No sound, no apparent movement. There was no time to be sure of anything; he slipped along the wall, listened for two seconds at the door, turned the knob with his left hand, pushed.
Sounds, some distance away. Blubbering. Broken already.
Parker went through a messy kitchen, without really seeing it, concentrating on the doorway beyond, the sounds from beyond that. Into a dark hall, a dining room through a doorway opposite, some muddied daylight from the lace-curtained glass in the front door down to the right. Sobbing from down that way.
The hall carpet silenced his feet. He came swiftly down the hall, pistol ahead of himself, spun into the living room doorway, and put a bullet into the knee of the one on the left.
The tableau froze for one second, paralyzed by the sound of the shot Making the turn, he'd seen Lloyd's back to him as he slumped on his knees at the coffee table fronting the sofa on the far wall, shoulders heaving as he wept, arm moving as he wrote on a sheet of paper on the coffee table. The two strangers hulked on either side of him and back a pace, both standard-issue thugs, big but ordinary. He needed one of them alive at the end of this, to answer questions. The one on the right held a sap, long and flexible, that would hurt wherever it hit, but the one on the left held the 9mm Beretta, so it was the one on the left Parker brought down first.
The other was a surprise. He heard the shot, he saw the tableau dissolve as his partner began to crumble and Lloyd's head jerked upward, and without ever looking in Parker's direction he wheeled on his right foot, folded his forearms over the top of his head, and launched himself through the living room's picture window.
"Get the gun and keep that one!" Parker yelled at Lloyd, turned, and ran out the front door.
The other one was just vaulting the porch rail. Parker snapped a shot at him, but knew it was no good, and knew he couldn't do any more shooting, not here, not now. The other guy, face and forearms bleeding, ran across the lawn, and Parker saw a passing driver give the scene a curious look.
He wanted them both, he needed them both, but he couldn't chase a bleeding man in a family neighborhood in the middle of the afternoon. And how long could he trust Lloyd to keep the first one, even with a bullet in him? Reluctant, but knowing there was no choice, Parker went back into the house.
Lloyd was alone in the living room, curled up in a fetal position on the floor, face into the carpet. He heard Parker come in, and lifted a tear-stained face that was astonishingly smiling; but then he uncurled enough to show he still had the Beretta, clutched in both hands. That was the reason for the smile; he hadn't let a knee-shot man take the pistol away from him.
Parker spread his hands, asking the question, and Lloyd nodded jerkily at the connecting doorway to the dining room. Parker started toward that doorway, then realized that was the mistake. The guy's knee was gone; how fast could he move, and for how long?
Parker went out to the hall and down to the dining room that way. When he eased his head around the frame, he saw the guy just to the right of the other door, Lloyd still visible through there on the floor, the guy leaning heavily against the wall, blood soaking his right pants leg from the knee down, his hands clenched on a chair he'd dragged over from the dining room table. He wanted Parker to come through that doorway and take the chair in the face.
No. Parker stepped into the dining room, showed the pistol, and said, "Sit on it. You'll feel better."
The guy looked at him. He was in pain, but he was still trying to find a way out of here. His eyes flicked at the side windows.
Parker said, "I don't think so. You want him to come back, and so do I, but I don't think so. Sit down, it's still question time."
The guy thought about that, then shook his head. "I'm just the heavy lifter," he said, wheezing as he talked. "My partner knows everything."
"You know some—"
Lloyd came erupting out of the other room, face twisted, grimacing with hatred and shame and revenge. 'You bastard)." he yelled, and stuck the Beretta into the middle of the guy's face, and pulled the trigger.
2
Parker stepped forward, knocked the Beretta away, knocked Lloyd to the ground, but it was too late. The thug's head was splattered on the wall now, and his body had dropped like a sack of doorknobs.
Lloyd, on his side on the floor, stared in horror at the man he'd just killed. "My God," he whispered.
"I needed him," Parker said. "You needed him. And you don't need this mess."
"I didn't— I don't know what I—"
"You got tough all of a sudden," Parker told him. "Get up. Stop looking at him, get up, come into the other room, we'll work this out."
Lloyd finally looked away from the dead man, blinking up at Parker. "I was just... scared," he said.
"Come in here," Parker said again, and went back to the living room, where the furniture was a little messed up, not too bad, and the broken window
didn't show very much under the dark porch roof. He stood looking at the room, considering it, until Lloyd came in, shaky, unsure of his balance. Then Parker sat on the sofa, put his feet on the coffee table, on the story Lloyd had been writing, and said, "You want to give this place up? Or you want to deal with what happened? Sit down."
"Do I want to— What do you mean, give this place up?"
"Sit down."
Lloyd sat, on the chair angled to Parker's right. He stayed forward on the seat, knees together, hands clasped on knees, worried face turned to Parker. He said, "Move? How can I move?"
"You've got two choices," Parker told him. "You can give up being on parole, hide out, take your profit from the Montana job and turn yourself into somebody else. Or you can clean up this mess."
"I can't— I can't—"
"You can do either one. They're both gonna be tough."
Lloyd looked at the doorway. 'That man—"
Parker said, "How much does the law watch this house?"
"What? Oh, the patrol." Lloyd shook his head, to clear it. "City police keep an eye on me," he said. "In a car, the regular patrol car. Not often. They just drive by, I see them look at the place, they drive by."
"They never come in?"
"Once or twice, if something's different. A strange
car in the driveway, other people here." He made a twisted smile. 'They want to be sure everybody knows I'm a felon."
"What about when you drive away from here? Stop you, search the car?"
"A few times they stopped me," Lloyd said, shrugging that away. 'Just ask me where I'm going, remind me I'm on a leash."
"Search the car?"
"Never."
"Do you have a tarp?"
Lloyd didn't seem to know the word. "A what?"
"A large waterproof sheet," Parker told him. "Plastic, whatever."
"Oh, yes, sure. In the basement. You mean for"—a glance at the doorway—"him."
"You wrap him good," Parker said. 'Then you clean up in there. You got any caulk, for windows, anything like that?"
"Yes, probably."
'The bullet's in the wall," Parker said. "After you clean the wall, plug the hole with anything you got that'll dry hard. It's a small hole, don't worry about color. And it didn't come through on this side."
Lloyd hadn't noticed that. Now he gave this wall a surprised look and said, "All right."
"When everything's clean, and it's rolled in the tarp," Parker said, "call a glazier, say you were moving"—he looked around the room—"that bookcase, and it tipped and broke the window."
"Shouldn't I say somebody threw a stone at the house? There is harassment here, sometimes. People around here know the story."
'The glass is on the porch," Parker reminded him, "not in here. Say it's a rush job, you need it today. Then ..." Parker took the Honda keys out of his pocket and tossed them to Lloyd, who caught them two-handed. 'Then you go get your car. It's beyond the church, by the library. The opener's on the floor in the garage."