“You can go,” Buenadella told him. “You can get out of here any time you want.”
“How can I leave, with all this shooting?”
Buenadella moved into the room from the doorway. “Go on now,” he said. He felt a sudden savage pleasure, a need to hurt someone. “Just explain to everybody you’re a noncombatant,” he said. “Tell them you’re a medic.”
“Mr. Buenadella, I can’t—”
“Get out of here!”
“There isn’t any way for me to—”
Buenadella closed in on him, following the sound of the voice. He reached out, his clutching fingers closed on a face, a working mouth. He slid his hand down, grasped the throat, squeezed. “I said get out of here,” he said. In the doctor’s presence, he was feeling stronger and stronger his own weakness seemed to have dissolved in the presence of this other man’s greater weakness. “Get out or I’ll kill you myself.”
“You’re—you’re—” The doctor’s hands clutched at the hand holding his throat. “My God, you’re strangling me!”
Buenadella gave him one shake, and released him. Speaking in the darkness, permitting any expression at all to cross his face because no expression could be seen, smiling broadly with his lips curling back from his teeth, he said, “Now. Get out now.”
The doctor didn’t argue. He scurried by, bumping into Buenadella on the way, stumbling into some piece of furniture, patting the wall, then making it out into the hallway. Buenadella followed, cautious but still somewhat familiar in this house, and found the door he’d opened; he closed it, felt for a key, found none. No matter.
He turned the other way, moved slowly across the room, hands out in front of himself at waist height, patting the air. Finally he found what he was looking for: the metal strip at the foot of the bed. As he moved along that to the left, there was another sound of a gunshot, seeming much closer than any of the others. He paused, frowning, listening, but heard nothing more.
He rounded the foot of the bed, stopped there, fumbled in his pockets for matches. Finding some, he lit a match and saw Green lying in bed, his head propped up on two pillows, his eyes open, looking directly at Buenadella.
“Uh!” Buenadella dropped the match and it went out. He could still feel the eyes looking at him.
Was Green capable of movement? Was he creeping this way along the bed right now, was his bony hand reaching out from the darkness? Breathing faster and faster, Buenadella tore another match from the pack, nearly dropped all the matches, managed to light the second one, and Green was there exactly as before.
Too exactly. Buenadella moved to the left, but the eyes didn’t shift.
Was he dead? Buenadella watched, and slowly the eyes blinked. When they opened again, Buenadella could see that they were looking at nothing.
“You’ll never see anything again,” Buenadella told him, and the bedroom door opened.
He turned his head, and wasn’t surprised that it was Parker, standing in the doorway, a gun in his hand. Buenadella threw the match away from himself and took two fast steps backward, trying to hide himself in the darkness of the room. He left himself framed by the rectangle of window behind him, but he didn’t know that.
“Goodbye, Buenadella,” Parker said, and Buenadella thrust up his splayed-out hands to stop the bullet.
Fifty-one
Approaching the rear of the house, Parker moved with wary caution. He knew Handy and Dan Wycza and Fred Ducasse were on his flanks, but he could neither see nor hear them. The house was dead ahead, but invisible; the closer he got to it, the less help he received from the car headlights around on the other side.
The glow from the headlights didn’t reach all the way through the house; there were too many rooms, too many walls, between there and here. There was no definition of the windows along the rear wall, though occasionally still an upstairs window became pinpointed for an instant by the red flash of someone firing a gun at shadows. Parker was moving toward his memory of the French doors, though he was deflected at times by shrubbery. Still, it was the French doors he wanted; Calesian and Buenadella and Dulare had all been inside there, with another man.
A sudden flurry of shots came from the right, five or six shots, and the sound of breaking glass. Parker moved forward through the grass, forcing himself not to hurry. The house was very close now. He reached out, took two more steps, and touched wood. The frame of something. His hand moved to the left, touched siding, moved to the right, found a small pane of glass. More glass—the French doors.
They opened inward. He pressed slightly, and the door eased open without a sound. Cool air-conditioned air came out through the opening. Standing next to the frame, not to outline himself against the sky in the doorway, Parker listened to the interior of the room.
Nothing. A door was apparently open on the other side, and through it came sounds of movement, shouting, hurrying, gunfire; but from the room itself no sound at all.
Parker went down on hands and knees. His pistol was in his right hand, and now he held a small pencil flash in his left. He moved into the room, keeping low, patting his left hand out ahead of him onto the floor as he went. Once clear of the doorway he angled to the left, still on hands and knees.
His probing left hand touched something: cloth, a trouser leg. He crawled up the length of the body, aware now of the odor of blood, and when he reached the face he clicked the flashlight on and off, giving himself light for a milli-second. He studied the afterglow in his mind, and recognized the face: Calesian. So it had been a good shot.
And the rest of them had left the room. Moving without thought, leaving this entrance unguarded.
It wouldn’t be for long. Dulare would think of it in time, and send some people back here. Parker got to his feet, crossed the room toward the space the sounds came from, and found the doorway. He stepped through and noise came from the left. Looking that way, he saw a faint blue-whiteness: headlight glow. And two bulky shapes came trotting around the corner, belated guards for the French doors.
