Butcher's Moon

Thirteen

Lozini sat in the back seat of the black Oldsmobile while up front Frankie Faran did the driving as he told the story of the gambling island off the coast of Texas.

It hadn’t been a surprise to Lozini when it turned out Faran knew about Cockaigne Island and what had happened to it. Faran was an amiable drinker, a social drinker in a cocktail-lounge sense, and people of his sort were always full of stray anecdotes. Faran had been out in Las Vegas several times the last few years, and on one or another of the trips he’d been told about Cockaigne.

“A fella named Yancy told me this,” Faran said, driving along. “He was in on it at the beginning. Just the early stages, you know, when they were setting it up.” He sounded and looked better now than he had this morning; probably he’d had a chance to sleep a few hours since the meeting. Or maybe he’d eased himself by drinking lunch. Anyway, his driving was all right, and his voice was clearer and stronger, and he didn’t seem to be distracted any more by an overriding physical discomfort.

“According to Yancy,” Faran was saying, “there was a small island off the Texas coast, down in the Gulf of Mexico. A fella named Baron made a deal with Cuba where Cuba claimed the island and Baron built himself a casino on it. You know, like a gambling ship outside the three-mile limit.”

“Mm.” Lozini, listening, watched out the side windows as they drove out Western Avenue. He wondered at what point Parker would contact him.

”The problem was,” Faran said, “Baron wouldn’t join in with anybody. He wouldn’t be part of the structure, you know?”

Lozini knew. Baron, like himself, had been a man with a local fiefdom of his own; but whereas Lozini had connections and obligations within the loose national federation, Baron had stayed independent. Lozini said, “What did they do to him?”

“They tried to deal with him,” Faran said. “According to Yancy, they talked with him for six years, but Baron just wouldn’t come around.”

“Six years!”

“Well, he never went to the mainland. And he had about thirty armed guards out at the island, with only one place you could land a boat, so they could never get their hands on him. He just thumbed his nose at everybody.”

“For six years,” Lozini said. He couldn’t get over it.

“And all that time,” Faran said, “he’s costing everybody money. All those good high rollers, rich people from Galveston and Corpus Christi, from as far away as New Orleans, some of them with their own yachts, people with money that used to throw it around in organization places, and they’re all going out to the island instead.”

Lozini nodded. “All right,” he said. “Where does Parker come in?”

“He was their outside specialist. One of the higher-ups brought him in. They made him a deal to knock over the casino. So he brought in some friends of his, and looked the place over, and did it. They walked in, gutted the place, burned it down, took the cash, killed Baron, and left.”

Lozini hunched his shoulders inside his suit jacket. He didn’t like that story. “How many friends? How big a bunch did Parker have with him?”

“Three guys,” Faran said.

Lozini had no more questions. Frowning, looking out at the traffic without really seeing it, he tried to remember what Parker looked like, from their one brief face-to-face meeting two years ago. All he seemed to have retained was a memory of very cold eyes in a hard face. Would he even recognize the man now?

“There they are,” Faran said suddenly. “One of them, anyway.”

Startled, Lozini focused on the car next to them, and saw a bronze Impala with only a driver, no passengers. The driver was dark-haired, in his thirties, handsome in a way Lozini thought of as untrustworthy. He was waving to Faran to follow him.

Lozini said, “That’s not Parker.”

“No,” Faran said, “that’s the other one. The one that sweet-talked Angie.” He sounded a little sour on the subject.

The Impala surged ahead, and Faran fell in behind it. Lozini, looking around, saw that they were out beyond the city line now, out where the occasional diner or gas station was followed by stretches of empty lot or woods. Western Avenue lost its name at the city line and became State Highway 79: four lanes, no sidewalks, no central divider.

The arrangement Lozini and Parker had worked out for the meeting was that each of them would be accompanied by one other man; Lozini had suggested Faran, whom Parker knew from last night, and Parker had agreed. Lozini and Faran would drive out Western Avenue until Parker decided it was safe to contact him. Then Parker would lead the way to the meeting place, and if Lozini felt it was safe, he and Faran would stop.

There was an intersection up ahead, a country road unmarked except by three suburban developers’ billboards. The Impala took the right, and Faran smoothly followed.

The Impala stayed on the country road only a few hundred yards, then turned again onto a smaller blacktop road, barely two lanes wide, meandering off past woods and occasional strips of cleared farmland. Faran said, “I know this road.” He waved an arm to the right. “There’s a crick over there I used to swim in when I was a kid.”

The Impala’s brake lights went on. Lozini put his hands on his legs, just above the knee, and held on tight. The Impala stopped, and Faran eased the Oldsmobile to a stop just behind it. There was cleared field on both sides of the road here, good flat visibility for a long way around in crisp afternoon sunlight. A safe place for a meeting—but where was Parker?

The Impala’s door opened, and the second man came back, grinning slightly in an amiable way. He opened the right front door and slid in next to Faran. “Hello, again,” he said to Faran.

Faran gave him a cold look and a cold nod.

The guy turned to look at Lozini. “Parker’s in the other car,” he said. “Back seat. You talk to him there, I’ll talk to Mr. Faran here.”

“I thought you were alone in there,” Lozini said.

The guy grinned again, still in a friendly way. “That was the idea,” he said. “Parker kept down out of sight until we found out whether you had any other plans or not.”

“No other plans,” Lozini said. He pushed open the door and got out of the Olds, feeling immediately the heat of the afternoon; the sunlight wasn’t so crisp when you were away from air-conditioning.

As he closed the door again, Lozini heard the guy saying to Faran, “My name’s Green, Alan Green.”

Lozini walked slowly forward to the Impala. Now he could see the silhouette of somebody sitting in the back seat. The Impala’s engine was running and the windows shut, for the air-conditioning. The low stutter and growl of the two cars’ engines was the only sound. No other traffic on the road at all, not a house in sight. Just cleared fields that hadn’t been farmed for a while and were now knee-deep in weeds. No wind blowing, no movement anywhere; the view was like a painting, or a jigsaw puzzle. Lozini paused next to the Impala, his hand on the door handle while he looked around. Nobody and nothing. In the front seat of the Olds, Faran and Green were in cheerful conversation. That was fast; Green’s old-buddy style had to connect with Faran, of course, but Lozini was surprised at how quickly they’d become pals.

Lozini opened the door, and cold lifeless air came out of the car. His body was still adjusting to the outer heat, and now he was going to enter air-conditioning again. He stooped and slid into the back seat, and pulled the door shut.

Parker was on the other side, his shoulder against the side window. He was half turned toward Lozini, facing him. Just looking at him; no words, no expression.

“Hello, Parker,” Lozini said. He was thinking that Parker didn’t look quite as vicious as his memory had made him. He looked like an ordinary man, really; a little tougher, a little colder, a little harder. But not the ice-eyed robot of Lozini’s memory.

Parker nodded. “You wanted to talk,” he said.

“I got a problem,” Lozini said, and spread his hands expressively. “I don’t want trouble with you, but I don’t know how to get around it. That’s why I want to talk.”

“Go ahead.”

Lozini looked away, out across the front seat and the steering wheel and through the windshield at the empty road curving away behind a stand of trees up ahead. It was colder in here than in the Olds, and Parker was one of those people who almost never blink. Looking out at the road, Lozini said, “I called Karns. He told me about your trouble with Bronson, and he told me about Cockaigne. He said if I owed you money, I ought to pay you.”

“That’s right.”

Lozini turned and looked at Parker full-face. Now he, too, didn’t blink; he wanted Parker to know he was hearing the truth, the bottom line. “My trouble is,” he said, “I don’t have your money.”

Parker shrugged, as though it was a minor matter. “You want time?”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean I never had it. I didn’t find it in the amusement park.”

“It isn’t there,” Parker said. “Where I left it.”

“I didn’t get it,” Lozini told him. “I have never had your money.”

“Some of your people got it, and kept it for themselves.”

“I don’t think so.” Lozini shrugged and shook his head. “It’s possible, but I don’t think they’d try it. Not any of the people I had in there with me.”

Parker said, “Nobody else would find it. Where I left it, no maintenance man would go near it, nobody else would stumble across it. The only way it’s gone is because somebody was looking for it and found it. That’s you and your people, nobody else.”

“Maybe that’s what happened,” Lozini said. “I don’t say it couldn’t have been that way, somebody holding out on me. All I say is, I’m not the one who got the money. I never had it and I don’t have it now.” He leaned closer to the other man, put his hand out as though to touch his knee but didn’t quite complete the gesture, and said, “Listen, Parker, I’m on the level. Maybe ten years ago I wouldn’t have given you the time of day, I would have just put every one of my people on the street to hunt you down, and not care how long it took or how much noise it made or how many times you scored against me before I got to you. That’s ten years ago, when things were different.”

Parker waited, watching him, still without expression.

“But right now,” Lozini said, “I can’t do that. Things have been quiet around here for a long time, I’m not even organized for that kind of war any more. I don’t have enough of the right kind of people now; most of my people these days are just clerks. And right now this town is in an election campaign.”

“I saw the posters.”

“It’s a tough campaign,” Lozini said. “My man may be in trouble. The election’s Tuesday, and the one thing I don’t want is blood in the streets the weekend before election. This is the worst possible time for me, things are very shaky anyway and you could make them a lot worse. So that’s another reason I don’t want a war with you. Besides what Karns told me. All of that, it all adds up to me wanting to get along with you, work something out, figure out some kind of compromise.”

“I left seventy-three thousand here,” Parker said. “Half of it belongs to my partner.” He made a head gesture toward Green back in the other car. “Neither one of us wants ten cents on the dollar, or a handshake, or a compromise, or anything at all except our money. Our full take, everything we took out of that armored car.”

“Then you’ve got to look somewhere else,” Lozini said. At that moment a farm pickup truck with an old refrigerator standing up in the back passed them, the first traffic since they’d stopped here. Lozini pointed at it through the windshield as it went bumping away, disappearing around the stand of trees. “If you went to that farmer,” he said, “and told him you left seventy-three thousand dollars in Tyler two years ago and you want it back, he’d tell you you’re at the wrong door because he doesn’t have it and doesn’t know where it is. And I’m telling you the same thing.”

Parker shook his head, betraying his impatience by a tightening of the lips at the corners of his mouth. “The farmer isn’t connected,” he said. “You are. Don’t waste my time.”

Lozini cast around for something else. “All right,” he said. “I’ll look into it. Maybe it was one of my people—”

“It was.”

“All right. I’ll check them out, and let you know what I come up with.”

Parker nodded. “How long?”

“Give me a week.”

The small sign of impatience again. “I’ll call you tomorrow evening, seven o’clock.”

“Tomorrow! That isn’t enough.”

“They’re your people,” Parker said. “If you’re in charge, run them. It won’t take long. I’ll call you at seven.”

“I don’t promise anything by then.” Parker shrugged and looked away.

Lozini was reluctant for the meeting to be over. He wanted an understanding he could live with, and he didn’t feel he had one. He said, “You want to take it a little easy, you know.”

Parker faced him again, and waited.

“I go for the easy way,” Lozini said. “That’s the situation I’m in right now, I go for the easy way. As long as the easy way is to cooperate with you, that’s what I’ll do. You lean too hard, you make it easier to fight back, then that’s what I’ll do.”

Parker seemed to think that over. “I can see that,” he said. “I’ll call you at seven.”