“I’ll call you,” Lozini said.
The four men left the room, saying so long, Lozini giving each of them a short angry nod. When the door closed and he was alone, he sat brooding out the window for a minute, staring at the sunny morning.
He was reluctant to make the call. Doing anything the bastard wanted him to do seemed somehow like a defeat, like knuckling under. Still, it was the only move that made sense right now.
The hell with it. Lozini reached for the phone. But it wasn’t that easy. It took twenty minutes just to find out what city Walter Karns was in right now—Las Vegas—and another half-hour to track him down on a golf course there. But finally the heavy authoritative voice did come on the line, saying, “Lozini?”
“Walter Karns?”
“That’s right. You wanted to talk to me.”
“I need to ask you about somebody.”
A small hesitation, and Karns said, “Somebody I can talk about, I hope.”
“He said I should talk to you,” Lozini said. “I should ask you about him.”
“He did? What’s his name?”
“Parker. He says.”
“Parker?” There was surprise in Karns’ voice, but not displeasure. “You don’t mean anybody that works for me,” he said.
“No, I don’t.”
Karns said, “You don’t sound happy about this fellow Parker.”
“I’d like to see him in a pine box,” Lozini said.
“What’s he done to you?”
“Claims I owe him money.”
“Do you?” It sounded as though Karns were smiling.
“No, I don’t.” This conversation was making Lozini uncomfortable; he had a sense of Karns laughing at him. He said, “But what difference does it make? Who is this guy?”
“You remember Bronson from Buffalo, a few years ago?”
“You took his place,” Lozini said. He was too irritable to be anything but blunt.
“I did. But I didn’t force his—retirement.” Bronson had been shot, Lozini remembered, in his own home. “That was Parker,” Karns said.
“You mean he’s the one—” Lozini stopped, trying to figure out how to phrase the question on the phone. Had Parker killed Bronson?
“That’s what happened,” Karns said. “He claimed our outfit owed him some money. Forty-five thousand, to be exact. The whole situation was ambivalent, and Bronson decided not to pay him. So he made various kinds of trouble and—”
“That’s what he’s doing here,” Lozini said.
Karns said, “Well, Bronson finally paid him off, but then he decided Parker shouldn’t get away with that, and he sent some people to—annoy him. That was when Parker figured he’d be better off dealing with Bronson’s successor.”
“You.”
“I had nothing to do with it,” Karns said. “Though I admit I didn’t mind it happening. But I didn’t meet Parker myself until a couple years later, when he helped us with some competition we had off the Texas coast. Did you ever hear about that?”
“No. What happened?”
“Ask around,” Karns said. “Maybe somebody local could tell you. Ask about Cockaigne.”
Lozini frowned. “Cockaigne?” He’d never heard of it.
“An island. But if you’re calling to ask me what I think about your problem with Parker, my advice is to pay the man.”
“I don’t have his money,” Lozini said. “He thinks I got it, but I don’t. Somebody else did.”
“But he holds you responsible?”
“Goddamnit, I’m not!”
“Good luck,” Karns said, with cool good humor in his voice, and hung up.
Lozini wanted to go on arguing, but he was holding a dead phone. Feeling angry and foolish, he slammed the receiver down and glared across the empty room. “I won’t be pushed,” he said aloud.
Eleven
At two-thirty in the afternoon Parker made another call to Lozini. When he’d phoned twenty minutes ago, Lozini hadn’t been available. “But I know he wants to talk to you,” the male voice had said. “He’s between destinations at the moment. Could he reach you anywhere?”
That had been too stupid a question even to answer. “I’ll call back in twenty minutes,” Parker had said, and had hung up, and now he was in a different phone booth making the second call.
The same male voice as last time said, “Oh, yes. Mr. Lozini just came in. Hold on, please.”
“For sixty seconds,” Parker said. Two years ago the local hoods and the local law had been in tight with each other enough to work together hunting him down in that amusement park, so maybe they were close enough for Lozini to have friends on the force who wouldn’t mind tracing him a phone call.
“Less,” the voice said, and went away.
Waiting, Parker looked around at the sunny afternoon. Grofield was at the wheel of the bronze Impala they’d rented this morning, after they’d checked out separately from the hotel. With the amount of fuss they’d made in this town last night, it was a good idea not to stay in any one place too long. The credit card they’d used in renting the car should be good for at least another week, giving them a mobile base of operations; later today, if necessary, they could find another spot to settle down for the night.
This phone booth was on a corner of Western Avenue, nearly out to the city line. The street was wide, lined with used-car lots and discount furniture stores. A supermarket the size and shape of an airplane hangar was a block away. Traffic went by fast, sensing the suburbs, but this was still a local in-town phone call.
“Parker?”
Parker recognized the rasping voice of Lozini. He said, “I still want my money.”
“I called Karns,” Lozini said.
“Good,” Parker said. “He told you to give me my money.”
“Yes, he did. I want a meeting with you, Parker.”
“No meeting. Just the cash. Seventy-three thousand.”
“I have a problem with that,” Lozini said.
“You want a few days to get it together?”
“I need to talk to you. Goddamn it, I’m not trying to ambush you.”
“We don’t have anything to say to each other.”
“We do! And I can’t do it on the phone. We’ve already said too much.”
“There’s nothing you can say to me,” Parker said, “that I need to hear. You going to give me my money or not?”
“If you won’t come off the dime, goddamn it, neither will I! I’m not saying no to you, I’m saying we have to have a meeting. There’s things to this you don’t know about.”
Parker frowned, brooding out at the sunlight, the speeding traffic, Grofield waiting in the car. Wasn’t this an either-or proposition? Either Lozini would pay off today, or he’d pay off later, after he’d been pushed a little harder. Or whoever took his place would pay off.
“Parker? Goddamn it, man, unbend.”
There was something new in Lozini’s voice, something older and more tired. It was that different tone, that weaker sound, that changed Parker’s mind. Maybe there was something more to know.
“I’ll think about it,” he said. “I’ll call you back in half an hour.”
Twelve
O’Hara spotted the diner up ahead on the right, and nodded to it. “Time we got some coffee,” he said.
His partner, Marty Dean, said, “Good idea. I’m goddam tired.”
They both were. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, meaning they’d both been on duty now for a full twelve hours. Driving around in this patrol car, their uniforms getting itchier by the minute, their guns and cartridge belts a dull weight pressing against their stomachs.
And O’Hara, besides being tired, was in a foul mood. This whole business was connected with that amusement-park mess from two years ago, which O’Hara didn’t like being reminded of in the first place. And he’d gotten the word that one of the guys involved in last night’s robberies was the actual son of a bitch from the amusement park himself, and oh, how O’
Hara wanted to be the one to catch up with him. He could taste it, he needed it, he had to even the score or die.
The diner. O’Hara turned the wheel, steered them over into the parking lot, and nosed into a space between a gray pickup and a red Toyota. The two men climbed out of the car, snicking the doors shut in the sunlight, and Dean stretched hugely, arching his back, saying, “Jesus God, it’s good to stand up.”
“Yeah, it is,” O’Hara said. He was trying not to let his bad mood out on the surface, because he had no explanation for it beyond the tiredness and overwork they had in common. He couldn’t very well explain to Dean that two years ago a lousy bandit had forced him to strip out of his uniform, had tied him up, and had used the uniform to make a clean getaway. And that instead of the eighteen thousand dollars he’d been anticipating for helping to run the bastard down in that amusement park, how much had he wound up with? Two grand. That money was long since gone, but the humiliation was as fresh as ever.
O’Hara and Dean walked into the diner together and found a couple seats at the counter. Somehow it was less like being off-duty when you sat at the counter; sitting in one of the booths would be more slothful, more as though you weren’t ready to leap back into action at any second.
They ordered coffee and pastry, and then O’Hara said, “I’ll be right back,” and went off to the men’s room.
He was standing at the urinal, brooding, when the men’s-room door opened, off to his right. He looked over at the new arrival, and his face showed his surprise. “Well, hello,” he said.
“Hello, O’Hara.” The guy smiled and stuck the barrel of a .25 automatic in O’Hara’s eye, and pulled the trigger.
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.”
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