Backflash

God knows he tried. He liked the Army, for instance. Go in there and do your job and don’t sweat about promotion, and the Army was never any problem for anybody, so long as they worked their ass off. But drink and bad companions have taken down many a better man than Ray Becker, and he did wind up with a bunch of clowns that had it in mind to rob the base PX, and of course they got caught, and of course Ray was the first to crack, so of course he was the one who wound up with the deal and testified against everybody else, and they went to Leavenworth while he didn’t even have a bad mark on his record; a general discharge under honorable conditions. Only the Army wouldn’t ever want him back.

Policing turned out to be like the Army, only with different-colored uniforms. But the concept was the same; a strict set of rules, easy to understand. Stay within them, you’ll be all right. And in police work, particularly small-town police work, you didn’t even have to work your ass off.

But the other little glitch was money. The old man had been as cheap a son of a bitch as it was possible to find, and still was, no doubt; Ray had had no contact at all with the family for more than ten years. What would be in it for him? Work for the old man, and get nothing out of it. The only reason the old man would know Ray wasn’t there was if he had to get somebody else to do the heavy lifting.

Thirty-seven years old. A born fuckup who didn’t really want much in life, but who simply couldn’t keep himself from conniving. Show him a rule, and he’ll say, “Oh, thank God, there’s rules,” and absolutely mean it, and at the same time scheme from the get-go for some sneaky way to get around the rule, subvert it, defy it and ignore it. Maybe that was an inheritance from the old man, too.

Well, Ray Becker’s fuckup days were done. This last one was the lesson, for good and all. Four million dollars in commercial paper being trucked north to Chicago out of some bank that went bust down south. A big tractor-trailer full of valuable paper and a handful of armed guards. Two unmarked cars, one ahead and one behind, with more armed guards, and here it all came, stitching up the center of the country, heading for the big stone banks of Chicago, America’s Switzerland.

Who knew about this movement of so much valuable paper? Hundreds of people, all of them supposed to be trustworthy. Bank people, the security service that provided the guards, various federal agencies, and police forces along the way, that had to be told what was happening in their territory, as a courtesy and for practical reasons, too.

Ray had no idea who set up the job, but one of the gang was an old pal of his from Army days’, one of the boys he’d sent to Leavenworth, who was out now and had joined up with a much more serious bunch of heist artists. Old pal Phil had found his way to Ray Becker to tell him he was prepared to forgive and forget the old Army days because old pal Ray was going to feed old pal Phil the information on how the truck full of valuable paper was coming through; what time of what day on what road with what additional escort. And just to show there were no hard feelings, Ray’s share was going to be two hundred thousand dollars. A nice little nest egg. And just to show this was all in earnest, old pal Phil was handing old pal Ray a thousand dollars, ten new one-hundred-dollar bills, on account.

On account of that was all he was going to get.

The final fuckup. Make a four-million-dollar robbery possible, get one measly miserable thousand dollars out of it, and be the only one who gets caught and goes to jail for it.

Not this time. This time luck had been with him, for once. This time, he thought he’d been given the hundred forty thousand dollars that would help him clear out and start over under another identity somewhere else, but instead he’d been given Marshall Howell, and then Hilliard Cathman, and then Parker and the others, and then the gambling boat.

Spirit of the Hudson.Luck is with me at long last, Ray Becker thought. So maybe I’ll take a little of tonight’s money, some time soon, take a ride on that gambling boat, see what happens. Not all of it, for God’s sake, not even a lot of it, not to fuck up all over again. Take a couple thousand, that’s all, see if my luck holds. Win some money, meet some nice blonde woman in a long dress with her tits hanging out at the top, drink a glass of champagne. Buy a necktie before I go.

Across the way, the sun had ratcheted down out of sight. The sky over there was deep red above the jagged black masses of the Catskills, with blackness below, pierced by a few pinholes of yellow light. And here came the boat, the very boat itself, gliding down the river, just exudinglight. Spreading a pale halo out over the water and the air, a misty milky glow that made it look like a ship from some other universe, a mirage, floating into our plain dark world. Faintly, he could hear music, he could see people move around on the ship, the beautiful white boat surrounded by its veil of light.

And you’re coming for me,he thought, whether you know it or not. He smiled at the ship. In his mind, the blonde woman leaned toward him, and she smiled, too.

5

For Greg Manchester, it was almost like being a spy. Here he was, on the Spirit of the Hudson,anonymous with his tiny pocket Minolta camera and his even smaller palm-of-the-hand audio cassette recorder, snapping pictures here and there around the ship, murmuring observations and data into the recorder, and nobody at all had the first idea he was a reporter.

And the funny thing was, he didn’t even intend a negative story. It was just that the management of this ship, Avenue Resorts, based in Houston, Texas, was so antsy about the controversial nature of casino gambling that they demanded total control over every facet of any news story involving them, or they would withhold all cooperation.

It was easy for the management to enforce that policy with television newspeople, of course, because television newspeople necessarily travel with so much gear, cameras and recording equipment and lights and all the rest of it, that they need cooperation everywhere they go. But Greg Manchester worked in the world of print, a reporter with the Poughkeepsie Journal,a daily paper in the town that just happened to be the Spirit of the Hudson’ssouthern terminus, and Greg Manchester was determined to get a story that was notmade dull and bland and predictable by an excess of cooperation with Avenue Resorts.

His editor had been skeptical at first, since the Spirit of the Hudsonwas already an important advertiser, but Greg had said, ‘Jim, I’m not doing an expose. What’s to expose? They’re a clean operation. This will just be fun for the readers, to be a fly on the wall for one cruise of the glamorous ship.”

“No controversy,” Jim said.

“No controversy,” Greg promised.

Well, it was an easy promise to keep. With the Spirit of the Hudson,with so much official oversight and political grandstanding all around it, everything was absolutely squeaky clean, from the place settings to the morals of the crew. So what Greg was doing was essentially human interest, which quite naturally led him to the girl in the wheelchair.

Poor goddam thing, he wanted to hug her or something. She looked to be in her late twenties, the same as him, but so frail, so vulnerable, and yet so brave. If he wasn’t careful, she’d take over the piece, and he didn’t want that. She’d be in it, of course, a part of it, but the story still had to be about the ship.

So he limited himself in the early hours of the cruise to one brief conversation with the girl in the wheelchair and the rather tough-looking man in a chauffeur’s uniform who wheeled her around. They were out on the promenade deck at that time, watching the shoreline go by, and he went over just to make a little small talk lucky in the weather, beautiful scenery, that kind of thing, just to establish a connection and they were both gracious, but she was obviously very weak and not up to too much talk, so soon he moved on, looked at other things, took pictures here and there (a few of the wheelchair girl, too, of course, and he’d have to learn her name before the cruise was over), and made his observations into the recorder.

There was somebody else of interest aboard, too, a VIP of some sort, an ill-tempered kind of guy with a couple of bruisers who looked like they must be bodyguards, all being escorted around by Susan Cahill. He remembered Susan Cahill, though she’d have no reason to remember him, from the press conferences when the ship first arrived, when he’d just been a part of the herd of reporters all being schmoozed at once. Susan Cahill was sexy and smart and tough as nails, and Greg could see she was treating this short fat sour-looking man with the softest of kid gloves. Somebody important, at least to the Spirit of the Hudson.

He took pictures in the better dining room, on the port side of the ship, but actually ate in the sandwich joint on the other side, since he didn’t have an expense account for this little jaunt. He visited the casino but didn’t play, and noticed that the craps tables were the most popular (and the loudest) and the two roulette wheels the least. Six blackjack tables were open, three with a ten-dollar minimum and three with a twenty-five dollar minimum, and all did well. The rows of slot machines were almost all occupied almost all of the time, but the video poker games didn’t draw as big a crowd.

The ship arrived at Poughkeepsie a little before eleven, and would stay at the dock for ten minutes. Now Greg was sorry he hadn’t taken the train up to Albany; if he had, he could get off now, because he had just about everything he needed for his story, except the name of the girl in the wheelchair and the identity of the VIP, which would take no time at all. But he’d driven up this afternoon, so his car was up there, so he had to do the round-trip. But that was okay, there could still be more to learn.

A little after eleven, the ship steamed out away from Poughkeepsie, made a long curving arc out to the middle of the river, then slowly pivoted on its own axis there, while the customers who could tear themselves away from the gaming tables crowded along the rails to stare, until the prow was finally pointed upstream, white foam now giving it an Edwardian collar as the ship’s engines deepened their hum and they started up against the current.

Well, he might as well get his two “who” questions answered, so as the lights of Poughkeepsie faded in the night darkness behind them Greg went looking for the girl in the wheelchair and his VIP.

He found the VIP first, in the casino, with his bodyguards and Susan Cahill, glowering in disapproval at the roulette wheels. The floor manager, a neat young guy in the royal blue and gold uniform of the ship, stood at parade rest just inside the casino door, and Greg approached him, saying, “Excuse me. That must be somebody important, I guess.”

“Hethinks so,” the floor manager said. He had some sort of southern accent.

Greg laughed. “Who does he think he is?”

“New York State assemblyman,” the floor manager said. “Not that big a deal, Iwouldn’t think. Name’s Kotkind, he’s from Brooklyn.”

Greg blinked, and stared at the VIP and his entourage across the way. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” the floor manager said, and took a business card out of his shirt pocket. “Gave me his card, you see? Handing them out to anybody in the crew he talks to. I told him I don’t vote in his district, and he said that’s okay, when he runs for statewide office I can vote for him then. Pretty pleased with himself, huh?”

Greg looked at the card, and it was Assemblyman Morton Kotkind’s card, sure enough; he’d seen it before. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “Thanks.” And he left there, to try to think this out. What the heck was going on here?

Coming out of the casino, he was just in time to see the nearby elevator door close, with the girl in the wheelchair and her chauffeur companion inside. Going up. He’s the one I’ll talk to, Greg thought. He felt confused, and didn’t want to blow his cover or make a stupid mistake, so he felt he needed somebody to discuss the thing with, and that chauffeur had struck him right away as a competent no-nonsense kind of guy.

Up the stairs he went, and saw the chauffeur just pushing the wheelchair out onto the glass-enclosed promenade. Greg followed, and found very few people up here now, there being so little to see at night, except the few lights of little river towns. The chauffeur pushed the wheelchair slowly along, in no hurry, apparently just to keep in motion. Greg hurried to catch up.

6

Mike Carlow was glad this was the last night. He’d been pushing this damn wheelchair around for over a week, carrying Noelle’s slops into the men’s room, doing his strong silent (but caring) number, and he was bored with it.

Also, just pushing the wheelchair got to be a drag. But he’d learned early the first night out that he had to keep the wheelchair moving. Stop somewhere, and the sympathetic people started hovering around, asking questions, being pains in the ass. Noelle could pitch a faint every once in a while to make them lay off, but that was work, too. It was simpler to just keep moving.

Of course, even then you still got the pushy ones, of all types, old and young, male and female. Of them, Carlow thought he probably disliked the young males the worst, the ones who came on all sympathetic and concerned but you could see in their eyes that what they really wanted was to fuck Noelle’s brains out.

Not that Carlow wanted Noelle for himself. He was meeting her for the first time on this job, he liked her, he thought she was stand-up and could be counted on, but she wasn’t the kind of woman who appealed to him in that other way. For that, he liked a heftier woman, someone out of his own world, the kind you’d meet in the auto race circuit, who could change a tire and whose favorite food was pancakes.

For Mike Carlow, everything related back to the track and the fast cars. He’d driven his first race when he was fourteen, won for the first time when he was sixteen, and had never much cared about anything else. For instance, he’d figured it out early that the amount of gasoline in the gas tank affected the car’s center of gravity, constantly shifting the center of gravity as the fuel was used up, so while still in high school he’d designed a car that wouldn’t have that problem because there wasn’t any gas tank; the car was built around a frame of hollow aluminum tubing, and the tubing held the gas. When someone told him it was crazy to want to drive a car where he’d be completely surrounded by gasoline, he’d said, “So what?” He still couldn’t see what was wrong with the idea, and didn’t understand why no official at any track in America would permit such a design into a race.

Still, there were other cars and other designs that they wouldaccept, so Carlow was reasonably happy. Every year or so he took a job like this one, to raise the money to build more race cars, and every year, one way or another, he survived both his obsession with race cars and the heists he went on to support that obsession.

“Excuse me.”

Carlow looked around and it was one of the young studs, in fact one that had hit on them earlier in the evening until Noelle had gone all faint on him. Not wanting to have to deal with the same guy twice in one outing, and also feeling some of the impatience that comes when you know the job is almost finished, and feeling illused because he’d come up here to the promenade because it wasn’tfull of annoying people after dark, Carlow gave him a pretty icy look and said, “Yes?”

“Do you mind?” The guy was young and eager like before, but now he also seemed troubled. “I need to talk to somebody,” he said, “and I was going to come see you two, anyway. I’m just not sure what to do.”

The promenade had benches along the inner wall, but the rest was clear. Down ahead toward the stern, a few people strolled along, moving away. Back toward the prow, an exhausted older couple sat on a bench barely awake. Carlow took all this in because he had a sense for this kind of problem when he was on a job, a sense that told him when there was a rip in the fabric, and he just had the feeling there was a rip in the fabric coming right now. The question was, what had gone wrong, and what could they do about it? “Sure,” he said. “Why don’t you sit on the bench here so Jane Ann can be part of the conversation.”

“All right.”

The guy sat, looking disturbed, confused about something, and Carlow arranged the wheelchair and himself so the guy was hard to see from either direction along the promenade. “Tell us about it,” he suggested.

“Well, the thing is,” the guy said, “I’m here sort of secretly, and I’m not sure if I should blow my cover.”

Carlow said, “You mean, you’re not an ordinary passenger, you’re not what you seem to be, you’re something else.” A cop? Not a chance.

“That’s right. My name’s Greg Manchester, and I’m a reporter, and I’m doing a”

Noelle snapped, with more sharpness than her frail condition would allow, “A reporter?”

Manchester was too involved in his own problems to notice Noelle’s slip. He said, “The cruise line company won’t permit unescorted reporters, so I just want to do a fly on the wall kind of thing. Not negative, just fun.”

Carlow said, “So you’re going around looking at things, making notes

“

“And taking pictures, too,” Manchester said. “When nobody’s looking.” To Noelle he said, “That’s why I was coming to you anyway, to get your name.”

Noelle said, “You have pictures of me?Oh, I wouldn’t like that, the way I look”

“You’re beautiful,Miss Jane Ann, is it?”

Carlow said, “But then something else happened. What?”

“There’s a VIP on the ship, I don’t know if you”

“Yeah, we’ve seen him,” Carlow said, thinking, this is it. This is it right here. “What about him?”

“Well, he sayshe’s a state assemblyman named Kotkind,” Manchester said, “but he isn’t. He’s a fake. I knowAssemblyman Kotkind, I’ve interviewed him.”

“Ah,” Carlow said.

“What I can’t figure out,” Manchester said, “is why anybody would dothat. Did the real assemblyman send this guy in his place? He is handing out the assemblyman’s business card. If I say something, mycover is blown and maybe I just make a fool of myself. Or maybe something’s wrong, and the cruise line should know about it. What do you think?”

Noelle said, “I think” and began to cough. She tried to go on talking through the coughs that wracked her poor frail body, and Manchester leaned closer to her, concerned, trying to make out what she was trying to say.

Carlow kept his wallet in his inside jacket pocket because he kept his sap in his right hip pocket; a black leather bag full of sand. It was one smooth movement to reach back, draw it out, lift it up, drop it down, and put Mr. Manchester on ice.

Noelle’s left arm shot out, her hand splayed against Manchester’s chest, and she held him upright on the bench. “Don’t kill him,” she said.

“Of course not,” Carlow told her. He knew as well as she did that the law goes after a killer a lot more determinedly than it goes after a heister. If it were possible to keep this clown alive, Carlow would do it. He said, “I need a gag, and I need something to tie him.”

“You hold him for a minute.”

Carlow pushed the wheelchair a few inches forward, and sat on the bench beside the clown. He put his left elbow up onto the guy’s chest and said, “Okay.”

Noelle was wearing all these filmy garments out of a gothic novel, so now she reached down inside and gritted her teeth and Carlow heard a series of rips. Out she came with several lengths of white cloth, and handed them to him. “I’ve got him now,” she said, and put her hand on Manchester’s chest again.

Carlow bent to tie the ankles together, then tied the wrists behind the back, then stuffed a ball of cloth into Manchester’s mouth and used the last strip to make a gag.

Noelle said, “What are you going to do with him?”

“Lifeboat.”

They’d watched that damn safety drill every night for over a week, so Carlow knew exactly how to open the sliding glass door and how to open one segment of the top of the enclosed lifeboat just below. “You keep him,” he said, and started to rise.

“Wait!”

“For what?”

“Damn it, Mike,” she said. “Get the camera. That’s myface he’s got there, and probably yours, too.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

Carlow sat again, and patted him down, and found first the cassette recorder and then the Minolta. “Nice camera,” he commented, and pocketed both.

He looked around. The half-asleep couple were still in the same spot. Toward the stern, three or four people were looking out and downriver at where they’d been, talking together. Carlow stood, crossed to the outer glass wall, slid open a panel, stepped through onto the curved roof of the lifeboat, leaned down, gave the stiff handle a quarter turn, lifted, and a rectangular piece of the roof opened right up. Then he crossed back to Noelle, sat beside Manchester again, and said, “Now I have to get him over there.”

“Put him on my lap,” she said, “and wheel us over.”

“Nice.”

He held Manchester while Noelle wheeled herself backward out of the way. Then he stood, picked up Manchester under the armpits and placed him seated on top of Noelle. “So this is what they call a dead weight,” Noelle said.

Carlow wheeled them both across the promenade to the open glass door, where the cool night air now drifted in. He stopped, and she shoved, and Manchester went toppling out and down into the lifeboat. Carlow winced. He’d land on a stack of life preservers, but still. “Goodbye,” Noelle said.

“He’ll have a headache in the morning,” Carlow commented, as he moved the wheelchair to one side so he could shut everything up again.

“Let him take a picture of that,”she said, unsympathetic. “Asshole.”

7

Susan Cahill didn’t really like Morton Kotkind, Lou Sternberg could tell. She smiled at him, she waved her tits at him, she smoothed the way for him as they made their long slow inspection tour of the ship, she even went out of her way to chat with him during dinner at the captain’s table, since the captain himself was making every effort notto be friendly and accommodating but was instead doing a very good impression of an iceberg from his native land; and yet, Sternberg could tell, Susan Cahill didn’t really like Morton Kotkind.

Which was fine with Sternberg, who hadn’t liked Kotkind either, during those days in the lawyers’ bar on Court Street in Brooklyn, getting to know the man, getting to know him so well it was an absolute pleasure to feed him the Mickey Finn yesterday. Probably, Sternberg thought, Cahill would be just as happy to feed a Mickey to me,and the thought made him smile.

Cahill picked up on that, and smiled right back, across the dinner table. “Mister Assemblyman,” she said, “I believe you’re enjoying yourself.”

“I’m not here to enjoy myself,” he snapped at her, and put his pouty brat face on again, which she bravely pretended not to see.

But in fact he was enjoying himself, hugely, which was rare on a heist. For him, pleasure was at home, his little town house in London 2, Montpelier Gardens, SW6 with its little garden in the back enclosed by ancient stone walls, with roses to left and right, cucumbers and brussels sprouts at the back. There he lived, and in that city his friends lived, people who had nothing to do with any kind of criminality, except possibly in the tax forms they filled out for Inland Revenue.

That was an extra bonus in Sternberg’s living arrangements; he filled out no tax forms anywhere. To be resident in the U.K. for more than six months, legally, one had to sign a statement that one will be supported from outside the country, will neither go on the dole nor take a job away from some native-born Englishman. Howthe foreigner supports himself from outside the country doesn’t matter, only that he does. So there was never a reason to deal with Inland Revenue. At the same time, since he didn’t live or work in the U.S., didn’t even pay any bills or credit accounts or mortgages there, he also flew below the IRS’s radar. Which meant there was no one anywhere to say, “Just how doyou support yourself, Mr. Sternberg?” Lovely.

In fact, it was the occasional job with a trusted associate like Parker that took care of his material wants, while the house in Montpelier Gardens saw to his spiritual needs, so except for the occasional soulless transatlantic airplane ride he was a reasonably happy man, though you could never tell that from his face.

The airplane rides were necessitated by his iron rule that he would never work and live in the same territory. London in fact, all of England was out of bounds. Whenever it was time to restock the bank accounts, it was off to America once more, with Lillian the char left behind to see to the roses and the cucumbers; the brussels sprouts took care of themselves.

This particular journey to the land of his birth looked to be a fairly easy one, and profitable. The last time he’d worked with Parker it had been anything but profitable, but that hadn’t been Parker’s fault, and Sternberg didn’t hold it against him. This job looked much more likely to provide another year or two of comfort in SW6.

The problem with the job was that it was taking too long. Sternberg had pretended to be other people before in the course of a heist a telephone repairman, a fire department inspector but never for five hours. From eight P.M. till one A.M., in this confined space on the Spirit of the Hudson,essentially on his own since Parker and Wycza’s job was just to stand around looking tough and competent, Lou Sternberg not only had to be a politician and a Brooklynite, he also had to be a bad-tempered boor. He actually was bad-tempered at times, he had to admit, but he’d never been a politician or a Brooklynite, and he certainly hoped he had never been a boor.

Ah, well. Dinner passed, the turnaround at Poughkeepsie passed, the inspections of the casino and the kitchens and the purser’s office and the promenades and the game room and the laughable library and all the rest of it slowly passed. The engine room was interesting, being more like a windowless control tower than like anything purporting to be a steamship’s engine room Sternberg had ever seen in the movies. And through it all, he maintained this sour and offensive persona.

There were reasons for it. First, the original was like this. Second, bad temper keeps other people off balance, and they never believe the person being difficult is lyingin some way; rudeness is always seen as bona fide. And the third reason was the money room.

There’d been only one real fight so far, the one over the handguns, and Sternberg had won that, as he’d expected to. The money room would be another fight accessto the money room was almost certain to be a fight and by the time they got there Sternberg wanted the entire ship’s complement to be convinced that if they argued with this son of a bitch assemblyman, they lost.

Of course, if Susan Cahill had led them straight to the money room at nine-thirty or ten, it would have been a real waste, because most of the money wouldn’t have arrived yet, but they’d assumed that she wouldn’t want to mention the money room at all, and so far she hadn’t.

Twelve-fifteen, and not a single goddam thing left to look at. The last place they inspected was the nurse’s office, and found she was well equipped in there for first-level treatment of medical emergencies, and also had a direct-line radio to the medevac helicopter at Albany Hospital, probably for when winners had heart attacks. Sternberg stretched the moment by congratulating her on her readiness and enquiring into her previous work history, and unbent so far he could feel the curmudgeon facade start to crack.

So finally they came out of her office, and it was only twelve-fifteen, and Cahill said, “Well, Mister Assemblyman, that’s it. You’ve seen it all. And now, if you wouldn’t consider it a bribe” and she beamed on him, jolly and sexy “the captain would love to buy you a drink.”

Sure he would. Too early, too early. What should he do? This was Sternberg’s call alone, he couldn’t confer with the other two, couldn’t even take time to look at them. Accept a drink? Should he stall another half an hour that way, then all at once remember the money room and demand to see it? Or go with it now, knowing they’d be cutting their take by about forty-five minutes worth of money?

Go now, he decided. Go now because they were in a movement here, a flow, and it would be best to just keep it going, not let it break off and then later try to start it up again. And go now because he was tired of being Mister Assemblyman. “We’re not quite finished,” he said. “When we arefinished, if there’s still time, I’ll be very happy to join you and the captain you will join us, won’t you? in a drink.”

Either she was bewildered, or she did bewilderment well. “Not finished? But you’ve seen everything.”

“I haven’t seen,” he said, “where the money goes. It’s still on the ship, is it not?”

She looked stricken. “Oh, Mister Assemblyman, we can’t do that.”

He gave her his most suspicious glare. “Can’t do what?”

“That room,” she said, “you see, that room is completely closed away, for security reasons, nobodycan get into that room.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “There must be people in there. How do they get out?”

“They have their own door on the side of the ship,” she explained, “with access direct to the dock and the armored car, when we land.”

He said, “You’re telling me there’s no way in or out of that place, whatever the place is”

“The money room,” she said. “It’s called the money room.”

“Because that’s the whole point of the operation, isn’t it?” he demanded. “The money. And what happens to it next.”

“Mister Assemblyman, the company’s books are”

“Very attractive, I have no doubt,” he interrupted. “Ms. Cahill, do you suddenly have something to hide from me? The very cruxof this matter is what happens to gambling money once it has been lost to the casino operator.”

“Mister Kotkind,” she said, voice rising, forgetting to call him by his title, “we hide nothingon this ship! Every penny is accounted for.”

“And yet you tell me there’s no access to the, what did you call it, money room. And if this ship were to sink, the people in that money room would simply die? If it caught fire? Is thatwhat you’re telling me? You have human beings in that room, and their safety is at risk for money?”

“Of course not.” She was scrambling now, not sure how to stay ahead of him. “They can unlock themselves out if it’s absolutely necessary.”

“And unlock others in,” he insisted. “I haven’t even seen the doorto this place. Is there”

“It has its own staircase,” she said reluctantly, “down from the restroom area, with a guard at the top and a verylocked door at the bottom.”

“Oh, does it. And I assume that door has, like any apartment in my district in Brooklyn, an intercom beside the door, and a bell. You can ring that bell and explain the situation and they can open up and let me in to inspect that room and I can see for myselfwhat’s happening with that money.”

“Mister Ambas Assemblyman, I

” She shook her head, and moved her hands around.

“And without,”he told her, as heavily as any prosecutor, “warning them ahead of time that they are going to be observed.”

She’d run out of things to say, but she still didn’t want to give in. She was desperate, confused, blind-sided but not yet defeated. She stood staring at Sternberg, trying to find a way out.

No; no way out. He let the full flood of his exasperation wash over her: “Ms. Cahill, do I have to go to the captain?This absolutely corepart of my inspection you are unreasonably denying me, and you claim there’s nothing to hide? Is thatwhat I must take back to the assembly with me and report to my colleagues? Shall I explain what my report is going to be to the captain?”

Silence. Cahill took a deep breath. Her previously perfect complexion was blotched. She sighed. “Very well, Mister Assemblyman,” she said. “Come along.”

8

As far as George Twill was concerned, no matter who upstairs won or lost, he himself was the luckiest person on this ship. He was fifty-one years of age, and he’d been more than two years out of a job, after the State Street in Albany branch of Merchants Bank downsized him. Twenty-two years of steady employment, and boom. Unemployment insurance gone, severance pay almost used up, savings dwindling, no jobs anywhere. Supermarket assistant manager; movie theater manager; parking garage manager; even motel desk clerk: every job went to somebody else. George was feeling pretty desperate by the time he joined the hundreds of other people who responded to the newspaper ad for jobs on this ship, to fill in for the people who hadn’t traveled with it up from the south. And he got the job. Teller in the money room, so here he was a teller again, though a very different kind of teller from before. But the people in the money room had to not only have some banking background but they also needed solid reputations, because they’d be bonded, so that was why George Twill was at last employed again, at better than his old salary at the bank. And thisjob wouldn’t be taken over by an ATM machine.

He was by far the oldest of the five people who worked in here, probably twenty years older than his immediate boss, Pete Hancourt, whose job title was cashier but who was known in the room as Pete. They were a pretty informal bunch in here, happy in their work, and with one another. The two women were Helen and Ruth, and the other male teller was Sam. They worked day shift four days, then three days off, then night shift three nights, then four days off. Good pay, easy hours, fine co-workers; heaven, after the hell of the last two years.

The other thing George had, because he was the oldest here, was one extra responsibility. He was in charge of the panic button. It was on the floor, a large flat metal circle that stuck up no more than an inch, and it was an easy reach, maybe eighteen inches, from where his left foot was normally positioned when he was seated at his counter. If anything ever happened in here that wasn’t supposed to happen, like a fire or a sudden illness or a leak in the side of the ship all of them extremely unlikely it would be George’s job to reach over with his left food and press down just once on that button. Otherwise, his responsibility was not to bump into that button inadvertently. No problem; it was tucked well out of the way.

The work here was easy and repetitious and he didn’t mind it a bit. The vacuum canisters came down, with cash for chips, or chips for cash. George and the other three tellers made the transactions and kept track of the drawers of money and the drawers of chips. No cash was used up in the casino; even the slots took only chips.

At the beginning of each run, down here in the money room, they’d have a full supply of chips and just a little money. By the end of each run, they’d be down fifty or a hundred chips, because people forgot they had them in their pockets or wanted to keep them as souvenirs, and they would have a lotof money, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights. It was fascinating to see the efficiency with which it worked. And if George Twill had ever had a tendency toward being a betting man which he had not being around this efficient money machine would have cured it.

When the buzzer sounded, all of a sudden, at twenty minutes to one, it startled them all, and at first George had no idea what that sound was. Then he remembered; it was the bell for the door, the entry to and from the rest of the ship that was always kept locked and that none of them ever used. He’d only heard it once before, the third day of his employment, and that time it had been the ship’s nurse, a recent hire like George, bringing around medical history forms to be filled out. Apparently she hadn’t realized she wasn’t supposed to have done it that way, but mailed it to their homes. Pete said he’d heard that a couple of executives from the company had really reamed her out that time.

So whatever this was, it wouldn’t be the nurse again. Feeling his responsibility, and feeling also a sudden nervousness, wondering what this would turn out to be, George moved his foot closer to the panic button and watched Pete, frowning deeply, walk over to the door and speak into the intercom there.

George could hear that it was a woman’s voice that answered, but he couldn’t make out the words. Pete said something else, the woman said something else, Pete said something else, and then Pete unlocked the door.

Susan Cahill came in. George remembered her, she was one of the people who’d interviewed him when he applied for the job. She’d seemed remote and cold and a little scary, and he’d thought she didn’t like him and would recommend against his being hired, but apparently he’d been wrong. This was the first time he was seeing her since, and the familiar face eased his tension and brought his left foot back to its normal spot on the floor.

Three men followed Susan Cahill into the room. The first was short and stout and grumpy-looking, glaring around at everybody as though looking for the person who stole his wallet. The other two men were large one of them huge blank-faced, tough-looking, in dark suits and ties.

Susan Cahill said, “Thank you, Pete,” then addressed the rest of the room. She seemed to George to be annoyed or upset about something, and trying to hide it. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “this is Assemblyman Morton Kotkind, from the New York State legislature, and he’s here on an inspection tour of the ship. We operate, as you know, at the discretion of the legislature. Assemblyman Kotkind wanted to see where the money eventually comes. These are his

aides, they are state troopers, Trooper Helsing and Trooper Renfield.”

“That’s funny,” Pete said, grinning at the two troopers.

They turned and gave him blank looks that seemed to contain a hint of menace. Susan Cahill, sounding frazzled, said, “What’s funny?”

Pete seemed to belatedly realize this was a formal occasion, not a casual one. “Nothing,” he said, and avoided the troopers’ eyes as he turned to say to George and the others, “Folks, just keep doing what you’re doing. The congressman is here to see how the operation works.”

“Assemblyman,” the grumpy man said.

“Oh. Sorry.”

A vacuum canister slid into the basket in front of George. He picked it up, twisted it open, and five one-hundred-dollar bills dropped out, along with the upstairs cashier’s transit slip. Only an hour left on the cruise, and they were still buying chips.

Grey Hanzen, in the darkness at the water’s edge, stripped out of shoes and socks and pants. What he really wanted to do was get back in his car and drive down to the Kingston bridge and across the Hudson River and line out west and not stop until the water in front of him was the Pacific Ocean. If only.

How had he got himself into this mess? It had all been so simple and easy to begin with. Now there were all these different bunches of people, and him in the middle like a grain of wheat in a goddam mill. Any one of those people could crush him in a second, and most of them would have reason. How in the good Lord’s name was he going to steer himself through these rapids and come out safe and alive on the other side?

“I should just get the hell out of here,” he told himself out loud as he waded into the cold water. Gloomy, despairing, not even pretending to have hope, he waded out to his boat, threw his clothing into the bottom and climbed in.

Nothing else to do. You can’t escape your goddam fate, that’s all.

He was certainly taking his time about it, this assemblyman. George found it hard to concentrate on the task at hand, the numbers coming in, the numbers going out, with those three silent men moving around and around the room, slowly pacing, stopping from time to time to watch a particular operation. They didn’t ask any questions at all, which was a relief. But their presence was distracting and made the room feel uncomfortable.

Now the assemblyman was standing beside George, just to his right, watching George twist open a canister, make his entries into the computer terminal in front of him, slide the greenbacks into their bins in their drawer, put the transit slip in its bin, scoop out the right denomination of chips

He was on the floor. He had no idea what happened, he just had a moment of disorientation and panic. Why am I on the floor? Heart attack?

He was on his right side on the floor, and the left side of his head felt a sharp stinging pain. He blinked, thinking he’d fallen, blacked out, and the pain spread across his head from that electric grinding point just above his left ear, and when he looked up, the bigger of the two state troopers was standing over him, but not looking at him, looking across him at the other people in the room, pointing at them, saying

A gun. Pointing a gun. A pistol, a gun. Pointing a gun at the people in the room, saying, “Hands on your desks. Helen, Ruth. Come on, Sam, you don’t want to die.”

And another voice the other trooper, it must be was saying, “Pete, hands on your head. Susan, if you reach for that beeper, you’re dead.”

He hitme, George thought, and felt more astonishment at that than even at the fact of the gun and the things they were saying. We aren’t children in a schoolyard, we don’t hit each other, we don’t

It’s a robbery.

The shock of it, being hit, being all at once on the floor, feeling such pain, seeing the astonishing sight of that gun in that man’s hand, had befuddled George for so long that only now thirty seconds? forty? did he realize what this meant. These people were robbing the ship!

The big one, who’d hit him with the side of that gun, it must be now looked down at George. He didn’t point the gun at him, but he didn’t have to, not with those cold eyes. He said, “George, you can sit up, cross your knees, put your hands on your knees. Don’t reach a foot toward that button, George.”

He knows! They know everything, they know my name!

A sudden spasm of guilt washed through George, and he twisted around to stare toward Pete and Susan Cahill. They’ll think it’s me! They’ll think I’m the one told these people everything, and I’ll lose my job, and I’ll go to jail!

The assemblyman no, he can’t be an assemblyman, it’s all a fake he was frisking Pete, while the other non-trooper, also now holding a gun, was taking the beeper off Susan Cahill’s belt. Pete looked frightened, but Susan Cahill was looking outraged. Both were too involved in what was happening to see George stare at them, so George quickly shifted to look at something else. Don’t act guilty, he told himself. Don’t make them suspect you.

Susan Cahill, her voice trembling with fury, suddenly spoke: “This is outrageous! How dare you men, how dareyou behave like this! The police will get you, the police will get you, and Avenue Resorts will be verytough, you can count on that!”

The non-trooper who’d taken her beeper ignored her, turning away to look at the non-trooper standing over George. “Tape,” he said, and pocketed his gun.

“Sure.”

This one reached inside his jacket and took out a compact roll of duct tape. He tossed it across to the other one, then looked down and said, “George, I told you to sit up.”

“Yes. Yes. All right.” He didn’t want to be hit again, or whatever worse might happen. He scrambled into a seated position, making a point of moving away from that button, that he could see just over there, under the counter. But no power on Earth would make him move toward that button, not even to save his job.

The non-trooper with Susan Cahill peeled off some tape and said to her, “Hands behind your back.”

“I certainly will not!” She folded her arms under her breasts and glared. “If you think you’ll get awaywith”

He slapped her, left-handed, open-handed, but hard, the sound almost like a baseball being hit by a bat. All of them in the room jumped at the sound, George and Pete and Helen and Ruth and Sam. The three robbers didn’t jump.

Susan Cahill staggered from the slap, and stared at the non-trooper, who stepped closer to her and said, as though he really wanted to know the answer, “Are those your teeth?”

She gaped at him. “What?”

“Are thoseyour teeth?”

She didn’t know the reason for the question, but she was suddenly afraid not to answer. “Yes.”

“Do you want to keep them?”

This answer was smaller, more defeated. “Yes.”

“Hands behind your back.”

She put her hands behind her back, quivering now with fear, but George could tell that the outrage and the fury were still there inside her, merely prudently banked for the moment. The non-trooper duct-taped her wrists, then started to put another piece of duct tape over her mouth, but she pulled her head away. He stopped, and looked at her, and the next time he moved the duct tape she didn’t resist. As he put it over her mouth, he said, “If I was a bad guy, or if you irritated me, I’d put this over your nose, too. You’re going to sit down now.” He took her arm to help her, and she sat on the floor, and he duct-taped her ankles together.

Meantime, the fake assemblyman had been ordering the others around, telling Helen and Ruth and Sam by name to keep doing what they were doing, handling the money and the chips, and not to vary the routine in any way. For instance, not to send anything more or less than normal up to the cashier’s cage in each vacuum canister.

“I’ll tell you why,” he said. “It isn’t your money, and it would be stupid to die for it. The line’s insured, you’ll still get your salary. If there’s trouble, we may get caught but you will absolutely certainly get dead. So cooperate, and this little unpleasantness will soon be over. Pete?”

Pete jumped again, as when Susan Cahill was slapped. “Yes? What?”

“Easy, Pete, gentle down, there’s a love. And here’s a plastic bag. I want you to fill it with the cash from George’s station, since he won’t be working any more tonight.”

“All right.”

As Pete came over with the white plastic bag kitchen can size the one non-trooper finished with Susan Cahill and tossed the duct tape back to the one by George, who said, “Okay, George, your turn. Hands behind your back.” And, as he put his gun in his pocket, the other one across the room took his out again.

George said, “Excuse me, I’m sorry, but I”

“Come on, George.”

No long explanations, not with these people; only short explanations. George blurted out, “I have asthma!”

The big man looked at him. He seemed really interested. “Yeah? Had it long?”

George hadn’t expected that question. He said, “Fifteen years. And I can’t always breathe through my nose, I’m afraid, if you put that tape on”

“I get it, George,” the big man said. “If you got asthma real bad like that, you probably carry some kind of medicine for it, am I right? An inhaler, something like that?”

“Yes.”

“How slow can you take it out of your pocket, George?”

“Very slow.”

“Go ahead.”

George kept his inhaler in his inside jacket pocket, and now realized that was exactly where a tough guy or a bad guy would keep a gun. Hand trembling, sweat starting to trickle down his face, breath becoming raspy already, he reached into his pocket, grasped the inhaler, lost it through his trembling fingers, grasped it again, jerked his hand back, shuddered the motion to a stop, and slowly and shakily brought the little tube into sight.

The big man seemed pleased. “Good, George,” he said. “Now, if you gave yourself a spray or two with that, you’d be okay for a while, wouldn’t you?”

“I think so,” George said.

“We both think so, George,” the big man said. “Go ahead, take a shot.”

George did. He had so much trouble keeping his right hand steady that he held it with the left hand so he could fit the inhaler into his mouth, lips closed over it, and direct the spray at the back of his throat. He did this twice, and while he did the big man said to the other one, “There’s a lot of asthma around these days, you know? Worse than ever. It comes from mold, a lot of times, and I read someplace, you can get it from cockroach dander. Can you believe it? You try to keep yourself in shape and some fucking cockroach is out to bring you down. You set, George?” George put the inhaler back in his pocket. “Yes.” Hunkered beside him, applying the duct tape, the big man in a friendly manner said, “What I think you should do, now that the working day is done, you got time on your hands, I think you should spend it working on what you’re gonna say to the TV news reporters.”

“And now, in sports”

Hilliard Cathman sighed in exasperation; mostly with himself. He knew he should turn off this “news-radio” station, which was in truth mostly a sports-score-and-advertising radio station, and go to sleep, but lately he was having even more trouble than usual dropping off, and he had this need to know,to know when they did it. He had to know.

It would be a weekend, that much was certain, when the ship would be the most full of gamblers, when the most money would be lost. A Friday or a Saturday night, and soon. Possibly even tonight.

Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Tonight. Get it over with, get this tension behind him at last.

He knew the risk he was taking, the danger he was in. Sitting up in bed past midnight, lights on in half the house, the nightstand radio eagerly rattling off the endless results of games he cared nothing about, Cathman reminded himself he’d known from the beginning the perils in this idea, but had decided the goal was worth it. And it was, and it still was, though these days all Cathman could really see was the expression in that man Parker’s eyes. Which was no expression at all.

Marshall Howell had been different, easier to work with, easier to believe one could win out against. He’d been a tough man, and a criminal, but with some humanity in him. This one, Parker

It will happen, that’s all, and I don’t need to know about it the instant it does. When it happens, I’ll know soon enough, and then one of three things will happen. Parker will come bring me my ten percent, which is the least likely, and I’ll deal with him in the way I’m ready to deal with him. Or he and the rest of them will fade away, and I have his telephone number, and from that I have found his house, and I have seen his wife, none of which he knows, and I can finish it the other way. Or they will get caught, which would be the best thing, and I will be ready for that as well.

“The time is twelve fifty-two. In tomorrow’s weather”

Oh, enough. Cathman reached out and switched off the radio, but left the lights on. He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, and for a long time he didn’t sleep.

Only Ruth was still at her station at the counter, dealing with vacuum canisters as they came down from the cashier’s cage upstairs. George could see the others, Pete and Helen and Sam and Susan Cahill, all seated like him on the floor, backs against the wall, duct-taped into silence and immobility. A degree of background panic gave his own breathing a level of fibrillation that scared him some, but he knew it was under control, that unless something else happened he’d be able to go on breathing through to the end of this.

What was coming down now, from the cashier’s cage, at nearly one o’clock in the morning, was mostly chips being cashed in, and very rarely a purchase of more chips by some diehard loser up above. There wasn’t much activity at all at this point, and it really would be sensible for the robbers to get out of here now, before they lost part of their loot to customers upstairs cashing in, which they seemed to realize. George watched them give one another little looks and nods and hand signals, and then the one who’d slapped Susan Cahill went over and opened the door, the door they’d come through that was never opened and how much better if it never had been opened and headed up the stairs.

George knew there was a guard on duty up there, though he’d never seen him, seated at a desk on the landing in front of the door at the top of the stairs. That guard would have seen this robber with Susan Cahill when they came down, he wouldn’t suspect a thing, somebody coming up the stairs like that, he’d been hired to keep people from going downthose stairs.

Yes. Here he came, a beefy young man in a tan uniform, looking bewildered and angry and scared, hands knitted on top of his uniform hat on his head, holster at his right side hanging empty, the robber now holding two guns, one in each hand, shutting the door with his heel as he came in.

The big one, the one who’d taped George, went smiling over to the guard, saying “Welcome aboard, Jack. You are Jack, aren’t you?”

The guard stared at all the trussed people. He stared at the big man. He burst out, ‘Jesus, you’re not supposed to dothis!”

The big man laughed. “Oh, I know,” he said. “We’re just regular scamps. Put your hands behind your back, Jack.” Then he laughed again and said to the one with the two guns in his hands, “Back Jack; how do you like that?” To the guard he said, “I’m so glad your name isn’t Tim I’m not even gonna punch you in the belly for not having your hands behind your back. Not yet, I’m not.”

The guard quickly moved his arms, like a panicky drowner lunging toward the surface, and when his hands were behind his back the big man duct-taped them, then his mouth, then helped him sit, then did his ankles.

During which George watched the man who’d claimed to be an assemblyman, but who now seemed much more believable as an armed robber, take a small screwdriver from his pocket and use it to open the control box next to the outer door, the door in the hull through which George and the others would exit at the end of their shift, through which the money would be carried into the armored car, and George saw that what he was doing was dismantling the alarm system in there. Supposedly, if this door were to be opened while the ship was in motion, an alarm would ring up on the bridge; but not now.

Surprised, George thought, why, they’ve planned it all out.

Carlow pushed Noelle’s wheelchair into the elevator. The four other people in the car smiled at her, and she smiled wanly back, and the tiredness she showed was probably real. Carlow felt the same way; this was the longest night of all.

When the elevator doors opened, one level down, the other four people dispersed themselves into the restrooms, the couple who’d been waiting here boarded the elevator after a smile at wan Noelle and Carlow pushed the wheelchair over to the door that led to the stairs down to the money room. It was a discreet door, painted to blend with the wall around it. Carlow turned the wheelchair around to face out, then rapped the door once with his heel.

The door opened inward. Carlow heard the click, and immediately went down to one knee. He grasped the handle of the box beneath the seat and pulled out a very different box from the one in the other wheelchair. This one was deeper and wider and much longer, and contained no bowl, empty or full. Carlow slid the box backward, looking down, and saw Parker’s hand grab it. Carlow stood, and the door behind him clicked shut.

They stood there for three minutes. A few people passed, and all smiled at Noelle, but all kept going. Everybody was tired, and they knew she must be tired, too, so they left her alone.

A knock sounded on the door behind him. Two couples, yawning together, waited for the elevator. He watched them, and then the elevator came, empty this time, and they boarded, and its doors shut.

Then Carlow rapped the door with his heel again, and went to one knee, and the box was slid out to him. It was much heavier now, filled with white plastic bags. Carlow slid it into place, stood, pushed the wheelchair over to the elevator, boarded it the next time it arrived.

The money usually went into heavy canvas sacks to be carried off the ship, and the robbers had thoughtfully cut air holes into these sacks before putting them over everybody’s head, but had then made sure the airholes weren’t placed so the people could see through them.

What don’t they want us to see, George wondered. There was a faint smell inside the money sack, not of money, but of something like a cabin in the woods or a thatched hut. The smell made George fearful again of his ability to breathe, but he kept himself from giving way to panic, and he breathed slowly and steadily through his nose, and he told himself he was going to survive, he was going to survive.

It wasn’t the TV news reporters’ questions he was thinking about now, it was the questions the police would ask. He’d be able to give full descriptions of the robbers, and he’d be able to describe just about everything they did and said.

And now there was the question of what the robbers didn’t want them to see. All he had left now was his ears, and he listened as hard as he could. He heard shuffling noises, and then he heard a click of some kind, and wondered what that was. There was something familiar about that click, and yet there wasn’t. Inside the canvas sack, George frowned deeply, breathing automatically, not even thinking about his breath now, and tried to think what that click could be, what it reminded him of, where he’d heard it before.

He almost got it, he was seconds from understanding, when another sound distracted him. A whoosh and a foamy rush, and a sudden sense of cool damp air, a breeze wafting over him.

They’d opened the outer door. Thatmust be what they didn’t want him and the others to see; what sort of transportation awaited them outside.

George strained to hear, leaning forward, staring at the canvas a half inch from his eyes. He heard murmuring, vague movement, and then not even that. And then a slam, as the outer door was shut again.

They’ve gone, he thought, and never did remember that click any more, and so didn’t come to the memory that would have told him that the click was the sound of the inner door closing. And so he never did get to tell the police the one thing they would have been interested to hear: that before the robbers left, one of them went upstairs.

Greg Hanzen trailed the big gleaming ship for several miles, and at every second he wanted to veer off, run for his life. But he was afraid to leave them stranded there, afraid they’d escape anyway somehow and come after him. They would surely come after him.

They might anyway.

The door in the side of the ship, up ahead of him, opened inward, showing a vertical oval of light. Immediately, not permitting himself to think, Hanzen drove forward, in close to the ship’s flank, up along the side of that open doorway, where Parker stood in the light, empty-handed.

Hanzen tossed him the line, and Parker handed it on to a much bigger man, who stood grinning down at Hanzen as he held Hanzen’s little boat firm against the Spirit of the Hudsonwhile Parker and a third man jumped in. Then the big man grabbed the outer handle of the door and jumped across into the boat, slamming the door behind him. That would be, Hanzen guessed, so that there wouldn’t be an unexpected light in the hull of the boat for the next hour, to maybe draw attention from shore.

“Okay,” Parker said.

But something was wrong. Hanzen looked at the three of them. “Where’s the money?”

Parker said, “That’s going a different way.”

Oh, Christ. Oh, what a fuckup. Hanzen had an instant of even worse despair than usual, and then, afraid Parker might see something on his face, he turned away to the wheel and said, “Well, let’s get us out of here.”

He put on speed and veered away from the ship into the darkness, as they opened the duffel bag Parker had given him earlier to bring along on the boat. Here were the clothes they would change into, to become fishermen out at night, while the suits and ties and white shirts, into the duffel bag with a rock, would soon be resting on the river bottom.

Hanzen gritted his teeth and chewed his lower lip. Had he given himself away? He snuck a look at Parker, and the man was frowning at him, thinking it over.

Oh, Jesus, I did! He saw it! He knows already. Oh, Christ, everybody’sgot a reason to be down on poor Greg Hanzen, and I never wanted anyof it. Low man on the totem pole again. Whydidn’t I cut and run when I could?

Whoever survives this night, Hanzen told himself, if anybody does, it won’t be me.

9

One-fifteen. It wasn’t necessary for Noelle to pitch her faint for another fifteen or twenty minutes, but she was ready to do it now. She really did feel queasy as hell, and it wasn’t because she was on a ship; the motion of the Spirit of the Hudsonas it coursed upstream was barely noticeable.

No, and it wasn’t the money under her that had her queasy, either. She understood about that, and agreed with the thinking behind it, and had no trouble with it. She’d been the girl distraction more than once in her life, either carrying the dangerous stuff herself or fronting for the one who did, though she’d never done it as an invalid before. But the idea here was a good one; she was an established presence on the ship. The robbers would have left through the door in the hull, and why wouldn’t they have taken the money with them?

Of course, the reason they hadn’t taken the money with them was because they would be half an hour or more in that small boat on the river before they reached the safety of the cabin. Nobody knew how soon the alarm would be raised, but when it was, there would be police boats out. They might be suspicious of four night fishermen, but on that boat they wouldn’t find any guns, any dress clothes, and most importantly, no money.

Would the police have any reason to think the money was still on the ship? None. Why would they believe that three men would go through such an elaborate con job and robbery and then not take the money with them?

So Noelle wasn’t worried about being caught sitting on several hundred thousand dollars. What had her shaky and nauseous was something much simpler; she was dehydrated. Having to sit for over six hours every night in this damn wheelchair or the other wheelchair, actually, up till tonight without any opportunity to leave it for any reason at all, meant she’d been avoiding liquids as much as possible the last eight days.

Six hours without a bathroom isn’t easy, if you stay with a normal intake of liquids, so Noelle had been cutting back, and finding it a little chancy anyway, and by tonight the drying-out had begun to affect her. She knew it already in the van driving up to Albany, but she didn’t dare do anything about it then, with the whole night in front of her, so she’d been hanging in there, feeling sicker and sicker, until by now what she was most afraid of was dry heaves; and dry they’d be.

Apart from the physical discomfort, though, she was having no trouble with this job. Since she and Tommy had split up, it had been harder to find strings to attach to, so money had often been a problem, which tonight should go a long way to solve.

And another good thing about this crowd was, none of them felt he had to hit on her. Parker had his woman Claire, and the other three all seemed to understand that she was simply another member of the crew, and it would screw things up entirely if they got out of line. Also, they probably knew she could be difficult if annoyed; they might even have heard about the guy she’d kneecapped in St. Louis.

It would probably be better all around if she found some other guy on the bend to hook up with, but she’d gotten along before Tommy and she’d get along now, and if another guy appeared, fine. It would certainly be easier, though, if Uncle Ray were still alive.

It was her father’s older brother, Ray Braselle, a heister from way back, who’d brought her into the game, over her pharmacist father’s objections. Ray Braselle had been around for so long that once, in describing the first bank job he was ever on, he’d said, “And I stood on the running board,” and then he’d had to explain what a running board was.

Uncle Ray was all right, though old as the goddam hills. But the people he ran with were more like Parker; tough, but not just smash-and-grab, always with a plan, a contingency, ways in and ways out. For guys like that, a good-looking girl could frequently be part of the plan, and if she was a pro herself, steady and reliable, not a hooker and not a junkie, who knew how to handle a gun, an alarm system or a cop, so much the better.

Uncle Ray liked to spend his free time living off away by himself, in a scrubby ranch he had in Wyoming, north of Cheyenne, up in the foothills before the high mountains toward Montana, and it was there that a horse rolled on him some kind of accident, no way to be sure exactly what happened and the body wasn’t found for six days. After that, Noelle still got the occasional call from guys she and Ray had worked with, and on one of those jobs she’d met Tommy Carpenter, and they’d lived together for a few years until all of a sudden it turned out Tommy was afraid of the law, so here she was on her own. And feeling mighty sick.

Should she ask Mike to get her a glass of water? No; the very idea made her feel even worse. What would happen if she tried to drink water and she threw it up, right here in this chair? Down to the nurse’s office, no way to avoid it; the change of clothing, the examination, the discovery of the money; ten to fifteen in a prison laundry.

Hang in there, she told herself, and to Mike she said, “Mike, could we stay in one place for a while? I feel like shit.”

“I thought you did,” he said. “Before you start feeling better, let’s go talk to the purser.”

“Good.”

They’d done this on two other nights, so the purser would be used to the idea. Half an hour or so before the ship would dock, they’d go to the purser and Mike would quietly explain that Jane Ann was feeling kind of bad, a little worse than usual, and would it be okay if they got off first, the instant the ship was made fast? Hey, no problem. No problem twice before this, and it should be no problem tonight.

Getting to the purser’s office meant another elevator ride; Noelle gulped a lot, and breathed through her mouth, and held tight to the wheelchair arms, and didn’t at all have to put on an act for the other people in the elevator.

The purser’s office was open on one side, to an interior lobby, with a chest-high counter. The purser himself was there, with two of his girl assistants, all three of them in the blue and gold uniforms. He wanted them to call him Jerry, and he gave them a big smile as they approached: “Hey, Mike. How you doin, Jane Ann? Enjoyin the ride?” Nobody ever asked anybody if they were winning or losing; that was considered bad taste.

“Not so much, Jerry,” Noelle told him, and swallowed hard.

Jerry looked stricken, as though he thought the ship was to blame, and Mike leaned close to him to say, “I hate to be a pest, Jerry, asking special favors all the time” as the phone on the desk behind the counter rang and one of the girls answered it.

“Hey, no problem, Mike,” Jerry said. “I can see Jane Ann’s ready to call it a day. You be down in that lounge again, you remember? and Excuse me.”

Because the girl who’d answered the phone wanted to say a quick word to Jerry, who tilted his head toward her while continuing to face Mike and Noelle.

One strange thing about all these hours in the wheelchair was the way it changed your perspective on everybody else. They were all big people now, and she was little. Seated in the wheelchair, she was too low to actually see the countertop, but could look at an angle up past it at the faces of Jerry and his girl assistant as the girl, in low tones that nevertheless Noelle could hear, said, “The cashier’s cage say they’re not getting any change.”

Jerry looked blank, but continued to smile at Mike and Noelle. He said, “What?”

“People want to cash in now,” she told him, “and they’re sending down the chips, but nothing’s coming back up.”

Here we go, Noelle thought. One twenty-seven by the big clock on the wall at the back of the purser’s office. Here’s where the hairy part begins. Sooner or later, cops are going to come aboard, and they’re going to want to know if there are any anomalies here tonight, any odd or unusual passengers, and will they look at a girl in a wheelchair? Sooner or later they might, but not if she’s long gone, off and away from here.

“Excuse me,” Jerry said, and turned away from them, and made a quick phone call. Four numbers; internal. Calling the money room. Waiting. Listening. Waiting. Looking confused.

Exactly one-thirty. Jerry hung up, and stood still for a second, frowning this way and that, trying to decide what to do. Mike said, “Jerry? Something wrong?”

“No, no,” Jerry said. ‘Just a little, uh, communication problem. Excuse me, one second.” He made another internal call, and this time it was answered right away, and he said, “It’s Jerry. We’re not getting anything up from the money room, and when I called down there there’s no answer. Can you beep your guy at the top of the stairs? Well, can you send somebody over, see what’s up? Thanks, Doug.”

Mike, sounding worried, said, “Jerry? Is there gonna be a problem?”

“I’m sure there isn’t,” Jerry promised him. “Maybe there’s an electric failure down there, who knows what. They’ll take a look.”

Mike, more confidential than ever, said, “Jerry, the reason See, I’m responsible for Jane Ann.”

“I know, Mike, and you do a great”

“Yeah, but, see, if there’s gonna be a problem Jerry, I gotta get this girl home.”

“Don’t you worry, Mike, we’ll get Jane Ann home, there isn’t going to be any reason not. You’ve got my word on this, okay?”

“Would it be okay,” Mike asked, “if we stuck around here to find out what’s going on? You know, just so we know. I mean, if we gotta get the medevac helicopter, we oughta know that right”

Jerry blanched, but rallied. “If it comes to that,” he said, “we’ll move fast, don’t you worry, but it isn’t gonna come to that. Sure, stick around, I’m happy to have the company. Jane Ann? Anything I can get you?”

“Oh, no,” she said, and put a trembling hand over her mouth.

Jerry looked as though he couldn’t figure out which of his problems he should worry about most.

One thirty-three by the big clock, and the phone rang. The same girl assistant answered, then said to Jerry, “Doug.”

“Right. Jerry here. Yeah? What?Holy shit,I I I mean hell! Jesus! Whatare we Yeah, okay, I’ll come up, too, who knows whatthe fuck we’re supposed oh, God. I’ll come up.”

He slammed the phone down and gave Noelle an agonized look, saying, “I doapologize, Jane Ann, I’m very sorry, that isn’t like me, to use language like I was just I’m overwhelmed.”

Mike said, “Jerry? What is it?”

“I’ve gotta go see the captain.” Jerry was well and truly rattled.

Mike said, “Jerry, don’t leave us like this. What’s going on?”

Jerry looked both ways, then leaned over the counter and gave them a harsh stage whisper: “We’ve been robbed!”

“What?” Mike was as astonished as Jerry. “You’re kidding me, nobody could” Then, moving as though prepared to fling himself between Noelle and an approaching bullet, he said, “They’re on the ship? You’ve got robbers on”

“No, no, they I don’t know, apparently they came in through the door in the hull, there’s a separate door there, I don’t know if you ever noticed, the armored car, at the dock”

“No,” Mike said. “They came in through some door in the hull? The side of the ship, you mean?”

“And I guess back out again,” Jerry said. “With the money.”

Noelle said, “Jerry?”

He leaned close to give her a solicitous look, and to say, “Don’t worry, Jane Ann, we’ll still get you off, just as soonas we dock.”

“Thank you, Jerry,” she said, “but that’s not what I wanted to say. Jerry, do you realize what this is? It’s piracy!”

Jerry reared back, thinking about that. “By golly, you’re right,” he said.

Noelle said, “Look for a man with an eye patch.” And, despite how miserable she felt, she smiled.

At one forty-five they made the announcement over the loudspeaker. The money room had been robbed by gunmen who escaped in a small boat. More money was coming from the bank and would meet the boat, and people who still had chips to turn in would be able to do so while exiting the ship. There would be two exit ramps, so if you didn’t want to cash in any chips you wouldn’t have to wait on that line. All passengers would be required to give their names and addresses and show identification to the police when debarking, but otherwise would not be detained. The ship, its crew and its owners apologized for any inconvenience.

The ship was abuzz with excitement and rumor, and Mike and Noelle stayed well away from it. Mike asked permission to stay in the purser’s office till they landed, to protect Jane Ann, and the distracted Jerry agreed, but they didn’t hear any more about what was going on. The action had apparently moved to the security office.

When at last they docked in Albany, Jerry was as good as his word. He personally escorted them to the lounge near the exit, he spoke to the first police officers who boarded, and there was no problem about departure from the ship.

Mike showed his fake chauffeur’s ID, gave Jane Ann Livingston’s spurious address in a mansion on the Hudson, and three minutes after the ship had tied up at the dock he was pushing a thoroughly beat-up Noelle down the gangplank and through the departure building and out to the parking lot, where for the last time he did the elaborate ramp arrangement that got her wheelchair into the van. Then he got behind the wheel, and drove them away from there.

The second traffic light they hit was red, and while stopped he looked at her in his inside mirror and said, “How you doing?”

“Ask me,” she told him, “three beers from now.”

10

Ray Becker woke up. Holy shit, he fell asleep!

Around ten he’d driven away from the cottages and down into a nearby town to a pizza place, where he got a small pizza and a can of Coke, and came back, and sat here on the porch in the dark, looking out at the black river, with the living room and kitchen lights on in the cabin behind him, and while he ate he thought about where he’d go, once he had his hands on the money.

He wished he could just get completely out of the United States, but he didn’t dare. He wasn’t sure he could cross any border without ID, and he didn’t have any ID he’d care to show anybody official. And if he went somewhere else in the world, what would he know about the place? The laws, the systems, the ways things worked. What would he know about how they handled things? He’d be crippling himself, that’s all, and for what?

No, he’d have to stay in the States, which meant he’d have to go somewhere that was both out of the way and far from home; he wouldn’t want to run into any old high school pals on the street.

But it couldn’t be just anywhere. There were states, for instance, like Florida and Louisiana, that had a floating population of petty crooks and therefore had a lot of police forces alert to the idea of checking out any strangers who hung around too long. For similar reasons, big cities like New York and Chicago were out; but they were out anyway, because Becker had never felt comfortable in big cities.

He’d thought about Oregon and he’d thought about Maine, but the idea of the weather in both those places daunted him. On the other hand, if he went too far south, he’d stand out too much.

Maybe some place like Colorado or Kansas. Move in to some medium-size town, just settle in for a while, then get fresh ID, invest some of the money in a local business, start a new life.

ID wouldn’t be a problem, he knew how to do that. You’d choose a good-sized city Omaha, say, or St. Louis and look in the newspaper obits there for the year you were born, where you’d eventually find a child that had died before its second birthday. Using that child’s name, you’d write to the Hall of Records in that city to ask for a copy of your birth certificate. Using that, you’d go to the nearest Social Security office and explain you’d lived outside the U.S. since you were a kid, with your parents, but now you were back and you needed to sign up. With those two pieces of ID, and the same off-shore story, you’d go get your driver’s license, and all of a sudden you were as legit as any citizen in the country.

Kansas, he thought, that’s where I’ll go, check it out, see if that’s the place for me, and on that thought he’d fallen asleep.

Only to spring awake, with the realization that he’d almost made a huge mistake. A hugemistake. If the robbers came back with the money and Ray Becker was sprawled in this chair asleep, that would be it. No questions. No more chances.

Kansas? Bottom of the Hudson River, more likely.

The lights are still on! What time is it?

He was trying to look at his watch and jump up from the Adirondack chair, both at the same time, when a voice said, “Whadaya suppose they left the lights on for?”

Becker froze. Someone in the kitchen, directly behind him. He stared ahead of himself, out at the blackness that contained the river, and he listened very hard to the space behind him.

A second voice: “Maybe so they could find the place from the river.” Younger, more nasal, than the first voice.

“We’ll leave it the way they left it,” said a third voice, older and heavier and beerier, like the first one. And how the fuck many of them werethere? “We want those boys walkin in here all fat and sassy.”

Now he knew why he’d come awake. He must have heard them arrive somehow, a car door slamming or the front door opening or whatever it was.

Get off the porch; that’s the first thing. Slowly and silently, without attracting attention, get off this goddam porch.

Becker eased forward off the Adirondack chair onto his hands and knees. Behind him they were talking, making themselves at home, opening and closing the refrigerator door. A beer can popped.

The screen door off this screened-in porch was ahead and to the right, and it opened inward. Becker crawled over there, found the door by feel, pulled it a little way open, and for a wonder it didn’t squeak. Holding the door with his left hand, he shifted around to a seated position, then slid himself forward on his rump into the doorway, until his feet found the log step out there between porch level and the ground.

Easing himself out, and down onto that step, without letting the door slam, was damn tricky, but he did it, holding his hand between door and frame at the last, until he could get his feet under him, and reach up to the knob. He pushed the door open just a bit to free his hand, then eased it shut.

Darkness outside, with canyons of light vaulted from the windows. Becker eased along next to the building, peeked in the kitchen window, and saw three of them, all now with beers in their hands.

Bikers. Two big old rogue elephants, bearded and ponytailed and big-gutted, and one young ferret, all three of them in the black leather those boys like so much. One of them was the leader, and was telling the other two where to position themselves for the ambush to come; this one in this room, that one in that room.

Becker went back to the side of the porch, away from the light, then hurried around the next-door cottage to his pickup truck. From there he could see, gleaming in the living room light over there, three big motorcycles. So that’s what had waked him, those hogs driving in. Damn good thing.

When he’d first rented the pickup, he’d removed the interior light, so it stayed dark when he gently opened the passenger door. There was a narrow storage space behind the bench-type seat, that you got to by tilting the seatback forward. Not much room back there, but enough for the shotgun he’d taken from the trunk of his patrol car when he’d ditched it, and also for the two handguns he’d always carried; his official sidearm, a Smith and Wesson Model 39, a 9mm automatic with an eight-shot clip, and his extra, a little Smith and Wesson .38 Chiefs Special, a very concealable revolver with a two-inch barrel.

For present purposes, he left the automatic, pocketed the revolver in case he needed to do in-close work, and headed back for the lit-up cottage, carrying the shotgun at port arms.

And now at last he looked at his watch: five minutes to two! Jesus Christ, they’ll be back any minute! He had to get rid of those people, he had to get those lights switched off.

It’s getting complicated again, goddam it, it’s getting screwed-up again. Get it under control. Don’t let things spin away into disaster like every other time, this is the last chance, the last chance. The last chance.

The leader first. Moving cautiously along, stooped to stay under the shafts of light, Becker found him in the bedroom off the kitchen, in semi-darkness, looking through the mostly shut doorway at the kitchen, patiently waiting. He had a beer can in his left hand, a big automatic in his right, like the one Becker had left in the truck.

Take care of this now. Take care of it all right now. Get it simple again.

Becker rested the tip of the barrel of the shotgun against the wood frame at the bottom of the screen over the window. The window was open, so it was only the screen in the way. Focusing past it, not seeing the screen at all when he did, Becker aimed the shotgun carefully at the center of the back of that head, just at the knot in the ponytail. His finger slowly squeezed down on the trigger.

FOUR

1

“We didn’t leave lights on,” Parker said, and a shot sounded from up there, on shore.

He had both guns in his hands, the one he’d carried onto the ship in a shoulder holster and the one he’d taken from the guard on the stairs, because he’d planned to throw them out into the river as they left the boat, but now he turned and put the barrel of the Colt Python against Hanzen’s near temple. “Turn us around,” he said, being very quiet, because sound travels on water. “Take us out of here.”

Hanzen did it, without an argument, without a reaction at all, as though he’d been expecting this.

“You know,” Wycza said, speaking as quietly as Parker had, “I thoughtthis thing was going along too easy.”

Parker said, “We’ll head for your landing.”

“Oh, shit,” Hanzen said, but that was all. Behind them, a second shot sounded, and in quick succession a third.

Parker hadn’t one hundred percent trusted Hanzen, but had felt he could take care of things if a problem came up. But why would people be shooting back there? Had they been shooting at this boat? What would be the purpose in that?

Nobody spoke for a good three minutes, as Hanzen steered them at a downstream angle out toward the middle of the river. They’d come from upstream, and Hanzen’s landing was further on down. For those silent three minutes, Parker held the barrel of the Python against Hanzen’s temple, and Hanzen hunched grimly over his wheel, looking straight ahead, asking nothing, offering nothing.

Finally, Parker tapped Hanzen’s head lightly with the gun barrel. “I can’t hear you,” he said.

“You know the story,” Hanzen said. He sounded bitter.

“Not all of it.”

“Shit, man, Idon’t know allof it. Who’s shooting back there? Beats the shit out of me. Maybe they got stoned, they’re shooting at little green men. Wouldn’t put it past them.”

That was possible. Or there could be more players in the game. Parker said, “Just how many people you told my business?”

“Only them as leaned on me,” Hanzen said, “and you met them.”

“They didn’t buy our restaurant story, is that it?”

“A businessman don’t offer to run over one of them’s bikes. You come on too hard, so they wanted to know about you. I figure it’s your way, you can’t help it.”

Wycza said, “What have we got, exactly?”

“Three bikers,” Parker told him. “Friends of Hanzen.”

“Not friends,” Hanzen said.

“They do drug deals together,” Parker said. “They saw me one time, I was with Hanzen, the story was I was lookin for a site for a waterfront restaurant. Seems they didn’t buy it, and they got curious.”

“They leaned on me,” Hanzen insisted, “like I said.”

Wycza told him, “I look at you, friend, it don’t seem to me you’d need much leanin.” To Parker, he said, “So Hanzen here told these biker friends of his where they could expect to find us with some money on us.”

“And went there first,” Parker said.

Lou Sternberg had been silent all this time, seated on the bottom of the boat because his balance wasn’t good enough to permit him to stand when it was running through the water. But now he said, “Parker, why are you still talking to this clown? This is a deep enough river, isn’t it?”

“We couldn’t find his landing on our own,” Parker said.

Hanzen said, “That’s right, and we all know it. I’ll take you to my place you probably want my car.”

“Naturally.”

“So there it is,” Hanzen said. “I’ll take you there, you’ll go ashore, you’ll kill me, you’ll take my car, my problems’ll be all over and yours’ll still be goin on.”

“Maybe not,” Parker said. “You’re cooperating, and you didn’t tell them till they made you.”

“Don’t try to give me hope,” Hanzen said, “it’s a waste of time.”

Which was probably true, too, so Parker didn’t lie to him anymore.

“Leaned on him,” Wycza said, scoffing. “They leaned on him. Made faces and said boo.”

“That’s right,” Hanzen said, “they did that, too. They also kicked me in the nuts a couple times, kicked me in the shins so I got some red scars you could look at, twisted my arms around till I thought they broke ‘em, closed a couple hands down on my windpipe till I passed out.” He turned away from the wheel, though still holding on to it, and looked Wycza up and down. “You’re a big guy,” he said, “so you figure it don’t happen to you. The day it does, big man, when you got seven or eight comin at you, not to kill you but just to make you hurt, you remember Greg Hanzen.”

“I’ll do that,” Wycza promised.

“And remember I told you this. They got wonderful powers of concentration, those boys, they never forget what they’re doing. They don’t stop. They won’t stop, no matter how long it takes, until you say what they want you to say.”

“I’ll remember that, too,” Wycza said.

“Good.” Hanzen turned back to the wheel. “We’re coming in now,” he said, and angled them toward shore.

It was still possible that Hanzen had some other scheme in mind, so Parker kept both guns in his hands and peered at the black and featureless shore as the boat slowed and the river grew wider behind them. How could these river rats find their way around in the dark like this? And yet they could.

“I’ll run it on up on the shore,” Hanzen said. “Make it easier for you all to get out.”

“Good,” Parker said.

Hanzen said, “I hope you take them, and not the other way around. Them’s the bunch I got a grudge against.”

“We’ll do what we can,” Parker said.

Now the shore was close, very close. There was a little moon, not much, just enough to glint off glass in there; probably the windshield of Hanzen’s car. Parker said, “Where are the car keys?”

“In my pocket. Wait’ll we stop.”

“Fine.”

“Brace yourselves now.”

Hanzen switched off the engine. There was a sudden tingling floating silence, and then the keel of the boat scraped pebbles in the mud, angled up, ran partway up onto the bank, and jolted to a stop. Hanzen reached into his pocket, came out with a small ring of keys, and extended them toward Parker, who took them. “It pulls to the left,” Hanzen said.

Wycza stepped over the side first onto the bank, then helped Lou Sternberg over. Parker jumped over the side, and Hanzen jumped after him. Then Hanzen stood there, just waiting.

Wycza took Hanzen by the elbow, walked him farther from the water’s edge, into the oval clearing, very dark now. They stopped, and Wycza stepped to one side. He said, “Greg.”

Hanzen turned his head, and Wycza clipped him across the jaw with a straight right. Hanzen dropped like a puppet when you cut the strings; straight down.

Wycza turned to the others. “Okay, let’s go,” he said. “I see it’s another goddam tiny car. Lou, you’re in back.”

Sternberg said, “Dan, he isn’t dead.”

“Oh, what the fuck,” Wycza said. “By the time he wakes up, whatever we’re doing, it’s all over and done with. He’s just some dumb poor clown. He helped us one way, and he hurt us another. Listenin to him, out there on the water, I kind of felt for him. Okay?”

Parker and Sternberg looked at one another. To be betrayed, to be set up, to be led into an ambush, and then not deal with the guy that did it? On the other hand, it was certainly true that Hanzen wasn’t a threat to them any more, and for whatever reason the ambush hadn’t worked, and in fact killing was never a good idea unless there were no other ideas.

“And now,” Wycza said, “he’s got a broken jaw, so it’s not like he’s singin and dancin.”

Parker shrugged, and so did Sternberg. “Well, Hanzen was wrong about one thing,” Parker said, as he walked toward the little Hyundai, the car keys in his hand. “His problems aren’t over.”

2

Parker drove. He was probably taking a long way around, going out to the main state road and then north, but he didn’t know all the back ways around here, particularly at night. Still, the main point was to get to the cottages before Mike and Noelle did, because they wouldn’t know they were riding into an ambush. But they couldn’t reach there from the ship until close to three, and even going the long way around Parker could make it by two-thirty.

They were silent most of the way up, but as they neared the dirt road that led in to the cottages Parker said to Sternberg, in the back seat, “Lou, here’s the gun I took off that guard.”

“You’ve still got your other one? Fine.”

“My idea is,” Parker said, “Dan and me go in on foot, see what’s what. You and the car stay out by the turnoff, watch for Mike and Noelle.”

“Okay. If I hear anything

“

“You do what seems best.”

“Right.”

The landmark for the turnoff at night was the Agway just to the north of it. They kept lights on up there, in the yard and inside the main store building. Everything else for a few miles around was in darkness at this hour, so when they saw those white and red lights, they knew where they were.

There was no traffic at all; they hadn’t seen another car in motion in ten minutes. Parker switched down from headlights to running lights as he made the turn, then switched the lights off entirely before he stopped, with the Hyundai maybe four car lengths in from the blacktop, squarely in the middle of the dirt road. All three got out, and Sternberg, holding the guard’s gun loosely at his side, said, “I’ll sit against a tree over here.”

Wycza said, “Let’s hope Mike don’t take the turn too fast.”

Sternberg said, “Parker, now he’s worried about Hanzen’s car.You sure this guy’s one of us?”

“Promise you won’t tell,” Wycza said, and he and Parker walked on down the road.

There was enough moonlight and starlight to make the paler swath of the road stand out from the darker woods all around it. They walked side by side, guns in their hands, Parker near the left edge of the road, Wycza near the right. After a while, their night vision improved, and they could see a little ways into the woods on both sides. Except for the quiet crunch of their shoes on the dirt, there was no sound. And though the air was cool, there was no breeze.

Light up ahead. They moved more slowly, and saw the lights still on in their cottage. In the cleared space in front stood the three motorcycles, near Wycza’s Lexus and Parker’s Subaru. There was no sound, no movement.

Wycza reached across and tapped Parker’s arm, then pointed. The lit-up cottage was second from the left. Between the two cottages on the right a pickup truck was parked. It was a convention here.

There was no way to move to the left past the cottages, which is what Parker had wanted to do. But if you went that way you’d be picked up in the light-spill, so he moved to the right instead and followed Wycza around the edge of the clearing to the farthest right-hand cottage and around it into the deeper darkness there.

In that darkness they paused for a whispered discussion. Wycza said, “Who’s the truck?”

“Wild card.”

“There’s somebody somewhere. Down at the landing?”

“If they still think we’re coming from there. I’ll look.”

“I’ll see what’s in the cottage.”

“Fine,” Parker said, and went first, around the riverside end of the first cottage and straight out to the drop-off, then left to the wooden stairs down to the river, which were just beyond the range of illumination from the house.

The sound here was river against shore, river against support posts; faint whispers of wavelets, not much louder than Parker and Wycza had been, a minute ago.

Parker went silently down the uneven steps. There was no comfortable place for somebody to sit and wait on the steep slope to either side, and there was nobody on the dock. The river reflected moonlight and made a heavy steady sweeping movement from right to left.

Parker went back up the stairs, and at the top he stood and waited and listened. At first he heard and saw nothing, but then he caught the movement as the outside door to the screened porch of their cottage pushed inward, the screen of the door reflecting light differently as it moved. He looked lower, and could just make out Wycza crawling through the doorway, flat on his belly. The screen door eased shut.

Parker moved to his left, to get to the rear of the last cottage, where they’d split up, so he could follow Wycza’s route. He turned at that cottage, moved along its screened-in porch, and beyond it saw to his left the pickup, parked facing this way, as though the driver hadn’t considered the possibility he might want to leave in a hurry.

As Parker crossed the open space to the next cottage, there were two sudden shots. He dove to the ground, pressed against the stone foundation of the cottage, and lay prone, Python held in both hands on the ground in front of him.

The shots had come from out ahead, probably their cottage. And the two shots had been different, the first one lighter, more of a clap, the second one heavier, a full-throated bark. The kind of sound this Python might make, or Wycza’s 27.

Parker waited for some sort of follow-up, but nothing else happened, so he snaked forward along the ground, pulling himself on with his elbows, arms crossed in front of his jaw, Python pointed at the screened porch beside him.

At the corner, he was where the light began. He looked across at the yellow windows, and waited. After a minute, he heard movement, walking; somebody who wasn’t trying to conceal himself. Then the front door opened and slammed shut, and a few seconds later Wycza appeared around the corner down there, 27 in his hand but casually, pointed downward. He looked this way and that, but not warily, along the ground, like somebody who’s lost a cufflink. He stopped to look at the window to the bedroom off the kitchen, fingering the screen there. Then he came on, and Parker could hear he was singing, not loud, not soft: “Be down to getcha in a taxi, honey, better be ready bout half past eight.”

Wycza was not somebody who sang. As he rounded the corner and walked openly past the doorway he’d crawled through just a couple of minutes ago, Parker reversed himself and got crouching to his feet, and hurried bent low back the way he’d come, to the last cottage, and around it to the front, where he saw Wycza just moving out of the range of the light toward the road. He didn’t seem to care that he was exposed.

Keeping to the darkness, being sure he couldn’t be seen, Parker followed.

3

Down the dirt road, where you couldn’t see the light from the cottage any more, Wycza stood waiting. Parker joined him and said, “What’s up?”

“The three bikers, like you said, in three rooms. Set up for an ambush, but gunned down. Two dead, one not. Not then.”

“Wounded? Took a shot at you.”

“The young one. Been hit high on the chest, right side, lying in the living room behind the sofa. Lookeddead. I found the other two first, one in a bedroom, shot in the back of the head, one in the kitchen, shot in the chest. One shot each.”

“Economical.”

“I was keepin down, movin slow.” Wycza shook his head, remembering. “All of a sudden, this son of a bitch in the living room rolls over, he’s got a .22 in his hand. You know as well as I do, you can’t hit your own pocket with one of those.”

“They’re not for work,” Parker agreed. “For noise, and for show.”

“So he shot at me, hit the ceiling or some fucking thing, and I put him down.”

“Okay.”

“The thing is,” Wycza said, “he startled me, so I come upright, and I did him, and I’m standin there, and all at once I realize, I got windows on three sides of me. You know that living room, it’s all across the front.”

“But nobody killed you,” Parker said.

“Hell of a way to find out,” Wycza said. “So where’s the guy from the pickup? Those three in the cottage didn’t shoot each other, and the pickup’s still there, but nobody’s shooting at me. Is he hurt? Or is he just waiting? Did somebody maybe put a bullet into the pickup guy?”

“Not with a .22,” Parker said.

“The one in the kitchen,” Wycza said, “carried a .45 auto, been fired once tonight.”

“That’s different,” Parker said.

“So I figure,” Wycza said, “long as nobody’s shooting at me anyway, why not just waltz around, have a look?”

“I watched you,” Parker told him.

“You weren’t the only one, I’m pretty sure,” Wycza said. “So you saw me stop at the bedroom window.”

“You were interested in that screen.”

“Three fresh holes in it, two pushing in, one pushing out. The way it looks to me,” Wycza said, “those three were scattered in the house for the ambush. Our pickup guy came over, shot the one in the bedroom. The other one ran over through the kitchen, got to the doorway, saw the pickup guy in the window, took a shot at him, the pickup guy shot him back. Or the other way around. Anyway, the biker dead, the pickup guy wounded. Some blood drops on the wall, like it sprayed when he was hit.”

“But he went on after the third one.”

“Well, he had to,” Wycza said. “In a hurry, hurt, got him in the living room through the side window there, another hole in the screen. But he didn’t feel healthy enough to go in and finish the job. Went to hide, hope to feel better, wait for us. But from what I could see, it’s only the one guy.”

Parker turned and looked back toward the cottages. “So he’s there, probably in the cottage between ours and his truck”

“That’s where I’d put him,” Wycza agreed. “Where he can watch, but where he can also feel like he’s got a way out if he needs it.”

“And he’s wounded, or maybe he’s dead now,” Parker said. “Wounded bad, or just scraped.”

“He didn’t take a shot at me,” Wycza pointed out.

“Waiting for the money,” Parker said. “If he’s alive, that’s what he’s doing.”

Wycza nodded. “That’s what I’d do, I was him. And alive.”

“If we burn him out,” Parker said, “the flames’ll bring every volunteer fireman in a hundred miles. If we just go in to get him, he’s got too many chances to get us first.”

“Fuck him, leave him there,” Wycza said.

“I can’t do that,” Parker said. “Come on, let’s go talk to Lou.”

4

Before they reached the main road, they saw headlights turn in, then go black. “The money’s here,” Wycza said.

They continued on, and found the van stopped behind the Hyundai, its sliding side door open, spilling light onto the road. Mike Carlow, without his chauffeur’s cap and coat, stood beside the van listening to Lou Sternberg explain the situation, while Noelle sat in the van doorway, feet flat on the ground as she leaned against the side wall to her right. She was still in her invalid filmy white, and she looked like a ghost.

“Here they are now,” Sternberg said.

Wycza said, “Noelle? You okay?”

“Not yet,” she told him, “but I will be.”

“She got dried out,” Carlow explained. “What’s the situation back there?”

“Three dead bikers,” Parker said. “The one that got them’s holed up in another cabin, waiting for the money. He’s wounded, we don’t know how bad.”

Sternberg said, “They fought each other even before they got the goods?”

“No, it’s somebody else. No idea who.”

Carlow said, “He gunned down three bikers by himself, and now he’s in there waiting to take usdown?”

Wycza said, “He’s ambitious, we know that much.”

Sternberg said, “We’re here, the money’s here. Let him stay and rot, we’ll go somewhere else.”

Parker said, “I need to know who he is.”

“Idon’t,” Sternberg said.

Parker said, “But who is this guy? Where’d he come from? Is he going to be behind me some day?”

“He won’t be behind me,”Sternberg said. “I’ll be home in London.”

“What I’m thinking about,” Parker said, “is Cathman. I’ve been waiting for something from him, and I’m wondering is this it.”

Wycza said, “Cathman? Parker, from the way you describe that guy Cathman, that isn’t him back there.”

“No, but he could be fromhim.”

“Parker,” Sternberg said, “you understand the situation. You’ve got a link with this Cathman, the rest of us don’t. He may know your name and your phone number, but he doesn’t know a damn thing about me. You got a guy laying in ambush down in there? Fine, let him lay, I’m going home. We did good work tonight, and I’m ready to see the money, put it in my pocket, call British Air in the morning.”

“I’ve got to go along with Lou,” Noelle said. “I’m tired, and I feel like shit, and all I want to do is sleep and eat and drink. I don’t want to fight anymore.”

“Okay, you’re right,” Parker said. “Whoever this guy is, he’s my problem, not any of yours. Mike, can you get the van around this car or do I need to move it out of the way?”

Carlow said, “You need to move it, if I’m going in. Why am I going in?”

‘Just to get away from the road, so no county cop comes along while we’re splitting the take.”

Carlow laughed and said, “Thatwould be a moment. Yeah, move it over. Noelle, honey, you wanna get in or you wanna get out?”

For answer, she hunkered back and drew her legs up under her. Seated in the van doorway, cross-legged, slumped forward, she looked like an untrustworthy oracle.

Parker jigged the Hyundai forward and back to the side of the road, waited while Carlow drove around him, then got out and walked with the others after the van. They were all stained red when the brake lights came on, and then it was dark again, except for the van’s interior light, gleaming on the ghostly Noelle.

Carlow climbed from the driver’s seat into the back of the van and slid the box out from the wheelchair. It was crammed full of the white plastic bags, four of them.

“Excuse me, Noelle,” Sternberg said, and climbed up past her into the van. The rear seats had been removed in there, to make room for the wheelchair, which was now pushed as far back as possible, leaving a gray-carpeted open area. Carlow and Sternberg and Noelle sat on the carpet in this area, facing in, and began to count the money, while Parker and Wycza stood outside, sometimes watching, sometimes looking and listening up and down the road.

Three hundred nineteen thousand, seven hundred twenty dollars. Parker had had three thousand in expenses, that he took out first. Sternberg did the math on the rest, and said, “That’s sixty-three thousand, three hundred forty-four apiece.”

“You each take sixty-three,” Parker said. “I’ll take the change for dealing with the guy back there.”

“A bargain,” Carlow said.

Noelle had a handbag that would carry her share, and the others used the white plastic bags. In Parker’s bag, there was sixty-seven thousand, seven hundred twenty dollars.

The four of them would take the van, leaving the Hyundai, which nobody wanted. Wycza said, “Coming out, use the Lexus. The key’s in the ashtray.”

“I will,” Parker agreed. “Lou, I’ll take back that other gun now.”

“Right.” Sternberg handed it to him, and said, “Call me again sometime.”

“I will.”

Carlow drove, Wycza in the seat beside him, Sternberg and Noelle seated on the floor in back. Only the back-up lights were on as Carlow backed past the Hyundai and out to the main road. Parker stood watching, and saw the van’s headlights come on as it swung out and away, to the right.

Darkness again. It would take a few minutes to get his night vision back. He had the Python in his left hip pocket, and held the automatic in his right hand, the bag of money in his left. He walked down the road toward the cottages, and when he could see a little better he chose a spot where there was a thick double-trunked maple just to the right of the road. He went around behind it, put the plastic bag on the ground against its trunk, and brushed some dirt and stones and decayed leaves over it.

As he straightened, headlights came, fast, from the cottages. He stayed behind the tree, and the pickup went by, racing too hard for this road, jouncing all over the place. Whoever was at the wheel was impossible to see, and more than impossible to shoot.

The pickup lunged by. Parker stepped out into the roadway and listened, and there was a sudden shriek of brakes when the driver came across the Hyundai.

No crash, though; he managed to get around it. Then silence.

Parker put the Python in his right hand, and walked on toward the cottages.

5

Now there were lights in two cottages, including the one where Parker and Wycza had decided the unknown shooter must be holed up. Parker was certain there was nobody left alive back here, but he was cautious anyway. He took the same route as last time, around to the right, beyond the reach of the glowing windows. Around the last cottage, then hunkered low to go past the space between cottages, where the pickup used to be parked. And then, silently but swiftly, across the screened-in porch to the cottage that was now lit up.

When Parker had checked out all the cottages, back when they’d first moved in here, this back door had not been locked, and it still wasn’t. He stepped through into the kitchen, and it was dark, the lit rooms farther away, living room and bath.

Parker listened. Nothing. He crossed the kitchen to the hall doorway, and stopped. Nothing. He went into the hall and looked through the bathroom doorway at a mess. Half a roll of paper towels on the sink, bloody individual paper towels in the sink and the bathtub and on the floor. Blood smears on the sink.

The dark bedrooms he passed were empty, and showed no signs of use. In the living room, a floor lamp at one end of the sofa was lit, shining down on a dark stain on the flower-pattern slipcover. Parker crossed to look at the stain, and it was blood, some dry, some still sticky. It made an irregular pattern, just at the end of the sofa.

Wounded. Wycza had been right about that, about the blood spatters on the outside wall next door. Headshot, it looked like, except the guy was too active for that. He’d managed, after he’d been shot, to go on and kill the third biker.

But he hadn’t had the strength to switch the lights off. He had to know Parker and the others had gone away with the place dark, and would know something was wrong if they came back and it was all lit up. But he hadn’t had the strength to do anything about it. He’d come over here to collapse, to try to get his strength back.

So it wasn’t that he’d let Wycza live, in order to wait for the rest to show up with the money. He had passed out over here, he’d never seen Wycza at all.

And then came to. Patched himself one way and another, and took off, knowing the ambush was ruined, the money wouldn’t be coming here.

Where would he go now? Who the hell was he?

Maybe Cathman had some answers.

6

It was a long night, and getting longer. Parker had walked out the dirt road to get the plastic bag of money and bring it back here and now it was inside the window well of the right rear door of the Lexus. The automatic he’d taken from the guard on the ship had been flung out over the slope into the river. The two simple incendiaries had been set, one in each lit cottage. There would be no surfaces for the technicians to scan for fingerprints. There’d be plenty left here, though, to give the law things to think about.

If he’d done the fuses right, the two fires should start three hours from now, after seven in the morning; daylight, so they could burn longer before being noticed. Yawning, forcing himself to stay awake, Parker got behind the wheel of the Lexus and steered it out to the main road, intending to head north, to deal with Cathman, one way or another. But when he saw the Hyundai, he stopped.

He rubbed his eyes, and the grizzle on his face. Wycza had been wrong, dammit. He had the big man’s flaw of every once in a while feeling sorry for the weak.

Greg Hanzen knew their faces, he knew a link to Parker through Pete Rudd, he could describe the getaway from the ship. He could let the law know for sure that the money had not come off with the heisters. And his car was here, next to a scene of a lot of trouble that had to be connected with the robbery, and no way for Parker to get rid of it.

Cathman was to the north, Albany, an hour away. Hanzen was half an hour to the south, at his landing. Or, if he was conscious by now, maybe he’d made his way to a hospital somewhere, a river rat with a broken jaw on a night when a major robbery takes place on the river. Would the cops ask him questions?

I’ve got to look, Parker told himself. If he’s there, that’s that. If he’s gone, I don’t pursue it, I let it play out as it plays.

He turned right and drove south. Ten minutes later, he saw the first lights he’d seen, a 24-hour gas station and convenience store. He filled the tank and bought a coffee and a glazed sugar doughnut, and drove on south, finishing the coffee just before the turnoff in to Hanzen’s landing.

He switched off his headlights as he crossed the railroad tracks, and ahead he saw the glow of some other light. He stopped in the clearing, got out of the Lexus, and the light came from Hanzen’s boat, still beached up onto the shore. A not-very-bright light was on in the cabin, and the cabin door was open, facing the river.

Parker didn’t get into the boat; he was too tired to climb over the side. He held the Python in his right hand and walked down beside the boat until the water was ankle-deep, cold inside his shoes, where he could look back in at the cabin, and Hanzen was in there. He was awake and miserable, hunched over his battery lantern. He’d tied a towel under his jaw and over the top of his head, like somebody in a comic strip with a toothache. He sensed Parker, and looked at him with watery eyes. “Now what?” he said. His speech was mushy.

Parker said, “I came to tell you, your problems are over after all.”

7

Driving north toward Albany on the Taconic Parkway, Parker watched both dawn and a heavy cloud cover move in from the west. He drove with the windows open, for the rush of air to keep him awake.

One more detail, and it was over. He’d take a motel room, sleep the day and night away, not try to get back to Claire until tomorrow.

Howell should never have given Cathman Parker’s name and phone number. When he’d done it, of course, Howell hadn’t known he’d soon be dead, unable to keep control of what was going on. Still, he shouldn’t have exposed Parker this way.

Before Claire, it was simpler. Then, there was no phone number that would reach Parker, no “address” where you could put your hand and touch him. It was harder now to stay remote, but it could still be done. It was just more work, that’s all.

North, and then west, over the Hudson toward Albany and the gray day. It was after six, and there was starting to be traffic, early-morning workers. Once Parker left highway to drive on city streets, there were a few school buses.

Delmar was still mostly asleep. The supermarket where he’d left the Subaru when he’d visited Cathman at home that one time was not yet open, and the blacktop expanse of its parking lot was empty. One of the few houses in the neighborhood with lights gleaming inside the windows was Cathman’s, both upstairs and down. And in the next block, parked on the right side of the street in front of a two-family house, was the pickup truck.

Parker drove on another half block, looking at the pickup in his rearview mirror, and there was no question. He stopped the Lexus, rolled up its windows, locked it, and walked back to the pickup.

It had some new dents and scratches on it. There was a rental company decal just under the right headlight, like a teardrop. The guy had gone away without locking the truck, and when Parker opened the driver’s door to look inside there was a little dried blood on the seatback; not a lot, but some.

These trucks have storage spaces behind the bench seats. Parker tilted the seatback forward, and looked at a shotgun. It too had a decal on it, like the truck, this one smaller, gold letters on black, on the side of the butt, just above the base. It read “MONROVILLE P.D.”

Monroville? Did he know that name? And what was this guy doing with a police department shotgun?

And how come he was visiting Cathman?

Parker didn’t feel tired any more. He shut the pickup’s door, and walked toward Cathman’s house, number 437.

8

As before, shades were drawn over the windows of the enclosed porch downstairs and the front windows above. Light gleamed behind the shades, upstairs and down.

Parker took the same route in as when he’d come here wearing the utility company jacket. This time, it was early morning, nobody around, no traffic on this residential side street, so he just walked forward as though he belonged here. With the shades drawn in the house, nobody could watch the outside without shifting a shade, making a movement that he would see.

The kitchen door was locked again, and the lock still didn’t matter. He went through it, and then stopped to listen. Nothing; no sound anywhere.

Slowly he moved through the house. Three lamps burned in the living room, but no one was there. Two magazines and a newspaper lay messily beside one armchair.

Parker continued on, checked the enclosed porch, and the entire downstairs was empty. The staircase leading up was dark, but light shone around the corner up there. He held the Python across his chest and went up sideways, slowly. The stairs were carpeted, and though the carpet was worn the steps didn’t squeak.

There was a short upstairs hall, with doorways off it, none of the doors closed. Two of the rooms showed light, and from his last time here he knew the one on the left was Cathman’s bedroom, and the one at the end was his office.

The dark room on the right was empty, and so was its closet. Cathman himself was in his bedroom, in bed, asleep, curled up on his side, frowning. The ceiling light and a bedside lamp were both lit. Parker silently crossed the room and checked the closet, and no one was hiding there.

No one else was upstairs at all. Parker came last to the office, and it was empty, too, and where the hell was the guy from the pickup truck? It made sense he was linked to Cathman some way, that had made sense from the time he showed up at the cottages, and it made even more sense when his pickup was parked a block from here. But Cathman is sleeping with his lights on, and there’s nobody else around, so something in the equation doesn’t make sense after all.

The last time Parker had been in this house the office had been the neatest room in it, as though Cathman were demonstrating his professionalism to himself, convincing himself he deserved a hearing and respect and a job. This time, three or four sheets of lined paper were askew on the desk, covered with handwriting in black ink, with a lot of editing and second thoughts.

What’s with Cathman now? Why was he afraid to sleep in the dark? What idea is he trying so hard to express?

Standing over the desk, Python in right hand, Parker moved the sheets around with his left index finger. The writing was very neat and legible, a bureaucrat’s penmanship, but there were a lot of crossings-out and inserted additions. Numbers in circles were at the top left of each page. Parker picked up the page marked “1” and read:

“Gambling is not only a vice itself, but is an attraction to other vice. Theft, prostitution, usury, drug dealing and more, all follow in gambling’s train.”

Oh; it was his dead horse again, still being beaten. Parker was about to put the page back down on the desk, but something tugged at his attention, and he skimmed the page to the bottom, then went on to page 2, and began to see that this was more than just the dead horse, more than just Cathman’s usual whine. This time, he was building toward something, some point, some deal

“Knowing the dangers, seeing those dangers ignored by the elected officials around me, believing it was my duty to expose the dangers and give the people of the State of New York the opportunity to choose for themselves what path they might take, I have, for some time, cultivated contacts with certain underworld characters. I felt very out of place among these people, but I knew it was my duty to stay with them. I was convinced that the presence of so much cash money on that gambling ship, so large and obvious and available, would have to attract criminals, as bees are attracted to the honey pot. And now we see I was right.”

This was it, this was coming to the point at last. There’d always been something wrong about Cathman, something that didn’t ring true, and it was tied up with his fixation on gambling. And now Parker himself had made an appearance in this diatribe, along with Marshall Howell, and the others, all of them certain underworld characters. And all to what purpose?

Parker read on. More pounding on the dead horse, more self-congratulation. Parker skimmed to the bottom, and moved on to page 3, and midway down it he read:

“My recent contacts with career criminals have made it possible for me to be of very material assistance in capturing the gang involved in the crime and also in recovering at least part of the stolen money. In return for my assistance, which could be obtained nowhere else, and which I am offering freely and completely, I would expect proper publicity for my contribution to the solution of this crime. That publicity must include my reasons for having sought out these criminals in the first place, which is my conviction that gambling inevitably brings crime in its wake. I would need the opportunity to make these views widely known to the public. I would insist on at least one press conference

“

Insane. The son of a bitch is insane. The dead horse is riding him.He’s so determined to prove that gambling leads to crime that he’s got to rig the crime. He went out to find people to commit the crime for him; first Howell, then Parker. Point them at the ship, give them every bit of help they want, so after they do their job he can say, “See? I was right. Gambling led to the robbery, so shut down the gambling ship. And listen to me from now on, don’t shunt me off into retirement, as though I was old and useless and not valuable any more.”

There was no way to make that fly. Was he so far gone into his own dreams, his own fantasy, that he didn’t see it couldn’t work?

Does Cathman really believe he can tell the law he knows details about a robbery, but he won’t give them over unless he gets a press conference? If he clams up, that’s already a crime. He’ll have no choice, once he sends this goddam manifesto to whoever he’s going to send it to the governor, probably, being the megalomaniac lunatic he is he’ll have no choice but to tell the law everything he knows.

And everything he knows is Parker.

“at the tone seven-thirty. Expect high clouds today, seasonable temperatures

“

Cathman’s radio alarm clock. It went on, talking about this and that, and soon it would tell Cathman his designer robbery had come off according to plan. Time he should type up that letter neat and send it out.

Along with what? What else would Cathman have to give? Parker’s name and phone number written down somewhere. Maybe a diary? How much of his own involvement with the heist was he figuring to admit? (They’d get the whole thing out of him in five minutes, which he wouldn’t be likely to realize.)

Cathman is a danger and an irritation and a lunatic, but he has to be talked to, for just a little while, to make sure all of the danger and all of the lunacy is known about. What else are Cathman and his idle hands up to?

Parker folded the four pages, folded them again, put them in his left hip pocket. Then he picked up the Python from the desk and walked down the hall and stopped in the bedroom doorway.

Cathman lay on his back now, pajama’d arms over the covers, still frowning as he stared at the ceiling. He didn’t notice Parker right away, and when the excited news announcer began the story of last night’s robbery all he did was close his eyes, as though the effort to make that robbery happen had merely left him exhausted.

“Turn it off,” Parker said.

Cathman’s eyes snapped open. He stared at Parker in terror. He didn’t move.

Parker pointed the Python at the radio. “Turn it off or I shoot it off.”

Cathman blinked at the gun, at Parker’s face, at the radio. At last he hunched himself up onto his left elbow and reached over to shut it off. Then he moved upward in the bed so he could slump with his back against the headboard. He looked dull, weary, as though his sleep had not been restful. He said, “I didn’t know you’d come here. I didn’t think you’d actually give me the money.”

Parker almost laughed at him. “Give you the money? I just read your confession.”

“My con? Oh. That’s not a confession.”

“The cops will think it is.”

Cathman sat up straighter, smoothing the covers with his hands, looking at Parker more carefully. He had finally realized his survival was at issue here. He said, “You don’t think I intend to mail that, do you?”

“With copies to the media.”

“Certainly not,” Cathman said. He was a bureaucrat, he lied effortlessly. He said, “It occurred to me, there was a remote possibility you people might get caught, and then, what if you implicated me?In that case, I had that letter to show, the letter I would have said I was just about to mail.”

“What else” Parker said, and too late he saw Cathman’s eyes shift, and something solid shut down his brain.

9

Voices, far away, down a yellow tunnel, then rushing forward:

“All I want is the money.”

“Why would I know where any”

“You ranthis thing! It’s yourrob!”

“I never did! I’m not a thief!”

“He’s here.Look, look at him, he’s here.”

Handcuffs, behind back. Pain, in small mean lightning bolts, in the back of the head.

“I didn’t know he was coming here, I never thought he”

“I’ve been watching. You think you can lie to me? I’ve watched this house. He was here before, dressed like from the electric company, he spent hourshere”

“I never expectedhim to”

“I’m thinking, who is this guy? He’s not from the electric company, breaking in, staying hours.”

“He wasn’t supposed to”

“You came home. You talked with him.”

“He was in my”

“You drank wine withhim!”

Lying on the floor. Legs free. That idiot Cathman silent now. This one isn’t connected to Cathman after all, he was following him, watching him. Why?

“I didn’t hear everything you said, I came over after you came home, I listened at the side window. You called him Parker and he said he needed police ID and there was something about an assemblyman and you asked him when he was going to commit the robbery and he wouldn’t tell you.”

This one has been here all along, bird-dogging, waiting for it to happen. Who the hell is he? Where did he come from?

Cathman finally had his voice back: “You’ve still got it wrong. I’m afraid of that gun of yours, I won’t pretend I’m not, but you’re still wrong. I don’t know where the money is. You’ll have to ask him,if you didn’t kill him.”

“I didn’t kill him, but let’s wake him up. Go get a glass of water from the bathroom.”

“I’m awake.”

Parker rolled over onto his back, as much as he could with his hands cuffed behind him, and tried not to wince. When he moved, the pain in his head gave an extra little kick. He opened his eyes and squinted upward.

The guy was youngish, pudgy, thick-necked, in wrinkled chinos and a pale blue dress shirt; Parker had never seen him before in his life. His right ear was covered by a bulky makeshift bandage, what looked like a length of duct tape over several thicknesses of toilet paper. A red scar pointed to the bandage along his right cheekbone.

The biker back at the cottages had come very close, almost close enough. The .45 automatic slug does a lot of damage even on the near misses, and that’s what this had been. The bullet scraped facial bone, took out an ear, and kept going.

Parker nodded at the bandage. “You got any ear left down in there?”

The guy looked surprised, and almost glad. “Are you wising off with me?”

“Tell him, Mr. Parker,” Cathman said. “Tell him I have nothing to do with it.”

The guy laughed. He enjoyed being in charge. “Oh, now he’s mister,is he?” He held a little .38 revolver in his right hand, which he pointed at Parker as he said, “I bet, if I shoot you in the ankle, and then ask a question, you’ll answer it. Whadaya think?”

“I think this is the wrong neighborhood for gunshots,” Parker said. “I think it’ll fill up with cops, and I don’t think anybody in this room wants that. If you’d like to think with your brain instead of your gun, reach in my left hip pocket and read Cathman’s confession.”

That threw the guy off-stride. “His what?”

Cathman babbled, “It was a letter, I was never going to send it, I needed a”

“Read it,” Parker said. With difficulty, he rolled the other way. “Then we can talk.”

The guy was cautious, and not completely an amateur. He came the long way around Parker, staying away from his feet, crouching down behind him, touched the barrel of the revolver to the back of his neck, and held it there while he pulled the folded pages out of his pocket. Then he stood and backed away to the doorway, where Parker could see him again.

Cathman said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

The guy was struggling to unfold the pages while not letting go of the gun or looking away from Parker. Distracted, he said, “Go on, go on.”

Cathman, looking like a large sad child in his yellow and green striped pajamas, got out of the bed and padded barefoot into the connecting bathroom, while the guy got the pages open at last and started to read.

Parker rolled again and managed to sit up, then moved backward until he could lean against the foot of the bed. He looked around on the floor and didn’t see the Python, so it was probably in the guy’s pocket. He watched him read, and thought about how to deal with this situation.

‘Jesus Christ.” The guy had finished. He dropped the pages on the floor and looked at Parker and said, “He’s a fucking lunatic.”

“Yes, he is.”

“He set you up to do it, so he could turn you in. That isn’t even entrapment, I don’t know what the fuck that is.”

“Stupidity.”

“All right.” The guy was more relaxed now, as though Cathman being an amateur and an idiot had created a bond between the two of them. He said, “So if you didn’t come here to divvy up the money, or anything like that, why did you come?”

“To kill him.”

“Hah. No loose ends.”

“That’s right.”

“I wish I’d done it that way myself, years ago,” the guy said. “All right, Mr. Parker, I want in. I’ve got you, but I don’t want you, I want money. Are your partners dead, too?”

“No. We know each other, we work together.”

“So they’re waiting for you to come back, mission accomplished, the loose cannon dealt with.”

“Right. And we divvy the money and go our ways.”

“So if I kill you,” the guy said, “I can’t find them, and I can’t get any money. But if I let you live, I’ve got to have money. I need money, that’s what it comes down to.”

“I could see that.”

“So what’s your offer?”

“We got over four hundred thousand,” Parker said.

The guy frowned. “The radio said three and a half.”

“I don’t know about that. Usually they estimate high. All I know is, we got over four.” Because, to make his story work, there had to seem to be enough for everybody. “There’s five of us, so that’s eighty apiece, a little more than eighty. You help me in two ways, and”

“Like letting you live.”

Parker shook his head. “You aren’t gonna kill me, because I’m not a threat to you like this, and I’m no use to you dead. Don’t talk as though we’re both ignorant.”

“Well, fuck me,” the guy said, with a surprised laugh. “You talk pretty tough for somebody sitting under my gun. You think I never killed anybody?”

“I think you never killed anybody when you didn’t have a reason for it,” Parker said. “Do you want to listen to my proposition?”

The guy shrugged. “Help you two ways, you said.”

“First, kill Cathman. I need him dead. I can’t do it myself laced up like this, so either you do it or unhook me so I can do it myself.”

“We’ll work on that,” the guy said. “What’s the other?”

“For that, I do need to be unhooked,” Parker said.

“I don’t think so. For what?”

“I’ve got to search in here and in the office. I’ve got to see what else he put on paper that could make trouble for me.”

“I’ll search for you. You tell me what you’re looking for.”

“No.”

The guy looked at him, and waited, and then said, “No? That’s it, no?”

“That’s it. No. Do you want to hear what your side is?”

“This should be good.”

“Why not? If you kill Cathman, or let me do it, and let me run my search in here, that makes you a partner. I won’t have trouble with the others, so neither will you. We’ll each be getting a little over eighty. So we take twelve out of each of us, that still gives us almost seventy apiece, which is still good, and sixty for you. Is sixty enough for you?”

Clearly, the guy would try to figure out how to get it all, how not to have any partners at the end of the day, but just as clearly he’d also try to figure out how to make it look as though he was content with a piece. Should he pretend to think sixty was enough? Parker watched him think it through, and at last the guy grinned a little and said, “If things’d worked out the way I wanted, I’d have it all. Tell me why didn’t you come back to the cabins.”

“Youwere there?” Parker said. “Did you by any chance run into some bikers?”

The guy’s hand moved toward his wounded ear, but then lowered again. He said, “You know about them.”

“We had a guy with a boat,” Parker told him, “for when we left the ship. He sold us out to those people, but when we got in his boat it didn’t feel right, so we made him tell us what he’d done.”

“So where did you go instead?”

“His landing. He’s got a place upstream from the cottages, we went there. He had a whole operation up there, a shack by the water, he grows marijuana in peat moss bags suspended on the water. That’s his link with the bikers, he’s the farmer, they’re the processors.”

“A shack on the water,” the guy said. “I’ve heard about that peat moss business, it’s been tried before. Is that where your partners are, the shack?”

“Yes.”

“Telephone there?”

“Of course not.”

“And where’s the boat guy?”

“In the river.”

The guy thought it over. Parker let him have a minute, but then figured it was time to distract him: “Cathman’s been gone quite a while.”

“What?” Startled, the guy called, “Cathman!” When there was no answer, he strode over to the shut door and hit it twice with the gun butt. Then he pulled open the door and took one step in, and stopped.

Parker said, “Pills?”

The guy stepped back from the doorway. “Well, there’s one from your wish list. Or almost. The color of his face, the sounds in his throat, if we called nine one one right now and got the EMT over here on the double, they just might save him. What do you think?”

“I think,” Parker said, “we should respect his wishes.”

10

Parker thought he was probably a cop. The way he handled himself, some of the things he’d said, turns of phrase. And the shotgun in the truck being from a police department. And that he just happened to be traveling with handcuffs.

Some kind of rogue cop, running away from trouble he’d made for himself, needing a bankroll to start over. Somehow, he’d heard about the ship heist, decided to deal himself in. Wound up at the cottages, same as the three bikers, so all they did was screw up each other’s ambush.

The question was, where was his road in? It seemed as though it had to be one of the other four people in the job, but none of them looked right for the part. It hadn’t been Cathman, who’d had a different agenda, it wasn’t Parker, so who else could it be?

Dan Wycza; Lou Sternberg; Mike Carlow; Noelle Braselle. He couldn’t see this mangled cop cozying up with any of them.

Anyway, if it was one of them, wouldn’t this guy know more than he does? But what else could it be?

Maybe, a little later, he’d get a chance to ask that question. But for now, they still had to negotiate their way through this matter of the search. Parker needed to make that search, because the alternative was to uproot Claire and start all over again somewhere else, and if he did that this time he’d be doing it again, and Claire wouldn’t be happy on the constant go. Claire liked a nest.

“In here,” Parker said, meaning in the bedroom, “you can do it for me. Open drawers, take out anything that’s paper, throw it on the bed, let me look at it, and we take away what I want. In the office down the hall there, we could do it this way. I go first, and stop in the doorway. You undo the cuffs, and I walk forward to the desk, so you’re always behind me. You stay in the doorway with the gun on me. I do my search. Then I walk backward to the door with my wrists behind my back, you cuff me again. Or you could just cuff me in front, then I could”

The guy laughed at him. “Sure,” he said. “Cuff you in front. I could ask you to hold my gun for me, too.”

“Then the other way. You’re behind me, you’re armed, if I try to do something you don’t have to kill me, just wound me. What am I gonna do about you at the desk? Throw a pen at you?”

“I’ll have to search it first,” the guy said. “Maybe you happen to know there’s a gun in one of those drawers.”

“Cathman, with a gun? Search away. You want to help me to my feet?”

“No,” the guy said, and backed into the hall. “I don’t need to be that close to you, you’ll work it out.”

Of course he would. Well, it had been worth a try. Using the foot of the bed to push against, Parker turned himself partway around, got one leg under his torso, and pushed upward against the bed until he was on one knee. From there it was easier, except for one second when he wasn’t sure he’d keep his balance. But he did, again by leaning on the bed, and there he was, standing.

“I knew you could do it,” the guy said. “Come on out, lead the way. We’ll do this office first.”

They went down the hall and into the office, and the guy had Parker stand in the corner between the two windowed walls, facing the wall, while he did a quick open-slam of all the drawers in the desk. Then he said, “Okay, good. A lotta shit in here, you ask me. Back up to the door.”

Parker did, and felt the vibrations of metal scraping on metal as the key moved around the lock.

“Stand still, I’m doing this one-handed.”

“Right.”

The cuffs came off. “Walk.”

Parker walked. His head still ached, and now his wrists were sore. He rubbed them as he walked across the room, giving himself a fireman’s grip and kneading the wrists, and then sat at the desk.

A lot of shit in the drawers, as the guy had said, but not all of it useless. He palmed a paper clip, one of the larger thicker ones, and when he bent to open the bottom drawer he clipped it to the front of his shirt, below desk level. There were also ballpoint pens, simple plain ones that didn’t retract. He held one up, showing it to the guy in the doorway, saying, “I could use a pen. Okay?”

The guy snickered at him. “To throw at me?”

“Sure.”

“You want it, keep it.”

Parker dropped the pen in his shirt pocket, and kept searching, and at the end he had two pages from this year’s weekly memo book, one with Marshall Howell’s name and his own written there (the name “Parker” was followed by a question mark), and one with that phone number of his that Howell had given away. He had also smeared his palms over everything he’d touched. There was nothing else here either of danger or of use.

He held up the two torn-off pieces of paper and said, “I want to pocket these.”

The guy shrugged. His carelessness meant it didn’t matter what Parker did to avoid the law, he was dead meat anyway. He said, “Go ahead, you aren’t armed.”

Heisters don’t say armed,they say carryingor heavy,because a gun will be heavy in the pocket. Cops are armed.They don’t carry their guns in a pocket.

“I’m done,” Parker said, the two papers stowed away.

“Show me your hands.”

“Sure.” Parker held up empty hands, turned them to show the palms and the backs, fingers splayed out.

“Okay. Now do like we said. Stand up, turn around, back over to me.”

Parker stood, and as he turned he slid the paperclip into his right hand, held between the ball of the palm and the side of the thumb. The fingers of both hands were curled slightly. He backed across the room, seeing the guy indistinctly in the window ahead of him and to the right, and the guy backed across the hall. Very careful, very anxious.

“Okay, stop there.”

Parker stopped. The cold metal closed on his wrists again, and he heard the double snap. The guy tugged once on the cuffs to be sure they were locked in place, then said, “Okay, let’s go.”

“The bedroom.”

“Fine, fine.”

Parker went first, and in the bedroom he said, “I need those papers you dropped on the floor. Don’t tell me to pick them up, all right?”

The guy laughed. “I’ll help you out,” he said. “Go stand on the other side of the bed.” Too far away to kick him in the face, in other words.

“Sure,” Parker said, and walked over there, and through the open bathroom doorway he could see the mound of yellow and green striped cloth huddled between sink and toilet, like the laundry waiting for the maid. Well, you made a lot of trouble, Cathman, Parker thought, but tomorrow people will still pay money to see the next card.

The guy picked up Cathman’s four-page fantasy and put it in his own left side trouser pocket. He said, “Anything else?”

“Drawers. Dresser, bedside table. Anything paper.”

“I know, I know, toss it on the bed. You stay over there.”

“Naturally.”

While the guy was opening and closing drawers, Parker carefully shifted the paperclip to a more secure position, inside his curled fingers. The search was indifferent, but complete, and produced very little paper. Theater tickets, a medical prescription, a crossword puzzle magazine. Parker looked at it all, scattered on the bed, and thought at least some of this stuff would give this guy’s fingerprints to the law; the shiny magazine cover, for instance. He had to know it himself, so he had to already be in too deep shit to worry about such things. Which meant he wasn’t exactly careless in fact, he was very careful but he was reckless. So he’d be a little more hair-triggered and dangerous, but also possibly more readily confused and manipulated.

“Okay,” Parker said. “I’m ready.”

11

Then the next problem was the vehicle. They’d come downstairs, Parker being careful to rub along the wall, not wanting to lose his balance without hands to protect him in a fall, and the guy said, “My truck’s a block from here. You just walk a little ahead of me.”

“You’ll want to take my car,” Parker told him. “It’s about a block and a half that way.”

“Leave it, you can come back for it,” the guy said. “We’ll take my truck.”

“You want the car,” Parker insisted. He knew the guy was thinking about that shotgun in the truck, and wanted it with him, but Parker was thinking about the sixty-seven thousand dollars in the window well of the car.

The guy gave him an irritated look. “What’s your problem? You think the car’s more comfortable, because you’re cuffed? I don’t care about that. We’ll take the truck.”

“The point is,” Parker told him, “when we drive in there, if we’re in the car, they won’t shoot us.”

The guy frowned at him, trying to work out if that was true.

Parker said, “We just pulled a major job last night, everybody’s tense. We killed the guy owned that shack, we know the kind of people he hung out with. Some truck shows up, they won’t think twice.”

“I don’t know about this,” the guy said.

“Whatever you need out of the truck, get it and throw it in the car.” And all the time, he had to be careful to say “truck” and not “pickup,” because the guy hadn’t called it a pickup and he wasn’t supposed to know Parker had ever seen it.

Many things, though, were making him suspicious and antsy. He said, “What do you mean, what I need out of the truck?”

“Suitcase, whatever you’ve got,” Parker explained. “You aren’t carrying anything onyou.”

“What is this car?”

“Lexus. A block and a half that way. The keys are in my right side pocket here.”

“Keys.” The guy didn’t even like that, having to come close enough to get hold of the keys.

Parker knew they both knew what he might try at that point; the lunge, the kick, get the guy down and use the feet on him, hoping to get at the key for the cuffs later. But Parker wouldn’t do it that way; there was too much chance the .38 could go off, and nobody could know for sure where the bullet would go.

Nothing to do but wait. Words of reassurance would not reassure, they’d merely make him more spooked than ever. Parker stood there, patient, and the guy slowly worked it through, and then he said, “Face to the wall. Put your forehead on the wall. Don’t move anything.” Absolutely a cop.

Again the cool gun barrel touched the back of his neck. The hand burrowed into his pocket like a small animal, and withdrew, and then the barrel also withdrew.

“All right.”

Parker turned around, and the guy had retreated to the middle of the living room. The keys to the Lexus were in his left hand, the .38 in his right. “Nowwe go,” he said. “I’ll open the front door and step to the side. You go out, I follow. You stay just ahead of me and we walk to your car.”

“A block and a half, in cuffs? What if somebody sees them?”

“Maybe I’m arresting you.”

“And what if the somebody’s a patrol car? This is a middle-class neighborhood, no crime but a lot of voters. This is where the cops like to patrol.”

The guy started to sneer, as though about to defend cops, but then must have realized how stupid that would be. Instead, he looked around, saw the shut closet door over near the front door, and went over to open it. He rummaged around and brought out a raincoat. “You’ll wear this,” he said. “Over your shoulders. Stand still.”

Parker stood still. The guy brought the raincoat to him, draped it on his shoulders, and stepped back to consider him. “Works fine,” he decided.

It probably did, though too short. “Okay,” Parker said. “Now what?”

“Now we walk,” the guy said, and opened the door.

The gray day was still gray, the neighborhood still mostly empty, people now off to their jobs or schools. Parker, with the guy to his left and one pace behind him, walked down the street, crossed to the other side after they’d passed where the pickup was parked over there, and stopped at the Lexus.

“Is it locked?”

“Of course.”

The guy unlocked it, and said, “Get in.”

“Two things,” Parker said. “Could you take this coat off me? Throw it in the back seat or on the ground or whatever you want. And just give me a hand on the elbow to help me in.”

“I’m your goddam nurse,” the guy said, and yanked the coat off him, and let it drop to the curb. “Get in the car, I’ll help if you need it.”

He needed it; balance was impossible, to shift from standing outside the car to sitting inside it. As he was about to topple, the guy grabbed his right elbow with his left hand, his right hand staying in his pocket with the .38. He pulled back, helped Parker get into position, seated there against his own arms pulled back behind him, and said, “Don’t move.” He reached across him to strap him in with the seat belt.

Parker said, “Safety first?”

“Mysafety first,” the guy said. Then he shut the door, and went around to get behind the wheel.

Parker said, “Where’s your truck?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I thought you wanted things from it.”

The guy started the engine. “Where to?” he said.

12

The question was gasoline. It had been a while since the Lexus had been refueled. Parker had planned to do that after he finished with Cathman and got his day’s sleep, and as he remembered, the last he’d looked at the gas gauge it had shown just under a quarter tank. It was hard to see that little arrow from this angle, in the passenger seat, and he didn’t want to be obvious about it.

He was trying now to go through the trips he’d taken with Mike Carlow, when they were looking for a place to stay, when they’d wound up at Tooler’s cottages. Different real estate agents had shown them different things, driven them on different back roads. It was important now to remember them right, which road led where.

He needed a destination that would fit in with the story he’d told, in case they were still together that long. But it would be best if he could arrange the route so they arrived at the right kind of gas station when the needle was looking low. A small station, isolated, not too many customers, one guy on duty, no mechanics. So remember those places, too, and the different roads, and the different places the real estate agents had shown them.

Tiredness kept trying to creep in on him, distract him, but the discomfort of having his arms pulled around behind him, and then the weight of his torso against his arms, kept him from getting groggy. He thought about undoing the cuffs now, but he was afraid the freedom would make him careless, permit him to move his arms a little to relieve the pressure, and alert the guy beside him. So he left the cuffs where they were.

At first it was all major highways, across the Hudson River out of Albany and then due east toward Massachusetts. This was called the Thruway Extension and at the state line it would met up with the Massachusetts Turnpike, one hundred fifty miles due east to Boston. A little before that, there was the north-south highway called the Taconic Parkway, the oldest major highway in the state, built in the twenties so the state government people in Albany would have easy access to New York City, one hundred fifty miles to the south and screw the rest of the state, which didn’t get a big road until the thruway came in, thirty years later.

The Taconic was the road Parker and the others had been using between the Tooler cottages and Albany, but not today. Some miles before that turnoff was State Route 9, also north-south. “We take that exit,” Parker said.

The guy was suspicious of everything. “Isn’t there a bigger road up ahead?”

“Out of our way, too far east,” Parker told him. “We crossed the river, remember? Now we gotta go south, and then back west to the river. This is the turn.”

The guy frowned, but took it, and they drove southward through low hills covered with trees wearing their bright green new spring leaves, and here and there a little town with one intersection and a traffic light. And a gas station, usually, but not the kind Parker wanted.

Time to get off this road. “You’ll take the next right,” he said. “There’s a dark brown church at the corner, little graveyard.”

But there wasn’t; a different intersection appeared, with a farm stand on the corner, all its display shelves empty, not yet open for the season, nothing yet grown ripe enough to sell.

The guy pulled to a stop in front of the empty stand and said, “All right, what’s the story?” He was driving with the .38 tucked into his belt, just behind the buckle, and now his right hand rested on the butt.

“It must be the next one,” Parker said.

“Where we headed? Just tell me where we’re going, and I’ll go there.”

“I can’t tell you that,” Parker said. “This isn’t my neighborhood, I just came here a few weeks ago to do the ship. I don’t know the names of things and route numbers and all that, I just know how to get from one place to another. I forgot about this intersection, that’s all, it’ll be the next one.”

“If it isn’t,” the guy said, “we’ll try a different idea.”

“Fine. It’s the next one.”

The guy started the Lexus forward, and three miles farther on they came to the intersection with the old brown church. “See?” Parker said. “I’m not an old-time native here, that’s all. But I know where I’m going. You take this right, and it comes to a T, and then you take the right off that.”

“The right? That sends me north again.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Parker said. “These roads twist all over the place, because of the hills, and because they laid out the farms before they laid out the roads. We won’t go north any more, don’t worry about it.”

But they would. The second right would send them north, to a different road that would send them west again, if they went that far. Parker was grateful for the cloud cover; if the sun was out, it would be a lot harder to move this guy around into the right position.

Before they reached the T, Parker glanced over at the dashboard to see the fuel-low warning light gleaming red. “How long’s that been on?”

The guy didn’t look down from the twisty road. “What?”

“Low on gas, the light’s on.”

The guy gave it a quick look. “We’re all right,” he said. “It isn’t far now, is it?”

“In and back out? I don’t know. How long’s the light been on?”

“Not long,” the guy said, but out of irritation, not conviction.

“You’re in charge,” Parker said, “but if I was driving, and I come across a gas station, I’d put in a few bucks.”

“We’re fine,” the guy said.

As they’d been driving, to ease the tendency to cramp in his shoulders and upper arms, Parker had been rolling his shoulders, exercising them from time to time, keeping them limber. The guy hadn’t liked it the first time he’d done it, but then he’d realized the reason, and hadn’t minded after that. Now, as they approached that T, Parker rolled his shoulders, and this time he hunched his butt forward just a little on the seat, which increased the pain and pressure on his arms at the same time that it gave his hands some room between his body and the seatback. The fingers of his left hand plucked the paperclip out of his right palm. Both hands worked at straightening one end of the clip. Then the fingers of his left hand found the lock in the middle of the cuffs and bent it up so that it gouged into his flesh, but the fingers of his right hand could insert the end of the clip, holding fast to the part that was still bent.

He’d done this before; it would be painful for a while now, but not impossible. He probed with the end of the clip, feeling the resistance, feeling where it gave. There.

“The T will be coming up in a couple minutes,” he said, the words covering the faint click, already muffled by the seat and his body, as the lock released on the right cuff.

That was enough. He could undo the left cuff later, and in the meantime it could be useful.

They reached the T, and turned right. Parker rolled his shoulders, clenched and released his hands. His arms stung as the blood moved sluggishly through them.

“We turn left up ahead,” he said. “There’s an intersection with a Getty station and a convenience store.”

“If it’s there,” the guy said.

“No, it’s there. I got the church off by one, but this is right. You see the sign? There it is.”

The red and white Getty gas station sign was the only thing out ahead of them that wasn’t green. It was a small place, two pumps, a small modular plastic shop behind it that had been built in an afternoon. There were fishermen’s landings nearby, and a few small manufacturing businesses tucked away discreetly in the hills, not to offend the weekenders with the sight of commerce, so there was enough business to keep this gas station open, but rarely was it busy.

It was empty now. The guy slowed for the intersection, and Parker kept quiet. Push him, and he’d push the other way. And if this place didn’t work, there was one cabin that had been shown to them by one of the real estate agents that they hadn’t liked because there was no easy way to get down to the river you were supposed to admire the view, not enter it but that would do very well now, if necessary. Be better if it hadn’t been rented to anybody, but Parker would take what came.

“Maybe I will stop.”

Parker nodded, but didn’t say anything. The guy angled in toward the pumps. “I also gotta take a leak,” he said. Parker had been counting on that. Almost always, people want to take a leak before they go into something dangerous or intensive or important to them. This guy didn’t want to face five armed people that he meant to rob, and be thinking about his bladder.

“I could do the same,” Parker said.

“You can wait,” the guy told him. “Encourage you to get us there quicker.” He pulled his shirttail out, so it would cover the gun in his belt, and climbed out of the Lexus, shutting the door.

Parker sat facing front while the guy pumped gas, and then watched to see if he’d pay first or go to the men’s room first, and he headed around the side to the men’s room.

The second he was out of sight, Parker unhooked the seat belt and got out of the car. The cuffs dangled from his left wrist. He put his fingers through the right cuff, and held it like brass knuckles, as he strode across the asphalt and around to the side of the building, where the two doors stood side by side, MEN and WOMEN, with a broad concrete step in front of both.

Scrubland back here led to woods and nothing else. There was no one around. Parker stood to the left of the door marked MEN, facing the building, left arm cocked at his chest. He held the ballpoint pen in his right fist, gripped for stabbing. He waited, and the doorknob made a noisy turn, and the door opened outward, and as the guy appeared, in profile, Parker drove the metaled left fist across his chest on a line directly into that bandaged ear.

The guy screamed. He threw both hands up, and Parker stabbed for his right eye with the pen, but one of the guy’s flailing arms deflected it, and the pen sank into his cheek instead, high up, through the flesh, then scraping leftward over teeth and gums.

The guy was trying to shout something, but Parker was too busy to listen. His left fist, inside the handcuff, chopped at the cheek and the pen jutting out of it while his right hand reached inside the shirt and yanked out the .38.

The guy staggered backward, wide-eyed, blood running down from under the bandage covering that ear, more blood running down his cheek, spilling out of his mouth. He slammed into the sink behind him, but he was scrabbling for his left hip pocket, so that’s where Parker’s Python would be.

Parker stepped into the room, pulling the door shut behind himself. The guy’s hand was in that pocket, closing around something, when Parker shot him just above the belt buckle.

The bullet went through the guy and cracked the sink behind him, and he sagged back, staring, just beginning to feel the shock. Parker stepped forward, shifting the .38 to his left hand where the cuffs dangled downward again, blood-streaked now, while he reached around and got the Python out of the left hip pocket. Then he put the Python away, because it would be much louder than the .38, switched the .38 to his right hand, and then collected from another pocket Cathman’s four-page dream. He stashed that inside his shirt, then reached around the guy to find and collect his wallet. Then he stepped back, .38 in right hand, wallet in left, and the guy folded both hands over his stomach where the bullet had gone in. He stared at Parker with dulled and unbelieving eyes.

“Now,” Parker said, “we can talk.”

13

The guy said, “I’m

I’m gut-shot,” as though it should be a surprise to Parker, too.

Parker opened the wallet one-handed, looked at the ID in there, looked up. “Raymond Becker,” he said. “You’re a cop, Ray? I thought you might be a cop.”

“I need an ambulance, man.”

“Local cop, far from home. Sit down on the toilet there,” Parker advised him. “Keep holding it in, you’ll be all right.”

“I’m gonna die! I need an ambulance.”

Parker said, “I could shoot off your other ear, just to attract your attention. Or you could concentrate. Sit down there.”

Ray Becker concentrated. His breathing came loud and ragged, bouncing off the tile walls. He looked at Parker, and saw no help. Slowly, both hands pressed to his bleeding gut, he slid along the cracked sink to his right, and dropped backward with a little bark of pain onto the closed toilet lid.

Meanwhile, Parker studied Becker’s ID some more. “You don’t act like most cops, Ray,” he said. “Particularly far from home. You act more like a guy on the run, desperate for a stake.”

“I played my hand,” Becker said. He sounded weaker. “I lost. But I don’t have to die.”He was clenching his teeth now, pushing the words through them. The sweat drops that had started to form on his brow, silvery hobnails in the glare of the overhead light, reminded Parker of Marshall Howell.

He said the name aloud: “Marshall Howell.”

The name seemed to sink slowly into Becker’s consciousness, like a bone dropped into a lake. Parker watched him, and saw his eyes gradually focus, saw him at last look at Parker with a new kind of fear.

Parker nodded. He waved the wallet. “I see where you’re from, Ray.”

Becker said, “You were the other one in the car?”

“And walked off with the money, Ray. You were a little quicker, we could’ve met then.”

Becker blinked, but he didn’t have anything to say.

“You didn’t have a lot of time,” Parker told him. “I guess you were already in trouble, you look like that kind. He wouldn’t give you me, but he gave you Cathman, and here you come, on the run, gonna kill the whole world if you have to, get your hands on fuck-you money.”

“He was dying anyway,” Becker said.

“He was not,” Parker told him. “But he should have been. I knew it was a mistake to let him live.”

He took the Python out of his pocket, put it an inch from Ray Becker’s left eye. Becker was saying all kinds of things, panting and spitting out words. “We live and learn, Ray,” Parker said, and shot him.

14

Inside the cramped and crowded convenience store was one person, the kid seated on the stool in the narrow space behind the cash register, reading a paperback book. A small black plastic portable radio, dangling by its handle from a hook on the wall above and behind the kid’s head, played tinny rock music, pretty loud; another reason he hadn’t heard the two shots in the men’s room, at the far end of the building. Which was good, it meant he wasn’t another problem to be dealt with.

Parker had come around to the store directly from finishing with Becker because he wanted to know if the clerk in here had heard anything and was about to raise an alarm, but the answer was no. So the thing to do was pay the ten dollars out of Becker’s wallet for the gas Becker had pumped, meaning the kid still had no reason to remember him or even notice him, and then drive away.

He told himself he should find a motel soon, he was weary and sore, it was almost nine o’clock in the morning, but the adrenaline still pumped through him after Becker, and his exhaustion was offset by nervous tension. He’d left the .38 with Becker, along with the handcuffs, and now the Python was stashed inside the back seat of the Lexus. As he drove, he shredded Cathman’s confession, dropping scraps of it out the window for miles.

He stopped the littering as he passed the road in to Tooler’s cottages, where a patrol car was parked along the verge and a bored cop walked around on the dirt road, there to keep the curious and the press and the mistaken away from the scene of murder and arson within.

A few miles later, the Lexus crested a hill, and off to the right he could see the river, looking sluggish and dark under the gray sky. At first it was just the river, mottled, slate gray, but then a sailboat appeared out there, a white triangle of sail.

The Lexus drove down the other side of the hill.

About Richard Stark

Richard Stark is one of the preeminent authors-and inventors-of noir crime fiction. Stark’s recent Parker novels Comebackand Backflashwere selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. His first novel, The Hunter, became the classic 1967 movie Point Blank. Thirty years later The Hunterwas adapted again by Hollywood, in the hit Mel Gibson movie Payback.

Richard Stark is also, at times, mystery Grand Master Donald E. Westlake.

Also by Richard Stark

The Hunter

The Man with the Getaway Face

The Outfit

The Mourner

The Score

The Jugger

The Seventh

The Handle

The Damsel

The Rare Coin Score

The Green Eagle Score

The Dame

The Black Ice Score

The Sour Lemon Score

Deadly Edge

The Blackbird

Slayground

Lemons Never Lie

Plunder Squad

Butcher’s Moon

Comeback

Backflash