tight rein on herself right now. She said, “Morris. From the robbery.”
“Morris? He came here with them?”
“I’ll tell you about it,” she said, and now there was more vibrato in her voice, more trembling. “But first you have to get rid of it. You have to.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll get rid of it.”
It was simplest, despite the chill in the air, to do the job naked. It was going to be messy, and this way there’d be no clothing to be cleaned afterward.
But first there were preparations to be made. Parker found Morris’ clothes in the kitchen, ripped and torn and bloodied and strewn around the floor. He searched them for the keys to the white Plymouth outside, then bundled them up and carried them around the outside of the house to leave them temporarily with the body. He took the long way so as not to carry the bundle past Claire, and saw through the shattered glass door that she was no longer in the bedroom. He could hear water running in the tub.
He drove the Plymouth around the lake, taking the opposite direction from that of the Corvette, which meant he would follow the loop of road around the lake without coming out on the main road, with all its citybound traffic.
He knew it was a risk, leaving the house again, but it was one he had to take. The two in the Corvette wouldn’t get very far with a pair of tires gone, so they’d still be in the neighborhood for a while, but it was unlikely they’d choose to come back to Claire’s house, knowing it was now occupied by a man with a gun.
He passed the house where he’d borrowed the rowboat; his Pontiac still sat quietly in the driveway. And about half a dozen houses beyond that, where he had noticed on the way in a family loading their car, there was now no car, and the house was in darkness. Parker turned the Plymouth in at that driveway, left it, and went around to the boathouse, which was locked. Wood near water doesn’t last long; it took two kicks to spring the screws loose holding the hasp, and the door sagged open.
The boat inside was a fiberglass outboard with a forty-horsepower Johnson motor. Parker raised the overhead door at the lake end of the boathouse, untied the motorboat from its three moorings, stepped in, and started the motor. He backed out through the wide doorway, turned the boat around, and headed at open throttle across the lake.
Fewer houses were lit now, and with the porch lights still glowing, it was easier to recognize Claire’s place. Parker eased the motorboat in toward shore, nestled it between the rowboat and the concrete, and tied it to another of the rings along the edge of the dock.
Claire was in the tub.-She looked up when he came in, and her face seemed simultaneously drawn and puffy, a contradiction that made her look almost as though she’d been partying too much for several nights in a row. She said, “Is it gone yet?”
“Soon. You still want to stay here?”
She looked wary. “Why?”
“I shot out their tires, they’ll still be around the lake someplace. After I’m done here I’ll go look for them, but in the meantime they might come back. While I’m gone.”
“They won’t come back.” She sounded grim, but sure of herself.
“I don’t think so either. But they might. I wounded one of them.”
“That’s why they won’t come back. They’re cowards, you’ll see. They’ll hide in a hole someplace.”
“I think so, too. But just in case.”
“I’m too tired to go anywhere,” she said. “Too tired and too scared and too nervous. You were right before, I should have gone to a hotel. But now I can’t, I can’t do anything.”
“I’ll be as fast as I can.”
His first move was to switch off the bedroom and porch lights, and then to strip down. He stuffed his clothing in a pillowcase and took it down across the backyard and put it on the seat of the motorboat. Then he went back up to the darkened porch and put the chair back up on its legs and dragged it backward over to the door.
It was simplest to just push it through the doorway and let it bounce down the stoop. Then he dragged it across the lawn, detouring around tree trunks, and out over the wooden dock.
The rowboat was out perpendicular to the dock. Parker pulled it closer with the rope, then pulled on the side until it lay along the edge of the dock. He eased the chair backward until it was lying on its back on the dock, and then tipped it sideways off the edge and into the rowboat. It hit face down, which meant the body hit rather than the wooden chair, which muffled the sound.
Claire’s boathouse had a small-wattage bulb hanging from a wire in the middle of the ceiling. Parker switched it on and padded around the concrete edging, gathering up things to weight the body: a length of rusty chain, a broken piece of concrete block, an old metal pulley. He took them all back outside and fixed them around the chair and the body, then tied the rowboat to the rear of the motorboat, and got in the motorboat to tow it out to the middle of the lake.
The toughest part was getting the chair and the body out of the boat. The rowboat bounced and jounced, but wouldn’t tip over, and Parker finally had to climb into it and lift the chair over the side. But then it dropped down into the water at once, and disappeared.
The main thing was, if this area was going to be home base, it had to be kept clean. No sudden unsolved murders, no crime wave of any kind; crooked doings would show up around a rural section like this like a thumbtack under a coat of paint. Which was why replacing the divots took precedence over finding the two in the Corvette.
The rest went pretty fast now, after he sank the body. He towed the rowboat back to the house where he’d borrowed it, and used the bailing can from the motorboat to splash away the bloodstains Morris had left behind. Then he stepped into the cold water himself and scrubbed his body clean, and stood after that by the water’s edge while he put his clothes on again over his wet skin.
It was impossible to get the rowboat back into its original position without help from a second man; Parker dragged it close as he could, and left it there. Then he went back to steer the motorboat along to the left, close to
