today, right? It’s Sunday, everything’s closed. Tomorrow first thing I start. But you’re talking cash, that’s going to take a couple days.”
Parker said, “One day.”
Buenadella looked back and forth at the two of them, and decided to talk to Grofield again. “You can’t collect cash that fast,” he said. “You know what I’m talking about, it takes time, liquidating things, converting to cash. I’m in a bad cash flow situation anyway, what with the summer, attendance down, this election—”
“Well,” Grofield said, “I sort of think the election is what my partner had in mind. That’s Tuesday, right?”
“Sure, Tuesday.”
“Day after tomorrow.” Grofield shrugged, shaking his head, as though truly sorry to be the bearer of bad news. “See, that election’s important to us. It’s part of the pressure we have on you.”
“You don’t pay up by Tuesday morning,” Parker said, “your man loses. One way or another, he loses.”
“It can’t be done that fast!”
“You can if you really try,” Grofield said. “I tell you what; I’ll give you a call tomorrow morning, say ten-thirty, see how you’re coming along.”
Bitterly Buenadella said, “I wish I’d never heard of that money.”
“That would have been better,” Grofield agreed. “We can find our own way out.” He glanced at Parker, who nodded.
Grofield went first. He opened the French doors, stepped through to the cluttered rear lawn with its overcrowded plantings of bushes and hedges and small trees, and he saw the man with the gun just as the gun sparked white and red at the end of the barrel.
There wasn’t time to do a thing, not even time to think. He never heard the sound of the shot, but he felt the punch high on the left side of his chest; it felt as though he’d been hit by something as big as a fist, a metal fist.
It spun him around. Everything went out of focus as he turned, like a special effect in a movie.
Twenty-seven
When Grofield jerked back against the doorjamb, Parker didn’t need to hear the sound to know he’d been shot. From outside, from people hidden in the shrubbery out there, waiting. Signaled by Buenadella, somehow, since Parker and Grofield had come in here, then setting themselves up outside and waiting for their targets to come out.
But they’d started shooting just a second too soon. Parker moved to his right, crouching, getting away from the open doorway as he clawed out his own pistol. Finish off Buenadella first, retreat through the house. No telling how many of them were out there in the yard.
But when his movement brought him around to face Buenadella, the blank terrified bewilderment of the man made it obvious this wasn’t his idea. The people outside were operating on orders from somebody else—Farrell maybe, or Calesian. Buenadella wasn’t that good an actor, to have negotiated the way he had with Grofield or to be faking right now that look of stunned horror.
Another shot was fired out there, on the heels of the first, the bullet chunking into the paneling somewhere on the far side of the room. Grofield wasn’t moving. He was body hit, probably dead. This room would fill up with them in a minute; Parker turned some more, showing Buenadella the gun in his hand, and headed for the interior door.
It had all gone so fast there hadn’t been time for words, but Buenadella croaked out something as Parker pulled the door open and ran through. He couldn’t make out the words or the meaning, and didn’t slow down to worry about it. Slamming the door behind himself, he trotted down a corridor, went through a doorway on the right that should lead toward the front of the house, and strode across an empty family room with a ping-pong table at one end, a bar at the other, and a television set in the middle. He carried the pistol in his right hand, but kept the hand close in against his leg in case he should run into members of Buenadella’s family.
Then he almost walked into a dining room full of them, but just in time heard the clinking of silverware and the sounds of voices in idle conversation. The shots from the yard had not been very loud, and had apparently not been heard at this end of the house.
Parker veered away from the doorway, found another hall, and walked quickly along it. There was no sound of pursuit from behind him, probably meaning that Buenadella wouldn’t permit a shoot-out in his own house, but Parker moved fast anyway, wanting to be long gone by the time they’d decided what to do next.
He came to a living room, also empty, and then finally the front door. Opening it slightly, he looked out at a semicircle of blacktop driveway, a meticulously neat lawn dotted with small shrubs, and a genteel residential street. A dark blue Lincoln went by, purring. A television-repair truck was parked across the way.
There was no one in sight. The shrubs were too small for a man to hide behind, nor was there any place else out there to hide, except in the television-repair truck, and that was surely some sort of police stakeout; more likely to be state or federal than local.
And the truck would give Parker his safe passage. There just might be men with guns in the upstairs windows who would see Parker leaving, but they wouldn’t fire, not with that truck out there. Any cop hidden in there would just love to watch somebody shot down on Buenadella’s front lawn; it would give them all the excuse they needed to enter the house and give it a complete toss, end to end.
So there wouldn’t be any shooting in front of the house, though they’d have to try following him, hope to catch up with him someplace safer. He’d deal with that when it happened.
He opened the front door, went out into the sunlight and the overly warm air, walked briskly but casually out the driveway to the street. He turned right, headed down the block with no change in the regular pace of his movements.
Back to Lozini, now. Time to mobilize him, use him to break this town open.
