She put the lids on the boxes and started to carry them away, but Parker said, “Bring the string here, why don’t you?”
She looked surprised. “Oh, I see! Of course.” She went away, came back with a roll of twine, and said, “I wouldn’t give you empty boxes. Sooner or later you’d just find out and come back. And where else do I have to go but here?” She tied the two boxes together while she talked. “That’s the one kind of person you can trust,” she said. “The person who doesn’t have anyplace else to go.”
Parker didn’t say anything to that.
When the package was tied, the woman led the way back upstairs, Parker following with the shoeboxes under his arm.
Upstairs, Parker said, “You know where I can buy a car in this town?”
She nodded at the shoeboxes. “That way, you mean?”
“Where I won’t be asked questions,” Parker said.
“That’s what I meant,” she said. “Yes, there’s a very good place I know. It’s not very far from here.”
“Would you call them and tell them I’m on the way over?”
“Certainly.”
He waited while she made the call, and then she went outside with him and gave him the directions. It was another sunny day, and she looked out of place out here in the brightness with the dust and the age still on her. As though she were left over from some prior world.
Parker walked to the place she’d told him about, a used-car lot in a neighborhood of used-car lots. It took some dickering because what he wanted was a mace, a car with papers that looked good and plates that looked good, but half an hour later the deal was set on a two-year-old Pontiac with standard shift and a bad tendency to pull to the left. The car had been in an accident and had rolled, but it would take him where he wanted to go and it wasn’t on anybody’s list of hot cars and the plates would also be clean and cool, and that was all that mattered.
The dealer drove him to a Western Union office where he wired Claire for more money. He got it forty-five minutes later, went back to the lot, traded the cash for the car, and drove out of I he lot. He stopped in several downtown stores and bought a suitcase and gradually filled it with clothing and toilet articles. He didn’t bother to go back to the hotel because there was nothing there but a suitcase he didn’t own, and there was no point making a special trip to pay the bill. When he was done with his shopping he drove south out of Cleveland, and when he was near the entrance to the Ohio Turnpike he pulled off the road, opened the package of shoeboxes, took out the guns, threw the shoeboxes out the window, and loaded the guns. Then he got out of the car and walked a little ways into the woods beside the road and fired each gun twice into a nearby tree. They both worked all right. He reloaded, put the guns away in his pockets, and went back to the car. Now to find Uhl.
TWO
One
Parker sat in the darkness in the hotel room and waited for the phone to ring. He had questions, and all he could do now was sit around and wait for the answers.
He heard the shuffling of slippers along the walk out front and knew it was Madge coming to talk to him. That was the only thing wrong with her, the only thing wrong with this place of hers — she liked to talk too much. But it was safe; he could stay here and make his phone calls from here, so he was willing to put up with a little inconvenience.
He hoped the fact that the room was in darkness would keep her away, but he didn’t really expect anything to save him, and he wasn’t surprised when she rapped sharply on the door.
“Parker! Turn on some lights and open up! What’s the matter with you?”
Parker got up and switched on a table lamp and went over to open the door. He said, “Don’t yell my name all over the country.”
Madge came in saying, “Brother, you’re almost the only client I got. I don’t know what’s the matter with kids these days. I brought ice.” She held up the plastic bucket. “You got anything to drink?”
“I’ve got a bottle,” Parker said, and went over to the dresser to get it.
Madge dropped into a chair and let her arms dangle. “I’m gettin’ old,” she said.
It was true, and it had been true for a long time now. Madge was in her middle sixties now and a rarity: a hooker who’d saved her money during the good years. She’d bought this place a dozen years ago, this Green Glen Motel on Route 6 north of Scranton, and ran it herself with the assistance of a retarded young heifer named Ethel, who might or might not be Madge’s daughter. The motel returned Madge a modest profit, and in a way it kept her in touch with her original profession, since most of the rooms here tended to get rented by the hour.
Because she knew a lot of the right people and because she could be trusted, Madge’s place was occasionally a meeting ground for groups of men like Parker setting up an operation somewhere and was less often used as a temporary hideout by somebody on the run. Madge didn’t like to risk what she had that way, but if it was an emergency she wouldn’t turn a man away.
She was medium height and thin as an antenna, with sharp elbows and a shriveled throat. Her hair was white and coarse and cut very short in the Italian style worn by women forty years her junior. She was wearing dark green stretch pants tonight and a sleeveless high-neck top of green and white and amber stripes and green slip-on shoes. Great golden hoop earrings hung from her ears. She kept her eyebrows plucked and redrawn in sardonic curving lines. Her fingernails were always long and curved and covered in blood-red polish, but she wore no lipstick, so that her mouth was one more thin pale line in a heavily lined face.
If she’d had less toughness and assurance, the effect would have been pretty bad, particularly with the gleaming white false teeth she flashed every time she opened her mouth, but somehow or other she had the style to get away with it. The young clothes weren’t being worn by an old body but by a young spirit. In some incomprehensible way, Madge had stopped getting older along about 1920.
Parker had come here because he’d needed a base for a little while and he’d known Madge was safe. He could make his phone calls without anybody listening in. He could stay here as long as he wanted without anybody ever getting curious about who he was or where he came from or what he was all about. For all of that, listening to
