Plunder Squad

Six

Parker was on a deck chair by the lake, letting the sun dry his body. Summer was nearly here, and the empty houses around the lake were beginning to fill up; motorboats droned most of the time now, and curious faces were starting to be everywhere. Soon it would be time to take Claire and go somewhere else until the fall.

This was Claire’s house, but she’d picked it with Parker in mind. For most of the year, the area around the lake was as good as a ghost town, with the privacy that Parker preferred and had always found before this in resort hotels. Only in the summer did the place take on the look and feel of a normal community, surrounding him with the questions and prying that the straight world thought of as natural.

It was only too bad the art heist hadn’t worked out as well as it should. He and Claire would use up Renard’s twelve thousand and more during their two months away from the house.

Parker heard the sliding door open, and turned to watch Claire walk across the lawn from the house. He enjoyed watching her; she kept being new, and that was a rare thing in a woman.

She said, “There’s someone on the phone for you.”

That would be Mackey. “Thanks.”

As Parker got to his feet and draped the towel over his shoulders, she said, “I took it on the bedroom phone.”

“Right.” He padded barefoot across the lawn to the house, and went through the sliding doors into the bedroom, where the telephone receiver was lying on the bed. He picked it up: “Hello?”

“I’m here.” Mackey’s voice.

“Fine.”

“I called our friend, and he wanted to meet tonight.”

Mackey was in New York with the six paintings for Renard in the back of a stolen pickup truck. The rest of the group had separated, Sternberg to Boston and Devers to Los Angeles and Tommy and Noelle to Cleveland, leaving Parker and Mackey to finish the deal with Renard and send them their cash.

And Renard apparently wanted to make the switch right away, tonight. “That’s good,” Parker said.

“How long will it take you to get here?”

“An hour and a half,” Parker said. Looking through the glass doors toward the lake, he saw Claire walking this way. “Make it two and a half,” he said.