Deadly Edge: A Parker Novel Page 9

  There was nobody around. Half a dozen cigarette butts near the living room’s front window showed where they’d stood while they’d waited for Briley to get here. And a piece of paper near them on the floor seemed newer than the general layer of scag around the place. Parker picked it up and it had printing on it in two places. In one place, The Hearth, Los Angeles, California—Where Beef Is King, and in the other place, American Sugar Refining Company, New York, N. Y. The paper had been wrapped around a cube of sugar, and carried to Detroit from Los Angeles.

  Parker frowned at the paper, turning it in his hands. Sugar cubes made him think of horses; people gave cubes of sugar to horses. But why have sugar here? Then, still thinking, horse made him think of the other way the word was used: horse means heroin. But sugar has nothing to do with heroin, except sometimes wholesalers use sugar to cut horse.

  And then the thought of heroin led him to the next step, and he knew what the sugar was here for. He held the piece of paper up toward the light, over facing the broken-out windows, and there was the small hole, the pinprick in the paper. Needle-prick.

  He threw the paper away and went outside again and back over to Briley, who hadn’t moved. He put his hand to Briley’s throat, and the pulse was still working, though very feebly. Having turned Briley over before, Parker had made the bleeding from his stomach increase again.

  It was clear what had happened. Briley had come here, the two waiting for him had tipped their hands too soon, Briley had run for cover. They’d managed to hit him with one or more shots before he got clear of them, but he’d kept going and either held them off or lost them in those woods over there. So they’d given up after a while, and they’d gone away, taking Briley’s car with them. Briley had come back to the house and passed out, and the sound of Parker’s car arriving had brought him back to consciousness one last time. He’d come partly awake, afraid they were back again, and fired at the figure he’d seen on the porch. But that had been it for him, and he’d faded out again, and now he was finished.

  There was no point trying to get Briley conscious again, and even if there’d been a reason for it, Parker doubted it would be possible. Briley was dead everywhere but his lungs; they still kept moving the air in and out. But not for any good reason, and not for long.

  Parker got to his feet again, smeared Briley’s Colt with his palms to obscure his prints, dropped the gun on the ground beside the curved-fingered hand, and went away to the Mustang.

  Seven miles from the farmhouse, he stopped at a diner, ordered lunch, and got two dollars in change from the cashier, which he took to the phone booth back by the rest rooms. He dialed Claire’s number in New Jersey, paid the operator what she asked for when she came on, and listened to three rings before Claire’s voice said, “Hello?”

  “Hello, it’s me.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Mr. Parker. Yes, I’ve been expecting you to call.” She didn’t sound frightened at all.

  PART THREE

  1

  Claire stood in front of the house. She was wearing a pale green man-style shirt, and it wasn’t enough; she was cold, and stood with her arms folded around herself, shoulders hunched.

  It was Saturday, shortly after noon, twenty minutes after the call from Handy McKay. Claire stood there and watched Parker open the farther garage doors and go inside to his car. How could he travel that way, without any luggage at all, nothing, not even an overnight bag? She thought, Are we as mysterious to them as they are to us? She stroked her cupped palms up and down over her upper arms, to warm herself, and thought briefly of her dead husband, who had been named Edward and called Ed. He’d always traveled with a black attaché case. She’d hated it, it had destroyed the glamour of the commercial pilot’s uniform he’d worn, it made everything mundane.

  The Pontiac backed out of the garage and made a tight backward U-turn. When it stopped, the left side of the car was toward her. Parker had his window rolled down, and he called, “I’ll phone you. Tonight sometime.”

  “Good.” She raised a hand to wave, the way she used to do with Ed, and realized a second too late that with this one the gesture was inappropriate. She let her hand fall again, awkwardly, the flow of the movement interrupted, and finding no words to seam the awkwardness, nodded instead.

  The Pontiac rolled down the driveway and turned right on the blacktop road. Claire stood in front of the house, rubbing her folded arms, watching the car, and when it disappeared she flashed a sudden broad smile, unintended, and into her mind came the thought, Now it’s really mine!

  She pushed the smile and the thought away, and turned to go into the house and distract herself with the busy-work of making a pot of tea to take off the chill, but she knew what the smile meant, and what the thought meant, and she knew they were both true.

  They meant the house was different now, and it was different. She went in and stood in the kitchen a minute before starting the water for tea, and the house had a different kind of silence about it now. Different from last week, before Parker had come here for the first time. In the days between her moving into the house and his arrival, it had simply been a house that a solitary woman had bought and was living in alone. During the four days of his stay, it had been their house, which meant nobody’s house; it was simply where they were staying, like a hotel room. But now, with his mark on the place but with him not here, it was the house in which she waited for her man. That made all the difference in the world.

  She drank a cup of tea in the living room. The chairs faced the fireplace, but she turned one of them around to face the windows instead, with their view of the lake. She sat and looked at the empty lake and the tiny dots that were empty houses on the opposite shore, and the green mountains in the background, and she thought she would probably not want to stay here in the summer, when the lake and those houses would be full. They would spend the summer somewhere exciting, New York or San Francisco. Maybe they could go to Europe.

  Twelve thousand dollars. Not very much, really, he usually made more than that in one of his jobs. But he’d do more.

  There came into her mind, all at once, the remembered picture of Lempke, his face all bloody, coming through the hole in the bourse room wall and saying, “French.” As though it were a surprising word he’d just invented, and not the name of the man who had just shot and killed him.

  She hated that memory. It was brief, and vivid, and incomplete, and always terrifying. In her memory Lempke came through the wall and said, “French,” and his face was bloody, and he was in the process of dying. But in her memory he never fell.

  Lempke and Parker and some others had been doing a “job,” that strangely inappropriate word Parker used for his robberies. It was a coin convention, and they were stealing the cased coins from the guarded room where they were being held overnight. A coin dealer named Billy Lebatard, distantly related by marriage to Claire’s dead husband, had conceived the robbery, hoping the money from it would win him Claire. It wouldn’t, but she’d let him believe it might; this was shortly after Ed had been killed in the plane crash, and shortly after she’d learned just how little he had left her to go on with.

  It had still been a game, then. Everything in her life up to that point had been a game, one way or another. The teasing boy-girl game that had seemed glamorous and fun in her teens, the exciting-life game in being the woman of an exciting man—Andy, the stock-car racer; Ed; the others in between—and after the death of Ed, a new game, charming con-woman, with Billy Lebatard as her first fun victim.

  And in the middle of it all, in the middle of the robbery that she had instigated, suddenly the game had stopped and humorless deadly people who weren’t playing at anything had taken over, and Lempke had come through the hole in the wall with blood all over his face.

  Parker could have left her there, then. She had screamed, and then she had become helpless, unable to think or to move or to do anything to save herself. He had gotten her out, she still didn’t know how, and when she had gotten control
of her mind again, she’d felt nothing but terror and guilt. Lempke was dead. Billy Lebatard was dead. The game had crashed, and she had no idea what to do next, where to go, how to breathe. She’d said to Parker, “Will you take me with you?” and he’d said, “For how long?” and she’d known enough to say, “Until one of us gets bored, I suppose.” Later she’d said to him, “I know sometimes you’ll have to go away and do these things, but those times you can’t talk about. Not tell me anything, not before, not after.” He’d said, “That’s how I’d be. Whether you wanted it or not.”

  Four years now. Living in hotels, mostly, Parker away occasionally, with her most of the time. But even when he was with her, he was in some manner away from her; he was the most locked-in man she’d ever met. And even when he was away, he was in some manner with her, because his existence was letting her go on playing the exciting-life game after all, with added safety rules. It was exciting to eat in a restaurant with him and know she was the only one aware of who and what he was, and by some strange extension it became exciting to eat in a restaurant alone and know none of the people around her could guess what kind of man she was waiting for.

  But even with the added safety rules, there had been an undercurrent of nervousness in her life that had refused to go away. She’d expected it to go with time, the occasional dreams about Lempke’s face, the hollow feeling of darkness in the middle of sunny days, but it had neither lessened nor increased in the four years, remaining an ever-present knot of tension in the back of her mind.

  She hadn’t told Parker about it, partly because she wasn’t sure what his reaction would be and partly because in putting the nervousness and fear into words she was afraid she would make them stronger. But she’d tried to find something to ease the pressure, and when the thought of a house had come to her, a base of operations, a solid real dependable home which would be hers, she had known at once it was the answer.

  There had been a secret pleasure in the conversations with real estate agents, listening to their talk of taxes and schools, knowing they would never guess the real priorities inside her head. Living her true life below the placid surface of an assumed life; that was her joy.

  And now she had it. The house, the nest, forming the frame of her existence, and outside it the man who gave that existence its texture. Every task, no matter how ordinary, became charged with another level of meaning when she was doing it while waiting for Parker.

  Waiting for Parker. The thought of that made her remember the other thing he’d told her she was waiting for; whoever had wanted to know where Parker could be found would probably be coming here. If Parker didn’t get to them first.

  He would, wouldn’t he? She frowned, looking out at the lake, considering the possibilities for the first time. There was a wind across the lake, the water was choppy; it looked cold.

  Would some stranger be coming here? She hadn’t wanted to think about that, not with Parker telling her to leave her house and go back to a hotel, but now that he was gone and the pressure on her to leave had gone with him, it was possible to think, to consider the likelihood that someone from Parker’s unknowable and menacing world might be coming here for reasons she knew nothing about.

  The afternoon was edging by, the quality of the light was changing on the lake. She felt she should make some movement, some preparation, do something to guard herself and her house from intruders.

  The last mouthful of tea in the cup was cold. She made a face, got to her feet, carried the empty cup to the kitchen. There was still more in the pot, but it was only lukewarm. She didn’t want it, anyway. She put on a jacket, walked around the house locking windows and doors, and then went out to the garage and opened the doors and backed the blue Buick out. And then discovered there was no way to lock the garage doors. There was a hasp lock but no padlock to secure it. Irritated, blaming the real estate man in some obscure fashion, she got into the Buick and drove away.

  There was a town three miles away, but it was very small, too small for what she wanted. The nearest town of any size was twelve miles farther on.

  Her first stop was a hardware store, where she bought two padlocks, one for each set of garage doors. She also looked in their phone book, and found a nearby sporting-goods store.

  At first she wasn’t sure she’d come to the right place. Fishing equipment was everywhere, from racks of rods to nets hanging on the walls to display cases full of lures to creels hanging from the ceiling. The short round man who came swimming through all this toward her looked like the fish it was all designed for, with his round bald head and light-reflecting glasses. “Yes, miss.” He had a habit of rubbing his hands together, which gave the impression he planned to cheat somehow.

  She said, “My husband wants me to go hunting with him, so I have to have my own rifle. You do sell rifles?”

  “Certainly, certainly. This way, please.”

  A doorway in the back of the store, hemmed in with fishing net, led to an entirely different world. Rifles and pistols were everywhere, intermixed with red or red-and-black hunter’s clothing. There were large pictures of animals on the walls: elk, deer, moose.

  “Mr. Amberville? Mr. Amberville, this young lady would like to buy a rifle. Mr. Amberville will take care of you, miss.”

  The fish-man went back to his own department, and Mr. Amberville came smiling over. A younger man, very thin, he had the bony features of an Austrian ski instructor. He seemed pleasant, but remote; he said, “A rifle? A present?”

  “No, for myself. My husband wants me to go hunting with him, so I have to have a rifle of my own.”

  “I see.” He looked her up and down, impersonally, as though he were about to sell her a coat. “Something light,” he said. “What will you be going after?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What game will you be hunting?”

  “Oh.” What was man-size? “Deer, I suppose.”

  He said, “Hmmm. Well, let’s see. Over this way.”

  He began to show her rifles. She held them, and they all seemed heavy and awkward and unusable in her hands. He stood beside her, talking, pointing out the fine points of the different rifles as she held them, and she had no idea what he was talking about.

  She was beginning to get discouraged. She looked around, and saw some other rifles in another case, and said, “What are those?”

  “Twenty-twos,” he said. “A little light for what you have in mind.”

  “Let me see them,” she said. “They look more my size.”

  “They’re not really the best for deer-hunting,” he said, frowning. “They’re what you’d want for small game.”

  “That’s all right, I don’t expect to hit anything, anyway.”

  He didn’t seem to like that, but he didn’t say anything. Silently he put away the rifles he’d been showing her and led her over to the other case.

  “That one,” she said, picking one of them almost at random, simply on the basis of looks.

  His expression doubtful, he opened the case and took down the rifle she’d pointed to. “This is the Marlin 39A,” he said. “It holds twenty-five shorts, twenty longs, or eighteen long rifles. It’s forty and a half inches long, weighs six and three quarter pounds. It’s lever-action; like this.” His right hand made a fast down-and-up motion with a metal loop on the bottom of the rifle, making click sounds.

  She said, “What’s that for?”

  “It chambers your cartridge.” At her expression, he pointed to the smaller barrel under the main barrel. “You load the rounds in here. The lever—”

  “You mean the bullets.”

  “That’s right, the bullets. You load them in front here. The lever brings one bullet up into firing position, and ejects the used casing from the bullet you’ve already fired.”

  “You mean I have to do that with the lever every time I shoot.”

  “That’s right.”

  “May I—?”

  She took the rifle, and tried the lever, and didn’t like
it. “No, that’s not for me.” She looked at the other rifles in the case.

  “If I may suggest—”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He put the Marlin away and brought out a different gun. “This is the Remington 66. It holds fifteen long rifles. Those are the bullets. It’s thirty-eight and a half inches long and weighs four pounds.”

  “What do I have to do to get the bullet ready to fire?”

  “Nothing. It’s auto-load.”

  “May I see it?”

  “Of course.”

  It was the lightest rifle so far, and also the shortest. She was too self-conscious to hold it up to her shoulder and look down the sights, but of them all, this rifle felt the least cumbersome in her hands. “I’ll take it,” she said.

  “Very good. And ammunition?”

  “Please.”

  The rifle was fifty-four dollars and fifty cents—he wanted to sell her a four-power telescopic sight as well, which she refused—and a box of fifty long rifle .22 caliber bullets was eighty-five cents. She paid in cash, and he carried the cardboard carton with the rifle in it out to the car for her.

  Driving back, she suddenly found herself afraid that Parker’s enemies would be waiting for her at the house, and she felt an abrupt deep wave of resentment at him for endangering her home this way. The feeling of resentment didn’t last, but the fear did, and two miles from the house she pulled off the road and took the rifle out of the carton.

  She spent fifteen minutes parked off the road, studying the weapon, reading the instruction booklet that had come with it, and very gingerly loading it. She put it down on the back seat, barrel pointing at the right-hand door, and after that, drove much more slowly and cautiously, afraid that a bump in the road would make the thing fire.