without getting too stiff.’
‘I’ll be right back,’ she said, and was gone almost ten minutes, and came back dragging a large gray canvas painters’ tarpaulin. ‘Small windows, with bars,’ she said. ‘Decorative bars, but bars. There’s this, and there’s part of a roll of pink insulation. I thought we could put the insulation on the floor and part of the tarp on top of it, and put the rest of the tarp over us.’
‘Good,’ he said.
While she was gone this time, he went on all fours to the nearest chair and climbed it to his feet. The few hours of sleep had stiffened him, more than he liked to think about. He didn’t have time for the body to heal; it had to come along no matter what.
She came in with the roll of insulation, pulling it along, and they worked together to put down four strips of it, pink side down, shiny paper side up. Then they stretched the middle section of the tarp over it, with extra material on both sides to pull over them. She said, ‘Do you want the light on or off?’
‘I’m going to sleep,’ he said.
The laugh she gave had hysteria in it. ‘Are you kidding? In the spot we’re in, and in the condition you’re in, who’s going to do anything exceptsleep? I’ll turn off the light.’
4
She said, ‘What’s Claire like?’
‘No, Lesley.’
But she was following her own line of thought, answering her own question. ‘I think she’s very beautiful and very self-sufficient. Neither of you leans on the other, you both stand up straight.’
‘Sure,’ he said.
She considered him. ‘I need somebody
a little different,’ she decided.
He shook his head. ‘You don’t need anybody, Lesley.’
She surprised him by blushing. She turned away, then turned back and smiled sheepishly and said, ‘I’d like to need somebody. I keep thinking, if I find the right guy, I’ll need him.’
‘Could be.’
‘That’s how it is with you and Claire, I suppose.’
He knew this talk was simply so she could distract herself from the people downstairs. Her watch had told them it was almost eight-thirty in the morning, so whatever was going to happen would happen soon. But he didn’t feel like playing the game anymore, so he walked around instead, in and among the swivel chairs, rolling his shoulders, judging how his body felt this morning.
A little better, maybe, just a little better. His voice seemed stronger to him, and the night on the fairly hard flat surface the insulation hadn’t done much seemed to have been good for his ribs.
She sat in a swivel chair, swiveling slowly back and forth, watching him move. They were both silent for a few minutes, and then she said, ‘I’m hungry.’
‘So am I.’
‘Should we knock on the door or something?’
‘Let them have their own pace.’
‘Okay.’ Then, in a rush: ‘Are they going to kill us?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, and stood still, hand on the back of one of the chairs. Now that she was ready, they could talk. He said, ‘Melander’s the main guy, the big one with all the hair, and as far as he’s concerned they were all reasonable back when. He just borrowed money from me, and he meant to pay me back, and he might even pay me back someday. He thinks he’s straight in our world, that he doesn’t heist a heister, and what happened with me was just business or something.’
She said, ‘Could you let it bejust business or something?’
‘We’ll see how it plays out,’ he said, to keep her calm. ‘There’s Carlson, I think he’d prefer we were dead. He doesn’t like it that I didn’t wait at home like a good boy, that I’m here.’
‘And the other one?’
‘Ross follows. He’ll follow whoever’s on top.’
She thought about all that, slowly shaking her head. Her right shoe was half off, and she waggled it up and down with her toes. Then she said, ‘What do you think is going to happen?’
‘Nobody can leave this house for a few days,’ Parker told her, ‘that’s the problem. If we could all just split now, go our separate ways, they’d lock us up here and take off, and that would be it. But you know this island’s shut down, they’re checking every car on every bridge, every boat in the water, they’ll keep it up for three or four days.’
‘I know,’ she said.
‘I’m going to make Melander itchy after a while,’ Parker said. ‘Just by being here.’
‘And you can’t leave, not now,’ she said. ‘Or could you? Could we leave together? We wouldn’t tell anybody.’
He was already shaking his head. ‘They don’t want us loose. They want us under control. And for now, that means here. Later on, it could mean dead.’
‘But not this morning, you think.’
