There was no sense talking any more. Parker looked at Lennie and Blue, trying to decide which was the common-law husband, and picked Blue, the one with the moustache. He took the Sauer out from under his jacket and shot Blue in the left elbow. It was a quick loud clap of sound in the room, and Blue screamed and sat down on the floor. His face drained white, and his right hand came over, shaking, to touch his shattered elbow.
Parker looked at May. “The next one I give him is in the knee. That’s even tougher to fix. He’ll never walk right again as long as he lives.”
May and Lennie were both staring at the gun, their faces as white as Blue’s. May’s mouth opened, but no sound came out.
Parker felt the heft of the gun in his hand. “The simplest way,” he said thoughtfully, talking more to himself than to them, “would be to kill the three of you. Then Stubbs gets himself killed, and from then on everything is roses.”
“Wait,” May said, her voice an octave higher than before.
“It would be simplest.”
“Number two is named Wells,” said May, talking so fast the words tripped all over each other. “His real name is Wallerbaugh, but he’s calling himself Wells. And number three is named Courtney.”
Parker lowered the gun. There wasn’t enough reason to kill these three. It was dangerous to kill when there wasn’t enough reason, because after a while killing became the solution to everything, and when you got to think that way you were only one step from the chair. Parker had killed without enough reason twice, both times because he was impatient, and one time the killing could be matched to an FBI card with his prints on it. He wasn’t going to make any more mistakes like that.
“All right,” he said. “You give me the details. And then you wait out the month, just like you planned. If neither Stubbs nor I come back by then you can do whatever you want. That’s only a week from now.”
“All right,” May said. “All right. All right.”
Chapter 4
PARKER took the Carey bus from La Guardia to the East Side Terminal building on 37th Street in Manhattan. A rented Chevrolet was waiting for him there, but he let it wait a little longer, while he went up to Grand Central. It was five o’clock Sunday afternoon, and the station was doing a thriving business. Parker worked his way through it to the phone booths and the telephone books.
Buying a house had meant suburb to Parker from the beginning. The East Side Airlines Terminal had the phone books for the boroughs of New York — except for Staten Island — but the man Parker was looking for would be in Nassau County or Westchester County, or maybe even in Fan-field County up in Connecticut.
There was a “Wells, Chas. F.”, in Nassau County. Parker knew from May that Stubbs had planned to go through the phone book for all the possibilities and then go visit each one. He also knew that Stubbs would start with the city itself.
But sooner or later it would have to occur to Stubbs that Wells lived outside the city, and Stubbs was six days ahead of him. There wasn’t time to do it the way Stubbs was doing. Parker looked at the phone number for this Nassau County Wells, got some change out of his pocket and went into one of the booths.
He talked with an operator first, and fed some more money into the slots. Then the ringing sounded in his ear. He was just about to give up, after ten rings, when the phone was answered by a male voice. Parker said, “I want to talk to Charles F. Wells.”
“Speaking.”
“This is Wallerbaugh.”
If he was the wrong Wells, he’d be baffled. If he was the right Wells, the naming coming at him this way might throw him off base.
It did. There was a pause, and then the voice, wary and careful. “What was that name, please?”
“Dr Adler,” Parker said. Just to be absolutely sure.
The wait was longer this time, and the voice this time was low and vicious. “Who are you? What do you want?”
Parker hung up. He left the booth and went back across the crowded terminal floor and took a cab back to the Airlines Terminal. It was the right Wells, and he was still alive. That could mean Stubbs hadn’t found him yet, even though he’d had six days. Or it could mean Stubbs had found him and Wells had proved his innocence. It could also mean that Stubbs had found him and was now dead.
The address wasn’t much to go on. Reardon Road, Huntington, Long Island. There was a map in the glove compartment of the rented Chevrolet, and Parker found Huntington and figured out his best route. The Queens Midtown Tunnel, because it was handy to the Terminal, and then the Long Island Expressway. Glen Cove Road up to North Hempstead Turnpike, which was also 25A, and that road into Huntington. When he got there, he could ask directions to Reardon Road.
He put the map back in the glove compartment.
Chapter 5
PARKER walked into the bar and ordered a beer. Outside, evening was coming on, and this was the first bar he had come to in Huntington. All of the normal bar bric-a-brac was on display — the Pabst Blue Ribbon antique car; Miss Rheingold; the Budweiser hanging clock; the Miller’s High Life dancing lights; the light shaped like a 7; the Schlitz clock against a pattern of spangled blue. Haifa dozen locals sat along the length of the bar, and three more were playing the bowling machine in the back. One of them was a lefty.
Parker drank half the beer. “I’m looking for Reardon Road.”
The bartender looked at him and said, “You, too?” Then he turned to somebody else sitting at the bar. “Here’s another guy looking for Reardon Road.”
“Is that right?”
“You mean my brother’s been here already?”
