The Man With the Getaway Face by Richard Stark Page B

Parker stepped out into the passing lane, and waved the red flag at her, while motioning with his other hand that she should turn right. The car sagged when she hit the brakes, and then she made the turn.
    At the last minute, she must have recognized Parker or seen the Ford across the road, because she slammed on the brakes again and tried to get back to the highway, but she was already too far and her left front fender crumpled into a tree. The Ford came across and turned blocking the turn-off, and Handy ran over to the Dodge. He had the.38 in his hand, but when he got there the job was finished and Parker was putting the Sauer away again under his shirt. Alma had run only three steps from the car.
    They opened the rear door, and Skimm was lying on the money with a paring knife in his chest, which was why she'd taken longer than they'd expected. They pulled him out and got to the money. They stayed behind the Dodge, and the Ford was on the other side of that, so the occasional cars going by didn't bother them.
    There were four metal boxes of bills and five bags of coins. Handy took care of the locks on the boxes, and they started to count. The bills were all bound in stacks of a hundred, so the counting didn't take long. There was just over fifty-four thousand dollars in bills.
    Parker took out six thousand, for the bankrolling, and they split the rest in half. Parker stowed his share in the suitcase he'd put in the back of the Ford; Handy put his back in two of the metal boxes and stashed them in the trunk of the Dodge. Then Parker picked up a bag of coins in each hand and walked deeper into the woods. The ground was mushy, and when he came to a stream he stopped and dropped the two bags on the ground. On the way back, he passed Handy carrying two more bags in.
    Parker went back and got the fifty, and when he got to the stream again Handy had already slashed one of the bags open and was dumping rolls of quarters out on to the ground, scattering them around. Parker slit open another bag, this one containing rolls of pennies, and walked up the stream a ways, then started dumping. He stamped the rolls of coins into the ground and kicked them into the stream.
    It took them a while to get all the coins scattered around. They didn't want them, because they weren't worth the trouble to carry. There was probably less than six hundred dollars in all the five bags put together, and that six hundred was more awkward to carry and more dangerous to dispose of than the entire fifty-four thousand in paper. Banks in the area would be on the alert for a stranger wanting to unload rolls of coins. Getting rid of one roll here and one roll there would be a full-time job. The police knew that, and all professional thieves knew it, and so coins were practically never a part of any boodle.
    After they'd finished mining the whole area with rolls of coins, they slashed the canvas bags to ribbons and buried them. Then they went back to the cars. Parker had already moved the detour sign off the road and now he took it deeper into the woods and threw it away. Handy, meanwhile, started the Dodge; hitting the tree hadn't hurt it much, just dented the fender and bumper. It was his getaway car, since he wasn't going back to New Jersey with Parker.
    They said so long to each other. "You can get in touch with me through Joe Sheer," Parker said.
    "Arnie La Pointe usually knows where I am," Handy answered.
    "Right."
    Parker turned the Ford around, and headed back for the bridge. In the rear-view mirror, he saw the green Dodge come out of the turn-off and go up the road towards the ferry. He took a long way around to get to the farmhouse, not wanting to be too near the diner. He went around through New Brunswick, and it was nearly two o'clock before he got there.
    He walked in and the first thing he saw was that the automatic was gone from the card table. The second thing he noticed was that the door to the fruit cellar was still barred. He backed out, looking