Plunder Squad (1972) – Random House

A Parker Job (#15)

___“This job,” Parker said, pointing straight down. “This job, my price is forty thousand.”
___“Come off it,” Griffith said, as though suddenly he was desperate to be finished. “Come away from that number, how can I talk to you? I came up ten thousand, you won’t even come down five?”
___“What if it takes five men? Then my piece is twenty-eight. You offering me the other seven thousand to bring it up to thirty-five?”
___“No, God damn it,” Griffith said. “I’m saying I won’t make any separate deals, because once I do it with one, I’ll wind up doing it with everybody. I say to you all right, okay, thirty-five, and then one after another everybody else wants thirty-five, and then you do it with ten men. And where’s my profit?”
___Parker shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.
___“You don’t even give a damn,” Griffith said. “You stand there and you don’t care. Maybe the whole thing is, you don’t want to do the job at all, it scares you, but you don’t want Mackey to know you’re afraid of it, so you’re going through all this to have an excuse to run away.”
___“Pay me forty thousand,” Parker said, “and I’m in. Don’t pay it and I’m out.”
___“You won’t negotiate, damn it. How can I deal with you?”
___“Maybe you can’t.”