The place was still furnished, and Parker and his wife stayed awake late, in the movie star’s bed in the movie star’s bedroom. They made love, and smoked cigarettes, and made love, ft was always like that after a job. He would be fierce then, and strong, and demanding, and exultant, allowing his emotions the only release he permitted them. Always, for a month or two after a job, they wouldn’t skip a night, and often it would be more than once a night. Then gradually his passion would slacken, lessening with their cash reserves until near-celibacy just before the next job. The pattern was always the same, and Lynn had grown used to it, though not without difficulty.
At two in the morning Parker rose from the bed, donned shirt and trousers, and took up the automatic from the stand beside the bed. “I’ll go see Mal now,” he told her, and headed for the door.
His hand on the knob, she called his name. He turned around, questioning, irritated, and saw the Police Positive in her hand. He had just had time to remember that it had to be either Chester or Mai — the two who’d been given the revolvers — when she pulled the trigger and a heavy punch in his stomach drove the breath and the consciousness out of him.
It was his belt buckle that saved him. Her first shot had hit the buckle, mashing it into his flesh. The gun had jumped in her hand, the next five shots all going over his falling body and into the wood of the door. But she’d fired six shots at him, and she’d seen him fall, and she couldn’t believe that he was anything but dead.
He awoke to heat and suffocation. They’d set fire to the house. He was lying on his face and, when he drew his knees up under him in order to stand, pain lanced through his stomach and he saw, in the dim fire-glow, blood on his shirt and trousers.
He thought at first that the bullet was in him, but then he realized what had happened. The buckle, a silver one with a black engraved P, was mashed into a ragged cup-shape. Beneath it, the skin was purplish, and he seemed to be bleeding from his pores. His stomach ached fiercely, as though a heavy iron weight had been crammed into it.
He stood only because he wanted to stand, not because it was possible, and he moved in an agonized side- shuffle, leaning most of his weight against the wall. His chest and shoulders pressed to the wall, he edged slowly out of the room and down the hall.
He should have left the house right away. The far end of the hall was ablaze, and thick smoke filled the stairwell ahead of him. But he had to know which one it was. He made the circuit of the rooms where the others had slept.
Mal was gone. Chester lay dead, his throat cut. Sill was there, dead the same way. Ryan was gone.
Ryan had killed them both — it was his kind of kill. And Mal had given Lynn the revolver, to kill him. Mal had set it up, that was clear, but they’d been in too much of a hurry, wanting to be long gone before daylight. She had fired six shots at him, and he had lain bleeding on the floor, but they hadn’t made sure. And that was their mistake.
When he tried to go down the broad staircase into the smoke and the flames, his legs gave out and he fell, rolling and bumping down, landing unconscious again at the foot of the stairs. The heat forced him awake again, and he crawled for the door. There was less smoke at floor level; he could just make out the door, miles away across a flat plain of polished wood. The parallel lines of the flooring rushed away across the plain to converge at the door, like the lined landscapes in a surrealist painting.
He came at last to the door, and crawled up its rococo face to the ornate knob. It took both hands to turn it, and then he flung himself back, falling away, pulling the door open after him. Only then could he crawl over the sill and across the veranda and between two of the pillars and down the two-foot drop to the coolness of the lawn.
After a while, he had strength enough to get on his hands and knees and crawl around the house and down the path toward the landing strip. Midway, in the darkness, he stumbled across a leg, in shoe and trousers. He searched the pockets and found matches. When he lit one, he looked into the dead eyes of Ryan. A chill touched him, a reaction stronger than he was used to when faced with death, and he shook the match out at once. But he had seen the bullet holes in the dead man’s chest.
The plane was gone. As he lay on the ground by the landing strip, resting, he heard the faint sound of sirens, and knew he had to get away. This time, he managed to get to his feet and stay on them without holding on to anything. He lurched across the landing strip and into the woods on the other side.
When he came to the fence surrounding the property, he searched until he found a spot where the earth was soft, and scraped away dirt with his hands until he could crawl underneath. Then he went on, staggering downhill and then along a valley until, with false dawn outlining the mountains ahead of him, he fainted.
He spent three days lying in the underbrush, never more than semiconscious. The fact that he lay practically unmoving for three days, and that he didn’t take in any food during that time, helped to speed the healing. The next time he came fully awake there was only a dull pain in his stomach, vying unsuccessfully with the fierce ache of hunger. He could stand now with only a faint dizziness, caused by his hunger, and walk with nothing more worrisome than a labored stiffness in his joints. He left the valley, heading westward, trying to find his way back to civilization.
He was a mess. He had no shoes or socks, his shirt and trousers were bloody and filthy and torn, his face and arms were scratched and bruised, and he couldn’t walk properly. He came at last to a highway, and walked along it for five minutes before state troopers picked him up. He was too worn down to resist, and they vagged him.
His fifth month on the farm, he wrote a careful letter to a guy he knew in Chicago, asking for information about Mal in a roundabout way. He signed the letter by his prison name, Ronald Casper, because he knew it would be read by the censor before it was mailed, but in the body of the letter he tried to make it clear who the writer was.
He got an answer three weeks later, an answer as guarded in its phrasing as his question had been, but through the verbiage about nonexistent relatives he got the story. Mal, it seemed, had left Chicago some time ago, with a woman who could only have been Lynn. He had apparently squared himself with the syndicate and had been taken back into the fold. He had been recently seen in New York, spending heavily and living the good life. Lynn was still with him.
So Parker waited, and when his chance came he took it. He killed a guard rather than wait the two more months until they would have released him anyway. He had to get moving. He wanted Mal Resnick — he wanted him between his hands. Not the money back. Not Lynn back. Just Mal, between his hands.
He headed first for Palm Springs, but the fifteen hundred dollars he’d had in the hotel safe there was gone. Lynn had taken it. He knew without checking that she’d cleaned out his other reserves, too.
He wasn’t a petty thief or a hobo. He didn’t have the background or the training or the temperament for it. He fared badly coming across the country, but he stayed alive. He jackrolled for eating money, traveled by truck when
