Parker got into the police car and started the engine. The sound agitated them across the street again, and the windshield was hit four times. Lozini was jumping up and down and screaming, “The tires! The tires!”
Parker threw the car into gear and aimed for Lozini, but the old man got around behind the cart again. The left corner of the police car’s rear bumper nicked the cart, sending it spinning, and then Parker was accelerating down Brower Road.
When he looked in the rear-view mirror he saw a couple of them back there, standing in the middle of the street like FBI agents at the pistol range, firing after him, but none of the bullets came into the car. Others were running for the cars, and that looked like Lozini up again, limping now, probably still screaming. Dunstan was standing around like a wallflower, not knowing what to do with his hands.
It took Parker ten minutes to get to where the second car was stashed. He left O’Hara’s gunbelt and holster and the empty gun in the police car. The hat had fallen off back in front of Fun Island, and he’d long since removed the bandages from his head.
He switched to the other car. It contained extra clothing for himself and Grofield and Laufman, but he could change later on. For the first hour, he just drove.
Eight
PARKER TURNED in at the driveway where the rural mailbox said Willis. It wasn’t his idea, using that name, but this wasn’t his house, it was all Claire’s. He’d given her the money, but she’d bought it, it was in a name of hers, and she was the one who lived here. He stayed here when he wasn’t working, but Claire lived here. There was a difference, and they could both feel it.
The name Willis on the mailbox bothered Parker a little, but it really shouldn’t. It was a common enough name, after five years a woman who used that name wasn’t going to lead the law to Parker, who was wanted under it, but it bothered him because it was an illogical thing to do and he tried not to do illogical things. He’d stopped being Charles Willis two years before he’d met Claire, but he’d told her about the name and that was why she was using it. In order to force herself some way into his life even before he knew her, to make their relationship with one another have roots that extended into the period of time when they didn’t know of one another’s existence. It was a small illogic, and it would have no ill effects, and in a way it pleased Parker that she should want to feel like that, but he couldn’t help, every time he came back from a job, looking at that name on the mailbox and being troubled for just a minute about its evidence that all was not rationality.
Claire had recently had overhead doors installed in the two-car attached garage, to replace the old-fashioned doors in pairs that had opened outward. Now Parker reached into the glove compartment of the Pontiac — his own car, waiting for him where he’d left it at the Newark Airport parking lot — and pressed the button on the little box in there, and one of the doors lifted, and he drove in.
Claire’s Buick wasn’t there, so she was shopping or someplace. Parker pressed the button that shut the garage door again, walked across the empty space that Claire’s car would occupy, and went through the connecting door into the house. He went into the kitchen and made himself a sandwich and a cup of instant coffee, and carried them through the bedroom and opened the glass door and went out onto the back porch. It was briskly cold here, but the sun was shining and he was warmly dressed and he wasn’t minding the cold any more. He sat down on a chair on the porch and looked out at the ice on the lake in the sunlight, and ate his sandwich and drank his coffee. There were no snowmobiles out there today, but over on the other side of the lake he could see the tiny black figures of children skating. Across the middle of the lake went two boys on bicycles, with a skidding, sliding dog trying to keep up with them.
Only about a fifth of the houses around the lake were occupied year-round, that was one of the reasons Claire had picked this house. The houses on both sides were among those used strictly as summer cottages. This was a good place for a man who didn’t want to be noticed, and who didn’t want his comings and goings paid attention to.
Parker sat out there about half an hour after he finished the coffee and sandwich, and then the glass door slid open behind him — the house was half old-fashioned rustic, half modernized country — and Claire came out, saying, “I saw your car.”
“Hello,” he said, and she bent over him to kiss his lips. He was usually very interested in sex in the time right after a job, but this one had used up his body for a while. Tomorrow, maybe. For now, while she kissed him, he simply leaned up and stroked her hair.
She straightened and looked at him, a quizzical smile on her face. “Something wrong?” She was tall and slender and good-looking, the way a fashion model is tall and slender and good-looking, but with more than the usual fashion model’s individuality in her face.
“I’m tired,” he said.
“Feel like telling me about it?”
“Sure.”
She pulled over a chair and sat down and he told her about it, and when he was done, she said, “All of that, and you didn’t even get the money. You must be disgusted.”
“I know where it is,” he said. He stretched, and the muscles were aching again. He’d have to go to bed soon, sleep for a while. “Some day I’ll go back and get it,” he said, and got up yawning, and the two of them went into the house.
The end.
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