Deadly Edge: A Parker Novel (12 page)

The last mouthful of tea in the cup was cold. She made a face, got to her feet, carried the empty cup to the kitchen. There was still more in the pot, but it was only lukewarm. She didn’t want it, anyway. She put on a jacket, walked around the house locking windows and doors, and then went out to the garage and opened the doors and backed the blue Buick out. And then discovered there was no way to lock the garage doors. There was a hasp lock but no padlock to secure it. Irritated, blaming the real estate man in some obscure fashion, she got into the Buick and drove away.

There was a town three miles away, but it was very
small, too small for what she wanted. The nearest town of any size was twelve miles farther on.

Her first stop was a hardware store, where she bought two padlocks, one for each set of garage doors. She also looked in their phone book, and found a nearby sporting-goods store.

At first she wasn’t sure she’d come to the right place. Fishing equipment was everywhere, from racks of rods to nets hanging on the walls to display cases full of lures to creels hanging from the ceiling. The short round man who came swimming through all this toward her looked like the fish it was all designed for, with his round bald head and light-reflecting glasses. “Yes, miss.” He had a habit of rubbing his hands together, which gave the impression he planned to cheat somehow.

She said, “My husband wants me to go hunting with him, so I have to have my own rifle. You do sell rifles?”

“Certainly, certainly. This way, please.”

A doorway in the back of the store, hemmed in with fishing net, led to an entirely different world. Rifles and pistols were everywhere, intermixed with red or red-and-black hunter’s clothing. There were large pictures of animals on the walls: elk, deer, moose.

“Mr. Amberville? Mr. Amberville, this young lady would like to buy a rifle. Mr. Amberville will take care of you, miss.”

The fish-man went back to his own department, and Mr. Amberville came smiling over. A younger man, very thin, he had the bony features of an Austrian ski instructor. He seemed pleasant, but remote; he said, “A rifle? A present?”

“No, for myself. My husband wants me to go hunting
with him, so I have to have a rifle of my own.”

“I see.” He looked her up and down, impersonally, as though he were about to sell her a coat. “Something light,” he said. “What will you be going after?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What game will you be hunting?”

“Oh.” What was man-size? “Deer, I suppose.”

He said, “Hmmm. Well, let’s see. Over this way.”

He began to show her rifles. She held them, and they all seemed heavy and awkward and unusable in her hands. He stood beside her, talking, pointing out the fine points of the different rifles as she held them, and she had no idea what he was talking about.

She was beginning to get discouraged. She looked around, and saw some other rifles in another case, and said, “What are those?”

“Twenty-twos,” he said. “A little light for what you have in mind.”

“Let me see them,” she said. “They look more my size.”

“They’re not really the best for deer-hunting,” he said, frowning. “They’re what you’d want for small game.”

“That’s all right, I don’t expect to hit anything, anyway.”

He didn’t seem to like that, but he didn’t say anything. Silently he put away the rifles he’d been showing her and led her over to the other case.

“That one,” she said, picking one of them almost at random, simply on the basis of looks.

His expression doubtful, he opened the case and took down the rifle she’d pointed to. “This is the Marlin 39A,” he said. “It holds twenty-five shorts, twenty longs,
or eighteen long rifles. It’s forty and a half inches long, weighs six and three quarter pounds. It’s lever-action; like this.” His right hand made a fast down-and-up motion with a metal loop on the bottom of the rifle, making click sounds.

She said, “What’s that for?”

“It chambers your cartridge.” At her expression, he pointed to the smaller barrel under the main barrel. “You load the rounds in here. The lever—”

“You mean the bullets.”

“That’s right, the bullets. You load them in front here. The lever brings one bullet up into firing position, and ejects the used casing from the bullet you’ve already fired.”

“You mean I have to do that with the lever every time I shoot.”

“That’s right.”

“May I—?”

She took the rifle, and tried the lever, and didn’t like it. “No, that’s not for me.” She looked at the other rifles in the case.

“If I may suggest—”

“Yes, of course.”

He put the Marlin away and brought out a different gun. “This is the Remington 66. It holds fifteen long rifles. Those are the bullets. It’s thirty-eight and a half inches long and weighs four pounds.”

“What do I have to do to get the bullet ready to fire?”

“Nothing. It’s auto-load.”

“May I see it?”

“Of course.”

It was the lightest rifle so far, and also the shortest.
She was too self-conscious to hold it up to her shoulder and look down the sights, but of them all, this rifle felt the least cumbersome in her hands. “I’ll take it,” she said.

“Very good. And ammunition?”

“Please.”

The rifle was fifty-four dollars and fifty cents—he wanted to sell her a four-power telescopic sight as well, which she refused—and a box of fifty long rifle .22 caliber bullets was eighty-five cents. She paid in cash, and he carried the cardboard carton with the rifle in it out to the car for her.

Driving back, she suddenly found herself afraid that Parker’s enemies would be waiting for her at the house, and she felt an abrupt deep wave of resentment at him for endangering her home this way. The feeling of resentment didn’t last, but the fear did, and two miles from the house she pulled off the road and took the rifle out of the carton.

She spent fifteen minutes parked off the road, studying the weapon, reading the instruction booklet that had come with it, and very gingerly loading it. She put it down on the back seat, barrel pointing at the right-hand door, and after that, drove much more slowly and cautiously, afraid that a bump in the road would make the thing fire.

There was no one at the house. She fastened both sets of garage doors with the new padlocks, then went in through the kitchen and down the hall and used the interior door to get into the garage again and get the rifle. After not being sure what to do with it at first, she put it down on the sofa in the living room.

She looked at the phone, but it didn’t ring.

2

Claire fired, and the rifle stock thumped hard into her right shoulder. She grimaced, and stepped backward away from the pain, and held the rifle with her right hand so she could rub her shoulder with the left. She hadn’t expected the rifle to do anything like that, and the surprise and hurt distracted her for a minute from looking to see whether or not she’d hit her target.

It was a pint milk carton—a half-and-half carton, really—that she’d put on the ground in the middle of the backyard, between the house and the lake. She’d stood up on the porch, in the doorway, and aimed carefully at the cow on the carton, and very slowly squeezed the trigger.

And she’d missed. Coming down from the porch, she looked at the carton to find it untouched, and the ground around it also untouched. She frowned at that, and ranged wider, and could see absolutely no sign of the bullet anywhere at all.

Hadn’t it fired? The rifle had punched her in the shoulder, and she remembered from the Remington instruction booklet that that was called recoil. But had it been more recoil than normal, and was that because the bullet had somehow gotten jammed inside the barrel? She almost looked in the barrel to see, but recognized what that picture would look like from cartoons in magazines, and refrained.

She stood in the yard, holding the rifle in both hands, looking this way and that like a pioneer woman searching for Indians, and then noticed the window in the side wall of the boathouse. It had twelve smallish panes, three across and four down. She put the rifle to her shoulder again and peered down over the sights at the bottom middle pane.

As she started to squeeze the trigger, she felt her shoulder shrinking away from the rifle butt. That was no good, she knew that much. She pulled the rifle hard into her shoulder with her left hand, kept squinting one-eyed at the bottom middle pane, and fired.

It bucked less this time. Also, she noticed it less because she heard the tinkle of broken glass. Elated, she hurried over to the boathouse and discovered a triangular section of glass gone from the top right pane. “High and to the right,” she muttered. By about three feet.

But at least the rifle was working. And with a little more practice, she expected to get pretty good at it.

But she couldn’t keep shooting out windowpanes. She looked around again, saw nothing helpful, then put the rifle down on the grass and ran into the house. In the kitchen she got a package of paper plates and a cardboard of thumbtacks. As an afterthought, she grabbed the pencil from the window sill over the sink. Outside again, she
tacked the paper plates to the side of the boathouse in the vague shape of a man, stood back about twenty feet, and fired at his head.

The next four shots were all high and to the right, but each of them was closer to the paper plates. She was beginning to see that it was the recoil that was throwing her aim off, that and the way she pulled the trigger. The recoil made the rifle barrel lift upward, and her manner of pulling the trigger made the barrel veer to the right. She concentrated on keeping the barrel down and her right hand still, and the next shot nicked the upper right edge of the paper plate. Pleased with herself, she walked over and wrote the number 1 on the plate next to the ragged hole.

In all, she used thirty rounds, twenty-eight of them at the paper plates, nineteen of them hitting the plates, the last ten in a row all hitting home. The sun was going down behind the mountains across the lake when she took the plates and thumbtacks down from the wall and carried them with the rifle and the ammunition carton back into the house. She locked the door behind herself, leaned the rifle against the wall near the fireplace, started a fire, and went out to the kitchen to make dinner. She turned on the kitchen radio and sang with the music.

3

When the phone rang, shortly after two in the morning, she was just getting into bed. There were two extensions, one in the living room and one here, on the nightstand on her side of the bed. She picked it up after one ring, and said, “Hello?”

Parker’s voice: “It’s me. How are things?”

“Fine.” She used her free hand to lean a pillow up against the headboard, then rested her back against it. She was wearing a yellow nightgown he’d never seen; when they were together, she slept nude. She said, “How are you?”

“No visitors?”

“Nobody at all,” she said. Out in the living room, the dying fire made a dry settling sound. “Will you be back soon?”

“My friend died of a lingering illness,” he said. His voice was as flat and emotionless as ever. “Very painful illness.”

It took her a second to understand his meaning, and when she did she didn’t like it. “Oh,” she said. She knew what he was going to say next, and was already rejecting it.

She was right. He said, “You ought to take a day or two off. Go to New York, do some shopping.”

The mulish feeling came over her again; she could feel it even in the set of her jaw. “I don’t want to leave my house,” she said.

“This is serious!” His voice wasn’t more emotional, exactly, merely more intense, pushing each word harder into her ear.

“So am I,” she said. And then, casting around to find something reassuring to say to him, heard herself add, “Tomorrow I’ll buy a dog.” Which she’d had no intention of doing, till now. But a dog might be nice, a companion during the times when Parker was away.

He was saying, “I’m talking about tonight.”

“I’ll be all right. I went out and got a rifle.”

She hadn’t intended to tell him that, not until afterward, when he was here again and this situation was finished. It sounded foolish, really, to say she’d bought a rifle; she wouldn’t tell him about the time this afternoon spent shooting at paper plates out by the lake.

There was a little silence from his end of the wire now, and she read it to mean that the rifle hadn’t reassured him any more than the dog had, and that he was trying to find some way to change her mind. But in the end all he did was repeat himself: “I think you ought to go away.”

She didn’t want him to say that any more. “I know what you think,” she said, more sharply than she’d intended, and tried at once to soften it, saying, “I know you’re worried about me. But you just don’t know what
this house means to me. I
can’t
go away from it, not after I just got into it. I won’t be
driven
away from it.”

She felt she had told him a great deal about herself then, much more than was usual to her nature. She felt almost frightened, wondering what he would do with what she’d said, and the silence from the phone extended this time, and he did nothing with it, and finally she said, hesitantly, “Hello? Are you there?”

“I’m here.” He said it distractedly, and then there was silence again, and when next he spoke, his voice was matter of fact, seamless again, without the increase in pressure. “What you do right now,” he said, “you pack everything there that’s mine and get it out. Stow it all in one of the empty houses around there. But do it now, don’t wait till morning.”

“You don’t have that much here,” she said. Looking around the dimlit bedroom, all she saw of his was one pair of shoes on the floor near the closet.

“So it won’t take long,” he said. “If anybody comes looking for me, you don’t fight them. Understand me? You don’t fight them.”

She felt herself getting mulish again, thinking of the practice time with the rifle, but she fought the mulish feeling down and said, “What do I do instead?”

“Tell them you just run a message service, you only see me two or three times a year, when I give you some money for taking care of my messages. What you tell them, any time a message comes for me you call the Wilmington Hotel in New York and leave it for me in the name of Edward Latham. You got that?”