“You want to be careful,” Parker told him.
“Come
They moved toward the still-open door, Parker following, seeing their battered red Dodge Ram out there, with the fitted steel toolbox bolted to the bed. They stepped through, and Parker stood in the doorway behind them. “Always be careful,” he told Cal. “You wouldn’t want anything to happen to that other eye.”
As Cory pulled him toward the pickup with a hand on his elbow, Cal glared back, face distorted, crying, “Never mind the good one! What about
Parker shrugged. “Ask the parrot.”
14
Cory drove, so there was no squealing of tires, burning of rubber. Parker watched the Ram go, then stood in the open doorway another five minutes, listening to an absolutely silent night, before he stepped outside, shut the door, and walked down the driveway.
There were two tall streetlights at diagonal corners of the intersection down to his left, but otherwise the road was dark, with here and there the dull gleam of lights inside houses. Parker walked first to his right, past a dark house, then a house where an older couple played some sort of board game in a brightly lit living room, then another dark house, a boarded-up house, and then the last on this side, where a woman muffled up in robes and blankets as though she were on a sleigh in Siberia sat alone to watch TV.
This first walk through the town was simply to get a sense of it, and the sense was of leftovers, of people still in the stadium after the game is done. There were no children watching television, no toys on porches, never more than two people visible in any house. These were the respectable poor, living in retirement in the only place they’d ever known. They wouldn’t have much that would be of use to Parker, though there might be one thing. Older not- rich people in an isolated community: Some of them might have handguns.
Down the other side of the road, Parker passed the gas station, closed for the night, with light from a soda machine in front of the office illuminating the pumps and a small night-light gleaming on the wall above the desk inside.
Up till now, there had been no traffic at all through this town at this hour, the blinking signal lights at the intersection controlling nothing. But as he walked just beyond the gas station, Parker did see a car coming this way from the blackness outside the town. He continued to walk, continued to look at the houses, and the car rapidly approached, its high beams becoming troublesome just before the driver dimmed them; which meant he’d seen Parker and was doing the polite thing.
The car slowed, coming into the town, then went on by Parker, who kept walking at a steady pace. A few seconds later he heard the tire-squeal as the car made a U-turn, and here it came again, the opposite way, slowing beside him.
Not a cop. A beat-up older Toyota four-door, some dark color. The passenger window slid down as the car came to a stop beside Parker, and the driver alone in there, a woman, leaned toward him to say, “Can I help you?”
He could keep walking, but she’d just pace him, so he stopped and turned to her. “To do what?” he said.
She didn’t seem to know what to do with that answer. She looked younger than the people of this town, probably in her thirties, dashboard-lit in such a way as to give her face harsh angles and extremes of light and shadow. She said, “Are you looking for an address or something?”
“No.”
“I just thought— People don’t usually walk around here.”
“I do.”
“But you don’t live here.”
“I visit here.”
“Oh.” Now at last on familiar ground, she pasted what was supposed to be a friendly smile on her face and said, “Who are you visiting?”
It would cause less trouble and suspicion just to answer her. “Tom Lindahl.”
“Tom! I’m surprised. I thought he was—” Then it occurred to her she might be about to say something insulting about Lindahl, and this might be a friend or relative, so she laughed, an uncomfortable sound, and said, “You know what I mean.”
“You thought he was a hermit.”
“Yes, I suppose. Yes.”
“He is a hermit,” Parker said. “But I visit him.”
“Well, why not?” she said, moving her hands on the steering wheel as though sorry she’d stopped. “I’m glad he has I’m glad he has visitors.”
“And now,” Parker said, “I’m doing my after-dinner walk.”
“Of course. Well . . .”
She didn’t know how to end the encounter, but he did. He nodded and walked on, not looking back. After a long moment of silence back there, the car abruptly burst into life, with another U-turn squeal of tires, and receded quickly into silence.
A few minutes later, nearing the end of his walk-through, he came to the house where the old man had been asleep earlier today on the front porch. Now the only illumination from that house was the fitful blue-gray glitter from a television set, and when Parker looked in the living room window, the same man, in the same clothing, sat
