Deadly Edge: A Parker Novel (17 page)

What were they
doing?
Vaguely she saw movement outside, on the porch. They were out there, or one of them was out there.

Should she shoot at them through the glass? But they were so vaguely seen, and it was probably only one of them anyway, and the chances were she wouldn’t hit them at all, not under these conditions. And afterward they would know she had a gun.

Dragging sounds, rustling movements, half-seen
busyness out there on the porch. And then nothing. There still seemed to be someone or something there, a vague shape bulky outside the glass door, but she couldn’t make out what it was.

Turn on the light? But that would illuminate her much more than it.

There were porch lights, two of them, operated by a pair of switches, one beside the door in here and one beside the door in the living room. Either switch operated both lights. She could crawl over to the door—standing up and walking was beyond her now—and reach up and turn on the porch lights, and then she would know what it was out there. But did she really want to know?

She shifted position, turning half-around on the floor so as to put her left side toward the porch. She raised the rifle and pointed it at the bulky thing beyond the door.

Nothing happened. She waited, and nothing happened.

And then the porch lights came on, suddenly, unexpectedly, and she screamed at what was outside the door, looking in at her.

Morris. Dead and naked and cut all over his body and tied upright in a kitchen chair. Just sitting there, with his arms hanging down at his sides, his head dangling to the right, his eyes looking at her.

She emptied the rifle into him, and the laughing kept on anyway, and she was squeezing the trigger to make click sounds against emptiness when Jessup and Manny punched their way in through the bathroom door.

PART FOUR

1

The plane circled Newark for fifteen minutes, and had been late getting there in any event. It was nearly eight o’clock before they landed and the passengers could get off.

At night, Newark Airport looks like Newark: underilluminated, squat, dirty. The terminal building seemed to be full of short people speaking Spanish, all of them excited about one thing or another. Parker went through them like a panther through geese, and trotted across the blacktop street out front to the parking lot and the Pontiac.

He had major highway to drive on most of the way, with country blacktop for only the last ten miles or so. He drove by the turnoff to the road that circled the lake, knowing that just over a mile farther on, the other end of the same road came around to intersect with the one he was on.

There’d been a lot of traffic coming the other way, eastbound, weekenders on their way back to the city, and a car was waiting to come out at the second turnoff. Parker steered around it, and met two others coming out while he drove in. He would have preferred a week night, when there’d be a lot less activity around the lake.

He picked a likely-looking house on the lake side of the road, one that showed no lights or any sign of recent activity, but which didn’t have its windows boarded up for the winter. He left the Pontiac in the driveway, looked through one of the windows in the garage door, and saw a fairly large outboard motorboat in there, on a wheeled carrier. So the owner hadn’t started coming up yet this year at all, or the boat would be in the water and room would have been left in the garage for their car.

Parker walked around the side of the house and down the slope of weedy lawn at the back to the water’s edge, and looked out across the lake. There were maybe fifteen houses showing light over there; one of them would be Claire’s. He was too far away now to make out anything but light and darkness.

The house here was built on land that sloped pretty steeply down toward the water, so that what was the first floor on the road side was a good eight feet above the ground back here, held up by a series of metal posts. Part of the underneath section had been closed off to form a sort of workshop, and the rest was left open and used for storage of various things: a lawnmower, jerry cans, an oildrum-and-wood-platform float, and two aluminum rowboats.

Parker wrestled one of the rowboats out of the storage space, turned it right side up, and dragged it down to the water’s edge. Then he went back and found several wooden oars, their green paint flaking off, leaning against
the rear of the storage space. He brought them down to the rowboat, fit them into the oarlocks, and pushed the boat into the water.

It was a cloudy night, with occasional spaces of starry sky but no moon. Parker set off in the rowboat, and twenty feet from shore he could no longer clearly make out the house he’d started from.

It was a cool evening, but the rowing was warm work. The boat moved well enough so long as he kept at the oars, but it never built up any momentum; the instant he would stop to rest, the boat would sag to a halt in the water.

Out in the middle, he stopped for a minute to study the far shore, trying to figure out which house was Claire’s. But it still wasn’t possible, the lights were anonymous, not giving a clear enough indication of the shape of any of the buildings, and he was still much too far away to make out the rooms inside any of those lit windows.

He saw that his tendency while rowing was to veer slightly to the left, probably because his right arm was the stronger. When he started again now, he picked one of the lights back on the shore he’d left, and tried to keep that light on a direct line with the rear of the rowboat. When he looked over his shoulder at the shore he was approaching, it seemed to be working; so far as he could tell he was now traveling in a straight line.

Glimpses of the main road could be seen far away to the left, beyond the end of the lake; a steady stream of headlights made a broken white line marking the route. Parker knew approximately how far in from that road Claire’s house stood, and there were four or five houses showing light in the right area. He was aiming for the one farthest to the left, and when he got close enough to make
out details he would turn and parallel the shore until he got to the right house.

The first one wasn’t it. It had no boathouse, and the porch was a different shape.

Sound travels across the water. There were two young boys fishing off a wooden dock at the second house, and though he was well out from shore he could hear every word they said to one another. They were arguing, quietly and dispassionately, about which one of them had lost a missing lure. Parker rowed past, out beyond the reach of the light-spill from the house behind the boys, and at one point the right oarlock made a metallic creaking sound, not very loud. At once the boys stopped talking, and he could see their silhouettes as they gazed out in this direction. He kept rowing, now making no sound other than the dip of oar blades in and out of the water.

One of the boys said, “There’s somebody out there in a rowboat.”

“He’ll hear you.”

“That’s all right. Maybe he’s got that Big Red, since you don’t have it.” And they went back to their reasonable bickering about the lure.

There were five dark houses before the next lit one. Out in the middle of the lake there’d been a little breeze-chop making wavelets that had slowed the boat some, but in closer to shore the water was almost completely flat, with only a slight ripple from the breeze, and the boat cut through it faster and more smoothly.

He recognized the boathouse first, even though this was the only time he’d seen it from this direction. But he knew it was the right house before he could see it clearly, and he rowed more cautiously, shipping the oars at last and letting the boat drift the short distance in to the boathouse.

The living room was lit, the bedroom was dark. He could see no one through the living-room windows. Light-spill on the side of the house told him the kitchen lights were on.

He took out the automatic from under his arm and held it in his right hand while with his left he maneuvered the boat around the front of the boathouse and along the wooden dock on the side. The shore was finished with a concrete patio, so he kept the boat from drifting all the way in; he didn’t want the clatter of aluminum on concrete.

The boat had its own frayed rope, one end tied to a ring at the prow. There were several rings set at intervals along the outer edge of the dock, and Parker put the automatic down on the dock while he made the boat fast. Then he picked up the gun again and stepped up cautiously onto the dock.

Was that movement on the porch? He stood on the dock, against the boathouse’s side wall, and watched and waited. Nothing happened, and then a figure—two figures—moved past the lit windows from left to right. The door between the living room and the porch opened and closed.

Parker waited. Nothing else happened. He had the vague impression of people moving in the living room, but the angle was wrong to make out what they were doing.

He moved out away from the boathouse wall and came cautiously in off the dock, moving at an angle that would take him eventually to the lightless bedroom. The tall skinny trees spaced around the lawn obscured his view of the house slightly without giving him any cover. He moved up through them, eyes scanning the house, automatic ready in his right hand.

The porch lights snapped on, and a second later the night erupted in rifle shots and screaming and the clatter of breaking glass. There was something on the porch in
front of the bedroom door, Parker couldn’t see what; he crouched low and ran forward, now aiming more to the right, toward the living room.

Claire had said she’d bought a rifle.

The noise ended as abruptly as it had started: first the scream, then the glass, and finally the flurry of shots. None of the rifle fire seemed to have been aimed in Parker’s direction.

In the new silence, Parker moved along the edge of the screened-in porch toward the stoop and the screen door. Looking back to his left, he could see now what was in front of the bedroom door: a chair, facing the bedroom, with somebody sitting in it. Tied to it. Unconscious, or dead. The chair was turned away so that Parker couldn’t see who it was or anything else about him.

The porch lights were a nuisance, but the screaming had given him a greater sense of urgency. He went up the stoop, crouching, looking every way at once, and another scream sounded from the bedroom; louder, more shrill and hopeless than before.

Parker pushed at the screen door and the latch was on. He kicked the sole of his foot against the wood of the door just above the knob, and the door popped wide open, as though in invitation. He jumped through, looked to the right and ran left, toward the bedroom. He stopped behind the chair, looked over the shoulder of the thing sitting in it, and saw Claire sitting in the middle of the floor, clutching a rifle in both hands. Behind her, the hall door was barricaded with the dresser. To the left, the bathroom door had been locked, but had now been broken open, and two shaggy-looking men were standing just inside the doorway. One of them, moon-faced and grinning, started toward Claire as though he were a child and she a piece of
candy. The other one, more hawklike, stood back with the small smile of the spectator on his mouth.

Parker lifted the hand with the automatic in it. The hawklike one saw the movement, saw him standing there, and yelled, “Manny! Back!”

Manny? Parker fired at him, but Manny was already turning and the bullet didn’t hit him right; it caught him in the upper left arm and knocked him sprawling on his face on the floor in front of the bed.

Claire had flung the rifle away and lunged for the side of the bed, to press herself against the floor there.

The hawklike one had suddenly developed a gun. He fired twice, both bullets going wide, and shouted, “Manny, for Christ’s sake, get up!”

It was tough, from outside the room, to get a good shot at either of them. Having already wounded Manny, Parker tried for the other one, but the shot missed, and after it the guy ducked back through the doorway. And Manny had gotten his feet under him; in a scrabbling lunge, half-run and half-crawl, he catapulted himself across the open space and through the bathroom door and out of sight.

Parker knocked over the chair with the dead man in it, to get it out of his way. The glass door was locked; he reached through the broken part and unlocked it, then slid it open and stepped inside.

Claire was still cowering on the floor beside the bed. Parker left her there for now, and followed the two men.

He was slowed down because he couldn’t go through any doorway or around any corner without first being sure they weren’t waiting for him on the other side. But when he got to the kitchen he saw the outside door
standing open, and heard the roar of a car starting up. The kitchen was a mess, chairs overturned and slop everywhere; he saw it without thinking about it yet, and ran to the front door.

The light switch on the wall beside the door turned on two outside lights, an ornamental fixture beside the door and a floodlight mounted over the garage doors. Parker hit that switch on the way by, and where there had been darkness outside the doorway there was now the gravel driveway and two cars: a white Plymouth and a dark blue Corvette. They had been parked side by side in front of the door, the ’Vette nearest the house, and it was the ’Vette that was now in motion, backing fast and curving to put its taillights against the garage doors and point its nose down the driveway toward the road.

Parker got one shot at it while it was broadside to him over there, the driver shifting out of reverse. He didn’t bother to try for the driver, who was in any case crouched low in the seat and was a chancy target in this light. He shot the left front tire, and when the ’Vette surged forward, spraying gravel back onto the garage doors, Parker fired a second time and put out the left rear tire. The ’Vette slued badly, but kept moving. Parker ran forward three strides, turned sideways to the fleeing car, and tried to plant a bullet in the right rear tire, but apparently missed. As the ’Vette was grinding through the turn onto the road, swaying and bumping badly with both left tires out, Parker made a try for the gas tank, firing two shots into the car’s body. Then it was out of range of the floodlight, though for a few seconds longer he could still hear it.