Firebreak

'Well, you oughta know about it,' Dolan said. 'Harry and me don't want you guys to take a fall, but we gotta give you warning here. Just in case things don't work out, we don't care if they all of a sudden can't find you. If we sing, we sing, and if you've already lammed, tough shit.' Dolan shrugged. 'You see what I mean? If we can't powder, you two can.'

'Thanks for the option, Bob,' Elkins said.

Next morning, they took turns driving the Taurus toward Montana. Midway across Minnesota on Interstate 94, with Elkins at the wheel, Wiss said, 'I don't usually talk this way, but it might be, things don't go the way we like out here, Bob and Harry would be better off dead.'

'They already thought of that, Ralph,' Elkins said. 'They thought of it before you did.'

'Well, I thought of it now,' Wiss said.

4

Paul Brock led a charmed life and he knew it. More than once he'd survived when he shouldn't have survived; when Pam Saugherty had saved him instead of jailing him, for instance. More than once he'd fallen in shit and come out smelling like ... not roses. Like money.

It was unsettling to realize it was the money that had made it possible for him to fall into the shit all over again, this time with maybe no coming out at all. It was the money that had made it possible to spend all this time planning revenge against Parker, to at last find Parker, and to hire somebody to do him down once and for all.

Well, that hadn't worked. Not only did Charov turn out not to be the platinum pro he was cracked up to be, not only did Brock make the mistake of turning Parker's attention toward himself, but now his Outfit friends at Cosmopolitan weren't his friends any more. The schmuck who stayed out in the cold, that was Paul Brock.

The truth was, his own revenge jones toward Parker had shrunk away to nothing years ago. It was only for Matt's sake that he'd kept on, only for Matt's sake that he'd exulted when at last Parker's name had popped up on his own Web search, only for Matt's sake that he'd paid Charov the money and got himself into this mess.

What it was, he'd had some vague feeling—not a belief, barely articulated at all—that if he could bring down Parker, if he could show Matt that he'd brought down Parker, it would change Matt into something better, much closer to the man he'd used to be. The only man Brock had ever really wanted.

Matt wasn't a man anybody could want, not now. Swollen, bitter, helpless. In the old days, he'd been strong, purposeful, quick. He'd been mean then, too, and brutal, and seemed to take an angry pleasure in hurting women— like Pam—for making him want them. Brock hadn't cared about the meanness back then, because he'd had all the rest of Matt as well. But now the meanness was all.

Brock knew, of course, that killing Parker wouldn't bring back Matt's legs, but in his dream it would bring back Matt's spirit. Instead of which, it had brought the threat of Parker right into their home.

Brock made his living these days mostly by stealing technology for the mob. He owned a computer shop that made a small profit, he did debugging and other technical things for Cosmopolitan and others, but mostly he was the mob guys' computer genius, the one that could get them into closed files, find them everything from insider stock market knowledge to FBI surveillance tapes. They paid him well, or they had until now, when, because of Parker, all at once they'd cut him off. So that was the reason to finish Parker himself, if he could. Not for revenge, not any more, but just to get his livelihood back.

The first thing to do was move Pam out of the house until it was over. Matt hated Pam, and she despised him back. Usually Brock ignored that, because Pam made the household work, and had saved Matt's life, and saved Brock from going to jail. But now, having to watch and wait for Parker, Brock couldn't afford to be distracted. Matt had to stay, there was no choice about that, no chance for the two of them to go somewhere and hide, but Pam had to go.

'Go somewhere south,' he told her. 'Go somewhere sunny, phone me when you get there, tell me how to get in touch, I'll call you when things are normal here.'

She said, 'What's going to happen, Paul?' She was worried for him, he knew, not for herself, and certainly not for Matt.

He said, 'The man who shot Matt and me, that you saw out front, he's going to try to finish what he started. I'm going to try to stop him. If I do, I'll call you. If I don't...' He shrugged, not wanting to think about that alternative.

She patted his arm. 'I know you'll be all right,' she said.

Neither of them mentioned Matt.

The first thing to do was switch off the circuit breaker to the riding chair that Matt almost never used these days, that made it theoretically possible for him to travel down the one flight of stairs to the other wheelchair, motorized and kept near the front door. Matt was rebellious now, since the threat of Parker had become real, rebellious and angry and unpredictable and probably afraid. Brock didn't want him to suddenly take it into his head to leave the building, go haring off in search of a gun, in search of old friends to help him, in search of the simple relief of movement.

The strange thing, the sad thing, was Brock's realization there were no old friends. Matt had always been too rough to have friendships, and the people he'd known had dropped away the instant he was hurt. Brock had many friends, bar friends and techie friends and music friends from his days running a record shop, but now he realized just how shallow those friendships really were. There was no one to stand beside him now. He was on his own.

The next thing was to think about how Parker could get into the building. There was the front door. The rest of the ground floor was a tourist shop, T-shirts and

postcards and such, with its own separate entrance, and its own furnace in its own closed-off section of the basement, so there was no access from there. Behind the house, the narrow slate-surfaced space was a closed areaway between this row of brick houses and the larger newer apartment house that faced on the next street.