He heard the car drive into the garage, and almost immediately heard the garage door shut again. From the sound of it, it was equipped with an electrically controlled motor.
Car doors slammed, two of them. Parker tensed, the revolver held in his right hand.
The door from garage to kitchen opened, and a woman’s voice called, “Blackie? We’re home, boy!”
High heels took two steps on linoleum, but then stopped again. “Blackie? Where are you, boy?”
A male voice said something indistinct. Parker couldn’t make it out, whether it was Uhl or not. Then the woman said, “I don’t know what’s wrong. He always comes, you know that.”
Fluorescent lights flared in the kitchen. Parker stared diagonally through the doorway, trying to adjust his vision. The part of the kitchen he could see was set up as a dining area, with a small round table and four chairs.
“Blackie?”
The man’s voice said something.
The woman said, “I think you’re right, George.” She sounded worried, but capable.
Damn the dog. Parker stepped around the corner into the kitchen, the gun out in front of him, but the woman was standing in the line between him and the garage doorway. “Down!” he yelled, but she was frozen there, staring in astonished terror at the gun.
He didn’t see Uhl at all, but he heard the movement of the bastard going away. Parker looked to his right, saw a door leading to the back yard, and jumped to it. And the instant he took his attention away from the woman, she started to scream.
The door was locked. A button in the knob had to be turned and released. It all took time, and then he had the door open and caught a glimpse of something running across the yard toward the house facing on the next street.
This was not a neighborhood to do a lot of indiscriminate shooting. An area like this would be well covered by police patrols, and the citizens around here would be likely to reach for the phone at the first sound of trouble. And Uhl was not going to be caught up with on foot.
Angry, Parker stepped back into the house, slammed the door, and headed at a fast stride toward the woman, who was pulling breath for a third scream. She backed away, starting to jabber in a high-pitched voice, and too late turned to run. Parker grabbed her shoulder with his free hand, spun her around, and slapped her face hard. She landed against the wall beside the door and he held her there with a hand cupped against her throat. “Don’t make me do it,” he said.
“What do you—what do you—?” The words were gargled, as though he were strangling her, but he wasn’t.
“I want Uhl,” he said. “I want his address.”
“I don’t—I don’t—”
He pushed the gun barrel against her stomach. “If you won’t tell me, you’re no use to me alive. And you’ve seen my face.”
“I don’t—I can’t—”
He applied pressure to her throat, until she couldn’t talk. Her hands came fluttering upward, but the gun made her afraid to struggle with him, so that her fingers never quite touched the hand with which he was cutting off her air. She looked as though she were doing typing movements, her fingers twitching around his hand.
He eased the pressure again. “His address. I’m in a hurry.”
Now she closed both hands around his wrist, gently, as though in a request for kindness. “Mantle Street,” she said; her voice sounded rusty.
”In Philadelphia?”
“Yes. Two-eighty-three. Apartment seven.”
“Anybody else live there with him?”
“No. No.”
He switched his left-hand grip to her face, thumb on one cheekbone and fingers on the other. He pulled her head forward an inch, then punched it back against the wall. Her eyes glazed, and he used both arms to lower her to the floor. There was no point having her dead, but he didn’t want her raising the alarm for a while either.
There was a length of clothesline in a kitchen drawer. He did a fast job of tying her, then switched off the kitchen light and went out the back door.
The car he was using was a block away. He took a minute to find Mantle Street on a Philadelphia road map and work out the best route to it, then put the map away and started the car. Uhl had perhaps a ten-minute lead on him, but had left on foot and would have some trouble finding a cab in this sort of neighborhood at four in the morning. If Uhl was heading home, Parker had a fair chance to beat him there or at least catch up with him before he gathered his things and went anywhere else.
Thirty-five minutes later Parker was driving past 283 Mantle Street, a red-brick apartment building that looked to have been built in the twenties or thirties: corners slightly curved rather than square, casement windows, carriage lamps on either side of the arched entrance. There was no light showing in any of the building’s windows, except for a single row up the middle above the entranceway; that would be the staircase. The building was five stories high, with probably four or six apartments on each floor, and no elevator.
Parker drove on, and left the car a block away. He walked back and entered the building, and read on the mailboxes in the foyer that apartment 7 was occupied by a G. Underwood. So Uhl was apparently one of those who liked to keep their initials when using aliases, an idea that was always stupid and sometimes harmful.
The inner door was of the kind that can be opened by a tenant ringing a buzzer up in his apartment. Which meant it couldn’t be double-bolted, which further meant the credit card would open it. Parker went through and up the stairs and found that apartment 7 was on the second-floor rear. This door was double-bolted, and Parker didn’t travel with a lockman’s tools, so he left the door and went on up the stairs to the roof.
There was a fire escape down the back. The windows at the rear were also all dark, and there was no light source other than the stars and a quarter-moon. Parker went down the fire escape to the second floor, turned to the window that should lead in to apartment 7, and peered through it looking for light. He saw none, and went to work on the window.
Like those in the front, it was of casement type. A lever-and-ratchet arrangement inside would open or close it, and it would swing out like a door rather than raising. Parker inserted the credit card at the top corner, then slid it along the top toward the hinged end. This forced the outer corner away from the frame sufficiently for him to get a grip on it with his fingertips. He pried the corner farther open, and slipped a pencil into the space just as the credit card slipped through and fell inside the apartment. Pulling the corner out while simultaneously sliding the pencil along the top toward the hinged end, he made the opening steadily wider, until there was a sudden click-click sound from the bottom of the window as the ratchet slipped two or three notches.
Now the leading edge of the window was open about half an inch. Parker could get a firmer grip now, pull harder, and force the ratchet to give several more grooves, until he could slip his hand inside and turn the lever, opening the window the rest of the way. He stepped into a small dark bedroom, retrieved his pencil and credit card, and searched the apartment as he had earlier searched the house—silently, and in darkness.
It was empty. There was a flashlight in a kitchen drawer, and Band-Aids in the bathroom medicine chest. Parker put Band-Aids over the flashlight glass, leaving just a small open slit, and then used this narrow light to go through the apartment again, looking for something that would tell him where else Uhl might go. But he had apparently rented the place furnished, and had few possessions of his own. There was no address book, there were no letters, there was nothing to say a word about Uhl’s past or future. Some ordinary clothing in the closets and drawers, a few decks of cards, some paperback books; it was like the leavings in a rented summer cottage after the season is over.