Firebreak

He drove the Honda away from there, straight for half a dozen blocks, then a left for a few blocks, then another left, and then faintly heard crackling noises, static inside the car. Lloyd's radio? Had he turned it on in the house?

Yes. And was speaking: .. nobody gets hurt... how can it get back to you} It can't.' And wasn't Lloyd.

'If I knew where he was, I'd tell you.' That was Lloyd. 'I'm not a brave man, look at me, I'm scared to death of you two. If I knew, I'd tell.'

So Brock and Rosenstein's second team had decided Parker wasn't going back to the house on the lake, not right away, so they might as well try to get at him through one of the other names they'd picked up from Lloyd's computer. And they'd gone straight to the weakest link.

'I tell you what,' said a third voice, as Parker made the left and saw the brick church some distance ahead. 'You tell us another story first, just to get into the mood for it.'

'Story? What story?'

'The job you're pulling with the other three. Tell us about that.'

'Oh, I can't do that!'

'Sure you can.'

Parker pulled to the curb a block short of the church, by a branch library. His pistol was in his inside jacket pocket. The electric garage door opener from the visor he put into the right outer pocket, then got out of the Honda, left it unlocked, and went for a walk.

* * *

There wouldn't be time to come at this with indirection. Lloyd wouldn't stand up to those people for a second, and once they'd squeezed him, why not kill him? Even if they didn't do that, once he'd failed he'd have one more defeat to brood about when he should be thinking about Paxton Marino's security instead.

There is a thing called loser mentality, and losing is both its cause and symptom. It's clearly what had sent Lloyd on his rampage once before, and if he got another bout of the same illness he'd be no good to Parker and the others. Which was bad because, the way it looked, there was no job without Larry Lloyd.

The house was dark shingle, up ahead on the left, set back from the sidewalk behind a neat lawn, like all the other houses along here. Its wide front porch had a green shingle roof held up by square stone pillars, inside which the house looked muffled, almost abandoned. On its left side, nearest Parker as he approached, a one-car attached garage had been added at a later date, done in the same style but somehow not the same at all. The blacktop driveway to the garage was obscured on this side by a low privet hedge, put in by the neighbor. On a block where most of the houses were clapboard, in white or pastels, Lloyd's house looked like the one with secrets.

Parker didn't pause. Rounding the hedge, he strode up the driveway, trusting that the two inside would concentrate on Lloyd and not look out the windows. As he neared the brown-painted wooden overhead door, he pulled the opener from his pocket and thumbed the button. The door jerked, started its slide upward, and he went down to the blacktop, landing on his left side. He rolled through the gap under the door, thumbing the opener again—the door stopped—and again—it started down—then rolled across the empty concrete floor to the right wall, near the house, dropping the opener and reaching inside the jacket for his gun.

Would the few seconds of the opener motor have been heard inside the house? Would it have been recognized, in that short a time? Parker got to his knees then, holding the pistol in both hands aimed at the connecting door to the house. In that posture, he slid his right shoulder up the wall until he was on his feet.

No sound, no apparent movement. There was no time to be sure of anything; he slipped along the wall, listened for two seconds at the door, turned the knob with his left hand, pushed.

Sounds, some distance away. Blubbering. Broken already.

Parker went through a messy kitchen, without really seeing it, concentrating on the doorway beyond, the sounds from beyond that. Into a dark hall, a dining room through a doorway opposite, some muddied daylight from the lace-curtained glass in the front door down to the right. Sobbing from down that way.

The hall carpet silenced his feet. He came swiftly down the hall, pistol ahead of himself, spun into the living room doorway, and put a bullet into the knee of the one on the left.

The tableau froze for one second, paralyzed by the sound of the shot Making the turn, he'd seen Lloyd's back to him as he slumped on his knees at the coffee table fronting the sofa on the far wall, shoulders heaving as he wept, arm moving as he wrote on a sheet of paper on the coffee table. The two strangers hulked on either side of him and back a pace, both standard-issue thugs, big but ordinary. He needed one of them alive at the end of this, to answer questions. The one on the right held a sap, long and flexible, that would hurt wherever it hit, but the one on the left held the 9mm Beretta, so it was the one on the left Parker brought down first.

The other was a surprise. He heard the shot, he saw the tableau dissolve as his partner began to crumble and Lloyd's head jerked upward, and without ever looking in Parker's direction he wheeled on his right foot, folded his forearms over the top of his head, and launched himself through the living room's picture window.

'Get the gun and keep that one!' Parker yelled at Lloyd, turned, and ran out the front door.

The other one was just vaulting the porch rail. Parker snapped a shot at him, but knew it was no good, and knew he couldn't do any more shooting, not here, not now. The other guy, face and forearms bleeding, ran across the lawn, and Parker saw a passing driver give the scene a curious look.

He wanted them both, he needed them both, but he couldn't chase a bleeding man in a family neighborhood in the middle of the afternoon. And how long could he trust Lloyd to keep the first one, even with a bullet in him? Reluctant, but knowing there was no choice, Parker went back into the house.

Lloyd was alone in the living room, curled up in a fetal position on the floor, face into the carpet. He heard Parker come in, and lifted a tear-stained face that was astonishingly smiling; but then he uncurled enough to show he still had the Beretta, clutched in both hands. That was the reason for the smile; he hadn't let a knee-shot man take the pistol away from him.

Parker spread his hands, asking the question, and Lloyd nodded jerkily at the connecting doorway to the dining