Parker nodded, having gotten where he wanted to go. He said, “Is there a car in the garage?”
“What? Yeah.”
“Remove it. Park it down by the curb and leave the garage door open. But neither you nor Brock is to be in the garage. I’ll drive straight in. What room does the garage connect to?”
“The kitchen.”
“Is there a table in there?”
“Yeah.”
“You two be sitting at it with your hands where I can see them. You can leave the door to the garage open or shut, it’s up to you. I’ll come in empty-handed. You can have one gun on the table so you’ll know I won’t come in shooting.”
“All right. What about Uhl?”
“He’s in the trunk of my car. Don’t worry, he’s out of the play.”
“Good. Anything else?”
“Not here.”
“All right. We’ll empty the garage for you.”
“I’m on my way,” Parker said.
Six
The garage was at the left end of the house, its door like an open mouth. Parker drove into it with no hands on the wheel, looking for the doorway that had to be somewhere in the right-side wall, the one leading into the kitchen. His left hand was on the door handle beside him, and his right hand had a revolver in it.
There was a slight blacktop slope up from the road, and then the flat garage floor. Parker went up, fast, into the garage too fast, stood on the brake at the last second, saw that interior doorway empty in the middle of the wall to his right, shoved the car door open with his shoulder, and went out of the car backwards, dropping toward the floor as the first bullet came from that doorway over there into the car through the windshield and out this side, six inches over Parker’s head.
The car bumped into the rear wall. It was still in drive; the motor kept turning over, it kept pushing against the wall, but not hard enough to do any damage.
Parker hit the floor between the car and the exterior wall, folded his arms in close against his body, and rolled under the car. He kept himself rolling across the cement floor, the car rumbling over his head.
The garage door was sliding down. It must be run electrically, with a switch somewhere in the house.
Parker rolled out from under the right side of the car. Brock, startled, was standing in the doorway on the landing there with the open kitchen doorway on his right and the cellar stairs behind him. Parker had been in the garage less than ten seconds. He fired, lying on his back, and Brock jerked and toppled backwards down the cellar stairs.
Parker lunged for the wall as a shot was fired from the kitchen. It came through the angle of the two doorways and slapped into the side of the car.
The garage door was down. There’d been three shots, only one with the door open. With any luck the neighbors were all too busy and too far away to have noticed anything, but there couldn’t be a lot of noise from here on.
Exhaust was beginning to stink up the garage already. The car engine was still growling, pushing against the rear wall of the garage.
There was a faint call from the cellar: “Matt! Help me, Matt!”
“Damn you, Parker!”
That was Rosenstein’s voice from somewhere in the kitchen. Parker was pressed against the wall to the right of the doorway. There were two steps up to the doorway, and then the little landing inside and the kitchen doorway on the left.
There couldn’t be a stalemate now. He had to keep moving, keep Rosenstein from getting himself reorganized. There was a pegboard mounted on the wall to Parker’s right, the other way from the door, with tools hanging on it. He grabbed a hammer, stepped away from the wall so he could see on a diagonal through the two doorways into the kitchen, and threw the hammer at the far wall in there to give Rosenstein something else to think about for two seconds. He followed the hammer in, running low, diving across the threshold, firing blindly to his right as he went in. Not to hit anything, just to keep Rosenstein off balance, surround him with movement and noise.
A bullet ripped cloth above Parker’s shoulder blade, and then he was on the floor, on his side. Rosenstein was in the doorway at the far end of the right-hand wall. Parker had two hands on the gun for stability, his arms were outstretched and he fired as Rosenstein dove out of the doorway. Rosenstein roared and crashed somewhere out of sight.
Was he hit? Parker was on his feet and running. He went fast around the corner and almost tripped over Rosenstein lying on the living room floor. Rosenstein was trying to bring his gun hand up. Parker kicked his wrist and the gun went sailing across the room. Rosenstein grunted and fell back. His breathing sounded clogged but there was no blood visible.
Any more of them? Parker crouched over Rosenstein, looking around, but the house was full of silence.
Rosenstein was looking up at him. Talking as though his throat was closing up on him he said, “You broke my back.”
Parker straightened. There’d been only the two of them. He went farther into the living room and picked up Rosenstein’s pistol and put it in his hip pocket.
Rosenstein coughed and said, “You had luck. I could have taken you, but you had luck.”
