“Yeah. Yeah.”
“It’s worth a try. If it don’t work, we regroup, that’s all.”
Ryan frowned harder.
“We don’t have a hell of a lot of time,” Mal said quickly. “We’ve got to make our move before he makes his.”
“Yeah,” said Ryan. “Okay. We try it.”
On the way down the hall, Ryan stopped off in Sill’s room for a minute. That left only Parker to be taken care of.
There was a bathroom between each pair of bedrooms, connected on both sides. They went into the bedroom next to the one occupied by Parker and Lynn, and waited by the slightly open bathroom door.
She finally came through the door on the other side, nude, and they grabbed her the minute she closed the door, and hustled her info the other bedroom. Ryan showed her the knife, darkly smeared, and Mal his gun, and she knew better than to shout.
“We got something to tell you,” Mal said, talking low and quick. “Listen close. Somebody’s going to die in the room next door tonight, and you got the choice. It can be you, or it can be Parker. If you want, it can be both. Which is it?”
She stared up at him, shaking her head. “I don’t know what you mean. What is it, Mal? I don’t know what you mean.”
“I told you,” he said. “Somebody’s going to die in there. It’s you or Parker. Take your pick.”
“How can I — ? I don’t get it, Mal. Please, I don’t know what you mean.”
“Ryan, touch her with the knife,” Mal said.
He touched her, the tip of the knife against the underpart of her left breast, not quite enough pressure to break the skin. Her face was big and blank.
“Take your pick, Lynn,” Mal said. “You or Parker. Quick.”
She licked her lips, staring from face to face. Finally, in a voice almost too low to hear, she whispered, “I don’t want to die.”
Mal had Sill’s automatic in his pocket. He took it out and handed her his own revolver. “Point that at either Ryan or me,” he said, “and you’re dead right now.”
She looked from the gun in her hand to his face and back to the gun again. “You want me — ? You want me to — ?”
“Think it over,” he said. “Take your time.” He ostentatiously looked at his wrist watch. “You got thirty seconds.”
“You can’t want me to — to — “
“You got twenty seconds.”
“Mal, please. For God’s sake, Mai — “
“Twenty seconds. Ryan, touch her with the knife again.”
Ryan touched the tip of the knife to the same place on the underpart of her breast, but Mal said, “No, not there. On the red.” She flinched, and he said, “Ten seconds. Yes or no?”
“Oh, God,” she whispered. The knife was against her and she was afraid to move. “Don’t make me kill him, Mal.”
“Four seconds,” he said. “Better poke a litjler harder, Ryan. Two seconds. One — “
“All right!”
Mal exhaled, letting the burden slip from his shoulders. He hadn’t wanted her dead. That was the last thing in the world he wanted.
It was working out fine, detail after detail, he was getting everything he wanted. He wanted the dough, all of it, to repay the syndicate and get back into the Outfit, where he belonged.
He was getting the dough, share after share, first Chester’s and then Sill’s and now Parker’s and soon Ryan’s. And he wanted Lynn, who was tied completely to Parker and he was going to get her too.
She was going to help him murder her husband, and that would be the tie between them that would bind her to him. Knowing that she could have chosen death, but had not, she would have to realize how faint her love for Parker really had been, and she would need someone who could share that knowledge and still want her. And that would be him, Mal, the one who had done it with her, the one for whom she had killed.
But it wasn’t done yet. He explained to her now. He and Ryan would be in the connecting bathroom, waiting. They didn’t demand that she do the job right away. She could take all the time she needed, she could wait for just the right moment. But Parker was not to leave the room alive. If he did, one second later she would be dead.
And if she tried to warn Parker, Mal and Ryan would know. They would be watching, they would be listening; they would know. One wrong word and she and Parker would die together, at the same moment. He explained it all twice, making sure she understood. She watched him dully, watching his moving lips rather than his eyes.
“All right,” she said, when he was finished. “I’ll do it. I told you I’d do it.”
“Good.”
He wanted to reach out and pat her shoulder, just touch her flesh, but some instinct warned him not to.
She crossed through the bathroom to the room where Parker lay waiting for her. She walked diagonally across to him, the gun out of his sight in her right hand, held down against her thigh. When she bent to join him, she
