“I will. And this time I won’t shoot until I know what I’m shooting at.”
“Good. When I come back, I’ll knock twice before I come in. If anybody else walks in without knocking don’t think about it. Just shoot his head off.”
“I will,” she said.
The Corvette was parked on a gravel strip beside a small white clapboard house across the road from the lake, less than half a mile from Claire’s place. Damp blood was on the seat-back on the passenger side.
Parker was on foot, the automatic in his right hand. He was traveling without any kind of light. He circled the house beside the Corvette and found it locked up tight, no sign of entry.
A wooded area stretched away uphill behind the house. Parker considered it, and rejected it, for three reasons: Manny was wounded. Manny and Jessup were both city boys. Jessup would want another car, so he would prefer to stay near houses.
Claire had suggested earlier that Manny and Jessup wouldn’t be coming back because they were cowards, and Parker had seen no reason at that point to disagree with her. But cowardice was irrelevant. Whether they were cowards or not, they wouldn’t make another attack on the house tonight with an armed man inside and a wounded man outside. And whether they were cowards or not, they would eventually come back to repay Parker for routing them; cowardice would simply at that point make them more difficult to deal with.
Parker didn’t know Jessup, had seen him only once and then for only a few seconds of sudden activity, but he felt he understood the man. Jessup was the planner and organizer in his partnership with Manny, just as Parker was the planner and organizer in his own partnerships. So he put himself in Jessup’s place now, and decided that Jessup wanted to do and how he’d go about it.
Jessup wanted to get away from here. For that he would need a car. It was now not yet ten o’clock in the evening, and there was nowhere around here that cars were left parked at the curb; there were no curbs here, just the country roads and the houses. The weekenders would be taking their cars away from here tonight, and the full- time residents wouldn’t start settling down for the night for another hour or two. Jessup, when he stole a car, would have to take one from a garage, or at the best, a driveway. In either case, the car would be very close to the owner’s home, there might be a dog in the house—people out here tended to have dogs—and the only safe thing to do was wait until very late before making the move.
In the meantime, Jessup had Manny to contend with and Parker to watch out for. So his first move would be to abandon the Corvette just far enough away from Claire’s house so that Parker wouldn’t be able to see him do it, assuming Parker to have gone down the driveway to watch the Corvette drive away; that much he had done because here was the Corvette, one road curve away front; Claire’s house.
Next? Next Jessup would want an empty house to hole up in. He would leave Manny here in the car while he scouted around and found a suitable house, and then he would come back and get Manny and the two of them would go to the house he’d found. And that much he’d done, too, as was evidenced by how much bleeding Manny had done into the Corvette seat-back. All of that hadn’t happened in half a mile of driving: one minute, two minutes.
Which meant the empty house had to be nearby. Near enough for Jessup to have gone to it, and come back for Manny, taken Manny to it.
Parker stood beside the Corvette, frowning past the houses across the road at the vaguely seen lake. He was putting himself in Jessup’s place, running Jessup’s race for him.
Which direction? From here, in which direction would Jessup first look for an empty house in which to hole up?
Back. That was what Parker would do, and he was assuming Jessup would do the same. When being chased, having established the direction you’re running in, always double back when you’re going to hole up for a while.
Which side of the road? Having put the Corvette over here, would Jessup now choose one of the houses on the lake side of the road? Parker didn’t think so, both because of the psychological pressure of Claire’s house being on that side and also because Jessup would shy away from resting in a spot where he’d have blocked his own retreat in case of trouble. In this situation Parker would want dry land on all four sides of the place where he was hiding, and he anticipated Jessup would want the same.
It was true that circumstances might have forced Jessup to choose a house somewhere else, but it seemed to Parker that Jessup’s first preference would be back in the direction he had come from, on this side of the road.
Parker nodded. He turned away from the Corvette and walked on up behind the white clapboard house and headed back the way he’d come.
He knew it was the right house the instant he saw it. It was set farther back from the road than most of the other houses along here, which meant it was built higher on the hillside that sloped up from the lake, and it was a large house, with a second floor and a full attic, which meant that it commanded the best view available of the surrounding area. Sheets of clear plastic had been tacked around all the windows and doors, to protect them from the winter, and the fact they were still in place meant the owners hadn’t yet come up to open the house for the summer.
Parker had come along behind the houses, through lawns or gardens or scrub, depending on the ideas of the owner, checking each building out as he had come to it, and this large sprawling stone house was the fifth one from the Corvette, back toward Claire’s place. Parker saw it, and knew it was the right one, and cautiously approached it, making a wide circle so as to come down at it from behind, knowing he would be less visible against the woods than with the road or other houses for a backdrop.
And saw light. He stopped when he saw it, because it didn’t belong; Jessup wouldn’t be stupid enough to turn on lights.
But the other one would. Manny, he would.
The light could very faintly be seen, through a window with plastic sheeting on the outside and a shade pulled all the way down on the inside. Thin lines of yellowish light were revealed where the shade was warped inward away from the window frame.
A very dim light. Parker frowned downslope at it, and then saw that it was flickering, and realized it was a candle. The electricity wouldn’t be on in that house, in any case. There wouldn’t be water, either; people around here drained the water from the pipes when they closed their houses for the winter.
