Joyce Langer.
There had always been the chance she’d change her mind, and she was the type to do it too late. Parker waited where he was.
She came running into the room and skidded to one knee beside the bed. “George!” she started to shake his shoulder. “George, you’ve got to wake up! There’s a man after you! There’s a man named Lynch after you!”
Parker shut the bedroom door. “He knows me under a different name,” he said.
She spun so fast she almost lost her balance and fell over, grabbing Uhl’s upper arm at the last second to help her keep her balance. “You!”
“You should have phoned,” Parker told her. “You wouldn’t be in trouble now.”
“I couldn’t tell him on the phone,” she said. “What I did, I couldn’t tell him what I did.”
“Second guessers always make trouble for themselves,” Parker said. “Get up from there.”
She said, “Don’t do anything to — I shouldn’t have. Don’t do anything to him because of what I did. Please.” She turned and shook his arm again. “George, wake up!” Then she stared at him, struck finally by his lack of response, by the way he was just lying there. “George? George?”
He could hear panic and hysteria building in her voice. He said, “He’s alive. Don’t worry about him, he’s alive.”
“What did you do to him? What in the name of God did you do to him?”
He walked closer to her. “You shouldn’t have come back here.”
She stared up at him. “What are you going to do? What am I involved in? What’s going on?”
Uhl groaned, startling them both. Immediately she was all over him, tugging at his shoulders, shouting into his face: “George, George, wake up, please wake up!”
He mumbled something. His face was frowning, but other than that he still wasn’t moving.
Parker took the girl by the arm. “Up out of there,” he said. “You came at a bad time.”
She didn’t want to go. He had to tug harder. He knew she’d start screaming soon, and he couldn’t have that. In any case, he couldn’t have her in this room listening when he started asking his questions. He said, loud and commanding, “Joyce!”
She automatically turned her head to look up at him and he clipped her with a short, hard right hand. She bounced back against the edge of the bed and would have fallen to the floor if he hadn’t held on to her.
She was out. He picked her up and carried her into the living room and dumped her on the sofa, then went back to the bedroom and went through dresser drawers and found stockings and belts and a clean handkerchief. He took these back to the living room and bound and gagged her. She would keep now, for a while. But she still complicated things; her presence here still made the situation too difficult.
But he could work all that out later. He went back to the bedroom and Uhl had faded back down into sleep again, the frown lines gone from his face. Parker took the chair he’d been sitting in and pulled it over beside the bed and sat down. He already had a pencil and a piece of paper on the bedside table.
He said, “George.”
A faint frown.
“George, listen to me. Wake up and listen to me.”
The frown deepened; it became petulant, like a child not wanting to wake up from a nap. Uhl’s head moved slowly back and forth, once to the left and once to the right, as though he wanted to shake his head in a no gesture but couldn’t because it was too much effort.
“Wake up, George. Listen to me. Can you hear me? George? Can you hear .me, George?”
He wasn’t getting all the way through. He reached over and slapped Uhl’s face, not hard, and Uhl said, “Unn- nn,” the frown deepening even more into an exaggerated grimace, the eyes squeezing shut as though a bright light had been aimed at them.
“George? Can you hear me?”
“Ohh,” said Uhl, still grimacing, the sound petulant.
“Can you hear me?”
“Yes.” As though to say leave me alone.
“This is Parker. Do you know who I am?”
“Yes.” Said more calmly now, as though he was getting more resigned to answering questions.
“Who am I?”
“You’re Parker.”
“And who are you?”
“George. George Uhl.”
“You took some money away from me.”
No answer.
Parker looked at him, wondering if he’d faded out again, but then remembered his own session with this drug. It was necessary to phrase the sentences as direct questions, obviously requiring an answer. Statements weren’t answered, only questions were answered.
