had already gone through this routine lour other times, and it hadn’t come to anything yet, and he didn’t really expect it would come to anything this time. This Fred Burrows looked about as dangerous as a ladybug, soft and plump and scaredycat. He blinked a lot.
What they were supposed to be, him and Parker, they were supposed to be law. Parker always had these identification cards, driver’s licenses, discharge photostats, credit cards, all these bits and pieces of paper he kept assembling with other people’s names on them, and when it was necessary for him and Shelly to ape law, out he came with a couple of identification cards that said police all over them. They weren’t for this city, but nobody reads a cop’s card that close.
This was their fifth call. Whenever Feccio or Clinger or Rudd ran into somebody they couldn’t fix with the television questions, they passed the word on to Dan Kifka back at Vimorama, and Kifka passed the word on to Parker and Shelly, and Parker and Shelly went visiting in law face. The dodge was, they were investigating the murder of Ellen Canaday, and they wanted to know where this particular gismo was on Tuesday night. After they got the answer they checked it if necessary, and wound up scratching another name off the list.
Like this boy Fred Burrows. Shelly didn’t have to listen to the questions or the answers; he already knew you could scratch Fred off the list. But Parker was going through it all anyway, just like it mattered. Parker was thorough, and Shelly recognized that was a good way to be. Not for himself, Though; he was too easygoing to be thorough.
Parker at last gave the high-sign they were finished, and Shelly got to his feet, stretching his back and twirling his hat like any harness bull anywhere. Parker told Fred Burrows, ‘We’ll be in touch. Don’t leave town.’ Shelly scratched his nose to hide a grin, and they went on out of there, leaving Fred Burrows smiling painfully in the doorway.
Out on the street, Parker said, ‘He’s out.’
‘I knew that all the time.’
Parker shrugged, looking around. ‘We’ll go back to Vimorama,’ he said.
‘Sure thing.’
They walked down to Shelly’s car, a seven-year-old Pontiac with a five year-old Mercury powerplant and Ford pickup transmission. It looked like hell, and it sounded like hell, but it also went like hell.
Driving out to Vimorama, Parker said, ‘I don’t like the smell of it. It’s going to be one of the cop’s nine.’
‘We’ll know pretty soon.’
‘I don’t like going near those nine. What if the law grabs anybody that comes along, doesn’t just wait for me?’
Shelly shrugged and said, ‘If it was me, I’d give myself up peaceful as could be and say I was doing it for a joke. They might have me on some kind of misdemeanor, gaining entry under false pretences’ or something like that, but that couldn’t hurt me none. I’d just wait them out.’
Parker shook his head. ‘I just don’t like it,’ he said.
Out at Vimorama, they took the car around on the gravel driveway to the rear of the property, where it couldn’t be seen from the highway. They got out and started crunching back across the gravel to Unit One, where Kifka was. Shelly walked on the right, Parker on the left.
Shelly, glancing to his right, saw Little Bob Negli suddenly pop out from behind one of the cabins over there. He had a gun in his hand, a little gun, shrimp-size like himself.
Negli shouted, ‘Shelly, move over!’
Shelly had been starting to grin. Now he started to frown instead. ‘Bob, what the hell are you -‘
‘Move out of the way!’
Then, beyond Negli, Shelly saw someone else, a young guy, heavyset like a football player, loping forward between the cabins. Everybody had a gun in his hand all of a sudden; the young guy’s hand bulged with a .45 automatic.
Shelly shouted and dragged his own pistol out from under his coat. But Negli must have misunderstood. He shot Shelly three times.
Eight
After the man named Pete Rudd told him everything he wanted to know, he knocked Rudd out with his fist and got ready to leave here.
It had been pleasurable, forcing Rudd to talk. The last time he’d felt that way, free and exalted and as strong as a redwood tree, was back in college in football season. Hitting a man was like hitting a line; exulting in your own strength and the chance to bruise and push and bull your way through.
Rudd had been troublesome. It had taken a long while to break him down, and he worked up quite a sweat doing it. So, as always after prolonged exertion like that, he spent a while in the shower. Here, in this miserable place, the shower was in the bathroom down at the end of the hall. It wasn’t even a proper shower; he had to stand up in the tub, with a shower spigot over him and a plastic shower curtain constantly blowing inward and wrapping itself around him.
When he got back to the room, Rudd was still out, sagging in the chair to which he’d been tied with shoe laces and strips of his own shirt.
He packed quickly, but not hurriedly. There was no reason to hurry now. He knew what had to be done, and when it was finished he would go to Mexico as planned. He felt very peaceful now, with everything mapped out that way, and having had a good workout and a good shower afterward.
Various things that Ellen had said to him at one time or another, things about his abilities with women, kept trying to creep into his consciousness, but he was feeling too good to let such nonsense bother him. He pushed those memories to one side, old ballast he no longer needed.
When he was done packing, he had four suitcases, his own two filled with his clothing and other possessions, everything he owned in the world, and the two filled with money. As an afterthought he opened one of the money suitcases and took out handfuls of cash, stowing it around in his pockets. If by any chance he should be temporarily
