Read Online The Green Eagle Score by Richard Stark - Free Book Online Page B

dinner. Parker was sitting on the sofa, looking at Stan’s pictures spread out on the coffee table. Stan wasn’t around.
    Parker looked up. “It work out?”
    “Beautiful,” Fusco told him. “I sat at a table right next to a window, I could see everything happened at the gate. I had a book open in front of me, my notebook open, it looked like I was copying down stuff I was reading. Nobody paid me any attention at all.”
    Stan came in from the bedroom then, spying, “Marty, tomorrow I get my car back. I hate that stinking bus.”
    “I was going to be there longer than you,” Fusco reminded him.
    “I know, I know.” Stan looked at Parker. “You want to go over his stuff now, or after dinner?”
    “Whenever Fusco’s ready,” Parker said.
    “Couple minutes,” Fusco said. He dropped his notebook on an end table and went into the bathroom to wash up for dinner. He didn’t know why, but sitting in that library all day had made him stiff; his back creaked when he bent over the sink to wash his face.
    When he came out, Parker and Stan had moved to the kitchen table and Ellen was dishing up supper. Parker and Fusco both were taking most of their meals here, but were sleeping elsewhere, Fusco at the residence hotel over Checkers’ Bar & Grill down on Front Street, Parker at the motel in Malone, fifteen miles away. Parker had the Pontiac every night, but always brought it back in the morning in time for Stan to take it to the base. Unless, like this morning, either Parker or Fusco had a use for the car.
    Fusco sat down at the table and Ellen put a plate in front of him without a word, meatloaf, green beans, boiled potato, starving, Fusco dug right in.
    When Ellen sat down she said to Fusco, “How was your day?”
    “Good,” he told her. “No trouble at all.”
    “That’s good,” she said. In the last couple of days she’d gotten a lot better, a lot easier to get along with. She’d been all up in the air about this caper for a long time, but now all that seemed changed. Maybe she’d grown resigned to it, or maybe she’d just gotten interested in how the score was shaping up. Ever since Monday she’d been fine, listening to them talking things over, not bitching about anything. Stan had been understandably more relaxed himself as a result.
    Fusco liked it when people were relaxed. He hated trouble in the air, interpersonal hang-ups. It was much better now, the four of them sitting around the kitchen table together, Stan telling funny stories about some kid second lieutenant in his office. Fusco had two helpings of everything.
    Afterwards, back in the living-room, Fusco reported on his day, giving the names and times of all the commercial vehicles in and out of the South Gate, the quantity of passenger cars at different times of day, what Air Force vehicles used that gate in and out. At the end he said, “There were two trucks went out that gate but didn’t come in, at least not while I was there. One was a garbage truck, green, said S & L Sanitation Service on the side, went through at three-twenty. The other was a Pepsi-Cola truck, went through at four thirty-five. I figure they both must of come in the main gate, went through some kind of set route, and then they go out this way.”
    Parker said, “What kind of check do the commercial trucks get?”
    “They must have some kind of pass,” Fusco told him. “Every one of them stopped, the driver held something out for the kid on the gate to look at, and then the kid waved him through.”
    “In and out both?”
    “Right.”
    “Nobody got waved through? Not even people going to be the same every day? The gate guards have to know some of those drivers.”
    Fusco shook his head. “Everybody stopped. No exceptions.”
    Stan told Parker, “There’s some chicken outfit goes around trying to crack security on Air Force bases. They hit here three or four months ago, and the story went all over the base. One of their men came in in a Coke company truck, put