a few seconds before he’d started firing, the time he’d needed to step back down to the ground.
Would he still be over there, near that vehicle? Had he seen Parker’s run? Would he have any idea where Parker was now?
Time to move. Keeping his back against the wooden wall, Parker sidled leftward. Next past the ambulance was a pickup truck, also facing this way, then a two-wheeled horse trailer tilted forward, and then a small fire engine, facing out.
Was this the thing with the lights? The next vehicle was another pickup, facing outward, but too small to be the one with those lights.
Parker went down prone behind the fire engine and looked under the vehicles to see if he could find Cory’s feet. No; Cory wasn’t in the immediate area of the fire engine, and farther away it was impossible to see anything.
He was getting back up on his feet when another set of headlights flashed on, farther to the left. He turned toward them, but almost instantly the lights switched off again, making the darkness darker than before.
So Cory hadn’t known where Parker was, and now knew he had to be in here among the vehicles. Parker started toward where the headlights had flashed, and abruptly heard running.
The window in this pickup’s driver’s door was shut, but the door wasn’t locked. Parker pulled it open, causing more light as the interior bulb went on, and switched on the headlights, to see Cory running as fast as he could toward the gate and the ramp. He dove around the far end of the Ford as Parker fired at him, just too late.
Parker slapped off these headlights, slammed the pickup door, and trotted after Cory, calling, “Tom! Get back!”
When he reached the gate, he stopped to listen. Not a sound from down there. Had Lindahl managed to get deeper into the clubhouse, locking doors after himself, or was Cory now moving around inside the building? Or was Cory waiting down there in the darkness for Parker to come after him?
Parker crouched low and slid over in front of the Ford, which would keep him invisible from down below. He waited, and still heard nothing, and gradually became aware that the darkness down there wasn’t absolute. The lights were still on in the corridor beyond that room, and they gleamed a faint dark yellow through the thick glass of the small window in the door.
The gate was still slightly open, the way he’d left it. He sidled through, waited, inched forward. Infinitely slow, he traveled in a deep crouch down the ramp, left hand on the tilted concrete floor behind him, right hand holding the pistol out in front, eyes on that dim rectangle of light, hoping to see someone pass across in front of it.
As he advanced, he took shallow silent breaths through open mouth. He listened for any sound that would tell him where Cory was, but heard nothing.
At the bottom of the ramp, he stayed in the crouch, left hand now on the floor in front of himself. The duffel bag he’d brought in here from the safe room would be ahead and to his left; he moved toward it, always keeping his eye on that dim-lit window.
He had the bag. Turning slowly, bracing himself, he sat on it, knees wide, forearms on legs, hands and gun hanging downward. There was very little time to waste here, but there was time enough for this. He would wait, and Cory would reveal himself, and Parker would kill him. He would wait, and Lindahl would come back and make some sort of disturbance, flushing Cory out, and Parker would kill him.
The small rectangular amber gleam high up in the door was like a window in a castle far up a mountainside. Parker watched it, and breathed evenly, and permitted his body to relax, and waited.
6
Maybe ten minutes had gone by, no more than that, the two of them silent in the dark, and all at once this urgent hushed call came down from the top of the ramp. Lindahl, not in the clubhouse, after all, but up there, outside, by the gate and the two cars.
Parker kept his eye on the yellow window in the door as he sat up straighter, gun hand now resting atop his right knee. If Lindahl was outside, he’d made his way all around to that other door, the one they’d come in. If he’d done that, wouldn’t he have gone to look at the guards along the way, to see if they were alive or dead, and to take their guns? And if he’d done all that, he must not have left this room when Parker called the warning to him but earlier, the instant Parker had gone up the ramp and out of his sight. And he would have done that because he’d already had plans for the guards’ guns.
Defensive plans, or a double cross?
“Come down.” It was Cory said that, from the other side of the black room, making his voice sound rough, indistinct.
But he hadn’t sounded like Parker, because Lindahl up there at the top of the ramp said, with a quick quaver in his voice, “Who’s that? Cory, is that you?”
There was a long pause, and then Cory called, in his own voice, “Yes. Come down.”
Parker aimed at that sound, but it didn’t go on long enough. If he couldn’t be sure of his shot, he wouldn’t take it.
Lindahl wasn’t coming down. Instead, he was saying, “Where’s Ed?”
“He killed my brother.” Again too short to home in on.
“I know that,” Lindahl said. “Did you kill him, Cory?”
Another long pause. “Yes.”
“Cory, listen,” Lindahl said. “You don’t have any complaint against me, do you?”
