parker’s way.

The lock on the kitchen door was nothing. He went through it without damaging it, and spent the next hour tossing the house, careful but thorough. He moved furniture so he could roll up carpets to look for trapdoors to hiding places. He checked the ceilings and back walls of closets, and removed every drawer from every dresser and table and desk and built-in in the house. He stuck a knife in the coffee and in the flour, he took the backs off both TVs, he took off and then replaced every light switch and outlet plate. At the end, he put everything back the way it had been.

Nothing was hidden, nothing here changed the idea of Cathman as a solid citizen, predictable and dull. The only thing new Parker learned was that Cathman was looking for a job. He’d written more or less the same letter to about twenty government agencies and large corporations, listing his qualifications and stating his availability. The answers he got and he always got an answer were polite and respectful and not interested.

Clearly, he did this stuff at home, in this office upstairs at the back of the house that must originally have been a daughter’s bedroom, because he didn’t want his Rosemary Shields to know he was on a job hunt. That consulting business was just a face-saver, it cost him money instead of making money. He wasn’t strapped yet, but how long could he keep up the fake show? Was that reason enough to turn to the heisters?

Parker finished with the house at ten to five. There was no beer in Cathman’s refrigerator, but an open jug of Italian white wine was in there, cork stuck partway back in the bottle. Parker poured himself a glass, then sat in the dim living room and thought about the things that needed to be done. Noelle. The wheelchair. An ambulance or some kind of van that could take the wheelchair with a person in it. The limo for Lou. The chauffeur uniform. The guns. And Cathman’s part: ID.

He heard the garage door motor switch on, and got up to go to the kitchen, where the side door connected with the garage. He refilled his glass, and poured a second, and when Cathman walked in, slope-shouldered and discouraged, Parker was just turning with a glass in each hand. “You look like you could use this,” he said.

Cathman stared at him, first in astonishment, then in fear, and then, when he understood the glass that was extended toward him, in bewilderment. “What what are you”

“Take the glass, Cathman.”

Cathman finally did, but didn’t immediately drink. And now, because of having been startled and scared, he was moving toward anger. “You broke in here? You just come in my house?”

“We’ll talk in the living room,” Parker told him, and turned away, and Cathman had no choice but to follow.

The electric company jacket and the clipboard were on the sofa. Parker sat next to them, drank some wine, put the glass on the end table beside him, looked at Cathman standing in the doorway unable to figure out what to do next, and said, “Sit down, Cathman, we got things to talk about.”

Cathman blinked at him, and looked around the room. Trying to sound aggrieved, but coming off as merely weak, he said, “Did you searchin here?”

“Naturally.”

“Naturally? Why? What did you want to find?”

“You,” Parker said. “You don’t add up, and I want to know why.”

“I told you who I am.”

Parker said nothing to that. Cathman looked at the glass in his hand, as though just realizing it was there. He shook his head, walked over to sit in the easy chair to Parker’s right, and drank a small sip from the glass.

Parker wanted to shake him up, disturb him, see what fell out, but at the same time not to spook him so much he couldn’t be useful any more. So he’d come in here and show himself, but not make a mess. Not sit in the living room in the dimness when he comes home, but stand in the kitchen and offer him a glass of wine. Give a little, then get hard a little. Watch the reactions. Watch him, for instance, just take that tiny sip of wine and put the glass down. So he’s under good control, whatever’s driving him it isn’t panic.

Cathman put the glass down, and frowned at Parker. “Did you learn anything, coming in here like this?”

“You aren’t a consultant, you’re a guy out of work.”

“I’m both, as a matter of fact,” Cathman said. “I know your type, you know. You want to be just a little menacing, so people won’t try to take advantage of you, so they’ll do what you want them to do. But I don’t believe it’s just bluff, or I’d wash my hands of you now. It’s habit, that’s all, probably learned in prison. I’ll do you the favor of ignoring it, and you’ll do me the favor of not being more aggravating than you can help.”

“Well, you’re pretty cool, aren’t you?” Parker said. “I came in here to read you, so now you’re gonna read me.”

“I see you disguised yourself as a meter reader or some such thing,” Cathman said. “But I’d rather you didn’t do it again. If something goes wrong and you get arrested, I don’t want to be connected to a criminal named Parker.”

Ignoring that, Parker said, “What I need is ID, two pieces.”

Cathman frowned. “What sort of ID?”

“You tell me. If an assemblyman is out on an official job of some kind, he might ask for bodyguards, right?”

“Not bodyguards, not exactly,” Cathman said. “Oh, is that what you’re going to do, go on board as assemblyman Kotkind? Is that why I gave you his letterhead stationery?”

“What do you mean, not exactly bodyguards?”

“He might ask for a state trooper, to drive him, if it’s official.”

“In a patrol car?”

“No, a state car, with the state seal on the doors. Black, usually.”

“Trooper in uniform?”

“Probably not,” Cathman said. “He’d be a plain-clothesman from the security detail.”

“Then that’s the ID I want,” Parker said. “Two of them.”

“They’d be photo IDs.”

“Then get me blanks. Get me something I can adapt.”

Cathman picked up the wine glass, took a sip, brooded at Parker. He said, “When are you going to do it? The robbery.”

“Pretty soon. So get me the IDs.”

“No, I mean when.”

“I know what you mean,” Parker told him. Leaving his wine unfinished, he got to his feet and said, “I’ll call you here, next Monday, in the evening, tell you where to bring them.”

Cathman also stood. “Are you going to do it next week?”

Parker shrugged into the jacket, picked up the clipboard. “I’ll call you Monday,” he said, and left.

6

“I bet that’s her,” Carlow said.

Parker looked, and it was. Among the people getting off the Chicago Trailways bus here at the Albany terminal, that was the remembered face and figure of Noelle Braselle. She looked to be about thirty, tall and slender and very together, but she also looked like a college girl, with her narrow-legged blue jeans and bulky orange sweater crossed by the straps of a dark blue backpack, and her straight brown hair pulled back from her oval face to a black barrette and a short ponytail. She saw Parker and Carlow across the street from the terminal and waved, and as the other disembarking passengers crowded around the driver while he pulled their luggage out from the bus’s lower storage area, she came across to them, smiling. Noelle traveled light. “Long time no see,” she said to Parker.

“You haven’t changed,” he told her.

“I sure hope not,” she said, and raised a curious eyebrow at Carlow.

Parker said, “Noelle, this is Mike Carlow. He’s your driver.”

“Mydriver?”

“We’re taking different routes, on the night. Come on, I’ll tell you about it.”

They’d borrowed Wycza’s big Lexus, for comfort, because it was almost an hour drive from here to Tooler’s cottages, and it was parked now a block from the terminal. As they walked, Noelle said, “You still got that nice lady stashed?”

“Claire,” Parker agreed. “Yeah, we’re together.”

“Good. Tommy and I split, you know.”

“I heard.”

“Funny,” she said. “I used to think there wasn’t anything would scare him, then all at once everything did, and goodbye, Harry. Is this it? Nicer than a bus.”

“Very like a bus,” Carlow told her.

Carlow drove, Noelle beside him, Parker in back. They had to cross the river on one of the big swooping bridges here, and then head south. Parker said, “You remember Lou Sternberg.”

“From that painting disaster? Angry guy, overweight, drove the big truck.”

“That’s him. He’s with us on this. And a guy I don’t think you know, Dan Wycza.”

She turned to grin at Parker in the back seat and say, “I hope this one comes out a little better.”

“It will,” he said.

Wycza, in shorts and sneakers, was doing push-ups on the weedy grass in the sun in front of the cottage. Noelle, seeing him as they drove in, laughed and said, “Is this supposed to be my birthday?”

“Dan Wycza,” Parker told her, and Carlow said, “For the heavy lifting.”

“I can see that,” she said. “Is Lou Sternberg here?”

“Not yet. He’s in Brooklyn, watching a guy for later.”

Wycza got to his feet when he saw the car coming. He offered a small wave and went into the house, while Carlow parked the Lexus. They got out, Noelle carrying her backpack slung over one shoulder, and went into the house, where Wycza stood now in the living room, rubbing his head and neck with a tan towel.

Parker said, “Noelle Braselle, Dan Wycza.”

“Hi,” Wycza said, and Noelle frowned at him and said, “I know you. Don’t I know you?”

Grinning, Wycza said, “I wish you did, honey.”

“No, I’ve seen you somewhere,” she said. The two wheelchairs were in this room, one still together, the other mostly apart; she hadn’t remarked on them yet, but she did put her backpack on the complete one now as she continued to frown at Wycza, trying to place him.

“If I’d ever met you,” Wycza promised her, “I’d remember. Trust me.”

All at once her brow cleared: “You’re a wrestler! That’s where I saw you!”

Wycza gazed at her like he couldn’t believe it. “You’re a fan?”

“I went with a guy a few times,” she said. “I kind of loved it.”

Speaking confidentially, he said, “It’s all fake, you know. I’m not really getting beat up by those clowns.”

“I know! That’s what’s so great about it! I look at you, and I see you could open those guys like pistachios, and you just goof around instead. Wait. Strongarm! You’re Jack Strongarm.”

“Miss Braselle,” Wycza said, “you got a convert.”

“Well, if that isn’t something else,” she said, and shook her head at Wycza, and grinned. “Nice to meet you.”

“And you. Believe me.”

She turned to Parker to say, “You were gonna show me what I’m doing. Or should I get rid of my pack first? Which room is mine? What’s with the wheelchair?”

“You’re gonna be in it,” Parker told her.

“I am.”

“Every night, starting tomorrow, after we get you the right clothes, Mike’s gonna be in his chauffeur suit, pushing you in the wheelchair, and you’re gonna be the brave but broken debutante. You’ll be six hours on the ship, Albany to Albany. You’ll gamble a little, you’ll watch a little, you’ll do little brave smiles here and there.”

‘Jesus, I despise myself,” she said. ‘What am I playing this poor little rich girl for?”

Parker slid open the box under the seat, with the white plastic bowl in it. “See this?”

“Oh,” she said. “Don’t tell me, let me guess.”

“This is a wheelchair for people who don’t get out of it for anything.”

“I get the concept,” she said.

“Security’s tight on that ship,” Parker told her. “When you board, they’ll look in there.”

“So what?”

“It won’t be empty. You’ll see to that.”

She made a disgusted face and said, “Parker, what are you doing to me? That’s going to be under me all night?”

“Six hours. It’s airtight, no smell, nothing. But they’ll look in it when you come aboard, and they may look in it when you go ashore. And they may the next night, and they may the night after that.”

She began to smile. “And one of these nights they won’t,” she said, “because they knowwhat’s in there.”

“That’s right.”

“So that’s how the guns get on.”

“No,” he said, “we’re getting them on another way, that’s what Lou’s working on now. What you’re doing is, you’re taking the cash off.”

She looked around, and pointed, and said, “That’s what the other wheelchair’s for.”

Wycza said, “We’re adapting it a little, the seat on that one’s gonna be higher, so that night you hunker down some.”

“I can do that,” she said. She looked around at the three men and the two wheelchairs and the old-fashioned cottage and said, “A new experience. I never hatched money before.”

7

Parker rode the Spirit of the Hudsonjust once before the night. Since, when it all went down, he’d be in disguise, this time he went open, alone, in jacket and tie. He bought some chips, and he noticed that most of the other people buying chips were using hundred-dollar bills. That was a good sign.

Because this was a new operation, nobody knew yet what the take would be. The ship was medium to small, holding just over eight hundred paying passengers, and if they on average dropped a hundred dollars apiece, including the twelve-dollar fare to come aboard, that would mean eighty thousand dollars in the money room by the end of the night. If the average loss was five hundred dollars, which some area newspapers had estimated, that would be four hundred thousand waiting for them. It was an acceptable range, and from what Parker was seeing, the result would most likely be toward the higher end.

It wasn’t true that no credit cards at all were in use on the Spirit of the Hudson.Chips you could only buy with cash, but you could pay for your dinner or souvenirs with credit cards. The little bit of cash that came in from those sources didn’t go to the casino money room, so Parker didn’t think about it.

The casino ship took two runs a day, from noon till six P.M. and from eight P.M. till two in the morning. Every trip began and ended in Albany, with one midway stop at Poughkeepsie, where a few passengers would board or depart and more supplies would be taken on. The money only left the ship, though, at Albany.

Parker chose a Friday night trip, the same as the night they’d be taking it down, to get a feel for the place. The ship was full, action in the casino was heavy, and the people having dinner in the glass-walled dining rooms to both sides of the casino as it sailed past the little river towns were dressed up and making an occasion of it. The sense was, and it was palpable through the ship, this was a fun way to spend money. Good.

From time to time, Parker saw Carlow and Noelle in the distance, but made sure to steer clear of them. Noelle, with a little pale makeup and dark gray filmy clothing that made her seem even more slender than she was, looked mostly like a vampire’s victim. Car-low, pushing the wheelchair in his dark blue chauffeur’s uniform and cap, leaning on the handles when it was at rest, looked wiry and tough, as though he were as much bodyguard as chauffeur.

People smiled at Noelle, who smiled wanly back. People touched her for luck, or asked her to blow on their dice, and whenever she played a little blackjack or shot craps for a while she was surrounded by people cheering her on.

Noelle and Carlow had been at this game for four nights now, and the security people still looked in the bowl every night coming aboard, not going ashore but Noelle was making sure they had a good variety to look at and they were beginning to get embarrassed, and also to recognize her, and to ease up. Parker figured by the middle of next week they’d just be waving her aboard.

He had studied the space and blueprints of the Spirit of the Hudson,and knew the ship well, at least in theory, but reality is never exactly the same as the space. He wandered the ship, getting to understand it in this new way, covering every part of it that was open to the passengers.

There were three public decks. The top one was an open promenade, a long oval around the bridge with a lot of deck chairs that probably got more action on the daytime run. The deck below that was wider, another promenade, this one glassed-in, because upstate New York doesn’t get that much good weather year-round. This public oval surrounded an interior space of offices, a gift shop, a massage room, a game room with pinball machines, and a tiny joke of a library. The lifeboats were suspended just outside and below this promenade, not to spoil the view; if anybody ever had to actually board those lifeboats, the glass panels in front of them could be slid out of the way.

The third deck down was the important one, the casino, taking up the entire interior of the ship, with no windows, and no doors that opened directly to the outside. It could be reached only through vestibules fore and aft. Everywhere on the ship you were always aware of the humming vibration of the engines and the thrust of them through the water, but in the casino you could very quickly forget that you were afloat.

Flanking the casino were two dining rooms, of different types. The one on the port side was more upscale, with cloth napkins and expensive entrees and an eight-page wine list, while the one to starboard was a sandwich joint. Both were long and narrow, their outer walls all glass. Both, Parker knew from the specs, were served by the same kitchen, directly below the casino, with escalators for the waiters to bring the platters up. And in the center of that kitchen was a round metal post, inside which were the pneumatic tubes that moved money; upward to the casino cashier, in the middle of the casino, in an elaborate cage, and downward to the money room.

There was one bit of public access below the casino; restrooms, fore and aft. Broad carpeted staircases led down from both vestibules outside the casino, to wide hushed low ceilinged areas that looked like hotel lobbies, scattered with low sofas and armchairs, with the men’s and women’s rooms off that.

In the aft lobby, near the stairs, an unmarked and locked door led to a simpler staircase that went down to the corridor that led to the money room. A guard would be on duty at all times, the other side of that door, to keep people from coming in. He wouldn’t worry, until too late, about keeping people from coming out.

The aft section also contained a small elevator from casino vestibule down to restroom lobby, for people who’d have trouble with the stairs. Once every evening, Noelle and Carlow would take that elevator down and, while Noelle waited outside, Car-low would take the bowl into the men’s room and tip the attendant there very well to clean it out.

In the course of the evening, Parker ate small meals in both restaurants, when he could get window tables. He also walked the glassed-in promenade, and the top deck open-air promenade, where he was completely alone. Although the ship produced a lot of light, with a creamy nimbus around it on the disturbed water, it was very hard to see in close at the side of the ship. From above, the view was outward, not down. If Hanzen came up from behind, and stayed close to the flank as he approached the open door, no one would see him.

When the ship docked at Albany at two in the morning, Parker was among the first off. He stepped back on the pier, out of the way of the others debarking, and watched that door open in the side of the hull. An armored car was already parked there, facing away from the ship, and once that doorway gaped black the armored car backed up to it until it was snug against the metal side of the ship.

Parker watched Noelle and Carlow go by, both looking solemn, as though what they’d just come out of was church. Neither looked in his direction, but Noelle waggled two fingers as they went by. She was having fun.

8

The man who had the guns was named Fox. Maurice Fox,it said on the window of the store, Plumbing Equipment,on a backwater side street in the former downtown of New Brunswick, New Jersey. This wasn’t the kind of business to move out to the mall with all his former neighbors, so here he stayed, now with a storefront revivalist church on one side and a candle-and-incense shop on the other.

Parker left the Subaru in the loading zone in front of the store and went from the sunny outside to the dim interior, where the store was long and narrow and dark. Dusty toilets were lined up in one row, porcelain sinks in another, and bins full of pipe joints and faucets lined one wall.

A short balding man in a rumpled gray suit and bent eyeglasses came down the aisle between the rows of toilets and sinks. “Yes? Oh, Mr. Flynn, I didn’t recognize you, it’s been a while.”

“I phoned you.”

“Yes, sure, of course. You don’t go through Mr. Lawson anymore.” James Lawson was a private detective in Jersey City who fronted for people like Fox, on the bend.

Parker said, “Why should I? We already know each other.”

With a sad smile, Fox said, “Cut out the middleman, that’s what everybody does. In my business, most of the time, I’mthe middleman, why should I love this philosophy? I think I got what you want, come look.”

There was a way to talk to this man on the telephone about plumbing equipment and wind up with guns, but when you have to be so careful about listening ears, sometimes it’s hard to get the exact details right. But, as Fox turned away to lead Parker deeper into the store, he said, “What I heard, you want two revolvers, concealment weapons such as plainclothes police might carry, and the shoulder holsters to go with them.”

“That’s right.”

At the back of the shop, Fox led them through a doorway, which he shut behind them, and down a flight of stairs with just steps and no risers to a plaster-walled basement. At the bottom, Fox clicked a light switch on a beam, and to the left a bare bulb came on.

Now he led the way across the concrete floor, mounds of supplies in the darkness around them, to a wooden partition with a heavy wooden door. He took a ring full of keys from his pocket, chose one, and unlocked the door. They went inside, and Fox hit another light switch that turned on another bare bulb dangling from the ceiling. He closed this door, too, when they were inside.

The room was small and made smaller by the cases lining it on all four sides. The floor was wooden slats over concrete, except for one two-foot square in the middle, where there was no wood over the drain. Along the back wall the crates were crowded together onto wooden shelves, and Fox went directly over to them and took out a white cardboard box. The label pasted on the end claimed, with an illustration, that the box contained a bathroom sink faucet set.

A square dark table, paint-stained, stood in one corner. Fox carried the cardboard box to it, opened it, and inside, nestled in white tissue paper, was a nickel-plated .357 Magnum revolver, the S&W Model 27. This was the kind of gun developed for the police back in the thirties, when the mobsters first took to wearing body armor and driving around in cars with bulletproof glass, making the normal .38 almost useless. The .357 Magnum had so much more power it could go through a car from the rear and still have enough strength to kill the driver. One .357 slug could put out a car engine.

While Parker looked it over, Fox went away to his shelves and came back this time with a box claiming to contain a toilet floatball; inside was another S&W 27. “And holsters, one minute,” he said, and went away again.

When he came back, with two cartons of “icemaker tubing,” Parker held up the second of the revolvers and said, “The serial number’s off this one. Acid, looks like.”

Fox looked faintly surprised. “Isn’t that better?”

“It’s got to be shown like a lawman would show it, hand it over and take it back. Maybe they’re sharp-eyed, maybe they’re not.”

“Ah. A problem.” Fox brooded at his wall of boxes. “For the same reason,” he said, “you’d probably like them both the same.”

“That would be good.”

“I got an almost,” Fox decided. “The Colt Python. Looks the same, same size, same caliber. Could you use that?”

“Let me see it.”

Another bathroom sink set. The Python was as Fox had described, and looked a close relative of the 27. “I’ll take it,” Parker decided.

“You’ll want to check them?”

Parker knew how that worked with Fox. Under the drain plate in the middle of the room was loose dirt. To test-fire Fox’s merchandise, you stood above the drain and shot a bullet into the dirt. It made a hell of a racket here in this enclosed room, but Fox claimed the boxes absorbed all that noise and none of it was heard outside.

There were times when you expected to use a gun, and then you’d try it first, but this time, with what they planned on the ship, if they had to use one of these guns, the situation would already be a mess. The revolvers were both clean and well oiled, with crisp-feeling mechanisms; let it go at that. “No need,” Parker said. “I’ll take them as they are. Let me see the holsters.”

They were identical, stiff leather holsters without a strap across the chest. They fit the 27 and the Python, and they were comfortable to wear. “Fine,” Parker said.

“The whole thing is three hundred,” Fox said, “and when you’re done with them, if they haven’t been used, you know, you understand what I mean”

“Yes.”

“Well, we done business before,” Fox said. “So, if you just use them for show, afterwards I’ll be happy to buy them back at half price.”

Afterwards, no matter what happened, these guns would be at the bottom of the Hudson. “I’ll think about it,” Parker said.

9

CONTINENTAL PATRIOT PRINTING said the old-fashioned shield-shaped sign hanging over the entry door. The shop was one of several in a long one-story fake-Colonial commercial building in a faded suburb of Pittsburgh, built not long after the Second World War and long since overwhelmed by the more modern malls. A few of the shops were vacant and for rent, and several of the remainder continued the Colonial theme: Paul Revere Video Rental down at the corner, Valley Forge Pizza next to the print shop. The plate-glass display window of the print shop was crammed with multicolored posters describing the services available within: “Wedding Invitations Business Cards Yearbooks Letterheads Newsletters Announcements.” The one thing not mentioned was the service that had brought Parker here.

There was angled parking in front of the shops. Parker left the Subaru in front of Valley Forge Pizza and went into Continental Patriot Printing, where a bell rang when he opened the door, and rang again when he shut it.

The interior of this shop had been truncated, cut to a stub of a room by a hastily constructed cheap panel wall with an unpainted hollow-core door in it. The remaining space was divided by a chest-high counter facing the front door, again quickly made, and with cheap materials. The paneling across the front of the counter and the paneling of the partition itself were heavy with more posters promoting the services available here, with examples of the work that could be done. The general air was of a competent craftsman with too few customers.

The inner door opened, in response to that double bell, and an Asian man came out, in work shirt and jeans and black apron. He was around forty years of age, short and narrow-shouldered, with a heavy forward-thrusting head, and eyes that squinted with deep suspicion and skepticism through round glasses. His name; Parker knew, was Kim Toe Kwai, and he was Korean.

He and Parker met at the counter, where Kim said, “Yes? May I help you?” But beneath that professional courtesy was an undisguisable skepticism, the belief that this new person could not possibly help because nobody could.

“A fellow named Pete Rudd told me I should get in touch with you,” Parker said.

The suspicious eyes grew narrower, the mouth became a slit. “I do not know such a man,” he said.

“That’s okay,” Parker told him. “I’ll tell you what I need, and after I leave you can look in your address book or wherever and see do you know a Pete Rudd and call him and ask him if you should do business with Mr. Lynch. You see what I mean?”

Kim took an order form out from under the counter and picked up a pen held there with a piece of cord tied around it and thumbtacked to the counter. He wrote “Lynch” on the order form. He said, “You have brochures you want made?”

“That’s right,” Parker said, and while Kim wrote “brochures” on the order form Parker took a laminated card out of his pocket, plus two small headshot photos, one of himself and the other of Wycza. The laminated card was a legitimate identification card for a New York State trooper. Putting it on the counter for Kim to see, but holding one finger on it, Parker said, “At the end, I need the original back. Undamaged.”

Kim squinted at the ID, then frowned at Parker. “This is actual,” he said.

“That’s right. That’s why I got to get it back.”

This was what Cathman had come up with, out of the state files; a solidly legitimate ID taken from a trooper currently on suspension for charges involving faked evidence against defendants. Whether the trooper was exonerated or not, Cathman needed to be able to put that ID back in the files, and soon.

Kim pointed at the photo of Parker and then at the ID. “You want this,” he said, and then pointed at the photo of Wycza and again” at the ID, “and this.”

“Right.”

Kim wrote some scribbles on the order form, and then, in the right-hand charge column, he wrote, “$500 each.”

Parker put his hand palm down on the form. When Kim looked at him, waiting, Parker took the pen from him, and with the form upside down, he crossed out “each.” Putting the pen down, reaching for his wallet, he said, “Pete told me your price structure, and said you were fair in your charges.”

Kim gave a sour look, and a shrug. “No doubt,” he said, as Parker slid five one-hundred-dollar bills from his wallet and put them on the counter, “he also told you I do very fast work.”

“You’re right, he did.”

“This is complex, this brochure.” Kim thought about it. “Three days.”

“Thursday. I’ll be here Thursday afternoon.”

“I close at five.”

“I’ll be here,” Parker said.

Kim peeled off one copy of the order form and pushed it across the counter toward Parker, but Parker shook his head, not taking it. “We’ll remember each other,” he said.

10

On Assemblyman Morton Kotkind’s letterhead stationery, Lou Sternberg addressed Andrew Hamilton, New York State Gaming Commissioner, and wrote as follows:

As you know, I have been opposed to the further legalization of gambling in New York State, beyond the lottery and the bingo for tax-exempts already existing. I have been in particular opposition to the installation of a gambling ship on the Hudson River, worldwide symbol of the Empire State, site of the first inland European exploration, by famed Henry Hudson in his ship the Half Moon,of what was to become the United States of America.

The will of the people’s representatives, at this time, has seen fit to look the other way at the potential for abuse in this introduction of casino gambling into the very heart of our state, where our children can actually stand on the riverbank and see this floating casino, and judge thereby that such activity has the blessing of their elders.

Other esteemed members of the Assembly have assured me that the operation of this floating casino is utterly reputable, that the potential for corruption has been minimized, and that the anticipated tax revenues and economic benefits to the depressed areas of the Hudson River Valley far outweigh any potential for mischief or malfeasance. I am far from changing my attitude in this matter, but even my most severest critics have always had to acknowledge my open-mindedness. I am prepared to listen and to observe.

In this regard, I have decided to undertake a factfinding tour of inspection of the floating casino on Friday, May 23, this year, on the eight P.M. sailing from Albany. I wish this mission to be as low-key as possible, with no excess attention paid to me and my two aides who will accompany me. I would ask merely for one escort from the ship’s complement to conduct me on my tour. I will expect, of course, to see every part of the ship.

At this point, I would take strong exception to this tour of inspection being used for publicity purposes to suggest that my opposition to casino gambling in New York State has altered or diminished in any way. I shall myself make no contact with the press, and I would ask that your office and the operators of the floating casino do not alert the press to this tour of inspection. After the event, if you wish, we may make a joint public announcement.

My assistant, Dianne Weatherwax, will telephone your office from my constituent office in my district in Brooklyn on Wednesday, May 21, to finalize the details. Any questions you may have should be raised through her, at that office.

May I say that, although I do not expect to have my opinions on this issue changed, I would welcome convincing evidence that casino gambling is not the scourge I have long believed it to be.

Yours sincerely,

Morton Kotkind

Sternberg was proud of this letter. “It sounds like him,” he said. “Some of it is even from his speeches, like the children on the riverbank. And besides that, it’s the way he talks.”

It had been part of Sternberg’s job to meet Kotkind, study him, get to know him, befriend him. There was a bar near Kotkind’s Brooklyn law offices on Court Street where lawyers went to unwind after their hard days, and it had not been difficult for Sternberg, short and stout and sour-looking, to blend in among them, cull Kotkind from the herd, and share a scotch and soda with the man from time to time.

And now Sternberg was upstate, at Tooler’s cottages, with the letter. Parker and Wycza and Noelle and Carlow all read it, and all agreed it sounded like a politician/lawyer starting to reposition himself from off that limb he’d climbed out on.

Giving the letter back, Parker said to Sternberg, “So you’ll meet up with him on Tuesday”

“We already got an appointment,” Sternberg said. “We’re both gonna be in court that day, him in state civil, me in housing, and we’re gonna meet at the bar at five o’clock, have a drink before we go home to the trouble and strife, share our woes with the judges. That’s when I slip him the mickey.”

“What I want is him sick,” Parker said. “Through Saturday. Sick enough so he doesn’t go to any office, make any phone calls, put in any appearances anywhere. But not so sick he gets into the newspapers. Assemblyman down with Legionnaires’ disease; I don’t need that.”

“I’ll put him down,” Sternberg said, grinning, “as gentle as a soft-boiled egg.”

The letter was dated Monday, May 12th, but wouldn’t actually be mailed, in Brooklyn, until Friday the 16th, so it wouldn’t get to Commissioner Hamilton’s office until Monday the 19th at the earliest, four days before the tour of inspection. The Post Office would be blamed for the delay, and no one would think any more about it.

Kotkind’s Brooklyn constituent office was a storefront open only on Mondays and Thursdays. Carlow and Sternberg had already invaded it twice without leaving traces, and knew how the office worked. Noelle would go to Brooklyn with them on Wednesday, and from the constituent office she’d phone Commissioner Hamilton to work out the details of Assemblyman Kotkind’s visit, and she’d be happy to stick around a while so they could call her back, if for any reason they had to.

Parker said to Noelle, “That’s his administrative assistant, for real, Dianne Weatherwax, from Brooklyn, graduated from Columbia University in New York. Can you do her?”

“Shoe-uh,” said Noelle.

11

Throughout America, the states were settled by farmers, who mistrusted cities. State after state, when it came time to choose a spot for the capital, it was put somewhere, anywhere, other than that state’s largest city. From sea to shining sea, with the occasional rare exception like Boston in Massachusetts, the same impulse held good. In California, the capital is in Sacramento. In Pennsylvania, the capital is Harrisburg; in Illinois it’s Springfield; in Texas it’s Austin. And in New York State, the capital is Albany. State capitals breed buildings, office buildings, bars, hotels and restaurants, but they also breed parking lots. State-owned automobiles, somber gray and black, usually American-made, utterly characterless except for the round gold state seal on their doors, wait in obedient rows on blacktop rectangles all over Albany, each enclosed in a chain-link fence with a locked gate.

At seven-fifteen on an evening in May, in daylight, under partly cloudy skies with a slight chill in the air, Parker and Wycza stepped up to the chain-link gate in the chain-link fence surrounding the State Labor Department motor pool parking lot on Washington Street. Both wore dark suits, white shirts, narrow black ties. Wycza stood casually watching while Parker quickly tried the keys he held in the palm of his right hand. The third one snapped open the padlock and released the hasp.

While Wycza stood beside the open gate, Parker walked down the row of Chevrolets, his right hand dropping that first set of keys into his trouser pocket while his left hand brought out another little cluster of keys from his outside suitcoat pocket. Switching these to his right hand, he stopped next to one of the cars, tried the keys, and again it was the third one that did it.

The same key started the ignition. Parker drove the black car out of the lot and paused at the curb while Wycza locked the gate and got into the passenger seat, where he scrunched around and pulled his door shut and said, “Couldn’t you find anything bigger?”

“They’re all the same,” Parker told him, and drove off, headed downtown.

As they drove, Wycza took the small bomb from his suitcoat pocket, set it for one forty-five a.m., and put it in the glove compartment. There’d be no way to remove all the fingerprints from this car, so the only thing to do was remove the car.

On State Street, they pulled over to stop in front of a bar with a wood shingle facade. Almost immediately, Lou Sternberg, in a pinstripe dark blue suit and pale blue shirt and red figured tie, came out of the place, briskly crossed the sidewalk and got into the back seat. “I was hoping for a limo,” he said.

Wycza said, “You’re only an assemblyman.”

Parker steered back into traffic, heading downtown and downhill, toward the river.

The Spirit of the Hudsonhad its own parking area, on the landward side of an old converted warehouse, which until the gambling ship arrived had been empty for several years. Now a part of its ground floor had been tricked up with bright paint and plastic partitions and flying streamers and pretty girls in straw hats, and this is where the customers were processed, where they paid for their tickets and signed their waivers to absolve the operators of the ship from any kind of liability for any imaginable eventuality, and received their small shopping bag of giveaways: a pamphlet describing the rules of the games of chance offered aboard, a map of the segment of the Hudson they’d be traveling, pins and baseball caps with the ship’s logo, and a slip of paper warning that chips for the games could only be bought with United States currency; no credit cards.

Parker and Wycza and Sternberg ignored that normal way in. At the far end of the warehouse, a blacktop road led around toward the pier, where supplies would come aboard. Parker steered around that way, and when he got to the guard’s kiosk he opened his window and said, “Assemblyman Kotkind.”

“Oh, yes, sir!” The word had gone out, treat this politico well, we may have a convert. Stooping low to smile in at Sternberg in the back seat, the guard said, “Evening, Mister Assemblyman.” Then, to Parker, he said, “Just go on down there and around to the right. There’s a place for you to park right down there where the people get aboard.”

“Thank you,” Parker said, and drove on.

A pretty girl with a straw hat and a clipboard saw them coming, and trotted briskly over to meet them, smiling hard. Looking in at Parker, she said, “Is this the assemblyman?”

“In the back,” Parker told her. “Do I leave the car here?”

“Oh, yes, fine. No one will disturb it.”

Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Parker and Wycza got out on their own, but the girl opened the rear door for Sternberg, who came out scowling and said, “Are you my escort?”

“Oh, no, sir,” she said. “Someone on the ship will see to you. If you’ll just”

“I’d rather,” Sternberg said, because it seemed like a good idea to be difficult from the very beginning, “meet the person here, be escorted aboard.”

“Oh, well, yes, fine,” she said, her smile as strong as ever. Pulling a walkie-talkie from a holster on her right hip, she said, “Just let me phone up to the ship.”

While she murmured into the walkie-talkie, Parker and Wycza and Sternberg looked over at the stream of passengers coming out of the warehouse and passing along the aisle flanked by red-white-and-blue sawhorses to the short ramp to the ship, that ramp being covered by red-white-and-blue canvas tarp walls and roof. The people seemed happy, cheerful, expectant. It was twenty to eight, and there were already a lot of customers visible moving around on the ship. Friday night; the Spirit of the Hudsonwas going to be full.

“Look at that poor child in the wheelchair,” Sternberg said. “And gambling.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” the girl said, determinedly sunny. “She comes every night. It seems to cheer her up. Ms. Cahill will be down in a moment. Oh, I see her coming.”

They all did, emerging from the tarp-covered ramp, a tall slim woman, attractive but more substantial than the girls in the straw hats, she in low-heeled pumps, dark blue skirt and jacket, white ruffled blouse. When she approached their group, her smile looked metallic, something stamped out of sheet tin. The hand she extended, with its long coral-colored nails, seemed made of plastic, not flesh. “Mister Assemblyman,” she said, as though delighted to meet him. “I’m Susan Cahill, I talked with your Dianne Weatherwax on Wednesday.”

“Yes, she mentioned you,” Sternberg said, grumpily, accepting her hand as though it was only the likelihood that she was a voter that made him do it. “This is my escort, Mr. Helsing and Mr. Renfield.” Parker had not given Kim Toe Kwai any specific names to use on the IDs he’d made up, and he’d apparently been watching a Dracula movie recently.

Susan Cahill turned to offer a lesser smile to these lesser beings, and Parker said, “My identification,” showing her Kim’s first-rate handiwork in its own leather ID case, explaining, “Mr. Renfield and I are both carrying firearms. One handgun each. I’m required to tell you that before we embark, and to explain, the law forbids us to give up the weapons when we’re on duty.”

She blanched a bit, but said, “Of course, I understand completely. If I may?”

He held the ID case open so she could read. She was brisk about it, then nodded and said, “Thank you for informing me.”

“We’ll have to inform the captain, too.”

“I’ll take care of that,” she assured him.

Wycza had his own ID case out. “This is mine,” he said, but as he extended it she said, “No, I’m sure everything’s fine. Mister Assemblyman, would you and your escort follow me?”

“Before we go,” Sternberg said, “I want to make one thing perfectly clear. This is not an official visit. I am on a factfinding mission only. I shall not be gambling, and I shall not want any special treatment, merely a conducted tour of the ship.”

“And that’s what you’ll get, Mister Kotkind,” Susan Cahill assured him. “Gentlemen?”

They cut the line of boarding passengers, but no one minded. People could tell they were important.

THREE

1

Ray Becker waited an hour after they’d left, the man called Parker and the big one, both in dark suits and ties, the girl in her wheelchair that she didn’t need, driven in the Windstar van by the guy in the chauffeur suit, all of them off and away on a Friday night, a big night in the world of casinos, all dressed up to put on a show. Tonight’s the night. It’s over at last.

Five after six they’d driven away in the two vehicles, the Subaru and the van. The big man could be seen complaining, as they went by, about being crammed into the little Subaru; they’d left his big Lexus behind. So they’ll be coming back, without the Subaru. Over the water?

Becker’s observation post was the parking lot of an Agway, a co-op farm and garden place, a hundred yards up the road from the turnoff to the Tooler cabins. He’d rented a red pickup truck two weeks ago, over in Kingston, the other side of the river, and during his observation hours he wore a yellow Caterpillar hat low over his eyes and sat lazily hunched in the passenger seat of the pickup, as though he was just the hired man and the boss was inside the Agway buying feed or tools or fencing or whatever. If he squinted a little, he could just barely see that dirt road turnoff down there.

So he could always see them come out. Sometimes they’d turn south, away from him, and then he’d scoot over behind the wheel, start the engine, and race after them. Other times, they’d head north, and he’d have leisure to eyeball them as they drove by, before setting off in pursuit.

But not today. No pursuit today. Today he knew where they were going, and what they planned to do, and where they planned to come afterward with the money. And Ray Becker would be there when they arrived.

Just in case, just to make absolutely sure none of them was coming back for any reason, he waited a full hour in the pickup in the Agway parking lot before at last he roused himself and slid over behind the wheel of the pickup and started the engine. Five after seven. The Agway closed on Fridays at seven, to catch the weekend gardeners and do-it-yourselfers, so the chain-link gate was half-shut; Becker steered around it, waved a happy goodbye to the kid in his Agway shirt and cap standing there waiting to shut the gate the rest of the way after the last customer finally drove on out, and the kid nodded back with employee dignity. Then Becker turned left and drove on down to the dirt road, and in.

This was the first he’d driven this road, though he’d walked down it one night last week to spy on them, being damn careful not to make any noise, attract their attention. He’d found four cottages at the end of the road that night, but only one lit. He’d looked in windows long enough to get an idea of what their life was like in there, and he’d been surprised to see that the girl apparently slept alone. Two of the three men used the other two bedrooms, and the fake chauffeur bedded down on the sofa in the living room. There were guns visible in there, and maps, everything to confirm him in what he already knew: Howell had been right.

Now, just after seven in the evening on a Friday in late May, the sky still bright, late afternoon sunlight making long sharp black shadows that pointed at him through the woods, Ray Becker was back. As he drove along the dirt road toward the cabins, he visualized Marshall Howell as he’d been, the dying man in the wrecked Cadillac, and he grimaced yet again, feeling once more that quick twinge of embarrassment and shame.

He’d almost screwed it up but good that time. He’d known the man in the Cadillac was hurt and vulnerable, but he hadn’t had any idea at all that he was in such bad shape, that he was dying.

Well, no, not dying, probably not dying. But killable, as it turned out, very easily killable.

Becker was in such a hurry at that instant. He was the only lawman on the scene, but that couldn’t last. Others had heard the same radio calls, would be coming to the same location, while the Feds continued in pursuit of the other vehicle. Ray Becker, understanding at once what it meant, had raced here at top speed when the radio call came in, because there was supposed to be a hundred forty thousand dollars in this car, and a hundred forty thousand dollars could save Ray Becker’s ass. A hundred forty thousand dollars and his patrol car and he could be away and safe forever before they even noticed he was gone.

He’d already been thinking about it when the radio started squawking, thinking how the investigation was getting closer, how the detectives knewthere must have been a local cop involved in that hijacking two months back, they just didn’t know which one. But Ray Becker’s reputation wasn’t very good anyway, so they were focusing on him, and sooner or later they’d nail him, which was why he needed to get awayfrom here, with a lot of money for a cushion. A hundred forty thousand dollars, say.

He almost broke his neck racing down that steep tumbled hillside through the freshly broken branches and crushed shrubs and scarred boulders to the crumpled wreck of the Cadillac, and when he got there the hundred forty thousand was gone. One perp left, crushed inside the car, bleeding and sweating but conscious. Capable of speech.

“We don’t have much time,” Becker told the son of a bitch, with his hand closing on the man’s throat. “Where’s the money?”

“Don’t know.”

Lying, he had to be lying, he had to know where his partners were headed. Becker leaned on him, he did things to make the pain increase, and Howell moaned, and tears leaked from his eyes, but his story stayed the same. He didn’t know where his partners were going, he didn’t know where the money was.

“You got to give me something,” Becker told him, and all the rage he felt against the bastards that had double-crossed him and put him in this spot and cheated him out of his share of that other money, all of that rage made him bear down on this one, who finally broke and said, “Some thing else.”

“What? Another robbery? More money?”

“Yes.”

“Quick.”

“All knee. New. York. Cath

“

“What?”

“Cath man. Wan ted me.”

“For a heist. What heist? Quick!”

Howell’s mouth opened again, but this time a great sack of blood came out, and burst down the front of the man, dark red and reeking, the heat of it making Becker recoil.

He hadn’t known the man was that close to death. He hadn’t intended to kill him, and certainly not before he got all his answers, which made him feel stupid and inadequate and a failure then, and still did now. But then, as the man in the Cadillac’s last breath came out full of blood, here came the Federals, leaping and sliding down the hill in their dark blue vinyl coats with the big yellow letters on the back, grabbing for holds one-handed, their machine pistols aimed upward at the sky.

Becker stepped back from the Cadillac. He called up to them, “Take your time. They’re gone. And so is this one.”

But Howell had come through after all, hadn’t he? Becker had seen no choice but to follow through on Howell’s lead, because he didn’t have anything else, and it had all worked out. Hilliard Cathman. Then the one called Parker. Then the rest of them. Then the big white boat on the water, full of money, which hadto be what they were here for.

It would be dark when they got back with the cash, so no need to hide the pickup. He left it between two of the cabins that weren’t in use, then walked into the one they’d occupied. There was no locking these places, and they hadn’t bothered to try, so Becker just opened the door and walked in.

Plenty of time. He walked through the place, saw they’d left nothing personal at all, saw they’d taken all the guns but left a few of the maps. He went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and there was beer in there, but he wouldn’t be drinking anything until after. He’d need to be at his best tonight.

Gatorade, a big bottle of it, pale green. That was probably the big one. Kill him first. Kill the girl last.

Becker carried the Gatorade and a glass into the living room, turned on the television set, sat down. He looked at the picture when it came up, and abruptly laughed. The damn thing was black and white.

2

The reason Susan Cahill was so good at handling VIPs was that she understood the question of sex. With female VIPs you were discreetly hot tamales together under the skin, each acknowledging and admiring the allure of the other, becoming confidants and co-conspirators in the ongoing war of women to carve out a place for themselves in a male-dominated world, armed with nothing more than nerve and sex appeal. It worked; with the baggiest old crone, it still worked.

As for the male VIPs, they were even simpler. You turned on a little sex, a few smiles, a sidelong look or two, some body stretching. Enough to keep their minds focused, but not enough that anybody would lose their dignity. It was a nice tightrope to walk, and by now Susan could do it blindfolded.

She’d started, twelve years ago, as a flight attendant, where the most important skill you could learn, or be born with, was the non-aggressive manipulation of other human beings. She’d been very good at the job, keeping everybody happy at thirty-one thousand feet, and she’d also been very good-looking, and soon she was assigned to one of the choice transatlantic routes, Chicago-Milan. Her love affairs were with pilots or with amusing Italian businessmen. She made decent money, she had a nice high-rise apartment in the Loop overlooking Lake Michigan, she was having a good time, and then she made the one mistake. She’d seen others do it, and knew they were wrong, and knew it was stupid, and yet she did it herself. She fell in love with a passenger.

A banker, named Culver, based in Chicago. She fell in love with him, and took vacations with him, and said yes when he asked her to marry him, and quit the airline to spend more time with him, and then he said they’d be getting together forever just as soon as his divorce came through, which was the first she’d heard there already was a Mrs. Culver. Of course there would never be a divorce, and of course he would be prepared to keep her set up in a much better apartment in the same building, and of course there was a hiring freeze at the airline when she asked for her old job back.

Well, we learn from our mistakes. Susan had had this current job, customer relations with Avenue Resorts, for three years now, and she firmly understood that her job was notto have relations with the customers, so she didn’t. She knew that Avenue Resorts, even though its management was clean enough to pass any state gaming commission inspection, was mobbed up in some deep echelon of its command, but the fact of the mob didn’t have anything to do with her work and didn’t impinge on her in any way. The people of Avenue appreciated her, and she appreciated them, and that was that.

For three years she’d enjoyed her nice little house along the canal outside Biloxi, and she was sure she’d enjoy the nice house she’d just bought along the river south of Saratoga Springs, home of the famous racecourse, less than an hour commute from the boat. Mr. Culver the banker had tried to clip the airline attendant’s wings, but it hadn’t worked. And it wasn’t going to work, ever again.

Take Assemblyman Kotkind. At first, he’d tried to be grumpy, insisting on being met on the pier and escorted aboard, defiantly announcing the presence of his armed “aides,” two state cops in civvies, all muscle and gun, no brain. She’d rolled with the initial punches, turned up the sex just a little bit, and in no time at all Assemblyman Kotkind was giving her sidelong looks of his own and having a little trouble concentrating on the job at hand.

Which was, she knew, what the politicians call repositioning. When a question is still undecided, a politician can have any opinion at all on the subject, but once the matter is settled, there’s only one place for a politician to be: with the majority. Whatever Assemblyman Kotkind might personally think about legal gambling, he’d been publicly opposed to it, probably because that played well in his district, but now legal gambling was a fact, and the sky had not fallen, and it was time for Assemblyman Kotkind to be retroactively judicious.

On the other side, it was very much in Avenue’s interests to butter up this assemblyman, to help him in his effort to switch horses in midstream without getting wet. As it says in the Bible, there’s more joy when we get one to switch over to us than there is for the ninety-nine we’ve already got in our pocket. Therefore, “I am yours to command,” Susan told the assemblyman, with her most professional smile.

“I just want to see for myself what the attraction is here,” the assemblyman said, looking at the front of her blouse. He was short enough to do that without being really obvious about it.

She took a deep breath, and turned slightly into profile, also not really being obvious about it. “That’s what we’re here for,” she assured him. “You look us over as much as you want. Avenue Resorts wants you to see everything on this ship.”

“Good,” the assemblyman said, and blinked.

“And you’ll findthis way, Mister Assemblyman our first consideration is always safety.”

He gave her a different kind of look, considerably more jaundiced. “Not money?”

She laughed lightly. “That’s our second consideration,” she said. “Safety first, profit second. We’ll take this elevator up to the sundeck, you’ll get a better idea of what’s happening.”

It was a fairly tight squeeze in the elevator, but everybody managed to keep some distance between bodies, even the assemblyman. Riding up, Susan explained the nomenclature of the three decks: sundeck on top, open to the air; boat deck below that, the enclosed promenade with the lifeboats suspended outside; main deck below that, with the restaurants on the outside and the casino within.

At this point, they had the sundeck to themselves. The views up here were terrific, both up and down the river and westward toward Albany, the old and new buildings pressed to the steep slope upward, making a kind of elaborate necklace around the big old stone pile of the statehouse.

“Home sweet home,” Susan suggested, with a gesture toward that massive stone building.

“I’ve seen it before,” the assemblyman told her, being gruff again. “Tell me what’s happening now.”

“Come to the rail.”

She and the assemblyman stood at the rail, with the two state cops on the assemblyman’s other side. The ship was still tied up at the dock, and would remain there for another five or ten minutes. “First we have our safety drill, then the cruise begins,” she explained. “The Spirit of the Hudsonhas never sunk, and never will, but we want to be sure everybody’s prepared just in case the unthinkable ever does happen. You see the lifeboats directly below us.”

The assemblyman agreed, he did see them there.

“You see the crew opening the glass doors along the promenade. Every passenger’s ticket contains a code giving the location of the lifeboat that passenger should go to in case of emergency. The crew members down there are explaining lifeboat procedures now, and showing them the compartments on the inner wall containing life jackets. We don’t ask the passengers to try on the jackets, but crew members down there do demonstrate how it’s done.”

“If this unthinkable of yours does happen,” the assemblyman said, “and this unsinkable tub sinks, which is ourlifeboat?”

Well, she could see she was going to have to do a whole lot of tinkling laughter with this little bastard before the day was done. “Why, Assemblyman Kotkind,” she said, “naturally you andI would be on the captain’s launch.”

“Ah, naturally,” he said. “And speaking of the captain”

“He wants you to join him for dinner,” she said hastily, knowing that the last thing Captain Andersen wanted while setting sail was some bad-tempered politician underfoot. “You and your aides, of course,” she added.

“Of course,” the assemblyman said, while the “aides” continued to stand around looking blank-faced and correct. Poor guys, she thought, giving them some of her attention for the first time. If six hours with this gnome is going to be tough for me, what must it be like for them?

3

Dan Wycza thought this woman Susan Cahill would be therapeutic. She looked like somebody who liked sex without getting all bent out of shape over it, somebody who knew what it was for and all about its limitations. Look how she was giving Lou Sternberg those flashing eyes and teeth, those tiny bumps and grinds, not as a come-on but as a method of control, like the bullfighter’s red cape. Wycza knew Sternberg would be enjoying the show and at the same time he’d enjoy pretending to be taken in by the show. The bluffer bluffed.

Meanwhile, from the sidelines, Wycza could watch Susan Cahill strut her stuff and think to himself that she would certainly be therapeutic. A good healthy roll in the hay.

Health was extremely important to Dan Wycza. It was, as the man said, all we’ve got. His body was important to him the way Mike Carlow considered those race cars of his important. Take care of it, keep it finely tuned, and it will do the job for you. The way a car nut likes to tinker with the engine, the fuel mixture, the tire pressure, all those details, that’s the way Dan Wycza took care of himself. His diet was specific and controlled, his exercise lengthy and carefully planned. He traveled with so many pills, so many minerals and herbs and dietary supplements, that he seemed like either a hypochondriac or the healthiest-looking invalid in history, but it was all just to keep the machine well tuned.

And sex was a part of it. Simple uncomplicated sex was good for both the body and the mind. There was nothing like rolling around with a good willing woman to keep the blood flowing and the mental attitude perked up. A woman like this Susan Cahill, for instance.

Pity it wasn’t going to happen. This woman would never fuck anything but power, or at least her idea of power. At the moment, to her, Dan Wycza, aka Trooper Helsing, was just a spear carrier, part of the furniture, a nothing. Later, he’d be something, all right, but it wasn’t likely to be something she’d find a turn-on. Not likely.

For the moment, he and Parker were just doing their dumb-fuck thing, trailing along behind Lou Sternberg while the Cahill woman showed him a little of this and a little of that. Wycza remembered this ship from when he’d been a sucker aboard her, that one time, down in Biloxi. (The healthy woman he was with at the time liked to gamble.) It looked exactly the same, the carpets, the colors of the walls, the shapes of the doors, the edgings around the windows. The only difference was the uniform on the various crew members who worked in public; the pursers, dealers, hostesses, managers. When the ship was the Spirit of Biloxi,the uniforms were tan with dark red; sort of the colors of Mississippi dirt. Now that she was the Spirit of the Hudson,operating in the Empire State, the uniforms were royal blue with gold. But some of the people inside those uniforms were the same, he was sure of it.

Once the joke of a safety drill was done down on the boat deck, and the ship at last eased away from the dock to start its leisurely amble downstream, Cahill became a little less flirty and more matter-of-fact. “Of course I willbe taking you around for a complete tour of the ship,” she said, “but first I know Captain Andersen wants to greet you. He wasn’t able to before this, of course. Departure and arrival are his really busy times.”

“I’ll be happy to meet him,” Sternberg told her, and as she set off across the boat deck toward the bridge, the others following her, he asked, “Was he the captain before? When it was down South?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, sounding delighted by the fact that it was the same captain. “Captain Andersen’s been with the company for seven years. Longer than I have!” And she did that girlish laugh thing of hers again.

The bridge was amidships, up one steep metal stairway from the sun deck. Everything up here was metal, thickly painted white. The bridge itself was two long narrow rooms, the one in front featuring an oval wall of glass to give a full hundred-eighty-degree view of everything ahead of the ship and to both sides. The helm was here, and the computers and communications links that made the function of captain almost unnecessary these days. Tell the machine where you want to go, and get out of its way.

The rear room, also full of windows but without the oval, was a kind of office and rest area; two gray vinyl sofas sat among the desks and maps and computer screens. This is where the stairway led, and this is where Captain Andersen stood, splendid in his navy blue uniform with the gold stripes and his white officer’s hat with the black brim, as though he were about to lead this ship on a perilous journey around the world, pole to pole, instead of merely a pokey stroll to nowhere; Albany, New York, to Albany, New York, in six hours.

His back was to the open doorway, and he was conferring with three others, two dressed as officers, one as crew. He turned at their entrance, and he was a Scandinavian, or he wanted you to think he was. Tall and pale-haired, he had pale eyebrows and pale blue eyes and a large narrow pale nose. He wore the least possible beard; a narrow amber line down and forward from both ears to define his jaw, and no mustache. In his left hand he held a gnarled old dark-wood pipe.

Cahill did the honors: “Captain Lief Andersen, I’d like to introduce Assemblyman Morton Kotkind of the New York State legislature.”

They both said how-do-you-do, and shook hands, Sternberg with grumpy dignity, Andersen with a more aloof style. “You have a beautiful ship, captain,” Sternberg told him, as though forced to admit it.

“And you have a beautiful statehouse,” the captain assured him, nodding his narrow beak at it.

They all turned to look, even Wycza, who usually ignored polite crap like that, and it was still there all right, slowly receding. It was now quarter past eight, and though the sun hadn’t yet set it was behind the Albany hills, putting the eastern slopes of the city in shade, so that the statehouse looked more than ever like simply a huge pile of rocks.

Sternberg said, “It’s all right, I suppose. It’s always been a little too much like a castle for me. I’m too instinctive a small ‘d’ democrat for that.”

“The schloss, yes,” the captain agreed. “I quite understand. That may be why I like it. There was nothing in Biloxi like that.”

“No, there wouldn’t be.”

“I understand,” the captain said, “your associates here carry weapons. As you know, on the ship”

“That was all taken care of,” Sternberg broke in, and Wycza thought, now what.

“I’m sorry, Mister Assemblyman,” the captain said, with the faint smile of someone whose decisions are never argued with, “but the company has strict”

“This was dealt with,” Sternberg insisted, showing a little more impatience, almost a touch of anger, “when the arrangements were made.”

“If you were told” the captain began, but then Parker, standing next to Wycza here in the background, interrupted him, saying, “Captain, Trooper Helsing and I apologize, but we have no choice. We are not permitted to be disarmed while on duty. It’s regulations. You could phone our barracks in Albany, speak to the major”

Holy shit, Parker, Wycza thought, what if he does? What if he even asks for the phone number? Jesus, this was supposed to be solved, the fucking guns are the reason we’re playing this dumb game. What are we supposed to do now, shoot our way off the ship? Or hand over the goddam guns and play-act the whole evening and never get to do the caper. Walk into the money room and out again, say thank you very much, and go off somewhere and shoot ourselves in the head.

But before Parker could finish his offer, and before they could know whether or not the captain would have taken him up on it, Sternberg burst in, furious, and now furious at Parker: “Renfield, what’s the matter with you? One phone call to the barracks about me being on this ship, and why,and allof our security is destroyed. The pressis there, Renfield! The press is always in those offices.”

“Oh.” Wycza had never seen Parker look abashed, and wouldn’t have guessed he knew how to do it, but he did. “Sorry, Mr. Kotkind,” he said, with that abashed face. “I didn’t think.”

Sternberg turned a glowering eye on Susan Cahill: “Ms. Cahill, my office made these arrangements with”

“Yes, yes, you did,” she said, and Wycza felt almost sorry for her. She was between a rock and a hard place, and she hadn’t known this was going to happen. She said, ‘Just give me a minute, Mister Assemblyman,” and turned away, to say, quiet but intense, “Captain Andersen, could we talk for just a minute?”

“Susan,” the captain said, “you know”

“Yes, yes, but if we could just”

“There’s a perfectly adequate safe in that corner right there, no risk could”

“Captain.”

And finally, not merely holding his arm but stroking the upper arm from elbow to shoulder, up and down, up and down, she managed to turn the captain away as though he were the ship itself and she the small but powerful tugboat, and she walked him away into the forward room, the one with the oval wall of windows.

Once they were out of sight, Sternberg turned on Parker and hissed, “You knowthere’s to be no publicity about this! You understoodthat!”

Playing it out, Wycza knew, for the benefit of the other crew members in the room, all of whom were pretending to be busy at other things but were clearly listening with all their ears. Still, as Wycza guessed, Parker could play at this game only so far. He’d gone back to his usual stone face, and all he said was, “Yes, sir. I think Ms. Cahill will straighten it out.” Enough is enough, in other words.

Sternberg understood the message, and contented himself with a few harrumphs and a couple of glowers in the general direction of the receding city, until a much more cheerful Susan Cahill came back into the room, trailed by a discontented Captain Andersen holding fast to his dignity. “All settled,” she announced. “But you see now, Mister Assemblyman, just how careful we are on this ship.” Immediately spinning the scene from confrontation to a positive message.

“And I’m glad you are,” Sternberg told her, gallantly accepting the spin. “I’m sorry, Captain,” he said, “if the special circumstances of this tour mean we have to bend a rule or two. I think you’ll agree it’s in a good cause.”

The captain unbent himself, not without difficulty. “I’m sure it is a good cause, Assemblyman Kotkind,” he said, with a small bow. “We are newly arrived in your part of the world, we hope to become good neighbors and to be accepted by all our new friends, as time goes on. For that to be true, I realize, we will have to learn something of your ways. But for now, do follow Susan, let her show you this quite lovely ship, and although you are here for serious business, please do take pleasure in the scenery as we pass by.”

“I will,” Sternberg promised. “Delighted to meet you, Captain.”

“And you, Mister Assemblyman. I understand we’ll be dining together. I look forward to it.”

“As do I. We won’t keep you, Captain, I know you’re busy.”

As they were leaving, the captain even found a smile to show Parker and Wycza. “I certainly hope, gentlemen,” he said, “we shall not be seeingthose weapons of yours.”

Wycza grinned at him. He knew how to handle a soft lob like that. “If you see my weapon on this ship, Captain,” he said, “I’m not doing my job.”

4

Ray Becker sat in an old wooden Adirondack chair on the screened porch at the back of the cabin, the bottle of Gatorade at his side, and watched the sunset over the river. It’s a new day, he thought. I’m starting over, and this time I’m gonna get it right.

He was a fuckup, and he knew it. He’d been a fuckup all his life, third of five sons of a hardware store owner who was never any problem for any of his boys so long as they worked their ass off. Being in the middle, Ray had never been big enough or strong enough to compete with his meaner older brothers, and never been cute enough or sly enough to compete with his guileful younger brothers, so he was just the fuckup in the middle, and grew up knowing that about himself, and had never done anything in his life to make him change his opinion of himself.