Read Parker 01 - The Hunter for Free Online

guerrillas a continent away.
    As to the Americans and Canadians doing the selling, they wouldn't care; they wouldn't be out of pocket at all. They'd still have their munitions, and there was always a market for munitions.
    The truck driver didn't know when or where the money was supposed to change hands, but Chester found out from him the name of a man who did know, a lawyer named Bleak from San Francisco, one of the backers who'd put up the money in the states for the initial purchase of the arms. He also learned that he had five weeks before the arms would all have been delivered to the field in Keewatin.
    Chester at that time was a straight busher when it came to operations like armed robbery. Most of his experience was with cross-the-border running of one kind or another. He'd bring pornography into the states and bootleg it in Chicago or Detroit, transport cigarettes north and whiskey south, wheel bent goods into Canada for sale fence-to-fence, and things like that.
    He'd taken one fall, in a Michigan pen, when he was stopped at the border in a hot car with a bad daub job. The motor number was still there for all the world to see. And the spare tire was full of Chesterfields.
    A small, thin, narrow-faced ferret of a man, Chester knew the munitions money was pie on the sill, but he was also smart enough to know he wasn't smart enough to take it away by himself. So he drifted south into Chicago, full of his information, and there hooked up with Mal Resnick.
    Mal Resnick was a big-mouth coward who'd blown a syndicate connection four years before and was making a living these days in a hack, steering for some of the local business. The way he'd loused up with the syndicate, he lost his nerve and dumped forty thousand dollars of uncut snow he was delivering when he mistook the organization linebacker for a plainclothes cop. They took three of his teeth and kicked him out in the street, telling him to go earn the forty grand and then come back. He'd worked intermediary once or twice in the last year for Chester peddling pornography.
    If Chester had a failing, it was that he believed people were what they thought they were. Mal Resnick, despite the syndicate error, still thought of himself as a redhot, a smart boy with guts and connections. Chester believed him, and so it was to Mal he went with the story of the munitions and the ninety-three thousand dollars. They discussed it over the table in Mal's roach-ridden kitchen, and Mal, seeing the potential as clearly as Chester had, immediately bought in.
    The operation, at this point, ran into a snag that threatened to hold it up forever. Despite his promises and his big words, Mal didn't really know anybody worth adding to the group, but he couldn't bring himself to admit the fact to Chester. He stalled the little man off, while desperately looking up old syndicate acquaintances, with none of whom he'd ever been very close anyway, and all of whom were content with the work they had. They didn't even want to listen to his proposition. This went on for ten days, until the night Parker and his wife hailed Mal's cab just off the Loop.
    Parker wasn't a syndicate boy, and never had been. He worked a job every year or so, payroll or armored car or bank, never taking anything but unmarked and untraceable cash. He never worked with more than four or five others, and never came in on a job unless he was sure of the competence of his associates. Nor did he always work with the same people.
    He kept his money in hotel safes, and lived his life in resort hotels -- Miami, Las Vegas and Palm Springs -- taking on another job only when his cash on hand dropped below five thousand dollars. He had never been tagged for any of his jobs, nor was there a police file on him anywhere in the world.
    Mal had met Parker once, six years before, through a syndicate gun who had earlier worked a job with Parker in Omaha. He recognized Parker and immediately gave him the proposition.
    Ordinarily, Parker wouldn't