Butcher's Moon

Thirty-nine

Hurley and Dalesia drove west toward Tyler, Dalesia behind the wheel of the stolen three-year-old gray Mustang and Hurley beside him bitching about Morse.

In the two weeks since the busted jewelry-store robbery, Hurley had spent most of his waking hours looking for Morse, the guy who had sold them the plan, but Morse had absolutely dropped out of sight. Dalesia had traveled with Hurley, not because he himself felt any rage about the busted plan—that extra alarm could have been put in at any time, it wasn’t necessarily Morse’s fault that he hadn’t known about it—but simply because there hadn’t been anything else to do.

Now there was something else to do. Parker had called and said he had something kind of unusual in Tyler and would they like to be counted in. Was there money in it? Yes, there was. Yes, they wanted to be counted in.

But still Hurley couldn’t get over bitching about Morse. “After this business,” he said, as they made the transition from the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the Ohio Turnpike, “I’m really gonna take my time and find that son of a bitch. I’m one guy he doesn’t hide from.”

“I’m going to take my time, too,” Dalesia said. “I’m going to take my time up in the Laurentians, up above Quebec.”

Hurley gave him a quick look. “You think Morse is up there?”

“No, I think there’s a lot of trout up there,” Dalesia said. “You can go hunting, Tom, after this is over, but I’m going fishing.”

* * *

Ed Mackey and his girl Brenda drove north from New Orleans in a yellow Jaguar Mackey owned under his Illinois name of Edwin Mills. Hairy, stocky, just under average height, Mackey was about forty years of age and had an aggressive, pushing, cocky manner like a good club fighter. Though his chest and shoulders and back were covered with curly black hair, he was beginning to thin on top, a fact he usually hid, like now, with a cloth cap at a jaunty angle down over his eyes. He drove with his head back a bit, looking out from under the bill of his cap and through the narrow windshield of the Jaguar at the road unwinding toward Tyler.

Brenda said, “This fellow in Tyler. Isn’t he one of the people in that hijacking last year? Those paintings?”

“Parker, yeah,” Mackey said. “You remember him, the mean-looking one.”

“We went to that party with him.”

Mackey grinned at her. He really liked Brenda, she was okay. “That’s the one,” he said.

“He didn’t exactly turn me on,” Brenda said. A slender girl in her mid-twenties, Brenda was good-looking in a no-nonsense way, and had a lot of leg. She was the best woman Mackey had ever gone with, because she was easy in her mind; she knew who she was, and she liked who she was, and she was very easy to get along with. Most people, men and women, weren’t like that; most people didn’t know who they were, didn’t like who they thought they were, and weren’t at all easy to get along with.

“You’re okay, Brenda,” Mackey said.

She nodded, agreeing with him without making an issue of it, because she was thinking of other things. She said, “Do you think this one will work out?”

“It better,” Mackey said. “You know how nervous I get when I start wallpapering.”

“I don’t see why,” she said. “I never have any trouble at all.”

“Well, you always go to some guy behind the counter,” he told her. “He’s so busy looking at you, it don’t matter what you write on the check. You could put Fuck You down for your signature, they’d still cash it.”

“Don’t talk dirty,” Brenda said.

“In the car,” Mackey amended.

She smiled at him, with a sidelong look. “In the car,” she said.

* * *

It had been six years since Mike Carlow had worked with Parker; he was looking forward to seeing him again. Parker had been square the last time, when they’d knocked over that coin convention in Indianapolis, and it wasn’t too often you worked with somebody you could trust.

What had happened, Carlow had wound up in custody after the robbery, but Parker had gotten away with the coins. Another guy in on it, a Nazi named Otto Mainzer, had also been picked up by the law, and the only thing that had saved Carlow’s skin was Mainzer’s obnoxious personality. Mainzer had made the cops hate him so much that they offered Carlow a free ride out of town if he would put Mainzer on ice for them. Hating Mainzer himself, Carlow had sung like the Andrews Sisters and had come out of it all clean and clear and safe, and when he’d gotten home to San Diego, damned if Parker hadn’t sent him his quarter of the profits: fifty thousand dollars.

That had turned into the JJ-2. Three wins, two third places, and one spectacular crash at Ontario Speedway. A good car, the old JJ-2.

A car, to Mike Carlow, was something that took you from Point A to Point B in one second flat, regardless of the distance in between. That was the ideal, anyway, striven for but not as yet reached in either Detroit or Europe; or in the workshop of Mike Carlow. He was a racing driver, in his early forties now, who’d been at it since high school, when he’d started by pushing one clunker after another around the stock-car tracks. While still a teenager he’d designed a racing car with a center of gravity guaranteed to be unaffected by the amount of fuel left in the tank, because there wasn’t any tank; the car was built around a frame of hollow aluminum tubing, which would hold the fuel supply. When someone he showed the idea to objected that it might be a little dangerous to surround the driver with gasoline, he’d said, “So what?”

Racing cars would probably be his death, but until then they were his life. And if they didn’t cost so damn much to design and build and care for, he never would get involved in jobs with people like Parker, taking them safely and quickly away from the scene of a score. But they did cost, and he did refuse to simply become a hired hand for one of the major companies, so here he was again, back on the road, pushing his modified Datsun 240Z toward Tyler. And considering the different guys he’d driven for over the years in jobs like this, he was pleased that this time it was a score set up by Parker.

* * *

Frank Elkins and Ralph Wiss took turns driving their Pontiac down from Chicago. They’d worked together for fifteen years, they owned homes in the same Chicago suburb, their families visited back and forth, and it was beginning to seem that in a few years Elkins’ daughter Pam and Wiss’ son Jason would be getting married. Both wives knew what Elkins and Wiss did for a living, but the children and the cousins and the nieces and all the rest were kept in the dark. “We do specialty promotions,” Frank Elkins would say, if asked, and Ralph Wiss would nod. Specialty promotions.

Wiss was a safe man, a jugger, a man whose specialty was opening safes by whatever means was most appropriate. He was comfortable with liquid nitro and with plastic explosive, he was expert at peeling, he could drill out a combination lock or cut a circular hole in the top of a solid steel safe. He had helped to tunnel into vaults, to by-pass time locks and to remove wall safes entirely, so they could be worked on at leisure somewhere else. A small narrow man with a concentrated look, Wiss was a skilled craftsman, as devoted to his work as any fine jeweler.

Elkins was a general purpose man, a utility infielder. He would hold the gun, or carry the duffel bag full of cash, or keep an eye out the front window. He was the eyes and the muscles, complementing Wiss’ brain. They knew one another completely by now, trusted one another, and worked together with no waste motion.

The last time these two had seen Parker was in Copper Canyon, the time the whole town had been cleaned out. Before that, they’d worked with him in St. Louis, hitting a syndicate operation, a place where the local bookies’ comeback money was collected. Normally, people like Wiss and Elkins left syndicate places alone, but at the time Parker had had some sort of feud on with a boss named Bronson, and since it was bound to be a safe and profitable score, Wiss and Elkins had been happy to work it with him.

They didn’t talk much on the drive, being too comfortable with one another to need to force conversation. They did both wonder aloud about the score they were coming down to, but they didn’t worry about it. Elkins said, “If it’s Parker, it’s all right.”

“He gets gaudy sometimes,” Wiss said. He was a man with no taste for melodrama at all. “But safe,” Elkins said.

Wiss shrugged. He was always guarded, always kept a little in reserve. “It’s worth the drive,” he said.

* * *

Philly Webb drove the Buick west from Baltimore. The new blue paint job sparkled at him from the hood, the new license plates were a complementary blue from Delaware, and the new identification in the glove compartment and his hip pocket said that the Buick was registered to one Justin Baxter of Wilmington and that he himself was the same Justin Baxter.

Webb was a driver, like Mike Carlow, but he never had anything to do with racing. Robbery was his only profession, partying and gambling was where the money went, and the Buick was his single hobby.

This was his fifth Buick. He bought one every few years, buying it new and legit, straight out of a dealer’s window. But within a week a new car in his possession had completely lost its original identity and would never find it again. He switched engines so as to switch motor numbers, he altered serial numbers, he changed the paint job, he bought false registration and fake license plates. And after he’d had the car for a few months he would do the same thing all over again, changing things around, re-establishing yet another new identity. By the time he’d owned a car for three years, it would probably have operated under ten or twelve registrations, colors, and sets of license plates.

In addition to the periodic face lifts done mainly for the hell of it, Webb also completely redid his current Buick immediately after working a score. The blue paint on this car was less than three weeks old, but the car would be some other color within twenty-four hours of his returning to Baltimore. He prided himself on having attained the absolutely untraceable car, but in truth most of the changes he put his cars through were unnecessary, done more as a hobby than for any real reason.

Short and chunky and olive-complexioned, Webb had the chest and arms of a weight lifter, giving him a vaguely apelike look. He fit behind the wheel of a car with the naturalness of a cabdriver, and always seemed a little awkward when forced to walk. He had last worked with Parker in the air-base robbery with Stan Devers in Upstate New York. He’d come away with forty-two thousand out of that, every dollar of it long since spent, and he was looking forward to working with Parker again.