“I suppose. All right.”
“But today I thought it over, and I figured I’d better call you and make sure.”
“Okay. I’ll handle it.”
“I hope I didn’t louse you up.”
“Me, too.”
Parker hung up and went to the kitchen, where Claire was sitting reading a magazine with her lunch. He said, “Handy gave out this number.”
She looked at him. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know yet. He gave it to one of the people I was on that last job with.”
“When did he give it to him?”
“Last night.”
She closed the magazine. “And he hasn’t called, so that means something’s wrong.”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“What do we do about it?”
“You go to New York. Move into a hotel for a few days.”
“Move?”
“Just until I go talk to Keegan. That’s his name.”
“I don’t want to leave my house,” she said.
“We don’t know what Keegan wanted it for. Or who he wanted it for. I can’t leave you alone here.”
She got to her feet, frowning, looking angry and irritable. “I’m not going to go away from my house. I just got this house, I’m not going away from it.” She went over to the sink with her plate and cup, turned the water on, left it on and stood there with her back to him.
Parker walked around the table and stood beside her. “I can’t wait here for it, not knowing what it is. I have to go see Keegan. I know where he was headed from the job, I’ll go there and see him and find out what’s going on. But what if there’s trouble from ‘somebody else, and they come here while I’m gone?”
“Leave me a gun.”
“That isn’t sensible.”
Both hands gripping tight to the lip of the sink, as though she was prepared to resist being dragged physically out of the house, she turned her head and stared coldly at him and said, “I am not going to leave my house.”
He hesitated, then shrugged and turned away. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Keegan was nailed to the wall. His naked body had been cigarette-burned and scratched with a knife-tip, but it was probably the bleeding around the nails in his forearms that had killed him. He looked shriveled and small hanging there, his feet crumpled against the floor beneath him.
Keegan was a drinker who liked isolation, so there’d been no need to gag him. This Minnesota farmhouse surrounded by dairy grazing land was half a mile from the nearest neighbor. He could be left to either scream or tell the people torturing him what they wanted to know.
Parker touched the corpse’s chest, and it was cold; they must have started on him very soon after he’d made his call to Handy. Had they been with him then—was it for them he’d phoned Handy?
It was now shortly after midnight. Parker had driven from Claire’s house to Newark Airport, had taken the first plane to Minneapolis, and had stolen a white Dodge station wagon in the airport parking lot for the forty-five-mile drive to this house. He’d seen the house for the last quarter mile or more, all lit up as though for a night wedding, but when he’d gotten here the light had shone on empty rooms and silence. He’d entered the house cautiously, searched it room by room, and at last he’d found Keegan nailed to an upstairs bedroom wall, long since dead.
And the house torn apart. Besides what they’d done to Keegan, they’d ripped the house open from top to bottom, looking for something. The fact that no rooms at all were left unstripped suggested they hadn’t found what they were looking for.
In the kitchen, there’d been dishes in the sink and on the table to show where two men had eaten two meals, a dinner and a breakfast. So they’d been out of here already by the time Handy had called Parker today at noon.
Parker made a fast surface scan of the house, and then left. He’d worn rubber gloves inside, except when he’d stripped one off so he could feel the coldness of Keegan’s chest, and now he stood beside the Dodge and peeled the gloves off, put them in his pocket, and held his hands out in the air a minute, flexing the fingers, letting the skin get dry and cool. He frowned toward the house, thinking. Berridge dead; Keegan tortured and dead, his house searched. Keegan trying to locate Parker, just before the torturing started. Somebody wanted something, and the connecting link was Berridge.
Why kill Berridge back in the hideout? After killing him, why not stick around?
Because four men would be showing up, and these were only two. Better to wait till the four split up, and go after them one at a time. Follow one home, start with him, locate the others through him.
AH three others? Or just Parker? And how were they traveling? Could they be on the East Coast already?
Parker got into the Dodge and headed back toward Minneapolis. After fifteen miles he saw the light of a phone booth outside a closed gas station in a silent empty dark town. The phone booth, three streetlights, a yellow blinker
