The shapes stopped. Parker could make them out against the pallid light, but for them he was shielded by total darkness. One of them said, huskily, “Jesus Christ, it’s dark back here. Where is this fucking den?”
“Wait a minute. I’ve got a match.”
Parker shot them both, before they could light a match and alter his night vision. Then he turned the other way, moving along a black hallway. In a house this size there had to be a rear staircase, and if Grofield was still alive, it was upstairs that Parker would find him.
A doorway. From the floor on the other side, this was the kitchen. He took a step, halted, listened. Breathing? In a quiet but confident voice, Parker said, “Where are you?”
“Huh? Over here, by the window.”Parker moved diagonally away from the voice till he saw the rectangle of window, and the darker shape within it. The shape said, “You think there’s any of them around this side?”
“Yes,” Parker said, and shot him, then turned to the wall, felt his way along past appliances, found a swinging door with another room beyond it, ignored that, came to a wall turning, another door. This one opened inward toward the kitchen, and beyond it narrow stairs led up to the left.
He was halfway up when a frightened, heavily breathing man started down, muttering to himself. Parker waited, and felt the bulky leather bag before he touched the man. He had put his flashlight away, and now his free hand skittered up the man’s sleeve to his throat.
“Aaa!”
Parker pressed the pistol against him. Quietly he said, “Where’s Green? Where’s the prisoner?”
“I— Dear God. I don’t have anything to do with this, I’m a doctor.”
Parker pressed him harder against the side wall hemming in the staircase. “You work on fingers?”
The man shuddered all over, like a horse. His throat worked beneath Parker’s fingers, but he didn’t say anything.
“Where’s Green? Fast!”
“Upstairs! Second door on the left. You’ve got to understand the position I was in, I didn’t have any—”
Parker held the pistol back three or four inches and fired. He let the body tumble down the stairs, and went on up.
Blackness up here. No way to define the space, but it was probably some sort of hallway. Parker moved along the left wall past an open doorway and then to a door that was closed. He opened it, and saw a room lighted by a match in Buenadella’s hand. Grofield lay under blankets on a bed, either dead or unconscious.
Buenadella saw him in the doorway and threw the match away, hiding himself in the darkness. But then he stepped backward till he was between Parker and the window, making a silhouette that was as good as sunshine.
“Goodbye, Buenadella,” Parker said.
Fifty-two
The power substation went out at three twenty-two. An emergency relay system had been set up in Tyler five years before, after a summer of blackouts caused by power overloads, that would bring power in from other parts of the national grid if this substation were to go out. But the emergency system used the same distribution equipment from the same substation, and that equipment was now out of operation. It would take nearly six hours to rig up a temporary alternate distribution structure and return electric power to the west side of Tyler.
When the electricity went off, the Police and Fire Departments in the affected area went immediately into a standard emergency procedure; stand-by men were called in, extra telephone answerers were assigned, more patrol cars were readied to be put on the street, and selected radio-equipped fire engines went out to patrol the area. Two shopping streets were within the affected zone, so the principal concentration of police and fire attention remained there. Residential sections remained mostly unpatrolled, except in response to direct telephone complaints.
When the shooting started at the Buenadella house, the neighbors within a block radius were startled out of sleep. Nine families were awakened, and for all of them it was a terrifying and bewildering experience, with thoughts of invasion and revolution running through their heads. First there was the gunfire, and very quickly after that the discovery that the electricity wasn’t working. And when they tried to call the police, as practically all of them did, the phones weren’t working either. One man took his family and a shotgun out to the half-forgotten fallout shelter he’d installed behind the house way back in 1953; feeling an exultant sense of vindication, he bundled everybody inside, switched on the emergency generator, checked the load of his shotgun, and prepared to shoot any neighbor who tried to get in. Two other men armed themselves with rifles and stationed themselves by their front doors. Most other families sat around flashlights or kerosene lamps or the blue light of gas stoves and talked together in frightened undertones; nobody seemed to know what was the right thing to do. It was twenty-five minutes before one man finally got himself dressed and went out to his car and drove away from the neighborhood to find the police or a working phone or at least some explanation of what was going on; and by then the shooting had mostly died down.
At the Buenadella house, Handy McKay and Dan Wycza and Fred Ducasse moved room by room through the first floor, clearing Dulare’s men as they went, making sure that nobody alive was behind them. Parker stayed upstairs in the doorway of Grofield’s room, waiting and listening. Mike Carlow and Philly Webb were out front, using their cars as shields and peppering anybody who showed in a front window. Two of the headlights had been shot out, but that left ten still shining. Nick Dalesia had joined Stan Devers on the right side of the house; in the dim light-spill from the front they made sure nobody came out any of the side windows, to get around behind the people inside. Ed Mackey and Tom Hurley were doing the same thing on the left.
Dulare’s people were bewildered and leaderless. Half of them were dead or badly wounded, and the rest had no idea what they were supposed to be doing. Dulare and Quittner kept trying to organize a defense, but in the darkness and confusion there was no way to maintain any kind of general communication. The defenders were like steers in a pen, being shot down by men sitting around them on the fence rails.
Six men up on the second floor clustered in the blackness of the central hallway and whispered together, trying to decide what to do. A couple of them were in favor of going down the front stairs and joining the fight, but the rest would have nothing to do with it. One suggested they try jumping out windows onto the lawn, but another one
