‘That I wouldn’t know. Let me just give you the names.’
Feccio said, ‘Then we go play detective?’
Parker said, ‘Something like that.’
Rudd said, ‘We’re looking for trouble.’
‘Don’t worry, Pete,’ said Kifka. ‘This won’t be as bad as you think.’ He shifted around in the bed and started writing names and addresses down on the paper.
For a couple of minutes there was silence, everybody sitting around waiting for Kifka to get his list finished. Clinger came back in and shook his head and said, ‘A pizzeria and a movie theater.’
Parker said, ‘It figured.’
Shelly said, ‘Who’s for poker?’
They all trooped out but Parker and Kifka. Kifka sat on the bed, frowning in concentration like a wrestler trying to remember who’s supposed to win this bout, and Parker went over to the window and looked out at the night-dark city.
He was out there, somewhere.
PART THREE
One
He was standing in a small square room with beige walls.
The room was nine feet long, ten feet wide, nine feet high. Paint was peeling from the ceiling. A gray carpet covered most of the floor. The furniture was old and nondescript.
He was looking out the window at the night-dark city, feeling Parker’s eyes. Somewhere, looking out. from some other window in some other part of this city, were Parker’s eyes, searching for him.
He didn’t know Parker’s name, didn’t know his history, but it wasn’t necessary. He had seen Parker. He had tried once to frame Parker, and twice to kill Parker. He had taken an awful lot of money from Parker, money which must connect Parker with that robbery out at the stadium.
He was terrified of Parker.
At the beginning of it, he hadn’t really been aware of Parker at all. He’d known Ellen was living with another one, someone new, but his rage and hatred and sense of loss, all because of Ellen herself, had been so strong in him that he hadn’t had the thought or the inclination to wonder about this new one, or care about him, or even consider him in his plans.
Except to wait for him to leave the apartment.
For two days he’d snuffled around that building, loping and looking, waiting for Parker to come out of there. He’d been out of town for awhile, ever since Ellen had screamed at him that time, ranted and raved, cut him up with her tongue like slicing a piece of paper with a razor blade. She’d said things to him no one had ever said before in his life, things he would have killed a man for saying. She made fun of his triumphs, detailed his failures. She mocked his manhood, described the extent of his stupidity. She told him he was lousy in bed and worse out of it. She threw his electric razor out the window and told him to take the rest of his things and get the hell out of there. And when he went after her, driven beyond endurance, she’d run to the kitchen and grabbed a sharp knife out of the drawer there and held him at bay with it, screaming at him and taunting him all the time.
So he’d finally gathered up his gear and left the apartment, and she slammed the door after him. Standing in the hallway, he heard her slap the police lock into place. He had a key for the other lock, but not for that one.
He left town that same night, wound up in Mexico for a while. He knew Ellen would talk, would tell everyone how she’d routed him and why, and what she’d said to him, and how she’d held him off with a knife. He couldn’t face them, face anyone he knew in that city, knowing they would know, Ellen would tell them.
After months in Mexico, humiliation and rage gradually hardened into something colder and more dangerous than either, and he’d finally come north again, knowing he wouldn’t be able to rest until he’d paid Ellen back for everything she’d done to him.
He arrived Saturday afternoon. It was a cold fury that activated him, cold enough to make it possible for him to think, and to plan. He would even the score with Ellen, and he would do it in such a way that he himself would never be caught, because if he was caught and punished then that would negate the getting even, and Ellen would still be one up.
So he didn’t just attack. He reconnoitered first, studied the apartment, and saw Parker going in and coming out. He saw Parker drive off with the truck and later come back in a cab. He was waiting then to see the extent of Ellen’s perfidy. Was this stranger going to stay overnight?
Yes. Overnight and then some.
He waited. He’d taken a small room a few blocks away, and when he could stand it no more, when his eyes were dosing and he was weaving on his feet, he went back there and slept, fitful dozing, plagued by bad dreams. It was fully night when he went to sleep, and still night when he drove himself up from the bed and out of the room and back again to watch Ellen’s apartment.
He had begun by hating Ellen, but as the time went on, his hate expanded to include the stranger, too. Three days. Three days and three nights in that apartment there with Ellen. In bed with Ellen.
All the vicious things Ellen had said about his own prowess in bed came back to him, contrasting brutally against the silence of that apartment door and the slow inexorable moving of time.
Three days and three nights, and then at last the stranger came out. A big man he was, hard-looking, mean- looking. Alter all that time he didn’t even seem pleased or satisfied; his expression was flat, emotionless.
The stranger went down the stairs. He waited, listening to the stranger’s footsteps receding, then the door closing way down there at street level, and he was alone again.
His key still worked, and the police lock wasn’t on. No, and not the chain lock either. He went in, moving fast,
