pocket, and held the automatic in his right hand, the bag of money in his left. He walked down the road toward the cottages, and when he could see a little better he chose a spot where there was a thick double-trunked maple just to the right of the road. He went around behind it, put the plastic bag on the ground against its trunk, and brushed some dirt and stones and decayed leaves over it.
As he straightened, headlights came, fast, from the cottages. He stayed behind the tree, and the pickup went by, racing too hard for this road, jouncing all over the place. Whoever was at the wheel was impossible to see, and more than impossible to shoot.
The pickup lunged by. Parker stepped out into the roadway and listened, and there was a sudden shriek of brakes when the driver came across the Hyundai.
No crash, though; he managed to get around it. Then silence.
Parker put the Python in his right hand, and walked on toward the cottages.
5
Now there were lights in two cottages, including the one where Parker and Wycza had decided the unknown shooter must be holed up. Parker was certain there was nobody left alive back here, but he was cautious anyway. He took the same route as last time, around to the right, beyond the reach of the glowing windows. Around the last cottage, then hunkered low to go past the space between cottages, where the pickup used to be parked. And then, silently but swiftly, across the screened-in porch to the cottage that was now lit up.
When Parker had checked out all the cottages, back when they’d first moved in here, this back door had not been locked, and it still wasn’t. He stepped through into the kitchen, and it was dark, the lit rooms farther away, living room and bath.
Parker listened. Nothing. He crossed the kitchen to the hall doorway, and stopped. Nothing. He went into the hall and looked through the bathroom doorway at a mess. Half a roll of paper towels on the sink, bloody individual paper towels in the sink and the bathtub and on the floor. Blood smears on the sink.
The dark bedrooms he passed were empty, and showed no signs of use. In the living room, a floor lamp at one end of the sofa was lit, shining down on a dark stain on the flower-pattern slipcover. Parker crossed to look at the stain, and it was blood, some dry, some still sticky. It made an irregular pattern, just at the end of the sofa.
Wounded. Wycza had been right about that, about the blood spatters on the outside wall next door. Headshot, it looked like, except the guy was too active for that. He’d managed, after he’d been shot, to go on and kill the third biker.
But he hadn’t had the strength to switch the lights off. He had to know Parker and the others had gone away with the place dark, and would know something was wrong if they came back and it was all lit up. But he hadn’t had the strength to do anything about it. He’d come over here to collapse, to try to get his strength back.
So it wasn’t that he’d let Wycza live, in order to wait for the rest to show up with the money. He had passed out over here, he’d never seen Wycza at all.
And then came to. Patched himself one way and another, and took off, knowing the ambush was ruined, the money wouldn’t be coming here.
Where would he go now? Who the hell was he?
Maybe Cathman had some answers.
6
It was a long night, and getting longer. Parker had walked out the dirt road to get the plastic bag of money and bring it back here and now it was inside the window well of the right rear door of the Lexus. The automatic he’d taken from the guard on the ship had been flung out over the slope into the river. The two simple incendiaries had been set, one in each lit cottage. There would be no surfaces for the technicians to scan for fingerprints. There’d be plenty left here, though, to give the law things to think about.
If he’d done the fuses right, the two fires should start three hours from now, after seven in the morning; daylight, so they could burn longer before being noticed. Yawning, forcing himself to stay awake, Parker got behind the wheel of the Lexus and steered it out to the main road, intending to head north, to deal with Cathman, one way or another. But when he saw the Hyundai, he stopped.
He rubbed his eyes, and the grizzle on his face. Wycza had been wrong, dammit. He had the big man’s flaw of every once in a while feeling sorry for the weak.
Greg Hanzen knew their faces, he knew a link to Parker through Pete Rudd, he could describe the getaway from the ship. He could let the law know for sure that the money had not come off with the heisters. And his car was here, next to a scene of a lot of trouble that had to be connected with the robbery, and no way for Parker to get rid of it.
Cathman was to the north, Albany, an hour away. Hanzen was half an hour to the south, at his landing. Or, if he was conscious by now, maybe he’d made his way to a hospital somewhere, a river rat with a broken jaw on a night when a major robbery takes place on the river. Would the cops ask him questions?
I’ve got to look, Parker told himself. If he’s there, that’s that. If he’s gone, I don’t pursue it, I let it play out as it plays.
He turned right and drove south. Ten minutes later, he saw the first lights he’d seen, a 24-hour gas station and convenience store. He filled the tank and bought a coffee and a glazed sugar doughnut, and drove on south, finishing the coffee just before the turnoff in to Hanzen’s landing.
He switched off his headlights as he crossed the railroad tracks, and ahead he saw the glow of some other light. He stopped in the clearing, got out of the Lexus, and the light came from Hanzen’s boat, still beached up onto the shore. A not-very-bright light was on in the cabin, and the cabin door was open, facing the river.
Parker didn’t get into the boat; he was too tired to climb over the side. He held the Python in his right hand and walked down beside the boat until the water was ankle-deep, cold inside his shoes, where he could look back in at the cabin, and Hanzen was in there. He was awake and miserable, hunched over his battery lantern. He’d tied a towel under his jaw and over the top of his head, like somebody in a comic strip with a toothache. He sensed Parker, and looked at him with watery eyes. “Now what?” he said. His speech was mushy.
Parker said, “I came to tell you, your problems are over after all.”
7
