There was nobody around. Half a dozen cigarette butts near the living room’s front window showed where they’d stood while they’d waited for Briley to get here. And a piece of paper near them on the floor seemed newer than the general layer of scag around the place. Parker picked it up and it had printing on it in two places. In one place, The Hearth, Los Angeles, California—Where Beef Is King, and in the other place, American Sugar Refining Company, New York, N. Y. The paper had been wrapped around a cube of sugar, and carried to Detroit from Los Angeles.
Parker frowned at the paper, turning it in his hands. Sugar cubes made him think of horses; people gave cubes of sugar to horses. But why have sugar here? Then, still thinking, horse made him think of the other way the word was used: horse means heroin. But sugar has nothing to do with heroin, except sometimes wholesalers use sugar to cut horse.
And then the thought of heroin led him to the next step, and he knew what the sugar was here for. He held the piece of paper up toward the light, over facing the broken-out windows, and there was the small hole, the pinprick in the paper. Needle-prick.
He threw the paper away and went outside again and back over to Briley, who hadn’t moved. He put his hand to Briley’s throat, and the pulse was still working, though very feebly. Having turned Briley over before, Parker had made the bleeding from his stomach increase again.
It was clear what had happened. Briley had come 93 here, the two waiting for him had tipped their hands too soon, Briley had run for cover. They’d managed to hit him with one or more shots before he got clear of them, but he’d kept going and either held them off or lost them in those woods over there. So they’d given up after a while, and they’d gone away, taking Briley’s car with them. Briley had come back to the house and passed out, and the sound of Parker’s car arriving had brought him back to consciousness one last time. He’d come partly awake, afraid they were back again, and fired at the figure he’d seen on the porch. But that had been it for him, and he’d faded out again, and now he was finished.
There was no point trying to get Briley conscious again, and even if there’d been a reason for it, Parker doubted it would be possible. Briley was dead everywhere but his lungs; they still kept moving the air in and out. But not for any good reason, and not for long.
Parker got to his feet again, smeared Briley’s Colt with his palms to obscure his prints, dropped the gun on the ground beside the curved-fingered hand, and went away to the Mustang.
Seven miles from the farmhouse, he stopped at a diner, ordered lunch, and got two dollars in change from the cashier, which he took to the phone booth back by the rest rooms. He dialed Claire’s number in New Jersey, paid the operator what she asked for when she came on, and listened to three rings before Claire’s voice said, “Hello?”
“Hello, it’s me.”
“Oh,” she said. “Mr. Parker. Yes, I’ve been expecting you to call.” She didn’t sound frightened at all.
PART THREE
Claire stood in front of the house. She was wearing a pale green man-style shirt, and it wasn’t enough; she was cold, and stood with her arms folded around herself, shoulders hunched.
It was Saturday, shortly after noon, twenty minutes after the call from Handy McKay. Claire stood there and watched Parker open the farther garage doors and go inside to his car. How could he travel that way, without any luggage at all, nothing, not even an overnight bag? She thought, Are we as mysterious to them as they are to us? She stroked her cupped palms up and down over her upper arms, to warm herself, and thought briefly of her dead husband, who had been named Edward and called Ed. He’d always traveled with a black attache case. She’d hated it, it had destroyed the glamour of the commercial pilot’s uniform he’d worn, it made everything mundane.
The Pontiac backed out of the garage and made a 97 tight backward U-turn. When it stopped, the left side of the car was toward her. Parker had his window rolled down, and he called, “I’ll phone you. Tonight sometime.”
“Good.” She raised a hand to wave, the way she used to do with Ed, and realized a second too late that with this one the gesture was inappropriate. She let her hand fall again, awkwardly, the flow of the movement interrupted, and finding no words to seam the awkwardness, nodded instead.
The Pontiac rolled down the driveway and turned right on the blacktop road. Claire stood in front of the house, rubbing her folded arms, watching the car, and when it disappeared she flashed a sudden broad smile, unintended, and into her mind came the thought, Now it’s really mine!
She pushed the smile and the thought away, and turned to go into the house and distract herself with the busy-work of making a pot of tea to take off the chill, but she knew what the smile meant, and what the thought meant, and she knew they were both true.
They meant the house was different now, and it was different. She went in and stood in the kitchen a minute before starting the water for tea, and the house had a different kind of silence about it now. Different from last week, before Parker had come here for the first time. In the days between her moving into the house and his arrival, it had simply been a house that a solitary woman had bought and was living in alone. During the four days of his stay, it had been their house, which meant nobody’s house; it was simply where they were staying, like a hotel room. But now, with his mark on the place but with him not here, it was the house in which she waited for her man. That made all the difference in the world.
She drank a cup of tea in the living room. The chairs faced the fireplace, but she turned one of them around to face the windows instead, with their view of the lake. She sat and looked at the empty lake and the tiny dots that were empty houses on the opposite shore, and the green mountains in the background, and she thought she would probably not want to stay here in the summer, when the lake and those houses would be full. They would spend the summer somewhere exciting, New York or San Francisco. Maybe they could go to Europe.
Twelve thousand dollars. Not very much, really, he usually made more than that in one of his jobs. But he’d do more.
There came into her mind, all at once, the remembered picture of Lempke, his face all bloody, coming through the hole in the bourse room wall and saying, “French.” As though it were a surprising word he’d just invented, and not the name of the man who had just shot and killed him.
She hated that memory. It was brief, and vivid, and incomplete, and always terrifying. In her memory Lempke came through the wall and said, “French,” and his face was bloody, and he was in the process of dying. But in her memory he never fell.
Lempke and Parker and some others had been doing a “job,” that strangely inappropriate word Parker used for his robberies. It was a coin convention, and they were stealing the cased coins from the guarded room where they
