start the truck engine, and then the rest of them came out, carrying things, Parker and Keegan making two trips. The street was almost deserted, only two cars going by in the time it took them to load the truck. Parker sat up front beside Morris, Keegan and Briley sat in back on the bags of money, and Morris drove them away from there.
The first time they were stopped at a traffic light, Morris said, “Any trouble in there?”
“No. It went the way it was supposed to.” He thought about the laundry bag in the wrong place, and being short one man to carry things away from there, but they were points too minor to mention.
“Sounded like nice music.”
Parker had nothing to say to that. The light turned green, and they drove on.
The house they were heading for, Keegan had rented two weeks ago, though none of them had been there since, until they’d left their cars in the neighborhood and suitcases in the house earlier today. It had taken Keegan four full days to find a house that suited their needs, and this one had checked out right down the list. In the first place, it was owned by a realty corporation rather than an individual, which meant that so long as the rent was paid, no one would be dropping by to chat with the tenant. Second, its neighbors on both sides were commercial concerns that closed in the evening—a supermarket on one side, a hobby shop on the other. It had a garage and a’ good-sized backyard, all enclosed by a high board fence. It had come furnished, including a phone, so no one would be wondering why the house was standing empty, particularly since Keegan, the day he took the place, had set time switches that turned lamps on at six p.m. every day in the living room and one of the upstairs bedrooms, and switched them off again a little past midnight.
It was called Dornwell Street, and the house number was 426. When Morris drove the Union Electric Co. truck down Dornwell Street now, it was silent and dark and empty, the buildings black on both sides, the only illumination coming from wide-spaced streetlights. Morris turned into the driveway at 426, cut the headlights, and came to a stop. Keegan climbed out of the back of the truck and trotted up to open the garage door, a segmented aluminum door that slid upward. Morris drove the truck into the garage, and then all four of them carried everything into the house, turning on a small worklight over the stove in the kitchen, until they had themselves and everything else inside. Then they switched on the round fluorescent light in the middle of the ceiling.
Keegan had stocked the place with food this morning, and now he and Morris stayed in the kitchen to broil some steaks while Briley and Parker carried the blue plastic laundry bags into the dining loom.
The dining room had no windows, and the wide entryway to the living room could be closed by sliding doors recessed into the walls. They closed these doors now, and then switched on the overhead light fixture and emptied the first of the laundry bags onto the dining-room table. They’d chosen the bag with Briley’s clothes in it first, and Briley went away to change while Parker sat at the table and began the split.
They would stay here two or three days, depending on what the radio told them about the local law activity. The cars they had parked around the neighborhood were all clean, and shouldn’t attract any attention.
Briley came to the side doorway, which they’d left open because it didn’t expose them to any windows. He said, “Parker.”
“What is it?”
“You better come take a look.”
Parker got up from the table and went with him. The hall led to the front door at one end and the kitchen at the other, with the living and dining rooms opening off it along the way. The staircase was across the hall from the living room, with the bathroom between it and the kitchen. Briley, still in his coveralls, his clothes still over his arm, led the way to the bathroom and stood aside for Parker to go in. He’d already turned the light on.
Berridge was lying on his back on the floor. The side of his head had been punched in, and a plumber’s wrench with the end bloody and hair-matted was lying on the floor between the body and the toilet.
They searched the house and it was empty.
PART TWO
Parker turned in at the new mailbox, with the name Willis on it. That was the name Claire was using here, because at one time Parker had lived under the name Charles Willis, and Claire was trying to make her presence in his life retroactive to the time before they’d met. So she was going to be Claire Willis for a while.
At the hotel in New York, where she was either to have been waiting for him or to have left a message, there’d been a message. He’d known when he’d taken the sealed envelope from the desk clerk that it meant she’d found a house. Somewhere in the northeast.
It turned out to be here, seventy miles from New York, tucked away in a rural corner where the state lines of New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania all meet. It was a small house, country-looking, part gray stone and part brown shingling, built in the middle of a deep rectangular tree-covered lot between this blacktop road and the edge of a lake called Colliver’s Pond. The driveway was crushed stone, there were trees and underbrush all around the house instead of lawn, and the two-car attached garage looked almost as big as the rest of the place.
The end garage doors were open, old-fashioned doors that swung out to both sides, showing an empty space inside. Next to it, in the half-light, stood Claire’s blue Buick, a legal car bought under her own name. The Pontiac Parker was driving was a mace, bought outside the law but with papers good enough to pass a normal inspection; a car on nobody’s wanted list.
Parker drove the Pontiac into the garage, took the two suitcases out of the trunk, put them out on the crushed-stone driveway, and was closing the garage doors when Claire came out of the main entrance of the house, wearing slacks and a white sweater, with a cloth tied around her head. She smiled but didn’t say anything, and came walking toward him as he finished closing the doors. She was tall and slender and self-possessed, with the face and figure of a fashion model, and as she reached him she put a very remote expression on her face, through which the smile still shone, and said, “Mr. Lynch?”
That was the name he’d had the first time they’d met. She needed to keep touching things, to be sure they were still there, and when what she touched was the past, Parker had nothing to say back to her. His past didn’t exist. He said, “Hello.” At the same time he didn’t want to rebuff her, so he reached his arms out and drew her in close.
She nuzzled his throat and said, “You smell like money.”
He laughed, a barking sound. “That’s the suitcase.
I’ll show it to you.”
