Firebreak

Lloyd's car was a black Honda Accord, several years old, with a dented right front fender, hair-thin lines of red in the dents to suggest he'd one time run into a fireplug. Parker drove, Lloyd in the front seat beside him, happy to be a passenger. Elkins and Wiss were on their way home, outside Chicago, to wait to learn what Parker and Lloyd had found at Claire's house.

They had to make this trip in the other direction first because Lloyd needed some equipment to bring with him. Part of the equipment was to find the base linked to that camera at the house, and the rest of it was to keep the state of Massachusetts from learning that Lloyd had broken his parole again.

Lloyd lived outside Springfield, about forty-five miles east of Great Barrington. There was a more direct state road, but in the latter part of a weekday afternoon that would be full of shoppers and salarymen, so Parker took them north first to the Mass Pike, then east. The early part of the trip, Lloyd threw out a few more apologies and I'm-stupids, but then Parker said, 'That's done. Now we're doing what we're doing now,' and after that Lloyd calmed down.

The next time he broke the silence was just after they made the turn onto the Mass Pike, amid the lanes of thundering trucks and rushing imports, when he said, 'I'm wondering if Otto ever mentioned you.'

'Mainzer? Why would he?'

'There were two things Otto liked to do in prison,' Lloyd said. 'Fight and talk. He liked to tell stories about his great capers, the ones where he didn't get caught. I wondered if you were ever in those stories.'

'Did he put names in the stories?'

'Not usually, no.'

'He wouldn't,' Parker said.

Lloyd studied Parker's profile a minute, digesting that, and then he looked out at the yellow-gray world ahead, backlit by the late-afternoon sun behind them, the black shadows of all these vehicles leaping forward, and what he said was actually a continuation of the conversation, though it didn't sound like it: 'I think I'm learning more about this new world since I've been out here than in all the time I was inside.'

'You're a quick study,' Parker told him. 'You'll learn.'

'I don't have much choice,' Lloyd said. Which was true.

* * *

'I don't think you should come in,' Lloyd told him, as they neared his neighborhood. 'You're a bad companion, you know. In fact, you probably shouldn't even stop at the house. Just let me off at the corner and circle a couple times.'

'Fine.'

Lloyd reached under the dash, between them, and hit some sort of switch. 'That's my two-way to the house,' he said. 'When I'm ready to come out, I'll tell you.'

'Good.'

'If you need to speak to me about anything,' Lloyd went on, 'you see the white button over by the side vent?'

The hole for the button had been drilled neatly, but it was still clearly a non-factory add-on. 'Yeah,' Parker said.

'Push that and just speak. I'll hear you.'

'Who've you got at home?'

'No one any more.' Lloyd seemed embarrassed. 'My wife decided on a divorce two years after I went in.'

'That happens.'

'The counselor said so, yes. Also, I have cousins that visit sometimes, so we use the radio.'

'Uh-huh.'

'You'll let me off two blocks from here.'

This part of West Springfield, just west of the Connecticut River, was a neat working-class grid of older

two-story one-family homes, most with porches and cropped lawns, many with children's toys scattered around the front. Traffic was light, and very local. A stranger wouldn't get to stay here long without being noticed.

Parker said, 'How long do you think? Before you come out.'

'Oh, ten minutes, no more.'

'I'll drive out of the neighborhood and then back.'

'All right, fine. Up ahead here, by that brick church.'

Parker pulled to the curb, looking around. 'And where are you from here?'

Lloyd pointed away to the right. 'Half a block, number three-eighty-seven. But don't come to the house!'

'No, I'll wait back here.'

'Okay, good.'

Lloyd got out and walked away, a bedraggled but earnest figure, a guy who'd had a wife and a house in this modest neighborhood, when he was supposed to be rich instead, and had gone nuts when he'd found out, and was still trying to become some new guy, not yet sure who that new guy was. His openness and malleability had clearly helped him survive inside, but would do less for him out here. He was what Wiss and Elkins needed on the technical side, but Parker wondered how much of a liability he was going to be on the personal side.