Waltz of Shadows Read Online Free PDF

along. I never got the impression he meant for me to pick anybody. It was always him. He was just letting me and the others go through the paces.
    Guy we picked showed up at the bank every day about ten-forty-five. Real straight laced. Looked thirtyish. Well built. Grey suit one day, blue the next. Always a white shirt and a dark tie. Hair cut and combed and sprayed just right. Looked like the kind of guy if he wasn’t doing suit ads in the Sears
catalogue, he’d be reading you the news on TV. I remember thinking he probably had a blond wife with a nice ass and two kids and lived over on the good side of town. Made all the right parties. Most likely had his picture in the paper now and then.
     
•  •  •
     
       We watched till he came out of the bank, then we got in Dave’s car and followed him. Sure enough. The good side of town. You know where that great big house is on the hill overlooking the University on University Drive? One where the property trails off down that deep wooded slope, toward the creek, then rises up high on the other side?
    That was the house. We watched our guy go inside, and it didn’t take much for us to figure who he was. It was on his mail box. Guy named Doctor Benjamin J. Parker.
    Dave knew who he was, and when he told me, it rang a bell. The cosmetic surgeon. I’d seen the Doc’s ads all over. In the newspapers. On television.
    Guy like that, all the titties he’s stuffed, we figured he had money enough to put on toilet rollers for wiping his ass.
    Next day, third day in a row, we went back to our post to watch him. When he showed up, we knew we had somebody with a pattern. Ten-forty-five, every work day, this dude was at the bank.
    Next time, we were waiting outside the library. Dave had his video camera, and was taping the historical marker by the library. One tells about the Texans turning back the Mexicans during the war for Texas Independence by firing a cannon full of gravel and nails, or beatin’ a hundred of them to death with turkey legs, or some such shit. When Doc showed up, Dave turned and pretended to be taking shots of the street and the old bank front. As he was doing that, he got Doc and this fat guy in the video too.
    Fat guy was in his fifties. Gray haired. About five-nine. Must have weighed over two-hundred-and-thirty pounds. Wheezy looking fuck. Walked like he had tacks in his shoes. Wore a red and green suit coat looked like it belonged on a carnival barker. It was oversized in the shoulders so it would button around his fat belly. He had on these lime green pants, and scuffed brown shoes, and these stupid, thin, white socks you could see through. Wore a wide, red and green striped tie like they used to wear in the seventies. Big enough to dry off on after a shower. All that motherfucker needed to make him just right was some Christmas lights.
    Anyway, our Doc is going up the steps of the bank, and the fat guy comes out of the bank then, and they nod at each other. Casual like. Nothing overly friendly. Just two guys being polite. Doc reaches into his coat and brings out an envelope, which he drops. The fat guy picks it up, brings it in close to himself, and smiles. Then he reaches out and hands Doc back the envelope. Good Samaritan stuff. Right?
    We got home and looked at the video, to show the others that we’d found our perfect victim, and we noticed something funny. We ran it back a few times for a looksee. The envelope the fat guy hands the Doc, it’s not the one the Doc dropped. Doc’s envelope was slightly oversized. The fat guy handed him back a regular size envelope and pushed the other one inside his coat.
    It was smooth. Magician smooth. But us running that tape backwards three or four times to get a
good look at the Doc, Dave picked up on it, and  it was pointed out, we all saw it.
    A planned swap if ever there was one.
    Next day we went to the Square with the video, took a position down by the old hardware store they’re remodeling, and