Deadly Edge: A Parker Novel (18 page)

He half-turned and ran to the garage to get out Claire’s Buick, but there were padlocks on the doors that hadn’t been there thirty-six hours ago.

The Plymouth? He went to it and opened it and the keys weren’t in the ignition. He hadn’t really expected them to be, but it was worth a try.

So they’d made it. For now.

Parker went back into the house, shutting the door behind himself and switching off the lights again. He kept the automatic in his hand and walked back through the bathroom into the bedroom.

Claire was sitting on the bed. She looked weary, but not hysterical. She lifted her head when he walked into the room, and said, “They got away?”

“For now. How are you?”

“A nervous wreck. I’m glad you got here.”

He went over and stood in front of her and put a hand on her shoulder. “I came as fast as I could.”

“I know you did.” She patted his hand. “It was very scary, waiting. I’m going to have nightmares for a while.”

“Can you tell me about them? Can you talk yet?”

“Not till you get rid of that.” She moved her head slightly, without turning it, the gesture indicating the porch.

He glanced that way and saw the overturned chair with the body tied to it. He still hadn’t seen the face, still knew only that it was male and naked and dead and messy. He said, “Was that one of them?” Thinking there might have been a falling-out among them.

But she shook her head. She was looking straight ahead, at his belt buckle, as though she had to have a very tight rein on herself right now. She said, “Morris. From the robbery.”

“Morris? He came here with them?”

“I’ll tell you about it,” she said, and now there was
more vibrato in her voice, more trembling. “But first you have to get rid of it. You have to.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ll get rid of it.”

2

It was simplest, despite the chill in the air, to do the job naked. It was going to be messy, and this way there’d be no clothing to be cleaned afterward.

But first there were preparations to be made. Parker found Morris’ clothes in the kitchen, ripped and torn and bloodied and strewn around the floor. He searched them for the keys to the white Plymouth outside, then bundled them up and carried them around the outside of the house to leave them temporarily with the body. He took the long way so as not to carry the bundle past Claire, and saw through the shattered glass door that she was no longer in the bedroom. He could hear water running in the tub.

He drove the Plymouth around the lake, taking the opposite direction from that of the Corvette, which meant he would follow the loop of road around the lake without coming out on the main road, with all its citybound traffic.

He knew it was a risk, leaving the house again, but it was one he had to take. The two in the Corvette wouldn’t get very far with a pair of tires gone, so they’d still be in the neighborhood for a while, but it was unlikely they’d choose to come back to Claire’s house, knowing it was now occupied by a man with a gun.

He passed the house where he’d borrowed the rowboat; his Pontiac still sat quietly in the driveway. And about half a dozen houses beyond that, where he had noticed on the way in a family loading their car, there was now no car, and the house was in darkness. Parker turned the Plymouth in at that driveway, left it, and went around to the boathouse, which was locked. Wood near water doesn’t last long; it took two kicks to spring the screws loose holding the hasp, and the door sagged open.

The boat inside was a fiberglass outboard with a forty-horsepower Johnson motor. Parker raised the overhead door at the lake end of the boathouse, untied the motorboat from its three moorings, stepped in, and started the motor. He backed out through the wide doorway, turned the boat around, and headed at open throttle across the lake.

Fewer houses were lit now, and with the porch lights still glowing, it was easier to recognize Claire’s place. Parker eased the motorboat in toward shore, nestled it between the rowboat and the concrete, and tied it to another of the rings along the edge of the dock.

Claire was in the tub. She looked up when he came in, and her face seemed simultaneously drawn and puffy, a contradiction that made her look almost as though she’d been partying too much for several nights in a row. She said, “Is it gone yet?”

“Soon. You still want to stay here?”

She looked wary. “Why?”

“I shot out their tires, they’ll still be around the lake someplace. After I’m done here I’ll go look for them, but in the meantime they might come back. While I’m gone.”

“They won’t come back.” She sounded grim, but sure of herself.

“I don’t think so either. But they might. I wounded one of them.”

“That’s why they won’t come back. They’re cowards, you’ll see. They’ll hide in a hole someplace.”

“I think so, too. But just in case.”

“I’m too tired to go anywhere,” she said. “Too tired and too scared and too nervous. You were right before, I should have gone to a hotel. But now I can’t, I can’t do anything.”

“I’ll be as fast as I can.”

His first move was to switch off the bedroom and porch lights, and then to strip down. He stuffed his clothing in a pillowcase and took it down across the backyard and put it on the seat of the motorboat. Then he went back up to the darkened porch and put the chair back up on its legs and dragged it backward over to the door.

It was simplest to just push it through the doorway and let it bounce down the stoop. Then he dragged it across the lawn, detouring around tree trunks, and out over the wooden dock.

The rowboat was out perpendicular to the dock. Parker pulled it closer with the rope, then pulled on the side until it lay along the edge of the dock. He eased the chair backward until it was lying on its back on the dock, and then tipped it sideways off the edge and into the rowboat. It hit face down, which meant the body hit rather than the wooden chair, which muffled the sound.

Claire’s boathouse had a small-wattage bulb hanging from a wire in the middle of the ceiling. Parker switched it on and padded around the concrete edging, gathering up things to weight the body: a length of rusty chain, a broken piece of concrete block, an old metal pulley. He took them all back outside and fixed them around the chair and the body, then tied the rowboat to the rear of the motorboat, and got in the motorboat to tow it out to the middle of the lake.

The toughest part was getting the chair and the body out of the boat. The rowboat bounced and jounced, but wouldn’t tip over, and Parker finally had to climb into it and lift the chair over the side. But then it dropped down into the water at once, and disappeared.

The main thing was, if this area was going to be home base, it had to be kept clean. No sudden unsolved murders, no crime wave of any kind; crooked doings would show up around a rural section like this like a thumbtack under a coat of paint. Which was why replacing the divots took precedence over finding the two in the Corvette.

The rest went pretty fast now, after he sank the body. He towed the rowboat back to the house where he’d borrowed it, and used the bailing can from the motorboat to splash away the bloodstains Morris had left behind. Then he stepped into the cold water himself and scrubbed his body clean, and stood after that by the water’s edge while he put his clothes on again over his wet skin.

It was impossible to get the rowboat back into its original position without help from a second man; Parker dragged it close as he could, and left it there. Then he went back to steer the motorboat along to the left, close to shore,
and return it to the boathouse he’d taken it from. The kicked-in door was simple vandalism, the normal kind of petty crime in this area and nothing to worry about.

Morris’ Plymouth was waiting in the driveway. Parker got in it and drove the long way back to Claire’s house, avoiding the highway.

Claire had a mop and a bucket and was doing the kitchen floor. She’d dressed in slacks and sweater and sandals, she’d tied her hair up in a cloth, and she had the fixed look of a woman who is going to make it by will power alone. The table and chairs had already been cleaned and set right, the dishwasher was buzzing, and the few stains that had been along one wall were gone.

Parker came in and said, “No trouble?”

“No trouble.” The rifle was lying on the kitchen table. Claire saw Parker looking at it, and she said, “Next time I’ll know what to do with that. I learn fast, when I have to.”

“It’s loaded again?”

“Of course.”

Parker sat down at the table, pushing the rifle slightly away. “Tell me about them now. Who they are, what their game is, what their connection is, anything they told you.”

“Morris told most of it. For my benefit, I think. He already knew who they were.”

“What was Morris doing here?”

“He was doing the same thing you were. He’d heard that your friend Keegan was looking for him, so he went to Keegan to find out why. He found this phone number there, so he came here to find out if you knew what was going on.”

“What about the other two?”

“One of them is named Manny Berridge. He’s—”

“Berridge?”

“You didn’t tell me about the man who was killed. He was supposed to do the robbery with you, wasn’t he?”

“That’s right. Manny’s his son?” That was the one Parker had wounded, the one called Manny.

“Grandson.” She went on to tell him what Morris had said, and he sat and listened to it, frowning at the rifle in front of him on the table.

When she was done, he said, “What about the other one? Jessup, you say? What’s his connection?”

“I don’t know. I suppose he’s just Manny’s friend. He’s the brains of the two, but Manny can be much meaner. He’s like an insane little child.”

“All right.” He got to his feet, pushing the chair back from the table.

She looked at him, her expression apprehensive. “You’re going after them? But they won’t bother us any more, will they?”

“Yes. They strike me as the kind to hold grudges. In the meantime, I want you to do something for me.”

She had finished with the mop, had emptied the bucket into the sink and put mop and bucket both away in the narrow closet in the corner. Now she’d started cleaning the sink. Holding the cleanser in her hand, she said, “What do you want me to do?”

“Take Morris’ Plymouth to New York and lose it.”

“No.” She turned her back and sprinkled cleanser into the sink.

“It’s not to get you away from here.”

“It is.” She started scrubbing the sink.

“Partly. The rest is, we can’t have the car found around here. In New York it won’t raise any questions, but here it would.”

“I’ll take it tomorrow.”

“It would be best to do it now, at night.”

She faced him again, leaning against the sink. “I suppose you’re right,” she said, “but I’m not going to do it. I have something else I have to do first. When I’m finished I’ll take the car in, if I’m not too tired.”

“What do you have to do?”

“Get my house back. When I finish here, I have some things to do in the bedroom and the bathroom, and then the porch floor has to be mopped. And then I want to make a list of the people I have to call tomorrow. Someone to fix the glass in the door. Someone to fix the bathroom door.”

He looked at her, and understood vaguely that there was something in her head about the idea of
home
that wasn’t in his head and never would be. The world could go to hell if it wanted, but she would put her home in order again before thinking about anything else.

He tried to find something in his own mind to relate that to, so he could understand it better, and the only thing he came up with was betrayal. If someone double-crossed him in a job, tried to take Parker’s share of the split or betray him to the law, everything else became unimportant until he had evened the score. And like the two tonight, Manny and Jessup; there was no way that Parker was not going to settle with them for the insult of their attack. In some way, what Claire was into now had to be something like that, with a sense of home instead of a sense of identity.

“All right,” he said. “Just keep the rifle in the same room with you.”

“I will. And this time I won’t shoot until I know what I’m shooting at.”

“Good. When I come back, I’ll knock twice before I come in. If anybody else walks in without knocking, don’t think about it. Just shoot his head off.”

“I will,” she said.

3

The Corvette was parked on a gravel strip beside a small white clapboard house across the road from the lake, less than half a mile from Claire’s place. Damp blood was on the seat-back on the passenger side.

Parker was on foot, the automatic in his right hand. He was traveling without any kind of light. He circled the house beside the Corvette and found it locked up tight, no sign of entry.

A wooded area stretched away uphill behind the house. Parker considered it, and rejected it, for three reasons: Manny was wounded. Manny and Jessup were both city boys. Jessup would want another car, so he would prefer to stay near houses.

Claire had suggested earlier that Manny and Jessup wouldn’t be coming back because they were cowards, and Parker had seen no reason at that point to disagree with her. But cowardice was irrelevant. Whether they were
cowards or not, they wouldn’t make another attack on the house tonight with an armed man inside and a wounded man outside. And whether they were cowards or not, they would eventually come back to repay Parker for routing them; cowardice would simply at that point make them more difficult to deal with.

Parker didn’t know Jessup, had seen him only once and then for only a few seconds of sudden activity, but he felt he understood the man. Jessup was the planner and organizer in his partnership with Manny, just as Parker was the planner and organizer in his own partnerships. So he put himself in Jessup’s place now, and decided what Jessup wanted to do and how he’d go about it.

Jessup wanted to get away from here. For that he would need a car. It was now not yet ten o’clock in the evening, and there was nowhere around here that cars were left parked at the curb; there were no curbs here, just the country roads and the houses. The weekenders would be taking their cars away from here tonight, and the full-time residents wouldn’t start settling down for the night for another hour or two. Jessup, when he stole a car, would have to take one from a garage, or at the best, a driveway. In either case, the car would be very close to the owner’s home, there might be a dog in the house—people out here tended to have dogs—and the only safe thing to do was wait until very late before making the move.