Deadly Edge: A Parker Novel (21 page)

Parker reached down and slid one arm under Jessup’s shoulders and one under his knees.

Manny said, “And you be careful with him. If you hurt him, I’ll hurt you.”

Parker lifted Jessup into his arms, and then got to his feet. Jessup was still making the noises, but with long dry spaces of silence between them; then another grinding rasping intake of breath, and silence, and another tearing abrasive exhalation.

Manny backed out of the doorway as Parker approached him. Parker turned sideways to get Jessup through the doorway, and Manny moved back and to his left and gestured for Parker to go first down the stairs.

Jessup’s breathing started to get easier on the way down. With Manny three or four steps behind him, with no light but the candle, it was possible for Parker to reach his left hand around and close it over Jessup’s windpipe again. But this time he didn’t want Jessup dead, not yet.
Jessup’s life was protecting his own right now. He simply didn’t want Jessup improving.

Manny was cautious and alert, within his limitations, but his limitations were severe. Parker had three chances at him before they left the house, going out the same back door they’d all entered by, but he didn’t want to take over from Manny yet. Manny didn’t know it, but he was helping Parker solve his problems.

The next step Manny came to on his own, without suggestions: “We’ll take your car,” he said when they’d gone outside. He blew out the candle and threw the Chianti bottle away; it hit grass, and didn’t break. “You’re the son of a bitch, this is all your fault, we can take your car.”

Parker led the way, carrying Jessup, and Manny followed. It was less dark out here, and only sporadically could Parker close off Jessup’s air supply. But it was enough; whatever damage had been done, Parker could do enough now to keep it from correcting itself.

There was a driveway beside the house. They walked down it to the road and turned right. There were no houses showing light along this stretch, and looking between houses and out across the lake, Parker saw only two or three lights from over there. It was around eleven now; most of the weekenders had already gone, and the locals were starting to bed down for the night.

The only lights they saw on this side of the lake were those at Claire’s house, when they’d walked around the curve. Manny was keeping ten or fifteen feet back, and his feet scuffed when he walked. Parker didn’t know exactly what he’d taken, but it seemed to serve mostly as a sort of super-tranquilizer. It wasn’t LSD, which was simply a sledgehammer that took you away and brought you
back again, but it was a chemical of a similar kind. In any case, it was taken in a similar way, injected into a sugar cube and then the sugar cube sucked and swallowed. Some kind of speed, maybe, STP, the stuff that does permanent brain damage;
Speed Kills
, the warnings had said in the underground press. In any case, it was a stuff that didn’t take him away completely, and didn’t bring him back complete. It put an erratic cog in the engine of his brain; it would soon burn the engine out, but in the meantime its running would be wild and unpredictable.

At Claire’s house, a light showed in the kitchen window. If Manny wanted to go in there again, Parker would have to take care of him here; he would prefer to take it all away from this neighborhood first.

The kitchen light glinted on the Plymouth, Morris’ car. Parker headed for it, and behind him Manny said, “That’s yours?”

“I have the keys to it.”

Parker opened the rear door and laid Jessup across the back seat. He got out again and closed the door and turned to look at Manny.

Manny said, “Goodbye.”

“You can’t drive with that arm,” Parker said.

Manny frowned, and glanced down at his arm. He looked back at Parker, and his expression was uncertain again.

Parker said, “And Jessup wouldn’t want you to kill me yet. Or let me go.”

Manny grinned disbelievingly, though his larger puzzlement still showed through. “You think I’m going to let you drive?”

“You can’t. And I know where to find a doctor.”

“How come you’re so eager?”

“I want to stay alive a while longer.”

Manny frowned deeply, thinking about it. He glanced at the house, and Parker saw him thinking about phoning a doctor from here. Then he glanced at the Plymouth, and Parker knew he was imagining Jessup giving him orders. He wasn’t used to doing the planning himself.

Parker said, “You’re wasting time. But he’s your friend, not mine.”

It was being used to taking orders, having somebody else do the thinking, that decided it. Manny looked at him and said, “I’ll be in the back seat. I’ll be right behind you. You do anything funny, I’ll shoot you in the back of the head.”

“I know that.”

“All right,” Manny said.

7

The eastbound traffic was as heavy as ever, moving along bumper to bumper at a steady thirty-five miles an hour. Parker forced his way between a Ford station wagon and a Rambler sedan, and settled down to drive.

He couldn’t see Manny in the rear-view mirror, but he could sense him back there, in the left side of the rear seat. He had Jessup’s head in his lap, his wounded right arm was draped down across Jessup’s chest, and the .22 was in his left hand.

The incredible thing was, he hadn’t disarmed Parker. Probably because Parker had been using his hands instead of a gun, Manny must have decided there wasn’t any gun in it at all. Parker felt it, against his left side, and drove steadily along behind the Ford, the Rambler’s headlights in his rear-view mirror.

He didn’t know exactly how he was going to work all this out with Manny and Jessup, only that he wanted
to get the two of them—and this car—as far as possible from Colliver Pond. The Plymouth had Ohio plates; ten or fifteen miles should be far enough away.

And after that there’d be nothing to take care of but the Corvette. Buy one new tire, use the spare for the other, and Claire could drive it to New York tomorrow and leave it there. Parker’s own car, the Pontiac, had to be picked up from the other side of the lake. Then everything would be neat again.

But first Manny and Jessup had to be taken care of. In one way Manny was better to operate against, because he could be conned and dazzled, but Manny wasn’t entirely rational, his reactions couldn’t be counted on as Jessup’s could. Parker knew that at any second it might enter Manny’s head to start shooting, regardless of the fact that Parker was at the wheel and they were traveling at thirty-five miles an hour in all this traffic, regardless of any reasonable consideration at all. He couldn’t help it, his shoulders remained hunched, he felt he was holding his head stiffly, as though if he tensed sufficiently, the bullets would bounce off him.

Jessup had grown quiet again, and that might complicate matters, too, if he recovered sufficiently to take over giving the orders. He would want Parker disposed of right away, and he wouldn’t want a doctor.

Parker glanced at the speedometer. They’d come four miles from the turnoff. He would go ten miles, and then take the first likely-looking side road.

“How far to this doctor?” Manny sounded more irritable, less tranquilized. The nervousness in the situation must be counteracting the acid.

“Five or six more miles,” Parker said. “It won’t be long.”

“He’s the closest doctor?”

“He’s the closest safe doctor,” Parker said. “You want a doctor that’ll call the cops?”

“Don’t worry, nobody’s gonna call the cops. You go to the nearest doctor.”

“That means finding a phone book somewhere and looking it up. This is the only doctor I know. We’ll be there in ten minutes, maybe less.”

“Why don’t you pass some of these people?” Manny was getting increasingly irritable. He was coming down off his high, and his wounded arm was probably bothering him, particularly because of the way he’d been overworking it.

“After this curve,” Parker said. He too was impatient. They’d come seven miles now.

In the next two miles, he managed to pass three cars. It made no difference in the timing, three car lengths wasn’t any great distance, but it made Manny feel better to think they were hurrying.

Nine miles. In the back seat, Jessup had started moaning, and moving around. Parker listened, his head back a bit so he could hear better, his eyes frequently on the rear-view mirror.

Ten miles. Motion in the mirror; Manny’s head lowering. They were whispering together back there, either because Jessup had no voice now or because he was telling Manny how to handle the killing of Parker.

Parker’s right hand moved nearer the gun under his left arm.

Again, motion in the mirror, this time Manny’s head coming back up. Parker tensed, waiting. There was no traffic coming the other way right now; if necessary, he would throw the car into a swerve to the left and ram a pole
or a tree or a house on the other side, and finish them in the confusion. But that was the riskiest way, other ways would be better.

“Stop the car.” Manny’s voice, nervousness very plain in it now.

Eleven miles. Parker said, “The turnoff’s just ahead.”

A harshly whispered sentence from Jessup. Manny said, “All right. Stop after you make the turn.”

It was nearly a mile farther before a road appeared on the right. Parker made the turn, and accelerated hard.

“Stop now.”

“The doctor’s just ahead.”

Parker drove at the top speed the road would allow. It was narrow and winding and hilly, a blacktop county road through alternating stretches of woods and cleared farmland. Parker slued around curves and floored the accelerator on the straightaways. Manny might be the kind of fool who didn’t think about consequences, but Jessup wasn’t, and would know better than to have the driver killed at this kind of speed on this kind of road.

“What the hell you doing? Slow down!” Manny sounded startled and angry, but not really afraid.

“I want to get you to the doctor.” Parker had the high beams on, and he kept staring ahead for a useful place. He knew that Jessup was conscious back there now, he knew that Jessup didn’t want any doctor, and he knew that Manny had been told to put a bullet in Parker’s head the second the car came to a stop. So it couldn’t be done quietly after all.

And there it was. The Plymouth topped a rise and started down the other side, and ahead was a long straightaway, sloping down, with a sharp right at the bottom. And at the curve, directly ahead of the Plymouth, was a broad
low concrete-block building painted white, with several plate-glass windows across the front, and with a large sign running the width of the building above the windows, white letters on red: SUSSEX COUNTY TRACTOR SALES, INC. On the stretch of gravel between the front of the building and the road stood several pieces of farm or construction machinery, all painted yellow: tractors, backhoes, bulldozers. At both front corners of the graveled area, on high poles, floodlights glared down on the face of the building and the squatting bulky machinery.

The Plymouth hit ninety going down the straight stretch. In the mirror, Parker saw Jessup struggling upward, his face twisted with strain. Jessup knew something was going to happen, and he wanted to be able to stop it. His voice creaked without intelligible words, and Parker saw the curve coming; he braced his forearms across the steering wheel, pressed his back into the seat back, and slammed his foot down hard on the brakes.

The car bucked, nose down, and squealed forward along the road, the tail swerving bumpily to the left, the rear tires leaving broad stripes of burned-off rubber on the blacktop. Jessup and Manny were flung forward off the seat, and Parker was pressed flat to the steering wheel.

The curve. Parker’s left hand was on the door handle; his right foot lifted from the brake, his right hand spun the wheel to the left. The car shook itself and straightened out, pointing at all that yellow machinery. There was a narrow ditch straight ahead; the driveway entrance was farther to the left. Parker pushed down on the door handle, and as the front tires left the road, sailing into the air out over the ditch, he shoved the door open and lunged out, pushing back with his right foot on the accelerator as he went.

The car leaped away, hurdling the ditch. The door
slammed behind him, missing his right foot by an inch. The Plymouth bounced on the gravel, sideswiped a backhoe, and ran head-on into the side of a tractor.

8

Parker’s legs hit a tractor tire while he was still rolling; his momentum slued him halfway around before he stopped, on his back in front of the tractor, his legs twisted sideways and knees bent around the tire.

The final crash of the car happened after that, a second or two later. It sounded very loud, and various, as though a dozen cars were involved instead of just one, and the noise seemed to come from everywhere and not from any particular point.

Parker straightened his legs, and felt pain in both of them. He sat up and stroked his palms down over his shins and felt nothing broken, but both would be bruised and aching for a while.

He didn’t mind using the automatic here. He took it out, and used the grill of the tractor to help him get up. The legs didn’t hurt any more or less when he put weight on them.

The car wasn’t burning. That was all right, but he would have preferred a fire. He moved through the machinery toward it, watching. Both headlights were out, and the engine had stopped running.

Parker came around the side of a bulldozer, with the Plymouth directly in front of him, broadside, and the rear door on this side swung open and Jessup fell out, his arm stretched out in front of him, his finger squeezing the trigger of the gun he had pointed at Parker. Ricochets twanged from the yellow metal of the bulldozer, and Parker fired once, then ducked back out of sight, crouching behind a foot-wide tire as high as his shoulder. From high to the right came the glaring light of the floodlights.

“God damn you! God damn you!” It sounded like a frog croaking in words, not like a human voice at all.

Parker moved forward just enough to see. Jessup was kneeling beside the car, gun in his fist, head turning back and forth as he looked for Parker. Behind him, Manny crouched on the floor of the Plymouth, peering out. His face was bloody, and his wounded right arm hung motionless at his side.