‘Oh, could be delays, up ahead,’ Marty said. ‘Seemed like a good idea, go around it.’
‘Go around what?’
‘A few fellas coming the other way,’ Marty explained, ‘mentioned on the radio, there’s a roadblock a few miles up ahead.’
‘Roadblock?’ Parker shifted in the seat, trying to get more comfortable after sleeping in his clothes. ‘After drunk drivers?’
‘Probably,’ Marty said. ‘They always take the opportunity, long as they’ve got you stopped, check every goddam thing they can think of. Looking for drugs, illegals, overweight. Check your license, your manifest, your log. You can kill an hour, one of those places, just on line, waiting your turn. Better to get off, take one of these slow roads, come back up on the highway a little later.’
‘Well,’ Parker said, ‘drunk drivers can be trouble.’
‘Sure they can,’ Marty agreed. ‘Get em off the road. But it could be anything, up there. Maybe they’re looking for somebody escaped from prison, that happens sometimes, I even heard it on the local news, somewhere along here, the trip out.’
‘They don’t stay out long,’ Parker said.
‘You’re right.’ Marty hesitated, wanting to say something, not sure he would, then said, ‘Let me tell you a little story, long as Gail’s asleep back there. And even if she isn’t asleep, she can’t hear us.’
‘All right.’
‘Not that she doesn’t knowthe story,’ Marty went on. ‘God knows, she does. Anyway, I was dumb like you about a woman once.’ He nodded his head at the curtain behind them. ‘Before I met Gail.’
The road they were on now was two-lane asphalt with potholes, and the big truck had to slow-dance along it, Marty steering all the time. He said, ‘But I was even dumber than you, for even longer. Well, I was younger, too. But the fact is, I wound up doing four years well, almost four years in a state pen. Attempted robbery. Seven to ten, got out in the minimum.’
‘Four years is a long minimum,’ Parker said. ‘Oh, you know it.’ Marty concentrated on the road awhile, then said, ‘I know there’s fellas belong in there, I know there’s fellas I’d preferwas in there, but after being in there myself I could never put a man in a cage, personally. Never.’
‘I know the feeling,’ Parker said.
‘If a man wants to learn from his mistakes, fine,’ Marty said. ‘You look at me. You see the job I gave myself. Coast-to-coast hauling. You can’t get much farther from a four-man cage inside a six-hundred-man cage inside a four-thousand-man cage.’
‘Not much farther,’ Parker agreed. He looked out at the road, picked out by the white lights of the truck, with the ghosts passing just outside the light of the occasional farmhouse, gas station, diner, bar, all of them shut and dark. The dashboard clock read 4:27 A.M. He said, ‘What time zone is this?’
‘This,’ Marty told him. ‘We change it to keep track. Easier than changing our stomachs.’
‘There’s your roadblock,’ Parker said. Far off to their left, at a higher elevation, the cluster of red-white-blue shimmering lights was like a jamboree for machinery.
Marty looked over there, then back at the road. ‘No sense going through that,’ he said.
Parker said, ‘Won’t they see all the lights on this rig, over here, come over to see who we are?’
‘Not if they’re looking for a runaway,’ Marty said. ‘A runaway won’t be driving something like this.’
‘All right.’
‘They’re not evil geniuses, over there,’ Marty said. ‘They’re just boys doing their job. Go up on the highway, hassle anybody comes through. So that’s what they’re doing. Six o’clock, they’re told, go on back to the barracks, that’s what they’ll do. They aren’t hunters.They’re just boys doing a job.’
They went through an intersection marked by a yellow blinker, and Marty said, ‘Another fifteen, twenty miles, there’ll be an on-ramp. We’ll be fine from there.’
17
Claire rolled over when he walked into the room. Her eyes gleamed in the darkness, but she didn’t say anything as she watched him move. Out of his pocket and onto the dresser went the three Patek watches that were the only result of the jewel job. He stripped and got into bed and then, folding into his arms, she said, ‘Gone a long time.’
‘It felt like a long time.’
‘I knew you’d be back,’ she said.
‘This time,’ he said.
THE PARKER SERIES:
Point Blank (1962) aka The Hunter
The Mourner (1963)
The Outfit (1963)
The Steel Hit (1963) aka The Man with the Getaway Face
The Score (1964) aka Killtown
The Black Ice Score (1965)
The Jugger (1965)
The Handle (1966) aka Run Lethal
