Comeback

the cool outer air, cut short.

Parker sat up. His chest and forearms stung where the knife had drawn its lines, and his body was sore all over, but he had no serious wounds. The dizziness he felt right now would soon pass.

Leaning forward, he put his watch into the moonlight, and forced his eyes to focus. Almost quarter past ten. Just time enough to make the meet with Brenda and Mackey.

Slowly he got to his feet, and looked around, at the ruined house and the gaping hole in the window. Then he went up the stairs.

CLICK

'I'm getting bored,' Brenda said.

Ed kept on looking at the TV: CNN, multi-vehicle collision in fog on an interstate in California, blonde-haired woman solemn over her mike with ambulances in the background. He was waiting for the TV to tell him something new about events in this town right here, far from California and its fog. Outside this motel room, halfway around town from their first motel, the late afternoon sky was clear, visibility perfect. Inside, nobody on television, not local or network or cable, wanted to tell him what was happening here.

Brenda said, 'Ed? When are we getting out of here?'

'Late tonight,' Ed told her, pretending to be patient. 'You know why. You saw the TV.'

'California,' she said, and gave the television set a look of scorn.

'Come on, Brenda. Before.'

She knew, of course, he meant the business about Liss shooting up the local hospital, then taking off with some goon called Quindero that the cops wanted back unharmed for some reason. The law had been irritated already with just the robbery, but then you throw in Liss killing a guy the cops have under guard, right in front of them, and you could expect the locals were truly itching by now to get their hands on somebody. Anybody at all.

Which was the point Ed wanted to make. 'They're all over this town like a bad smell,' he said. 'We did enough running around here today. When it turns dark, I get us a nice little car, not flashy, nothing you look at twice, and then we clear out of here.'

They'd each been out of this room once since they'd checked in at this motel, Ed paying cash and using a driver's license for ID that had no history on it at all. First Ed had taken the most recent borrowed car back to the parking garage, to make their trail loop back on itself, and then he'd walked from there to a luggage store, where he'd bought three suitcases from a matched set and cabbed them back here, so they'd no longer be people with duffel bags. And then, a little after noon, Brenda had said, 'The hell with it, I want my stuff,' and over Ed's objections she'd cabbed back across town to their old motel.

She hadn't been completely careless, not at all. She'd left the cab two blocks from the motel, walked around the area, studied it, was very patient, and only when she was sure nobody had the place staked out did she go boldly back to their old room, where she packed up all her goods plus Ed's shaving kit and change of underwear. On her way out she noticed the woman in the office eyeballing her, so she went over there and checked out. 'The people in the room next to you,' the woman said, half-whispering, afraid the cockroaches might hear and pass it on, 'they had something to do with that big robbery.' v

Brenda widened her eyes. 'They did?'

'Might have killed us all in our sleep,' the woman said.

'That's not much of a recommendation for your motel,' Brenda pointed out.

The woman lowered her eyebrows and hunched down over her counter. 'You can't be too careful,' she said.

'Words to live by,' Brenda agreed, and took another cab back to the new motel, where Ed hadn't moved, and CNN was showing distant explosions on a green mountainside. 'Piece of cake,' she said.

Ed kept his eyes on the screen. 'Everybody else,' he said, 'has a woman constantly nagging: 'Be careful, be careful.' I got a woman, I'm the one says be careful.'

'I was careful,' Brenda assured him. 'I didn't want you to see me on that TV.'

'Be nice to see something, though,' Ed said.

They saw something, at six o'clock, on the local news. They saw ambulances and stretchers and hundreds of official people, all in front of some big hotel downtown, behind an excited reporter yelling into his microphone about how one of the stadium robbers had posed as an insurance investigator until Reverend William Archibald's head of security unmasked him, when the robber damaged a whole lot of people and escaped. 'Huh,' Ed said. 'Parker's a woolly

'And all I did,' Brenda reminded him, 'was go back to the motel.'

'Well, Parker's far from here by now, anyway,' Ed suggested.

'And I wish I was,' Brenda told him.

'Patience. Later. Patience.'

* * *

The guy in the motel office had said there was a good Italian restaurant two blocks down to the left, so that's where they'd go, around eight o'clock, and pick up a car on the way back, and be on the road by ten. At quarter to eight, Brenda went into the bathroom to freshen up her makeup for the journey to the restaurant, and two minutes later she came out with a scrunched-up expression on her face and an open compact in her left palm. 'Ed,' she said. 'Take a look at this.'

He looked. 'It's dirty,' he said. 'The mirror's all streaked.'