Parker would do?
“I think he’ll call,” Calesian said. “Sometime tomorrow. The way he worked it with Al Lozini.”
”He’ll come for his friend.”
Despite the situation he was in, Calesian felt irritation and couldn’t help showing it. “What makes you so sure?”
Quittner glanced at Calesian. His eyes were pale blue, they almost looked blind. Without expression, he said, “You shouldn’t have sent him that finger. He wasn’t the right man for that.”
It wasn’t smart to try defending himself, but Calesian couldn’t hold back. “That’s easier to see now,” he said. “At the time, it seemed the right thing to do.”
“He wasn’t the right man for that. He never was.”
Quittner turned his head again, looking out at the lawn. Calesian tried to find something else to say in his own defense, but was distracted by the sound of the den door opening. It was Buenadella.
He looked terrible. It was amazing how much he’d changed, just overnight. Inside his big frame he looked shriveled and stooped. His face was fixed in downward curving lines, like the unhappy side of a comedy-tragedy mask. He had sent his family out of the city and he should have gone with them, but he’d insisted on sticking around. Not that he could do any good; he’d become an old woman, fretful and frightened.
Dulare was just hanging up the phone. Looking up, he said, “How’s it going, Dutch?”
“Any news? Did they find him?” A faint whining note had come into Buenadella’s voice; it was the worst of the new characteristics, weak and grating.
“Nothing yet,” Dulare said. “How’s life upstairs?”
“The doctor says Green was awake for a while.”
“No shit,” Dulare said.
Quittner turned away from the window, his attention caught. Calesian kept watching Quittner.
“Just for a few minutes,” Buenadella said.
Quittner, walking over to the desk, said, “Did anybody talk to him?”
“He wasn’t awake that way, to have a conversation. It’s just his eyes were open for a little while.”
“If he really wakes up,” Quittner said to Dulare, “we want to talk to him.”
Calesian, having stayed over by the French doors, touched his palm to one of the glass panes. It was warm, warmer than the air in the room, so it must still be hot outside, even though the glare of floodlights made the greenery out there look cool.
Buenadella said, petulantly, “I don’t see why we don’t kill him. That’s the only reason Parker’s coming here, isn’t it? Kill him, leave him on a street downtown, the way Parker left Shevelly.”
Dulare, speaking with controlled impatience, said, “He’s a playing card. So long as we have him, Parker can still be ready to deal.”
“What if he tries to break in here?”
“Good,” Dulare said. “I’d love it.”
Calesian turned and looked out the window again. Buenadella was saying something else, that whine still sounding in his voice, but Calesian didn’t listen. He was trying to think of how to square himself with Quittner.
Did somebody move there? Out toward the end of the lawn, amid the individual clumps of bushes.
No. It was just nerves. Calesian squeezed his eyes shut and looked out again at the glare of light. Nothing. He would let Quittner know just how much clout he had in the police force, how many men owed him favors. Then the lights went out.
Forty-nine
Wiss carried the bomb, one he’d made in an empty soft-drink bottle out of materials from his safe-cracking bag. Elkins did the driving, and when they reached the electric company substation he merely slowed down, looping up onto the sidewalk while Wiss leaned out of the car window and tossed the bottle underhand. It arched up over the fence as Elkins accelerated away, landing in the middle of the high-voltage relay equipment, and exploding on contact. It wasn’t a very big explosion, nor very loud, but it cut off all electric service in that section of the city. Driving along in a world suddenly without streetlights or traffic lights, with utter darkness on all sides of them, Wiss and Elkins headed back again toward the center of the city; they had one more job to do tonight.
When the lights went out, the darkness was more complete than city dwellers ever know. High thin stars defined the moonless sky, but the earth was black wool, across which men stumbled, blinking, moving their arms out in front of them like ant feelers. The defenders in the Buenadella house stared out windows at nothingness, clutching guns, squinting, trying to see with their ears but hearing nothing more than their own breathing and faint creaking noises from the man at the next window. “Shut up!” they whispered at one another. “I think I hear something.” A couple of them, seeing light flecks before their eyes, fired aimlessly into the dark, the muzzle flashes a quick red light that they didn’t know to look away from, making them more blind than ever.
The two men inside the TV repair truck across the street, surveillance specialists from the state CID, didn’t know at first there was anything wrong. They had their own electric power inside the truck, and the camera through which they looked at the world outside was equipped with infrared. But then, just as they were realizing something had happened, the rear doors of the truck opened, a flashlight shone in at them, and a voice said, “Don’t reach for any guns.”
They might have reached for guns anyway, despite the fact that they couldn’t see past the hard brightness of the flashlight, if they hadn’t simultaneously heard the sound of shooting flare up over at the Buenadella house, reminding them that they were after all only technicians. Bewildered, but understanding instinctively that this wasn’t a mess they wanted to involve themselves in, they both raised their hands.
