It was ten days till the job. There was nothing to do now but wait, and make sure that when Melander and the others came back they didn’t notice Parker in the neighborhood. So why not go back to Miami for a few days, spend some time with Claire?
He left in late morning, took Interstate 95 south, and got off the highway at Fort Lauderdale to find a diner lunch. After, he came out of the diner to the bright sunlit parking lot, and the Jaguar was gone.
Stupid; to let that get ripped off. He looked around the parking lot for another car to take, and a guy came out of the diner behind him, working at his mouth with a toothpick. He said, ‘Hot day.’
‘Yes,’ Parker said. He waited for the guy to go away.
But the guy pointed across the parking lot with his toothpick and said, ‘You see that white Toyota Land Cruiser over there?’
Parker didn’t look at the white Toyota Land Cruiser, he looked at the guy with the toothpick. He was bulked up, tanned, about forty, grinning like a man with a secret. He nodded, not looking at Parker, and said, ‘There’s a guy in there with a thirty ought six you do anything he doesn’t like, any single thing at all, he’ll blow your head off.’
‘Maybe he’ll hit you,’ Parker said.
‘Funny thing about Herby,’ the guy said. ‘He never misses what he aims at. Never been known to happen. Why don’t we go over there, he can tell you about it himself.’
Now Parker looked at the Land Cruiser, a Land Rover clone, then back at the guy. These people weren’t from Melander and Carlson and Ross; that trio would handle their own problems. He didn’t see how they could be connected with Lesley. So who were they and what was their interest?
The guy said, ‘I’m walking over there now myself. If you don’t walk with me, they’ll be hosing down the pavement here later.’
Parker said, ‘We’ll walk together. I’m trying to remember where I know you from.’
The guy chuckled, not as though he thought Parker had said something funny, but as though it was a skill he’d learned one time, chuckling, and he liked to practice from time to time. As they walked across the parking lot to the Land Cruiser, that was the only answer he gave.
Herby, a sharp-nosed skinny man in a wrinkled white dress shirt and black pants and mirror-lensed aviator sunglasses, sat in the back seat, the big hunting rifle on his lap, right hand loose near the trigger, left hand loose under the barrel. There was no way to tell if he was looking at Parker or not, but it really didn’t make any difference.
The first guy, still cheerful, said, ‘You can ride up front with me.’
They were willing to kill him in public, if they had to, but they’d rather do it in private. So there was still a little time. Parker went around to the right side of the Land Cruiser and opened the door, and saw a small square photo on the passenger seat. He picked it up, slid onto the seat, shut the door, and looked at the photo. It was himself, one of the pictures Bobby had taken for his driver’s license.
He looked from the picture to the guy, now behind the wheel, grinning at him around the toothpick. ‘So Norte’s dead,’ Parker said, and dropped the photo out the window.
The guy stuck the key in the ignition. ‘Hell, pal,’ he said as the engine started, ‘everybody’s dead. Some people just don’t know it yet.’
11
They were going to kill him in the Everglades. A good place for it, obviously; the idea had been thought of before.
The white Land Cruiser headed out westward along Alligator Alley, the Everglades Parkway, a two-lane black binding tape laid on the uncertain green land, straight as a rifle shot across the flat landscape. Big trucks groaned along, and the smaller cars zipped around them and sped on. The guy with the toothpick in the rear corner of his mouth moved the Land Cruiser along at a steady unhurried speed. There was time enough to get the job done.
Parker thought about the Sentinel, now taped to the underside of the Parsons table in Melander’s dining room. There were two guns stashed in the Jaguar, but he had nothing on his body. Here there was Herby in the back seat with his rifle and maybe some other things. The driver wasn’t obviously armed, but he could have a pistol in a pants pocket or in a spring-loaded holster under the dash on the far side of the steering column.
They couldn’t do anything on this road, with this traffic. There were always at least half a dozen vehicles in sight. They’d have to turn off, and that was the point where he’d have to make his move. They were pros, and they would know that was when he’d have to move, but he had to anyway. And they knew that, too.
Although it didn’t matter now, he couldn’t help but wonder if it would have made a difference if he’d decided not to let Julius Norte live. He’d thought the man could handle himself against the fellow who’d sent those killers after him, but maybe without Bobby, Norte hadn’t been so invulnerable anymore.
It seemed to Parker that this guy, whoever he was, who’d hired these two in the Land Cruiser, would have been on Daniel Parmitt’s trail whether he’d left Norte dead or alive. There would have been papers in Norte’s office, evidence, things Parker wouldn’t have had the time or knowledge to find and destroy, to tell who the other customer had been that day, who’d dealt himself a hand. It was revenge that guy wanted now, as well as his grim determination to leave nobody alive who could possibly lead back to him. Nothing to do with Parker, but he was stuck in it anyway.
They drove for over an hour, passing the occasional tourist place, offering cold drinks or airboat rides into the swamp or views of caged alligators, and no one in the car spoke. The air-conditioning kept everything cool and dry. They passed small side roads from time to time, bumping away on rough bridges over the canals, and Parker waited.
Over an hour. The driver lowered his visor because the afternoon sun was rolling down the sky, dead ahead, and Parker did the same. There were warnings on notices attached to this side of the visor, but he didn’t read them.
The driver tapped the brake. Parker squinted, and maybe that was a road out there, still some distance off, leading to the right. He became very still, and the driver tapped the brake again, and the rifle barrel came to rest against the base of Parker’s skull, just below and behind his left ear, a cold hard smoothness of metal.
