Plunder Squad (4 page)

Walheim said, “You aren’t going to break into San Simeon.”

“Shit, I know that.” Beaghler grinned. “There’s a cousin of mine,” he said, “he’s one of the guides there, for the tours they have, the public tours. He told me there’s some stuff going out on loan, in about a month from now. Coming up here to the university, over at Berkeley.”

Ducasse said, “You want to make the hit at the college?”

“No, on the way up.”

Parker said, “How much stuff?”

“Three statues,” Beaghler said. “They’re some kind of famous old statues from Europe, from a long time ago. There was ten of them done, and three of them are down in San Simeon. They’re going to have maybe seven of them brought together at Berkeley, and pictures of the rest.”

Ducasse said, “How much are they worth?”

“My cousin says they’re two hundred grand apiece.”

Walheim whistled, and Ducasse said, “Six hundred thousand. That’s a lot.”

Parker said, “Who’s your buyer?”

Grinning, Beaghler shook his head and said, “I don’t have one. You know my story, I’m a driver, I never been anything but. I don’t have any contacts like that.”

Parker said, “You want one of us to come up with a buyer.”

“Right.”

“For three of a thing that there’s only ten of in the world.”

Beaghler’s smile slipped a little. “You don’t think it can be done?”

“I’m not sure,” Parker said. “But it doesn’t sound easy. What are these statues made of?”

“Gold. Solid gold, all the way through.”

Walheim said, “What would they be worth melted down?”

Parker shook his head. “Nothing, in comparison. The best bet would be the insurance company.”

Beaghler frowned. “We’d be lucky to get a quarter from the insurance company.”

“You’ll be lucky to find a buyer,” Parker told him.

Beaghler said, “All right, let’s wait a while on the buyer. Let me tell you my idea for the caper.”

Parker shrugged. “Go ahead.”

“My cousin told me they’re going to crate them up in three separate wooden boxes, packed really safe and secure. Then they’re going to travel up the coast road in an armored car. No escort, just the armored car.”

Ducasse said, “An armored car doesn’t need an escort.”

Beaghler looked around at the three faces. “Do all of you know the coast road, up through Big Sur?”

They all nodded. Parker remembered having driven it two or three times in the past, a curving two-lane road between the ocean and the mountains of the Santa Lucia Range, twenty-eight miles of rugged scenery, cliffs and boulders and mountains and no cities or towns. There were campsites and forest ranger stations off in the mountains, but that was all.

“All right,” Beaghler said. “They’re coming up that road. We ambush the armored car on one of the curves there, I’ve got one all picked out, a beautiful hairpin where they’re gonna have to come to practically a full stop anyway.”

Ducasse said, “How do you ambush it?”

“With grenades,” Beaghler said. “Smoke, and then percussion. We hit them with a smoke grenade so they can’t see and they have to stop. Then we roll a percussion grenade under the car to keep them stopped. Then we come down and George opens the rear door and we take the statues out and go on our merry way, safe and sound.”

Parker said, “On our way where? In the first place, armored cars keep in radio contact with their headquarters, and in the second place, there’s no way off that road. All they have to do is block both ends and wait for us.”

Beaghler’s broad grin showed he’d been waiting for that objection. “Not so,” he said. “I’ve got an ATV.”

“A what?”

“An all-terrain vehicle,” Beaghler said. “They make them for people who want to camp out. They’re like a jeep, only they’ll go places even a jeep won’t go. I’ve got one that’ll go places you’d think twice about going with a horse. It’s fantastic.”

Walheim said, “Where do you figure to go with it, Bob?”

“Over the mountains,” Beaghler said. “Over to King City. We’ll have another car stashed there, and we can just take the main road back up through Salinas.”

Walheim shook his head. “Not a chance.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t get through there. You’ll never make it to King City.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Beaghler said. “Because I’ve done it. Artie Danforth and me, we did it together about a month ago.”

Walheim squinted at Beaghler as though he was hard to see. “Are you putting me on? You really went through that country?”

“Man, we averaged six miles an hour. But we got through.”

Parker said, “How many miles?”

“Just under sixty.”

“You’re talking about ten hours.”

“Probably longer than that. We’ll probably have to camp out overnight. See, the timing is, we’ll probably hit the armored car around noon. Say one o’clock. Then we’ve got only five or six hours before—”

“Somebody outside,” Sharon said. She was standing by the living-room window looking out. “Looking at the cars,” she said.

All four got to their feet and went over to look out the window. Out there, giving the three rental cars a once-over, was a stocky compact guy with a flattened nose, thinning curly hair, and a heavy slightly-blued jaw. He was glancing in the windows of each car, strolling along past them, taking his time but not making a major production out of it.

Parker frowned, trying to see the guy’s face more clearly. There was something vaguely familiar about him, but he couldn’t really be sure.

Beaghler, sounding very worried, said, “Fuzz, do you think?”

“No,” Ducasse said. “Private maybe, but not law.”

Beaghler said, “Sharon?”

“I never saw him before.” The sudden frightened defensiveness told Parker just how tight a rein Beaghler kept on his wife, and suggested also how necessary it was. Which was confirmed when she added, “If I knew the guy, would I have said anything?”

Parker said, “Nobody knows him?”

Outside, the guy had turned toward the house, was coming up through the bedraggled lawn.

Ducasse said, “Not me.”

Frowning, Parker said, “There’s something—Let me take it.”

“Sure,” said Beaghler. “I don’t want him.”

Parker kept watching as the guy came up on the porch. Was it a familiar face, or just a familiar type? He said to Beaghler, “Are you into anything else right now? Anything I should worry about?”

“Not a thing,” Beaghler said. “I’ve been quiet for a year, that’s why I’m so broke.”

The doorbell rang. Parker walked around the others and over to the front door. When he opened it, the guy was standing slightly turned away, pretending to be bored and looking out toward the street, as though he were a house-to-house salesman or something. Which he wasn’t.

Parker had opened the door only wide enough for him to step outside onto the porch, and then closed it again. If this was somebody he had known in the past, he might not want to advertise it to the people in the house.

The guy had turned his head this way when Parker opened the door, and Parker watched the quick assessment in his eyes, and the recognition that neither of them was playing in his true role. But there was no other recognition there, not the kind Parker had been waiting for; and he himself still couldn’t be sure.

The guy had apparently decided to go ahead and continue playing salesman: “Mr. Beaghler?”

“No.” They didn’t know one another after all, so there was no point stretching out the conversation. Maybe he was simply from a credit outfit; maybe Sharon had been pushing her charge accounts too hard.

“How about the little lady of the house? Is Mrs. Beaghler—?”

“No,” Parker said, interrupting him, and waited for him to go away.

But he hadn’t yet given up. “You mean she isn’t here at the present time, or that—”

“I already said no.” Enough was enough. Parker reached behind himself for the doorknob, and stepped backward to go into the house again.

But as he turned away into the house, the guy suddenly said, “Parker.”

He stopped, and looked back. He never traveled in the square-john world under that name. To be recognized was one thing; to be called by that name was something else. He said, “What did you call me?”

“Parker.”

“You’re making a mistake. The name is Latham.”

The guy shrugged. “It was Parker in 1962,” he said. “You’ve gotten a new face since then, but the rest is the same.”

Sixty-two; California; a faint memory stirred.

Which the guy confirmed. “My name’s Kearny,” he said. “You were vagged in Bakersfield, broke out of the prison farm. A woman from Fresno gave you a ride, ended up taking you home with her for a two-day shack-up while the heat died down. You never told her you were the one they wanted, but she knew. She didn’t care. She was my wife’s sister. I stayed at the house the second night. We killed a bottle between us.”

Parker remembered. Kearny had a private detective’s ticket, but his field was bad credit risks, not wanted convicts. Parker had allowed him to kill most of that bottle himself that night, and had left early the next morning.

But that still didn’t explain his knowing the name. Stepping back out onto the porch, shutting the door again, he said, “I was Ronald Casper then.”

Kearny said, “She heard you telephoning a guy in Chicago, collect. He wouldn’t accept a call from Casper, you had to use the name Parker. She told me about it afterwards, after you left. She still talks about you. I never told her she was just an easy way for you to be off the street for a couple of days.”

Parker shrugged that off and said, “So what is it now?”

“I’m looking for a paroled con named Howard Odum.”

The name didn’t mean a thing. Parker said, “Odum is a friend of Beaghler’s?”

“Was,” Kearny said. “Friend of the wife’s now. Beaghler doesn’t know.” Kearny added carefully, “This has nothing to do with anything Beaghler’s into now.”

Was this the trouble with the wife? If Beaghler’s heist was going to break down—other than with the problem of a buyer for the statues—it would be something to do with his wife, and if it was going to happen, it might as well happen right now.

Parker half turned, opened the door partway, and called, “Sharon.”

It took her a while to come out; she was probably making a lot of denials in advance to her husband. When she did emerge, swinging the door wide and then closing it again, her face was as closed and sullen as a prison door.

Parker gestured a thumb toward Kearny, saying, “He wants Odum. Tell him.”

“Odum?” Her voice was shrill, announcing the lie. “I haven’t seen Howie since—”

Parker made an impatient move with one hand. She gave him a defiant look, but it didn’t last. Her eyes slid away, and finally she cleared her throat and said, in a much lower voice, “Sixteen-eighty-four Galindo Street.”

Parker glanced at Kearny, but the other man shook his head, so he turned back and said, “Try again.”

It was impossible for her to look innocent, but she tried. “Honest,” she said, “that’s his address.”

This was running on. Parker felt suddenly very impatient, very irritable. “Once more,” he said, and he meant it was the last time.

“Well, uh—” She was very nervous. She said, “Maybe he means, uh, Howie’s girl friend over in Antioch.”

This time Kearny nodded. Parker looked back at Sharon.

Now the words poured out in a nervous stream: “He . . . stays over with her a lot. She—I don’t know her name, but her address is, ah, nineteen-oh-two Gavallo Road. It’s a like new apartment building, twelve units. Howie said—”

“Good,” Parker said. “I’ll be right in.”

She’d been dismissed. It took her a second to get it, and then she scrambled back into the house like a cat leaving a full bathtub.

Parker turned to Kearny: “I’d hate to think you’d memorized those car plates to find out who rented them.”

“What cars?” said Kearny.

That was good enough. Kearny had shown himself a long time ago to be a man who minded his own business. Parker nodded and went back inside, where Sharon was white-faced,
Beaghler red-faced, and Ducasse and Walheim both looking very uncomfortable. “It wasn’t anything,” Sharon was saying. “I swear to God, Bob, it was a mistaken identity.”

Beaghler turned to Parker. “What was it all about?”

“Mistaken identity,” Parker said. “He’s a skip-tracer named Kearny I met once a long time ago. He’s looking for a dead skip, a woman, and he thought she lived here. He talked to Sharon and found out he was wrong. Now, what about this overnight stuff?”

Sharon was giving him a grateful look that would have tipped the lie if her husband had seen it. But he was glaring at Parker instead, saying, “What overnight stuff?”

“In your all-terrain vehicle,” Parker said.

“Oh. I thought you meant something—I don’t know what the hell I thought you meant.”

“I’m here to talk about a robbery,” Parker said.

“Yeah, you’re right, you’re right.” Beaghler turned away toward the table.

Sharon suddenly said, “I think I hear the baby.” With a frightened look toward her husband, she turned and hurried from the room.

The four men sat down at the table again, and Beaghler said, “Where was I?”

Ducasse said, “Staying overnight in the mountains.”

Walheim said, “You said we’d probably hit the armored car around one o’clock.”

“Right.” Beaghler nodded. “That gives us about five hours’ usable daylight. It gets too dark in the woods after six o’clock, you could drive into a canyon and think it was just a shadow.”

Parker said, “So we’d get into King City around noon the next day.”

“That’s the way I figure it, yeah.”

Parker nodded. That was good, to have a place to hole up the first night, and then finish getting out of the area the next day.

Walheim said, “How do you know they won’t track us?”

“Through those mountains? Hell, they won’t know where we are. They’ll figure we’re camping near the road someplace, they won’t look for us thirty miles in.”

Ducasse said, “Thirty miles isn’t very far.”

“Yes it is,” Beaghler said. “Thirty miles on Interstate 80 isn’t very far at all, but thirty miles of forest is one hell of a long distance.”