Parker led the way, carrying Jessup, and Manny followed. It was less dark out here, and only sporadically could Parker close off Jessup’s air supply. But it was enough; whatever damage had been done, Parker could do enough now to keep it from correcting itself.
There was a driveway beside the house. They walked down it to the road and turned right. There were no houses showing light along this stretch, and looking between houses and out across the lake, Parker saw only two or three lights from over there. It was around eleven now; most of the weekenders had already gone, and the locals were starting to bed down for the night.
The only lights, they saw on this side of the lake were those at Claire’s house, when they’d walked around the curve. Manny was keeping ten or fifteen feet back, and his feet scuffed when he walked. Parker didn’t know exactly what he’d taken, but it seemed to serve mostly as a sort of super-tranquilizer. It wasn’t LSD, which was simply a sledgehammer that took you away and brought you back again, but it was a chemical of a similar kind. In any case, it was taken in a similar way, injected into a sugar cube and then the sugar cube sucked and swallowed. Some kind of speed, maybe, STP, the stuff that does permanent brain damage; Speed Kills, the warnings had said in the underground press. In any case, it was a stuff that didn’t take him away completely, and didn’t bring him back complete. It put an erratic cog in the engine of his brain; it would soon burn the engine out, but in the meantime its running would be wild and unpredictable.
At Claire’s house, a light showed in the kitchen window. If Manny wanted to go in there again, Parker would have to take care of him here; he would prefer to take it all away from this neighborhood first.
The kitchen light glinted on the Plymouth, Morris’ car. Parker headed for it, and behind him Manny said, “That’s yours?”
“I have the keys to it.”
Parker opened the rear door and laid Jessup across the back seat. He got out again and closed the door and turned to look at Manny.
Manny said, “Goodbye.”
“You can’t drive with that arm,” Parker said.
Manny frowned, and glanced down at his arm. He looked back at Parker, and his expression was uncertain again.
Parker said, “And Jessup wouldn’t want you to kill me yet. Or let me go.”
Manny grinned disbelievingly, though his larger puzzlement still showed through. “You think I’m going to let you drive?”
“You can’t. And I know where to find a doctor.”
“How come you’re so eager?”
“I want to stay alive a while longer.”
Manny frowned deeply, thinking about it. He glanced at the house, and Parker saw him thinking about phoning a doctor from here. Then he glanced at the Plymouth, and Parker knew he was imagining Jessup giving him orders. He wasn’t used to doing the planning himself.
Parker said, “You’re wasting time. But he’s your friend, not mine.”
It was being used to taking orders, having somebody else do the thinking, that decided it. Manny looked at him and said, “I’ll be in the back seat. I’ll be right behind you. You do anything funny, I’ll shoot you in the back of the head.”
“I know that.”
“All right,” Manny said.
The eastbound traffic was as heavy as ever, moving along bumper to bumper at a steady thirty-five miles an hour. Parker forced his way between a Ford station wagon and a Rambler sedan, and settled down to drive.
He couldn’t see Manny in the rear-view mirror, but he could sense him back there, in the left side of the rear seat. He had Jessup’s head in his lap, his wounded right arm was draped down across Jessup’s chest, and the .22 was in his left hand.
The incredible thing was, he hadn’t disarmed Parker. Probably because Parker had been using his hands instead of a gun, Manny must have decided there wasn’t any gun in it at all. Parker felt it, against his left side, and drove steadily along behind the Ford, the Rambler’s headlights in his rear-view mirror.
He didn’t know exactly how he was going work all this out with Manny and Jessup, only that he wanted to get the two of them—and this car—as far as possible from Colliver Pond. The Plymouth had Ohio plates; ten or fifteen miles should be far enough away.
And after that there’d be nothing to take care of but the Corvette. Buy one new tire, use the spare for the other, and Claire could drive it to New York tomorrow and leave it there. Parker’s own car, the Pontiac, had to be picked up from the other side of the lake. Then everything would be neat again.
But first Manny and Jessup had to be taken care of. In one way Manny was better to operate against, because he could be conned and dazzled, but Manny wasn’t entirely rational, his reactions couldn’t be counted on as Jessup’s could. Parker knew that at any second it might enter Manny’s head to start shooting, regardless of the fact that Parker was at the wheel and they were traveling at thirty-five miles an hour in all this traffic, regardless of any reasonable consideration at all. He couldn’t help it, his shoulders remained hunched, he felt he was holding his head stiffly, as though if he tensed sufficiently, the bullets would bounce off him.
Jessup had grown quiet again, and that might complicate matters, too, if he recovered sufficiently to take over giving the orders. He would want Parker disposed of right away, and he wouldn’t want a doctor.
Parker glanced at the speedometer. They’d come four miles from the turnoff. He would go ten miles, and then take the first likely-looking side road.
“How far to this doctor?” Manny sounded more irritable, less tranquilized. The nervousness in the situation must be counteracting the acid.
“Five or six more miles,” Parker said. “It won’t be long.”
