Flashfire p-19 Read online

  It was ten days till the job. There was nothing to do now but wait, and make sure that when Melander and the others came back they didn’t notice Parker in the neighborhood. So why not go back to Miami for a few days, spend some time with Claire?

  He left in late morning, took Interstate 95 south, and got off the highway at Fort Lauderdale to find a diner lunch. After, he came out of the diner to the bright sunlit parking lot, and the Jaguar was gone.

  Stupid; to let that get ripped off. He looked around the parking lot for another car to take, and a guy came out of the diner behind him, working at his mouth with a toothpick. He said, ‘Hot day.’

  ‘Yes,’ Parker said. He waited for the guy to go away.

  But the guy pointed across the parking lot with his toothpick and said, ‘You see that white Toyota Land Cruiser over there?’

  Parker didn’t look at the white Toyota Land Cruiser, he looked at the guy with the toothpick. He was bulked up, tanned, about forty, grinning like a man with a secret. He nodded, not looking at Parker, and said, ‘There’s a guy in there with a thirty ought six you do anything he doesn’t like, any single thing at all, he’ll blow your head off.’

  ‘Maybe he’ll hit you,’ Parker said.

  ‘Funny thing about Herby,’ the guy said. ‘He never misses what he aims at. Never been known to happen. Why don’t we go over there, he can tell you about it himself.’

  Now Parker looked at the Land Cruiser, a Land Rover clone, then back at the guy. These people weren’t from Melander and Carlson and Ross; that trio would handle their own problems. He didn’t see how they could be connected with Lesley. So who were they and what was their interest?

  The guy said, ‘I’m walking over there now myself. If you don’t walk with me, they’ll be hosing down the pavement here later.’

  Parker said, ‘We’ll walk together. I’m trying to remember where I know you from.’

  The guy chuckled, not as though he thought Parker had said something funny, but as though it was a skill he’d learned one time, chuckling, and he liked to practice from time to time. As they walked across the parking lot to the Land Cruiser, that was the only answer he gave.

  Herby, a sharp-nosed skinny man in a wrinkled white dress shirt and black pants and mirror-lensed aviator sunglasses, sat in the back seat, the big hunting rifle on his lap, right hand loose near the trigger, left hand loose under the barrel. There was no way to tell if he was looking at Parker or not, but it really didn’t make any difference.

  The first guy, still cheerful, said, ‘You can ride up front with me.’

  They were willing to kill him in public, if they had to, but they’d rather do it in private. So there was still a little time. Parker went around to the right side of the Land Cruiser and opened the door, and saw a small square photo on the passenger seat. He picked it up, slid onto the seat, shut the door, and looked at the photo. It was himself, one of the pictures Bobby had taken for his driver’s license.

  He looked from the picture to the guy, now behind the wheel, grinning at him around the toothpick. ‘So Norte’s dead,’ Parker said, and dropped the photo out the window.

  The guy stuck the key in the ignition. ‘Hell, pal,’ he said as the engine started, ‘everybody’s dead. Some people just don’t know it yet.’

  11

  They were going to kill him in the Everglades. A good place for it, obviously; the idea had been thought of before.

  The white Land Cruiser headed out westward along Alligator Alley, the Everglades Parkway, a two-lane black binding tape laid on the uncertain green land, straight as a rifle shot across the flat landscape. Big trucks groaned along, and the smaller cars zipped around them and sped on. The guy with the toothpick in the rear corner of his mouth moved the Land Cruiser along at a steady unhurried speed. There was time enough to get the job done.

  Parker thought about the Sentinel, now taped to the underside of the Parsons table in Melander’s dining room. There were two guns stashed in the Jaguar, but he had nothing on his body. Here there was Herby in the back seat with his rifle and maybe some other things. The driver wasn’t obviously armed, but he could have a pistol in a pants pocket or in a spring-loaded holster under the dash on the far side of the steering column.

  They couldn’t do anything on this road, with this traffic. There were always at least half a dozen vehicles in sight. They’d have to turn off, and that was the point where he’d have to make his move. They were pros, and they would know that was when he’d have to move, but he had to anyway. And they knew that, too.

  Although it didn’t matter now, he couldn’t help but wonder if it would have made a difference if he’d decided not to let Julius Norte live. He’d thought the man could handle himself against the fellow who’d sent those killers after him, but maybe without Bobby, Norte hadn’t been so invulnerable anymore.

  It seemed to Parker that this guy, whoever he was, who’d hired these two in the Land Cruiser, would have been on Daniel Parmitt’s trail whether he’d left Norte dead or alive. There would have been papers in Norte’s office, evidence, things Parker wouldn’t have had the time or knowledge to find and destroy, to tell who the other customer had been that day, who’d dealt himself a hand. It was revenge that guy wanted now, as well as his grim determination to leave nobody alive who could possibly lead back to him. Nothing to do with Parker, but he was stuck in it anyway.

  They drove for over an hour, passing the occasional tourist place, offering cold drinks or airboat rides into the swamp or views of caged alligators, and no one in the car spoke. The air-conditioning kept everything cool and dry. They passed small side roads from time to time, bumping away on rough bridges over the canals, and Parker waited.

  Over an hour. The driver lowered his visor because the afternoon sun was rolling down the sky, dead ahead, and Parker did the same. There were warnings on notices attached to this side of the visor, but he didn’t read them.

  The driver tapped the brake. Parker squinted, and maybe that was a road out there, still some distance off, leading to the right. He became very still, and the driver tapped the brake again, and the rifle barrel came to rest against the base of Parker’s skull, just below and behind his left ear, a cold hard smoothness of metal.

  Parker sensed, but didn’t turn his head to see, the driver grin. Still facing front, feeling the steel against his skull, he said, ‘Try not to jounce on the turn.’

  The driver practiced his chuckle again, and slowed some more, flipping on his directional.

  It was a dirt road, heading north over the scrub near the highway, then going on into the ripe green of the swamp shrubbery. Parker watched it coming and knew he couldn’t do the move, not now. He’d have to wait until they thought he wasn’t going to do anything. Eventually, they’d believe he’d given up the idea of doing anything, because eventually everybody gives up, and they’d know that. Eventually, he, too, might give up.

  The driver made the turn, smooth and slow, but then they bumped a little when they crossed the wooden bridge over the nearby canal, and the rifle barrel jounced hard against his skull, but the gun didn’t go off. And a minute later, with the car up to a good speed again and the mangroves and palmettos getting closer, the rifle barrel went away.

  Parker adjusted the air-conditioner vent so it wouldn’t blow directly on him. He looked at the driver, who concentrated now more completely on his driving on this imperfect road, then twisted around to look back at Herby, who was seated sideways in the left corner back there, so he could hold the rifle with its trigger handy to his right hand and its barrel aimed at the back of Parker’s seat. The aviator glasses reflected Parker, darkly. He faced front again.

  Once in the swamp, the road veered left and right to keep on the dry ground. Water glinted among the trunks on both sides. The road was one lane wide, but here and there were wider spots where one car could pass another.

  A straight stretch, and down at the end a sharp curve to the left. The driver accelerated, and Parker watched his
foot on the pedal. At the end of this stretch, he’d have to brake.

  There. The foot started to lift, and Parker moved everything at once. His left foot mashed down on the driver’s foot and the accelerator, jolting them forward, maybe spoiling Herby’s aim for just a second. His right hand shoved the door open against that acceleration as his left hand swung up backhanded to mash that toothpick into the driver’s mouth. And his right foot shoved down and leftward, propelling him backward out of the Land Cruiser, as the crack of the rifle shot banged around inside the car.

  He landed hard on his back, the Land Cruiser spraying dirt back at him as the driver tried to brake, to steer, to keep the Land Cruiser from running off into the swamp. Herby was rolling out of the car on the other side, not waiting for it to stop, rolling with the rifle cupped against his chest under his crossed arms.

  Parker rolled away from the road, hoping for water, but a low berm had been built along here to keep the swamp away from the road, and it stopped him. He had to rise, not wanting to, if he would get over the berm, and as he came up on his knees he heard the crack behind him, much smaller in the outer air, just a firecracker. Except that a punch in the back threw him forward across the top of the berm, and when he lifted himself, suddenly very heavy, there was blood spreading across the front of his shirt. The bullet had gone through him.

  He shovedwith his arms, but they were heavy as trees and he only dropped forward, rolling onto his back. There was no sky, only the darkness of the leaves.

  He felt their feet when they rolled him down into the water, but when he hit the water he wasn’t feeling anything anymore.

  THREE

  1

  He wasn’t there. The house at Colliver Pond was empty, and that was bad news. Melander and Carlson and Ross wandered the empty rooms, looked out the windows at the frozen lake, and they were not happy.

  Dissension had started among them not twenty minutes after they’d left Parker at the motel in Evansville, with a handful of earnest money instead of his share of the bank job. Carlson had started it; being the driver, he was the brooder, the one with extra thinking time on his hands. ‘I don’t like it,’ he’d said.

  The other two had known immediately what he was talking about, and Melander had said, ‘Hal, we didn’t have a choice. We thought he’d come in. Tom Hurley would’ve come in.’

  ‘But Hurley left. And he sent us this guy Parker, and I can’t help thinking we made a mistake.’

  ‘No choice,’ Melander said again.

  ‘We had choices,’ Carlson told him, keeping his eye on the road, Interstate 64, headed east, going to switch to 75 southbound at Lexington, aimed for Palm Beach.

  Ross, seated beside Carlson up front, with Melander in back, said, ‘What choices, Hal? The Clendon jewels is the only thing we got, and this is the only way to get it.’

  ‘If we were going to rob him’

  ‘Hey!’ Surprised, a little angry, Melander said, ‘Rob him! Who, Parker?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘We didn’t rob him, we borrowed the money, he’ll get the whole thing, we explained it to him.’

  ‘If you did it to me,’ Carlson said, ‘I’d say you robbed me.’

  They all thought about that for a minute, trying to imagine the situation reversed, and then Ross shrugged and said, ‘Okay, he thinks we robbed him. So what?’

  ‘So maybe,’ Carlson said, ‘we shouldn’t have left him alive.’

  Ross stared at him. ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Come on, Jerry, you know what I’m saying. If we’re going to rob him, maybe we should go ahead and kill him.’

  Melander, firm about it, said, ‘Hal, we don’t do that. We don’t kill the people we work with. How could we dothat?’

  ‘Then there he is,’ Carlson said, ‘behind us, thinking how we robbed him. He didn’t strike me as a let-it-ride kind of guy.’

  They thought about that awhile, going over their brief knowledge of Parker, and then Melander said, ‘We can keep in touch with him. We’ll call him, time to time, let him know we’re still gonna pay him, let him know it’s gonna be all right.’

  ‘And make sure he’s in place,’ Carlson said.

  ‘That, too,’ Melander agreed.

  When Tom Hurley had bowed out of the bank job and suggested Parker to take his place, he’d given them a way to make contact, if they had to. There was a phone number, and they should ask for Mr Willis. But they shouldn’t start off with that call, they should wait for him to make the first move, to let them know he was interested. As it happened, he’d done everything with that first move, so they hadn’t had to use the Mr Willis number, but now they could.

  Except, four days later, with their freshly installed telephone at the estate in Palm Beach, when they tried that number there was no answer. They had a go at it on and off for three days, and then Carlson said, ‘He’s following us.’

  Melander didn’t like that. He walked around the empty living room, with the out-of-tune piano shoved into a corner, and he glared out at the terrace and the ocean and all the beautiful weather he was supposed to be enjoying instead of that icy northern shit, and he didn’t like it at all. ‘We left the son of a bitch alive,’ he complained.

  ‘Like I been saying,’ Carlson pointed out.

  ‘We left the son of a bitch alive,’ Melander insisted, ‘so he’d know we were good for it, he can count on us, we’ll come through. Not so he could follow us around and make trouble. We’re busy here, we got a lot on our minds, we don’t need this shit.’

  ‘Like I been saying,’ Carlson said.

  ‘Jesus, Hal,’ Melander said, ‘what made you so fucking bloodthirsty all of a sudden? You never wanted to go around popping people before.’

  ‘I don’t want to this time,’ Carlson said. ‘It just seems to me, before we did what we did, we should have thought it through a little more.’

  ‘Well, we didn’t,’ Melander said, ‘and I don’t see what more fucking thoughtwas gonna do about it. We did what we had to do, what we agreed we had to do, and we did it and it’s done and I swear to God, Hal, I want you out of my fucking face on this topic.’

  ‘I’m just saying,’ Carlson said.

  ‘I hearyou saying, and I’m tired of hearing you fucking saying, you follow me?’

  Ross, speaking quietly as though in a room with some possibly dangerous dogs, said, ‘Maybe what we should do is go there.’

  They stopped glaring at each other to frown at Ross. Melander said, ‘Go where?’

  ‘Where that phone number is,’ Ross said. ‘With a phone number, you can always get an address.’

  Melander, feeling belligerent toward everybody, said, ‘Go there and do what? What’s the purpose?’

  ‘Maybe there’s something there tells us where he is,’ Ross said, still being very mild. ‘Or how to get in touch with him. And he’s supposed to have a woman there, too, maybe she knows where he is. Or maybe she should come stay with us awhile to make sure Parker doesn’t get to be too much.’

  ‘The woman,’ Melander said, nodding, losing his belligerence. ‘That’s a good idea.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Carlson said. ‘Maybe that just makes it worse. First we rob him, then we kidnap his lady friend, maybe he’s gonna’

  Exasperated, Melander said, ‘Why do you keep worrying about how he’sgonna take it? Whose side are you on?’

  ‘Mine,’ Carlson said.

  Ross said, ‘Let’s go take a look at the house.’

  So they did, driving up the east coast to the still-icy North, and the house was in northwest New Jersey, seventy miles from New York, on a lake where most of the houses were seasonal, still shut up for the winter. The house the Mr Willis phone number led to, behind a rural mailbox that said “Willis” on the side, was small, part gray stone and part brown shingles, with an attached two-car garage. It was surrounded by trees and brush, and it was empty.

  People lived here. There was much evidence of the woman, less evidence of the man,
who had to be Parker. They found three guns stashed in the house, one clipped under the living room sofa, one clipped under the bed, and one in a sliding wood panel in the garage, next to the kitchen door, just above the button to operate the overhead garage door. That last was the one that got to Carlson. He could see it: the guy makes an innocent turn to push that button, open or close the overhead door, and turns back with an S&W Chiefs Special .38 in his hand.

  They could see that the woman had packed, and probably for an extended stay. But there was nothing to show where she’d gone, no travel agent’s itinerary, no notes about airline connections, nothing. There was nothing at all about Parker; his footprint was not deep in this house.

  They stayed four days in the house, finding a couple of diners and a supermarket not too many miles away, waiting to see if anybody showed up or if there was a phone call. If Parker phoned, looking for his woman, they’d talk to him, see if they could cool him out, discuss it with him.

  But nothing happened, no calls, no visits, and after four days Melander couldn’t stand it anymore. ‘And it’s fucking cold,’ he said. ‘This isn’t where I was gonna be right now,’

  Carlson said, ‘We aren’t doing anything here except act like jerk-offs.’

  Melander, who’d been thinking the same thing, didn’t like the thought when he heard it expressed. ‘Jerk-offs? What are you talking about?’

  ‘We’re sitting around here,’ Carlson told him; ‘waiting for people who aren’t here and aren’t gonna be here and in fact are probably themselves in Palm Beach.’

  ‘Getting warm,’ Ross said.

  ‘Fuck it,’ Melander said. ‘Nobody’s coming here, let’s go back.’

  ‘Like I said,’ Carlson said.

  They didn’t want Parker to know they’d been there, in case he did happen to drop by before the Clendon job went down, so they put everything back the way they’d found it, including restashing the guns. There was a late snowstorm, which delayed them another day and got Melander’s back up even more, and then they drove south, grousing at one another most of the way. They usually got along together, but the wait this time was getting to them, and the complication of Parker just made everything worse.