Deadly Edge: A Parker Novel Read Online Free

than things he did understand. “Groupies? What the hell’s a groupie?”
    “Rock-and-roll fan. Mostly girls.”
    Briley laughed and said, “Looking for autographs?”
    “Looking to get laid.”
    A flashlight beam arched upward in their direction, and they all leaned backward. They waited a few seconds, and then Morris took a look and said, “They’re all done.”
    “Just so they don’t come up the fire escape,” Keegan said.
    Parker looked over the edge, and the flashlights were moving back toward the wrought-iron gates.
    Morris said, “Just an easy check. Now they’ll put a man outside the gates, so nobody climbs over.”
    “By God,” said Keegan irritably, “what if they see something on the Strand door?”
    They wouldn’t, because there was nothing to see, but nobody bothered to answer him.
    They had gotten here through the Strand. At four-thirtythis afternoon they’d driven up to the entrance of the Strand in a gray-and-white Union Electric Company truck, all four of them wearing gray one-piece coveralls with the company name in white on the back. It had been simple to get through the lobby doors of the Strand, carrying three toolkits, the third containing sandwiches and a Thermos container of coffee. Briley and Keegan and Morris had played blackjack to pass the time, betting the expected proceeds from this job, but Parker had slept for a while, walked around the dusty-smelling empty theater for a while, and sat for a while in darkness in the manager’s office, looking out at the city. He’d watched the crowds form for the early show, all the bright colors after the gray centuries of Reason, and then the traffic. Then he’d left the office to walk some more.
    He had a woman, named Claire, that he found himself thinking about while waiting. She was somewhere in the Northeast now, buying a house; the thought of having a woman who owned a house was a strange one. He’d been married once, to a woman named Lynn, but they’d lived in hotels; his life, and she’d adapted to it. She was dead now; she’d been hard, but pressure had come to her, and she’d broken. The new one, Claire, was not hard, but Parker thought she wouldn’t break.
    Morris said, “There they go,” and the wrought-iron gates closed, and there was no longer any light down there except the one yellow globe suspended from a metal pipe jutting out of the Civic Auditorium wall. “I doubt they’ll be back.”
    Parker said, “Watch. Just in case.”
    “Oh, I will.”
    Parker and Briley and Keegan went back to the hole they’d made and squatted down on their haunches,and Briley shone the flashlight down into the room below.
    So far, the map they’d bought had been absolutely right. Right about the Strand, the alley, the fire escape, the roof. And now, right about the room. They’d chopped where the map said to chop, and it had led them to an empty office. “Public Relations,” the map had told them; “already moved to temporary offices in another building.”
    Sometimes jobs were done this way, from a map—a package, really, like a do-it-yourself radio kit—bought from a middleman who had bought it from someone on the inside, a non-professional who simply laid out the particulars of the case. Years before, most of John Dillinger’s jobs had been done that way, bought as a packet from a middleman, and it was still sometimes the best way to get set up.
    The office below was just as the map had described: medium size, two desks, four chairs, a short brown Naugahyde sofa, several gray-metal filing cabinets. One of the desks, empty except for a green blotter, black telephone and one wrinkled legal-sized envelope, was directly beneath the hole.
    “Hold this,” Briley said. Parker took the flashlight from him, and Briley put both hands on one of the lower-level joists and dropped down into the room. He swung forward once, backward once, and dropped two feet to the desk top. He grinned up toward the flashlight and dropped lithely