Comeback (16 page)

Parker nodded. "I think you're right about that."

"So that isn't your name."

"That's my joke," Parker told him. "My name is John Orr. Meaning, my name is John, or it isn't."

"It isn't. You're one of the robbers. You and Liss had a falling-out." Thorsen showed that thin smile again, thinner than ever. "I think Liss makes a career out of having falling-outs with people. I think maybe he doesn't play well with others. What do you think?"

Parker said, "Dwayne, I understand, the situation you're in, it can make you jumpy, paranoid. The story I told you is solid."

"Then I'm gonna owe you an apology," Thorsen said. "But before I give you that apology, let's take a picture of you, and take your fingerprints, and ask the local law to check you out. And let's call your home office in— Where's Midwest Insurance located, by the way? I called our insurance guy in Memphis just now, and he never heard of it."

"That's because he's in Memphis. He isn't in the midwest."

Thorsen poised a hotel pen over a hotel notepad. "Give me the phone number of your home office, and the name of your supervisor." When Parker didn't say anything, he smiled again and said, "And you might as well also give me the Reverend's thousand dollars, while you're at it."

So this piece was played out. Parker glanced around at the four young guys standing there at parade rest, silent, watching, ready to do whatever they were told. He said, "Are these guys armed?"

"You don't want to know," Thorsen said.

"Oh, yes, I do. I've been without a gun for too long, I need one. I'm wondering, do I take that dinky thing of yours, or is one of these fellas better hipped?"

One of the youngsters spoke: "We don't need to be armed," he said, being tough.

Thorsen had put the pen down to stare at Parker. "By God, you're sure of yourself," he said.

"Why not," Parker said, and rose from the desk. As he did so, he pulled the empty metal side drawer out of the desk and swung it around in a short quick arc into Thorsen's face.

Always take out the brains first. Then you can deal with the hands and feet.

The four guys hadn't known it was going to play out like this. They'd thought their presence was supposed to keep trouble from happening. They were still working on their poses when Parker moved, so they were still reacting when Parker finished his first lunge, halfway across Thorsen's desk, Thorsen flying backward out of his chair, his face a red mess.

The return swing with the metal drawer caught the nearest young lion on the side of the head, and sent him reeling into number two, while Parker ran forward, the drawer held out in front of him like a battering ram, and caught number three as he was trying to duck away. One bottom corner of the drawer sliced his cheek as the other corner gouged his shoulder, and the whole drawer, Parker's momentum behind it, drove him straight back into the wall. He hit hard, crunched between the wall and Parker's weight on the drawer, and he dropped straight down when Parker let go of the drawer. The drawer and the man were both still falling when Parker spun around and kicked number four twice, first in the balls and then in the forehead as, in agony, he bent quickly down.

These four had trained in gyms, and knew a lot about self-defense. They actually didn't have guns, and they'd never thought they would need such help. But they'd never been crowded into a small room before, getting in each other's way, with somebody who was trying to kill them and who didn't do any of the moves they'd learned about in gym.

Thorsen and numbers three and four were out of play. Number one, having been side-swiped with the drawer, was groggy but standing, and number two was moving in on Parker, hands splayed out, doing
all
the moves he'd learned.

Parker didn't have a lot of time. He didn't know how much noise he was making or who might be around to hear it. He didn't know when it would occur to one of these survivors to run the hell out of this room and go for help. He didn't know when it would be too late to get out of here, so he had to get out of here
now,
so he lunged in, ducked back, feinted for the balls, and sliced the edge of his left hand across number two's Adam's apple. Number two stopped, clutched his throat, made a strangled scream, and fell backward, trying desperately to breathe.

Number one, bleeding on the side of the head where the drawer had hit him, was getting less groggy by the second, but wasn't yet one hundred percent. He came in at Parker, arms in defensive position, looking to throw a punch, and Parker pointed at number two, on the floor, making terrible noises through his crushed throat: "If I put you down, there won't be anybody around to get him breathing."

Number one looked down and to his right, following the point of the finger and the sounds from his friend, and Parker stepped in fast to clip the side of that jaw with his right elbow.

Forty seconds since he'd first reached for the drawer. They were all down. They were all out and silent except the one trying to breathe. Parker crossed to Thorsen, stripped off the coat, stripped off the very nice holster that was engineered to fit against the side without a strap across the body, and put it on himself, under his jacket. It would need some adjustment later, but it would do for now.

The hall was empty. Parker pulled the door to 1237 hard shut, to lock it, and walked at a steady pace toward the turn to the elevators. Behind him, way back at or near Archibald's suite, a door opened and closed, but he didn't look back.

The neat young guard was still in place on the wing chair facing the elevators. He nodded when Parker came around the corner, and put a finger in his missal to hold his place. Parker said, "How you doing?"

"Fine, sir."

Parker pushed the Down button and waited, but before it arrived someone else came walking around the corner. Christine Mackenzie. Dressed as before, but now with a simple gray hat and gray cloak as well, as though she were on her way to give alms to the poor. "Well, hello," she said, on seeing Parker, with a bigger smile than she'd permitted herself back in the suite. "Fancy meeting you here," as though she hadn't been watching Thorsen's office door, waiting for him to leave.

"How you doing?" Parker said.

"Well, I'm doing fine," she told him. "Since we have this unexpected stay here in this nice city, I believe I'm going to do some shopping."

"Good idea."

The elevator arrived. He gestured, and she boarded, and he boarded, and she pushed L. The young guard was back reading his missal again before the doors closed.

They were alone in the elevator. "You should see the view on nine," she said, and pushed that button.

Parker didn't have time for views, or anything else. A lot of people were going to be chasing after him in a few minutes. He said, "Why's that better than the view on twelve?"

Here they were at nine already. "They have a conference room here," she said, holding the door open. "Huge windows, all around. Come on and see, it's fabulous."

It was easier to go along. "Okay," he said, following her out of the elevator. "Show it to me."

She giggled, a low contralto. "I will," she said.

He never thought about sex when he was working, but he was always hungry for it afterward. What situation was this he was in now? The heist was done, and yet it wasn't done. The job was finished, but it was still going on, with complications and trailing smoke. Was he going to have sex with this woman now, or not? He looked at her body, imperfectly hidden in somebody else's clothing, and it looked very good, but his mind kept filling with Liss, with Brenda and Mackey, with the duffel bags full of money; and now with Thorsen and Archibald and Calavecci and Quindero and who knew how many more. But still, it was a good body, walking along beside him here.

The conference room was at the opposite end on nine from Archibald's suite on twelve, so it was a view of a different quadrant of the city, but not that much different. Still, the room was large and airy and empty, with thick gray-green carpet and a large free-form conference table and some tan leatherette sofas along the inner wall.

"Come look," she said, and when he went over to stand beside her she hooked her arm through his. "I love the way the sunlight bounces off that roof," she said, pointing with her free hand. "See it?"

'Yes."

She smiled at him, came close to laughing at him. "You don't care much for views, do you?"

"Depends," he said, and bit that swollen lower lip.

"Oo, careful," she said. "No marks."

Beneath his hand, her breast was so firmly contained in place it might have been made of kapok. This wasn't going to work; she might as well be a sofa. "Not a good idea," he said, and backed away, disengaging her arm.

"You don't think so?" She stood by the window, facing him, letting the full light from outside make her argument.

Three floors up, they'd surely be making phone calls by now, and not all of them for a doctor. Parker said, "Sometimes the time isn't the right time."

"All times are the right time," she corrected him, and slowly smiled. "As the Bible says, Hope deferred maketh the heart sick."

"That's the Bible?"

"I always do what the Bible tells me," she said, and stretched, and smiled again. "Come, let us take our fill of love, until the morning. It says that, too."

She was a true pistol. He said, "What about Archibald?"

She laughed at the idea that he cared about

Archibald. "Stolen waters are sweet," she quoted, "and bread eaten in secret is pleasant."

"I'm sure it is," Parker told her. "And it'll be even better later. I'll take a rain check."

The smile disappeared. The body snapped to attention. Behind the horn-rim glasses, the blue eyes flashed at him. "Rain check? I'm not a
game."

That wasn't from the Bible.

It was called Sherenden, and it was a house from the twenties, modern architecture of the time, designed by someone famous in his day and built at the edge of a ravine in what had then been the outskirts of town. On two steep acres of brush-covered rocky hill, at the end of a narrow winding road from the nearest city avenue, the house had been constructed of fieldstone and native woods and stainless steel, fitted into the broken shape of the landscape, with a large airy living room at the top, four windowed walls around a central black-stone fireplace. The rest of the house spread away beneath, for a total of four stories with an interior elevator, its shaft blasted into the rock.

The original owner was a lawyer, also famous in his day, and the bottom level of the house, enclosed by two jutting rock ledges of ravine, had been his study, with accompanying bath and small kitchen. From his desk in there he could look out through plate glass at the wildness of his ravine as though suspended from a balloon, and not see the slightest corner of the rest of the house.

When it was built, the place was considered daring and original and one of the templates that would describe the future. It was written up approvingly in newspapers and magazines of its day, and was still mentioned, with small black-and-white photos, in books on modern architecture.

Time had not been kind to the house. First there had been the divorce, as acrimonious as any divorce in the history of law, which had seen Sherenden fought over but unlived in for more than ten years. The winner, the ex-wife, had had no real use for the house but had wanted it out of spite, and had thereafter ignored it almost completely. Her heirs sold it as soon as they could.

Then there was the city, which had grown in ways and directions not expected by the town planners. This rocky area just within the city limits, full of inaccessible ravines, had seemed the least likely direction for the city to grow. But then, after World War Two, the interstate highway system was born, and an on-ramp was placed just outside the city line in this direction, and it suddenly made sense to knock down hills and fill ravines and put in working-class housing developments; a thousand homes from the same blueprint, girdling the two acres that contained Sherenden.

In the early sixties, one of the subsequent owners turned Sherenden into two apartments, by means of a lot of plywood and the removal of about half the original windows. (The elevator had ceased to function years before, and now became an additional closet on each level.) In the late seventies, another owner decided to restore the place to its former glory, despite the fact that the views from the living room were now of many small Monopoly-board houses stretching away toward infinity and the view from the bottom floor study was of the dump that had been made at the base of the ravine. However, he went bankrupt while the work was still under way, and so the plywood went back up, even more than before, sealing the house away.

The bank that took over at that point enclosed Sherenden with a tall wire fence, and waited. They were always on the verge of selling the two acres—nobody at the bank ever thought about the house itself, except as a problem—to someone who would demolish the "existing structure" and level the land and put in eight houses, but the deals always fell through.

Kids and vagrants and drunks had made a sieve of the fence and a sty of the house. In the last decade, homeowners in Golden Heights and Oak Valley Ridge Estates, the neighboring development communities, had put forth a number of petitions against this eyesore in their midst, but the bank wouldn't tear the place down without a purchaser, and so the stalemate continued.

Parker took a cab to a shopping center, out away from the middle of town. He had lunch in a bar there—despite its fake Tiffany lamps, it was a bar—and watched the television up on its high shelf, full of excited local bulletins, one after another. A whole lot of stuff happening around here these days. The bartender thought it was probably the work of a private army, stocking up money and supplies for the revolution, and Parker said he thought the guy was right. The bartender had known after one look that Parker was a kindred spirit.

From the phone booth in the back of the bar, Parker called the Midway Motel and asked for Mr. or Mrs. Fawcett, and was told they'd checked out. No, the woman on the phone didn't know when they'd left, they were just gone. He asked to be connected to Mr. Grant's room, and let the phone ring in the black emptiness there for a good long time. The woman who'd switched him over never did come back to tell him his party wasn't answering and might be out and did he want to leave a message, so eventually he hung up.