Butcher's Moon

Nine

Parker sat at the writing table in his hotel room, counting bills. Nine hundred from the New York Room, three hundred from the brewery. The restaurant credit-card slips and brewery checks had all been ripped up and dumped into the river. The restaurant would never recoup, but the brewery would get new payment checks from at least some of its customers—a long and expensive and irritating operation.

The only light in the room was the table lamp at Parker’s elbow. Off to his right the Venetian blinds chittered occasionally in a slight breeze; they were angled upward, to let in air and to show the night-black sky with its thin nail-paring of moon and to block out the street-lit empty expanse of London Avenue. The bed was still made, and two dark-toned zippered jackets were lying on it. Parker counted slowly, separating and smoothing the bills with blunt fingers, organizing them into two equal stacks. His face was expressionless, as though his mind were working on other thoughts behind the mechanical process of counting.

Grofield came out of the bathroom, stretching and yawning and scratching his cheeks. “Wool,” he said. “I don’t know how skiers stand it.”

Parker finished counting the bills. “Four sixty-five each,” he said.

“By God,” Grofield said. “And to think some people say crime doesn’t pay.”

“We’ll do one more tonight,” Parker said.

“We will? What time is it?”

“Quarter to four.”

”Lozini must know by now,” Grofield said. “He’ll have his soldiers out beating the byways.”

“They can’t watch the whole town,” Parker told him. He pulled open the writing-table drawer and took out the notes Grofield had brought back from the library.

“Any ideas?”

“Let’s see.”

Parker got to his feet, and Grofield came over to take his place at the writing table. As he leafed through the notes, Parker went over to the window. He pulled the blind cord, shifting the slats till he could look down through them at the street.

Tyler was a clean town; the breeze gusted through empty gutters. Bright sodium street-lighting glared on the wide empty thoroughfare of London Avenue, showing the storefronts across the way but leaving the upper stories of the buildings in total darkness. There was no sound out there at all, not even when a dark sedan moved slowly past from right to left. The big Farrell for Mayor banner flapped in the breeze off to the right. What was the name of Farrell’s opponent? Wain. Parker stood unmoving, looking out through the horizontal slits at the sleeping city. It made no connection with him; he’d grown up in different circumstances.

Grofield said, “Got it.”

Parker turned.

“Midtown Garage,” Grofield said. “It’s a parking building, four stories high, open twenty-four hours. On a Friday night they’ll do a good business, all of it in cash and all of it still there.”

“Where is it?”

Grofield gestured toward the window. “Two blocks from here, on London. We could walk.”

“We’ll drive,” Parker said. “Drive in, drive out. That’s what you do in a garage.”

“Right.” Grofield put the notes away again in the drawer, and hesitated. “The money, too?”

“Why not?”

“Right.” Grofield put the two stacks of bills into the drawer on top of the notes, shut the drawer, and got to his feet.

After they put on their jackets Parker looked around the room to be sure nothing had been left out. “Okay,” he said.

They took the stairs down to the lobby rather than ring for the elevator. At the foot of the stairs a left turn would take them into the quiet lobby, but they turned right instead, down a short hall to a small side exit next to the hotel drugstore. They’d used this route a couple of times already tonight, not seeing any hotel employees at all along the way.

The side exit led to a narrow business street lined with appliance stores and record shops. Down to the left was brightly lit London Avenue, but the side streets were still equipped with dimmer and more widely spaced old-fashioned lighting.

Parker and Grofield walked a block and a half away from London Avenue and the hotel, then stopped next to a Buick Riviera, vaguely maroon in the darkness. There were night lights in the interiors of stores, but no illumination showing in any upper-story windows. No headlights anywhere to be seen, nor any pedestrians other than themselves.

Parker took from his pocket a dozen keys on a circular metal ring and began to run them for the Buick’s door. The fifth one worked; he opened the door and slid in fast, shutting it behind him to switch off the interior light, and reached across to unlock the other door for Grofield.

They took side streets until they were beyond the garage, so they’d be coming at it from the direction opposite the hotel. There was no other traffic at all until they finally dropped back to London Avenue, but then they saw a prowling police car almost at once, plus a couple of other slow-moving cars with two male occupants in each.

Grofield said, “Your friend Lozini organizes himself pretty fast.”

Parker, remembering Lozini in charge of the hoods hunting him down in the amusement park, said, “He isn’t stupid, just too impatient. He gets in a hurry and he gets mad.”

“Then he gets stupid,” Grofield suggested.

“Right.”

The Midtown Garage was a tan-brick building on a corner, square and functional, with broad glassless window areas on each floor. A vertical red neon sign standing out from the second and third stories spelled out the name of the place, with the word PARKING beneath, like an underline. Under the sign, in the center of the London Avenue face of the building, was the entrance, a broad low concrete driveway bisected by a booth where tickets were picked up on the way in and money was paid on the way out.

A slender sleepy black boy of about nineteen was on duty in the booth, keeping himself awake with bad rock music from an imperfectly tuned station on a white plastic radio. He was sitting on a stool, resting his elbows on a high counter and gazing in a befuddled way out the glass window fronting the booth at the street. He reacted slowly and awkwardly when Parker turned the Buick in at the entrance and stopped next to the booth; it took him a long time to separate one ticket from the pile, and even longer to get it punched by the time clock on the counter. Parker, waiting, kept one eye on the rear-view mirror and saw the police car go by again, in the opposite direction. It seemed to him both the faces in there had been turned this way. Watching the strangers, waiting for something else to happen.

Beside him, Grofield was studying the wall to the right. Parker had only had a glimpse of it while turning in, but it seemed likely to contain the office; in a tile wall, a brown-metal door was flanked on one side by a bulletin board covered with required city and state notices and on the other side by a thick glass window showing a yellow-walled interior.

“Here ya are.”

Parker took the ticket, put the Buick in gear, and started slowly up the spiral that formed the interior of the building. There were no separate floors inside, but only a steadily upcurving ramp, leading by gentle gradations from level to level and marked with white lines for parking.

The interior was mostly empty, with only an occasional car parked with its nose to the exterior wall or the central supporting divider. Parker followed the curve of the ramp up and around until they were out of sight of the booth, and then nosed the Buick in against the interior wall and cut the engine. The silence afterward seemed loud and echoing.

Grofield said, “I didn’t like all that action on the street.”

“You want to call this off?”

“No. But we better make damn sure we give ourselves enough time at the other end.”

“We will.”

They got out of the car. They both carried handguns in their jacket pockets; Parker a Colt Detective Special in .32 caliber and Grofield an old Beretta Cougar in .380 caliber. They walked down the ramp with their hands in their jacket pockets, and saw the boy nodding in the booth again, facing the other way. The squawk of his radio covered all other sound.

There was no activity out in the street. They reached the brown-metal door to the office, and while Grofield tried the knob Parker watched the boy in the booth; he was more asleep than awake, and completely unaware of their presence.

“Locked,” Grofield said.

Parker took two paces forward and looked through the window next to the door. From the car, all he’d been able to see was the yellow far wall, but now he could see the two desks, the filing cabinet, the free-standing wooden closet, and the man in green work shirt and pants sitting at one of the desks, feet up, reading Playboy. He was short and heavy-set, Italian-looking, with thick dry black hair and stubby-fingered hands. He had a garage-mechanic look about him, and was about forty years old.

Good. Old enough to be sensible, to neither panic nor be a hero.

To the right, behind the guy at the desk, was a second window, fronting on the street. Parker looked at that, stepped back next to Grofield without having been seen by the man in the office, and said, “Take the sidewalk window. Show him your gun at my signal.”

“Right.”

“And let me know if anybody’s around.”

Grofield walked briskly out to the street and around the corner, and Parker stood next to the window again, where he could look through at the man inside and the other window. He glanced over at the boy in the booth, who continued to nod to the echoing blary music, unaware of the world around himself.

Grofield appeared outside that other window. Parker watched him look both ways, then nodded as Grofield gestured to him that they had privacy. He made one last check of the sleeping boy, then took the Colt from his pocket, stepped to the middle of the window, and tapped the gun barrel against the glass.

He had to do it twice before the man inside looked up, and then his reaction was so huge it seemed he might be having a heart attack. His ankles had been crossed on the desk top, showing worn work boots; now his feet flew into the air, his arms shot out, the magazine went sailing across the room, and his chair teetered back and forth on the edge of falling over before finally thudding forward to land on all four legs.

The gun was in Parker’s right hand. He pointed toward Grofield with his left, both to signal Grofield to make his own move and to attract the attention of the man in the office, who was now leaning forward in his chair, feet flat on the floor and arms out at his sides as he gaped open-mouthed at the gun in Parker’s fist.

For a long moment nothing happened. Grofield had taken out the Beretta and was holding it close to his belt buckle, shielding it from the street as he pointed it in the direction of the man in the office. Parker remained where he was, gun aimed and pointing finger indicating Grofield. And the man inside went on being stunned into immobility, sitting like a drugged ape in the zoo, staring at the black circle of gun barrel.

Then Grofield tapped on the glass with his own pistol. The man’s head turned, as though some invisible hand had reached down and forced it to swivel on the neck, and when he saw Grofield and the second gun he slowly lifted his arms straight over his head.

Parker tapped again. The man, arms still up, turned and stared at him. He seemed more dazed than frightened, as though the display of guns had robbed him of the power of thought. With his free hand Parker pointed to the locked door. The man continued to sit there, blinking. Parker pointed again and made a move-along gesture with the pistol, and abruptly the man got to his feet and hurried forward on wobbly legs, moving to the door.

Parker waited till he’d reached it, hand on knob; then he moved to the left, so that when the door pushed open outward he was in position to step inside and pull the door instantly closed behind him again. “Take it easy,” he said.

“Okay,” the man said. It was as though Parker had made some insanely controversial remark, but the man was determined to agree with him anyway. “Okay okay,” he said. His arms were still straight up, but he nevertheless patted the air with his palms, as though to pacify an angry opponent.

“Put your arms down,” Parker told him. “You don’t have heat.”

“That’s right,” the man said, fervently agreeing with everything. His arms stayed up in the air. “I just work here, that’s all,” he said.

“Put them down.”

The man looked startled, then sneaked a look up at his left wrist. It was like a comedy routine, except that the guy was serious. “Oh, yeah,” he said, and snapped his arms down to his sides. “I got, uh—I got flustered.”

“Today’s receipts,” Parker said. “Go get them and bring them to me.”

“Well, sure,” the man said. “Naturally.” Backing away, moving at a half-turn, unwilling to look away from Parker and the gun, he kept talking, maniacally cheerful and agreeable. “I fluster easy,” he said. “I’ve always been like that, I get flustered, I— With my wife, like. She’s very volatile, you know, and then I get flustered.”

He’d reached the filing cabinet. Now he had to turn his attention away from Parker while he searched his pockets for keys, and it was clearly not an easy thing for him to do. He kept reaching in the same pocket, over and over.

“Relax,” Parker said. “Nobody’s going to get hurt.”

“Well, yeah,” the man said. “That makes sense. I mean, you’re, uh—you’re here for money, right?” He finally reached into another pocket and found his keys.

“That’s right,” Parker said. He glanced over at Grofield, who was looking left and right at the street. Their eyes met, and Grofield nodded; everything still all right.

The garage man was still being flustered. Keys rattled together while he tried to remember which was the right one. Then he got it, couldn’t make it work, nearly dropped the whole chain of ten or so keys on the floor, recovered, and unlocked the filing cabinet. Then he stooped to open the bottom drawer and take out two green-metal money boxes, both about the size and shape of small tool kits. Putting them on the floor, he pushed the file drawer closed again, then picked up both boxes and walked toward Parker, waddling slightly from the awkward weight. An apologetic smile on his face, he said, “I don’t have the keys for these. When Mr. Joseph comes around, he—”

“That’s okay,” Parker said. “We’re going out of here now.”

The man looked stunned. “What? I thought you’d take the . . .” He gestured with both money boxes.

“You’ll carry them to the car,” Parker told him. “We’ll go out of here, you ahead of me, and you’ll walk up the ramp. Don’t look back at me, don’t try to give any sign to the boy in the booth, and don’t talk.”

“Listen,” the man said. He was concentrating himself to explain something very important, as though Parker were an examiner from Internal Revenue. “I’m not sure I can do it,” he said.

“You can do it,” Parker told him. He put the Colt in his jacket pocket, kept his hand in there with the gun, and reached with his other hand for the doorknob.

“I don’t know,” the man said. Droplets of perspiration edged his hairline all across his forehead. “My legs give out, I can’t always, I don’t know if I can—”

“Move,” Parker said, and pushed the door open.

Blinking, trembling, stumbling a bit, the man moved forward past Parker and out the door. Parker followed, letting the spring pull the door closed again behind him.

Nothing had changed outside: somnolent boy, raucous music, nobody else around. Parker kept a few paces back, and followed the man with the money up the ramp. They walked past the Buick and on up, and at a Volvo one level higher, Parker said, “Stop right there.”

The man stopped.

“Put the boxes down. Go over and open the passenger door.”

The man put the metal boxes down; they made sharp little clangs on the concrete. Parker strode quickly up behind him as he moved to the right side of the Volvo. The man reached for the door handle, and Parker took the Colt from his pocket, reversing it. “It’s locked,” the man said, and Parker clipped him behind the ear.

It wasn’t enough. The man sagged forward against the car, air puffing out of his mouth as though he were a balloon, but he didn’t fall. Holding him in place with a hand pressed against his back between the shoulder blades, Parker hit him again, and this time he slumped in a boneless way, sliding down the side of the Volvo, Parker easing him to the floor. At this point he didn’t want anybody dead; robberies could be kept basically a simple matter between himself and Lozini, but murder would complicate the situation.

Carrying the metal cases, Parker walked back down the curving ramp to the Buick, where he found Grofield waiting for him, looking edgy. “Police car went by again,” he said. “I couldn’t stand out there, so I came in.”

“We’re all right,” Parker told him.

They got into the Buick, the metal boxes on the floor at Grofield’s feet, and Parker drove back down to the booth, where he gave the boy the parking ticket and a dollar. “Keep the change,” he said, and drove out, having to wait a second to let a slow-moving dark sedan go by. The two men inside glanced at the garage and kept going.