Movement. A rustling. Reeds bent, sluggishly, and didn’t come upright again. Parker watched the movement to his right, away from the house, and waited for it to become something meaningful, but after a few minutes it stopped again.
He headed toward where the agitation had been, and through the reeds he saw a form stretched out on the ground, and when he came closer, it was a man lying face-down, arms bent laxly around his head.
Alone? Parker circled him, listening, watching, and when the silence continued to stretch without snapping, he moved in closer and saw the automatic enclosed in the slack fingers of the man’s right hand. And also the familiar contour of his head, a reminiscent slope to the shoulder and back.
Parker stood upright, and looked around, and nothing happened. He stepped quickly forward and kicked the barrel of the gun, and it slid away through the reeds with a faint squishing sound.
Parker bent and turned Briley over, and the front of his shirt and trousers was smeared with mud and blood, drying unevenly together. He put his hand to Briley’s throat and felt pulse, felt breath shuddering in and out. He got to his feet, looked around, listened, then stepped to the left, bent, picked up Briley’s gun, held it in his hand and looked at it.
It wasn’t the same automatic he’d carried in the robbery. This one was a Colt Super Auto, chambered for high-speed .38’s; a fairly old, well-used gun, it had the scratches and scars of a weapon that had been through many hands. Parker ejected the clip, and it was half empty. He put the clip back, felt the front of the barrel, and it was warm.
Leaving Briley where he was, Parker went back to the house and up on the porch. Briley’s shot had further broken the broken glass in the storm door and had then gouged a new streak in the graying wood of the main door, before digging a hole for itself in the frame. Parker pulled open the storm door and saw the jimmy marks on the frame near the inner door’s knob. He pushed, and the door eased open. Holding his own gun in his right hand and Briley’s Colt in his left, he kicked the door open farther, and stepped in.
The place had been stripped. Wiring straggled from the walls where light switches and outlets had been removed. Molding around windows and doors had been stripped away, and even part of the living-room floor had been ripped up and taken away, leaving a grave-size hole through which a dirt-floored basement could be seen.
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 93 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
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 attache 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 97 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.