suggested.
“A hundred forty thousand,” he told her. “Supposed to be. I didn’t count it yet.”
“I like it that you save the fun parts for me,” she said.
What she meant was, she didn’t want any part of it at all, what happened when he was away. They’d met in the first place because her ex-brother-in-law, an idiot named Billy Lebatard, had involved her in a robbery at a coin convention that had gone very sour. At the end of it, Billy was dead, there was blood everywhere, and Parker had dragged Claire into safety at the last second. She’d been married once, earlier, to an airline pilot who’d died in a crash; with that, and the mess Billy’d made, she wanted no more. Once, a couple of hard-edged clowns had broken in here, but Parker had dealt with it, and now he and Claire were together most of the time, warming themselves at each other’s fire, liking the calm. When Parker went away, as he sometimes did, she wanted to know nothing about it. She was willing, at the most, while he showered, to count the money and leave it in stacks on the coffee table in the living room for him to see when he came in, wearing a black robe and carrying a glass. She sat on the sofa without expression and said, “A hundred forty thousand exactly.”
“Good.”
‘Just like the paper said.”
He sat on the sofa beside her and cocked his head. “The paper?”
“You haven’t read any newspapers?”
“I’ve been moving.”
“Before you went away,” she said, “a man named Howell phoned you.”
“Right.”
“A man named Howell is dead.”
That surprised him. “Dead? How dead?”
“Injuries from an automobile accident. While escaping, the car he drove crashed down a mountainside. The other three people, and a small truck with anti-tank rockets, all escaped. Arrests are expected.”
“They killed him,” Parker said.
“Who killed him?”
“The law. Feds or local. Let me see the paper.”
She got up and crossed to the refectory table near the stone fireplace, and brought back a day-old newspaper turned to the national news page. Handing it to him, sitting again beside him, she said, “Why would they kill him?”
“They were in a hurry,” Parker told her. “They wanted names, they wanted to know where we’d be. Especially because they lost the rockets. Howell was hurt, but he wouldn’t tell them anything. We talked about it before I left, and he said he wouldn’t tell them anything, and I believed him, and it turns out I was right. And they were in such a hurry, they didn’t wait to see how much he was wounded, maybe hurt inside, before they leaned on him, and he died.”
“Poor Mr. Howell,” she said.
“He wasn’t really much of a reader anyway,” Parker said, and turned to the newspaper, which told him several things he knew and nothing he didn’t. Three rogue Marines had been trading with a terrorist group, selling them weapons stolen from a military depot. There was to be an exchange, rockets for cash. The two groups didn’t know there were two other groups involved as well; the Feds, who’d got wind of the thefts at the depot and were trying to follow the trail, and the four professional thieves who showed up at the transfer point meaning to take everything from everybody. Which they did, at the cost of one of their own, a man named Marshall Howell. The Feds expected to round up the other three momentarily.
Parker put the paper down and said, “That’s the end of it. The other two keep the rockets, sell them to somebody else. I keep this.” And he nodded at the money.
Claire pointed at the newspaper. “That could have been you.”
“It always could,” he said. “So far, it isn’t. I go away, and I come back.”
She looked at him. “Every time?”
“Except the last time,” he said.
She put her arms around him, touched her lips to the spot where the pulse beat in his throat. “Later,” she said, “let’s have a fire.”
3
The best place to hide money is in somebody else’s house. The morning after he got back, Parker filled seven Ziploc bags with ten thousand dollars each, put them in the pockets of his windbreaker, and went for a walk along the lakefront.
There were five houses along here he’d previously set up for himself, both as drops and as potential backup sites if trouble ever came too close. He’d made simple clean access to each house and prepared banks for himself in all of them. A false joist in a crawlspace; an extra ceiling in a closet; a new pocket in the wall behind a kitchen drawer. These people all liked their summer houses just the way they were, but it would pay them, though they didn’t know it, to remodel.
He was gone not quite an hour, a householder taking a long casual walk along the lake in the thin spring sunlight, and when he got back to the house Claire said, “Mr. Howell called.”
Parker looked at her, and waited.
She smiled slightly. “Mr. Marshall Howell.”
“Did he.”
