It was time to bring it to an end, time to write the letters, and time to talk to Bronson. He was somewhere in the country. Parker would find him, and make an end to it.
PART TWO
1
THE WOMAN WITH orange hair sat on the porch and watched Parker come walking down the rutted road towards the house. This was in the middle of the Georgia scrub country, west of Cordele, about thirty miles north of Albany. The land was brown and dry; the ruts in the road rock-hard. The house was grey frame, two storeys high, a narrow, tall, rectangular box in the middle of a dead land, with blind uncurtained windows and an afterthought of a porch stuck askew on the front. A barn stood back of the house to one side; there was a long garage on the other side. Rusting automobile parts were scattered on the baked clay between house and garage. A lone dead tree stood grey and naked in front of the house with a rusty pulley arrangement fixed to a thick lower branch. Except for the woman with orange hair, the place looked deserted.
Yesterday, after checking out of the hotel, Parker had taken a plane to Atlanta, and then doubled back, taking a bus south to Macon, and another bus farther south to Cordele. A bus headed for Columbus had taken him west of Cordele along an empty blacktop road to the twin-rut turnoff, and carrying his suitcase, he’d walked the three miles in to the house.
It was November, but the land was still dry and the air was hot. After three miles, the suitcase got heavy. The rutted road made walking difficult. It would have been easier if he’d left the suitcase in Cordele, but he didn’t want to go through there again.
As he walked past the dead tree with the pulley on it, a lean mongrel rose up on the porch next to the chair the woman was sitting in. The hound stretched and yawned, then looked up at the woman and looked out at Parker. He watched Parker and waited, not barking or moving or doing anything.
Parker stopped where he was and dropped the suitcase on to the ground. He said, “Chemy around?”
The woman asked, “Who wants him?”
“Parker.”
“Parker, you say?”
“Parker.”
She lifted her head and called, “Elly!”
A boy of about fourteen, as lean and silent as the dog, came out of the house and stood there. The woman said to him, “Go on over to the garage see if Chemy ain’t there. Fella name of Parker lookin’ for him.”
Parker said, “Tell him I got a new face.”
The boy turned his head and gazed at him, the same way the dog gazed. The woman frowned and said, “What the hell kind of talk is that?” She was very fat, forty or forty-five, with a fat white face under the orange hair. She was wearing a dark-blue dress with pink flowers on it.
“Plastic surgery,” Parker told her. “He’ll have to recognize me by voice and build and what I know.”
The woman shook her head. “Go on, Elly,” she said. To Parker she said, “You can wait right there.”
The boy came down off the porch and walked around to the garage. He was wearing dungarees and nothing else. He was tanned as dark as an Indian, and his sun-faded blond hair was shaggy and long. He opened a door in the side of the garage and went inside, closing the door after him. The door squealed loudly in the silence, and seemed to affect the light oddly. Instead of a shaft of sunlight angling through the opening and lighting the interior of the garage, it was as though a shaft of darkness pooled out on the ground outside the door when it was opened.
Parker asked, “You want a cigarette?”
“Thank you, no.”
“I think I’ll have one,” he said.
He had wanted her to know what he was reaching for. She nodded, and he slowly took cigarettes and matches from his pocket. Then he stood smoking in the hot, dry air. The dog watched him, unwinking.
The squealing door opened again, and the boy stood in the pool of darkness, gazing at him. Then he turned and said something to somebody inside. Parker waited.
The boy came into the sunlight again, and a short, skinny man in overalls came out after him. The man had dry black hair and a narrow face. His bare shoulders were pale and covered with freckles. He came walking over and stood studying Parker for a minute.
Then he said, “Well, I’ll be darned. Got yourself a new face, eh?”
“It’s your brother I wanted,” Parker told him.
The skinny man frowned. “What’s that you say?”
“I asked for your brother.”
“The hell,” said the skinny man. “You asked for Chemy.”
“And you’re Kent.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Go tell your brother I want to buy a car. Like the Ford with the bullet holes in the trunk.”
The skinny man scratched his head. “You sound like Parker,” he said. “You sure as hell act like Parker. And you know the right stuff to beParker. But you don’t look like Parker.”
“Plastic surgery. I told your wife.”
