"All right," Lloyd said.
"Put the package in the trunk," Parker said, "and the other stuff you need in the car. Then wait for the glazier."
"You mean he has to come today."
"Sure he has to come today, it's an emergency, you can't leave a living room window broken overnight. Once he comes and fixes it and goes, you take a drive, get rid of the package where nobody sees you and it can't come back to screw you up later."
'There's the river, I could do that."
"Whatever you want. Then come back and get me and we'll get out of here."
'This is gonna take hours," Lloyd said. "What will you be doing?"
"Sleep," Parker said, and stood. "You got a spare room?"
Standing, doubtful, Lloyd said, 'There's a cot in my office. Upstairs."
"Good," Parker said.
* * *
It wasn't real sleep, but something close, learned a long time ago, a way to rest the body and the brain, a kind of trance, awareness of the outer world sheathed in unawareness. The dim room remained, shades drawn over both windows, the gray-canvas-covered synthesizer in which Lloyd kept his computer equipment not so much concealed as reconfigured, the shelves and cabinets, the closed door, the framed color photographs of machines, the small occasional sounds from outside the room, and the cot, narrow, with a thin mattress covered by a Canadian wool blanket in broad bands of gray and green and black that held him like a cupped hand. Inside it, farther within it, there was nothing except the small bubbles of awareness that surfaced and surfaced and found nothing wrong.
Parker had told Lloyd, "Knock," because, before lying on the cot, he'd leaned the gangly metal synthesizer chair off-kilter sideways against the knob. When the knock sounded and Lloyd's distant small voice called, "Parker," he woke at once and sat up, and the gray rectangles of the shaded windows were now black.
"All right," he answered. "I'll be down in a few minutes." And switched on the light, took the pistol from under the pillow, put on his shoes, moved the chair back from the door.
When he came downstairs, face washed, rested, still stretching the sleep out of his shoulders, Lloyd was seated on the sofa in the living room. He stood when Parker entered. "All set," he said.
Parker looked at the empty nighttime street through the new window glass. Lights in houses across the way seemed a canyon distant. He said, "Everything cleaned up?"
"Oh, yes," Lloyd said, with grim emphasis.
Parker looked at him. Lloyd was pale, but under control. "You're okay now," he said.
"I think so." Lloyd grinned and shook his head. "When I went to jail," he said, "I told myself, now I've really learned not to lose control, the bad things that can happen if I lose control. I'll never lose control again, I said, I've learned my lesson."
"Uh-huh."
Lloyd looked over at the dining room doorway, then back at Parker. "I was wrong," he said. "But this time, if I haven't learned anything, there's no hope for me."
"You did okay," Parker said. "Except when you got excited."
'That's the part I'm talking about," Lloyd said. "The tarp was slippery, you know. Heavy, and slippery, and hard to get a grip on. I thought the washing, the wall, that was going to be the worst, but it was the slippery tarp."
Driving west on the Mass Pike, not yet midnight, Parker at the wheel, Lloyd said, "I want to thank you."
"Don't have to."
"After I screwed up, after I... shot that fellow, you had every right to take it out on me, or just walk away. We did need him, talk to him, I know we did. But you stayed, you put me back together again, and I want to thank you for it."
Parker shrugged, watching the trucks ahead. "We need you for the job," he said.
3
"Mrs. Elkins?"
'Yes?" Wary, never knowing, when Frank was away, whether a phone call was good or bad.
"It's Parker." He'd never met the woman, but he'd left messages with her before.
'Yes?" Still wary; it could still be good or bad.
"Frank's on his way home," Parker told her.
"Good."
"Would you tell him my friends might drop in."
"Friends of yours?"
"He'll know," Parker said, and hung up, and went back to the Honda, where Lloyd was a pale disembodied face in the distant gas station lights. This was the same station where he'd talked with Elkins first, after getting rid of Charov, just a few miles from Claire's house, and it was three in the morning, the station closed.
Getting behind the wheel, he said, "We'll park at the lake, by one of the empty houses."
"A strange place to live," Lloyd said. "Where all the houses are empty."
There was nothing to say to that. Parker drove away from the gas station and up to the turn where the sign pointed to Colliver's Pond. He drove halfway from the turn toward Claire's house, then chose a driveway on the right leading up to one of the less desirable, less expensive houses without lake frontage.
Blank tan rectangles of plywood covering the windows stared down on them before Parker switched off the headlights. Most of the householders around here merely locked their places and went away at the end of each summer, but a few acted as though winter was the return of the Ice Age.
Parker and Lloyd walked along the road that circled the lake. There were no streetlights out here, so when the houses were empty the nights were very dark. A smallish moon low in the sky over their left shoulders helped them pick out the pavement of the roadway, and showed Parker the mailbox marked willis. Keeping his voice low, he said, "It's in there. I'll wait. Just don't go in the house."
"I don't have to. What electricity do you have on?"
"None. We shut it off at the box."
"Phone on?"
"Yes."
"Do you know where the service comes in?"
"Left corner, over the garage."
In his element now, playing with his machines, Lloyd was calm and confident. Taking a small device like a photographer's light meter from his pocket, he pressed the button on its side that made the dim light shine on the dial. Shielding that with one hand, he looked at the dial, turned the meter left and right, and said, "Something. Faint. Could be coming from in there. I won't be long."
Lloyd faded into the darkness of the driveway, under the trees, and Parker stood near the mailbox, watching the empty road. He remembered how smoothly and briskly Lloyd had done his work at Paxton Marino's lodge. If they could keep this other stress away from him, he'd be fine, but when he got emotional he was like a dog that needed to be shot.
Lloyd was back in less than ten minutes. "I guess there's something in there," he said, "but not sending, receiving. There's a signal coming in from down that way." Farther along the road.
'That's the base," Parker said. "Anybody opens that door, the camera will start to send. Can you find the base?"
"I should be able to," Lloyd said. "When we get nearer, the signal's going to be stronger. If we pass it, the signal will change, then get weaker."
"Good," Parker said.
Lloyd now carried a mini earphone, like ones used with cell phones, attached to that dial. Fixing it to his right ear, he started walking, slowly, listening to electricity in the night, while Parker walked beside him, watching, looking at the darkness, then seeing light ahead, amber light from the windows of a house on the lake.
Lloyd had seen it, too. "Not every house is empty," he said.
"There are some year-rounders," Parker agreed. "They're asleep now."
"This could be insomnia," Lloyd suggested. "But the signal is getting stronger."
Either the road was closer to the lake here or the house was set back farther from the shore, because it was more visible than Claire's house, nearer, through fewer trees. What looked like living room windows gleamed through the tree trunks on the left front of the low house, with darkness on the right. The driveway was farther left.