The driver looked irritable, but he took his foot off the brake and the Buick limped forward again.
Parker kept to the trees, far enough away so he’d be difficult to see as he moved from cover to cover, yet close enough to keep the Buick in sight. He didn’t want the passenger to slip out and come looking for him on his blind side.
The brake lights went on again briefly when they came to the Mustang, but the car didn’t entirely stop. Parker angled in closer, and when the Buick had gone about thirty feet past the Mustang, he called, “Stop there,” and the Buick stopped. “Turn off the engine. Climb out. Both on the left side. Leave your guns on the front seat. Walk around in front of the car. Face away from the car. Put your hands on your heads.”
Parker moved cautiously to the Buick, watching them. Neither of them said anything, to him or to one another. He opened the driver’s door, took the keys out of the ignition, put them in his pocket. There were two revolvers on the seat. He put away his own automatic, picked up the two revolvers, stepped back from the car, and said, “You’ll hear shots now. I’m shooting tires, not you.”
“And you’re making a big mistake,” the driver said.
“Before you shoot the tires—” the other one said, and Parker put a bullet in the left rear. As he walked around the back of the car, the second man started again: “We’re along to back you up. You’re putting heat on yourself for no reason, you aren’t what we’re after.”
“I told your boss I work alone.” Parker shot the right rear tire, moved up the side of the car.
The driver said, “Don’t you know we’re national? Don’t you know you can’t go anywhere we won’t find you?”
Parker shot the fourth tire. “Take five paces forward.”
They moved forward. The driver said, “You’re going out of your way to make a lot of people mad at you.”
“One pace to the right. Now lie down. Facedown.”
They were now where he could keep an eye on them while he backed up to the Mustang. He had to lose sight of them for a few seconds while he got into the car and started the engine, and when he backed onto the road, one of them was out of sight and the other was on his feet. Parker ignored that, and ran the Mustang in reverse all the way to the blacktop road, where he turned north.
Glass shattered in front of his face; a pistol shot sounded in the tall reeds beside the house. Parker leaped over the porch railing, landed on his shoulder, and rolled for cover over the brown-earth yard. In scraggly underbrush, he took out his automatic, got to hands and knees, and crawled for the back of the house.
He was going down the right side of the building, and the shot had come from the swampy ground off to the left. If the sniper didn’t move before Parker got there, he’d be flanked when Parker came around the rear of the house and moved into the area of the swamp.
There was no other sound, no other movement. This farmhouse, several miles northwest of Romeo on an unnumbered gravel road, had a battered old rural delivery mailbox out front with the name Gait on it, but gave the impression of having been deserted for at least a few years. Most of the windows had been broken, and somebody had removed clapboard siding from one section of the side wall. There were no other houses in sight.
It was now midafternoon, and as hot as it was going to get today, possibly sixty degrees. Mayflies made a background blur of sound that only intensified the silence; it was as though the leaves could be heard rustling on the fat oak trees beyond the farmer’s field.
Parker came around the rear of the house, and stopped when he was still in cover but could see the Mustang where he’d parked it in front of the porch. He waited, sitting on his heels, ready to jump in any direction, and nothing happened, nobody moved. A slight breeze semaphored tree leaves all around. Behind the broken windows of the house were no curtains or lights, only darkness and vaguely seen blank walls with rectangular door spaces.
Parker moved. The ground underfoot was very soft; water squeezed to the surface around his shoes when he shifted his weight. He moved in a crouch, with one hand touching the ground for balance, and the sensation against those fingers was cold and damp.
Movement. A rustling. Reeds bent, sluggishly, and didn’t come upright again. Parker watched the movement to his right, away from the house, and waited for it to become something meaningful, but after a few minutes it stopped again.
He headed toward where the agitation had been, and through the reeds he saw a form stretched out on the ground, and when he came closer, it was a man lying face-down, arms bent laxly around his head.
Alone? Parker circled him, listening, watching, and when the silence continued to stretch without snapping, he moved in closer and saw the automatic enclosed in the slack fingers of the man’s right hand. And also the familiar contour of his head, a reminiscent slope to the shoulder and back.
Parker stood upright, and looked around, and nothing happened. He stepped quickly forward and kicked the barrel of the gun, and it slid away through the reeds with a faint squishing sound.
Parker bent and turned Briley over, and the front of his shirt and trousers was smeared with mud and blood, drying unevenly together. He put his hand to Briley’s throat and felt pulse, felt breath shuddering in and out. He got to his feet, looked around, listened, then stepped to the left, bent, picked up Briley’s gun, held it in his hand and looked at it.
It wasn’t the same automatic he’d carried in the robbery. This one was a Colt Super Auto, chambered for high- speed .38’s; a fairly old, well-used gun, it had the scratches and scars of a weapon that had been through many hands. Parker ejected the clip, and it was half empty. He put the clip back, felt the front of the barrel, and it was warm.
Leaving Briley where he was, Parker went back to the house and up on the porch. Briley’s shot had further broken the broken glass in the storm door and had then gouged a new streak in the graying wood of the main door, before digging a hole for itself in the frame. Parker pulled open the storm door and saw the jimmy marks on the frame near the inner door’s knob. He pushed, and the door eased open. Holding his own gun in his right hand and Briley’s Colt in his left, he kicked the door open farther, and stepped in.
The place had been stripped. Wiring straggled from the walls where light switches and outlets had been removed. Molding around windows and doors had been stripped away, and even part of the living-room floor had been ripped up and taken away, leaving a grave-size hole through which a dirt-floored basement could be seen.
