He grinned and bobbed his head. “Maybe I’ll stop over later on.”
“Any time, Frank.”
“I’m not sure. Just maybe.”
“If I’m asleep,” she said, “just wake me.” She gave him a lazy grin and said, “You know how.”
“Yes, I do.”
He watched her leave, but the instant she was out of sight his mind veered away again. Al Lozini’s death, the replacement of Farrell for Wain, Dutch Buenadella taking over, Hal Calesian suddenly some kind of major power, that guy Parker still prowling around—it was enough to give a man nightmares. Even if he could get to sleep in the first place.
Faran had another ten minutes’ work. The numbers distracted him, soothed his mind, and the drink Angie had brought also helped. He was feeling a little better when he left the office, made his way through the empty club, turned the lights off at the main box by the front door, and went outside.
He was locking the door when he felt the gun in his back. His knees weakened, and he leaned against the door. “Jesus God,” he whispered.
It was Parker; Parker’s voice, saying, “Come on, Frank. Let’s take a walk.”
Thirty-seven
When the doctor left he switched off the light, leaving the room in total darkness. A window was open to let in the warm night air, but no illumination entered with it. The sky was black, dotted with high thin stars that showed nothing but themselves. The room remained black and silent, undefined except by the vaguely lighter rectangle of the window and the hair-thin line of yellow light under the door.
After two hours the sliver of moon appeared in the left edge of the window. Tomorrow night it would finish its monthly wink, closing down completely, but tonight it was still visible, though heavy-lidded. It gave very little more light than the stars, an almost unnoticeable pallor that wouldn’t be able to make its presence known if there was any other light source at all.
But in the bedroom there wasn’t. The gray light crept at an angle across the room, picking up a dresser against the wall and a corner of the foot of the bed. As the moon eased across the sky, more of the bed came into existence, until the light touched on a bandaged hand. Dr. Beiny, being as considerate as possible, had taken the last finger of the left hand.
The moon’s angle reached Grofield’s face, the skin as pale and bloodless as the light that defined it. His breathing was very slow and very shallow, and his eyes did no moving at all behind the closed lids. At times his brain fluttered weakly with incoherent dreams that he wouldn’t remember if he ever woke up, but mostly he was quiescent.
The bullet had gone through his body, entering between two ribs and taking a small chip from one of them, passing near the heart, tearing tissue and lung, and exiting through a much larger hole in the back. Dr. Beiny had filled this body with medicines meant to promote healing and guard against infection, had closed and bandaged both holes, had added blood to the depleted store, and was feeding Grofield intravenously with a liquid composed mostly of protein and sugar. The apparatus in the room, chrome and glass, glinting dimly in the moonlight, gave the place the air of a hospital or a medical station near a battlefield: inverted bottle suspended from a chrome armature, syringes, beakers, full and empty squat medicine bottles with cork stoppers through which the hypodermic needle would be thrust.
By midnight the moon was halfway across the window space. A small sound occurred in Grofield’s throat, his eyes twitched inside the lids, the remaining fingers of his left hand contracted slightly. His heart beat slowly but erratically, and then it stopped. The fingers opened out a bit again, losing their tension. The eyes became still. The heart thudded again, blundered forward like a blind man in a dense woods. A long, slow, almost silent sigh emerged through Grofield’s slightly parted lips; not quite the soul leaving the body.
The shred of moon moved on, showing other parts of the room, gradually leaving the bed in darkness. Toward morning Grofield died again, this time for three seconds, in silence and total darkness; then lived again, tenuous, clutching.
Thirty-eight
There are three planes a day from La Guardia Airport in New York City to Tyler National Airport in Tyler, the second one leaving just before noon. Stan Devers, having spent the night before with a girl he knew in Manhattan, took a cab at eleven in the morning and reached the airport with plenty of time to spare.
Stan Devers was in his late twenties, muscular and smiling and self-confident, with a clean strong jawline and curly blond hair. He had an easy long-strided walk and a manner of open honesty that was maybe just a little too good to be true. For as long as he could remember he’d been a swimmer upstream, a rebel for the sake of rebellion, opposed to everything that plain stolid ordinary society stood for. He’d been thrown out of two high schools and one college—having already, in the college, been thrown out of ROTC—he’d been fired from most of the jobs he’d ever held, but he’d survived nearly three and a half years of enlisted service in the Air Force before making the move that had thrust him out of square society forever.
He had been a finance clerk in the Air Force, on a base where the payroll had still been in cash, a thing that didn’t happen anywhere at all now. He’d worked out a way to take a month’s payroll and had involved himself with some professional thieves to pull the job, including Parker. They’d succeeded in getting the money, but then things had gone wrong and Devers’ connection with the robbery had become known by the authorities. He’d had to take off, and Parker had sent him to Handy McKay in Presque Isle, who had finished the job of turning him into a professional thief. He’d worked six robberies in the last five years, with varying success, including one with Parker last year, a hijacking of paintings that had gone very badly, with no profit for anybody. He’d had a minor score since then with some other people, but not enough to make him really easy in his mind about his money cushion. Which was why he’d been happy to hear from Parker again, even with Parker’s cryptic warning that this wasn’t an ordinary job.
The girl at the airline counter seemed mildly surprised that Devers was buying a one-way ticket. He hadn’t bought one round-trip ticket in the last five years, and doubted that he ever would again. In a way, it symbolized the kind of life he lived, the theme of it that he enjoyed: never go back to anything, never move anywhere but forward.
