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?”
“Yes. But what—”
“Give me the names back.”
She hadn’t been paying particular attention to the names, not knowing they meant anything. She said, “Is it important?”
“Yes. Those are the names to use.”
“Wilmington Hotel,” she said, trying to remember. “Edward—I’m sorry.”
“Latham. Edward Latham.”
“Edward Latham. Is that all?”
“Don’t antagonize them. They’re very mean people.”
The very flatness of the statement made her believe him. “I know how to be a little mouse,” she said, remembering times when she’d fought male strength with female cunning, feeling strong in the memories.
“That’s good,” he said. “I’ll get back there as soon as I can.”
It was rare that he let her feel tender toward him. “I know you will,” she said.
“Clean my stuff out of there right away.”
“I will.”
She heard the click as he hung up, but held the phone to her ear a second or so longer, then reluctantly put it back in its cradle.
Get his things out of here. It was after two in the morning, she was ready for bed, the temptation was strong to let it go until morning. But she believed him about the people he was involved with, and she believed he knew best how to prepare for them. Reluctant, but dogged, she got out of bed again, turned on the overhead light, and got his suitcase from the closet.
One suitcase was all it took; that, and fifteen minutes. Then she dressed, putting clothes on over the nightgown, and lugged the suitcase through the kitchen and out of the house.
It was very dark out, patches of cloud in the sky, no moon. She stood on the gravel a minute, then put the suitcase down, went back into the house, and got the flashlight from its kitchen drawer.
Stow his things in an empty house, he’d said. The houses were empty on both sides, why not pick one of them? She shone the flashlight right and left, and chose the house to her left because there seemed to be fewer trees and bushes in the way.
She left the suitcase outside the lake-side door, and went around the house trying doors and windows, all of which were locked. Finally she broke a window on the side opposite her own house, unlocked it, raised it, and climbed in. The electricity was turned off, so she found her way through to the rear door by flashlight, unlocked it, opened it, and brought the suitcase inside. The bedroom closet seemed a perfectly adequate place to leave it. She went out by the door, leaving it unlocked, and went back across to her own place and inside, carefully locking the door behind her.
In bed again, in the darkness, the rifle on the floor under the bed, she lay gazing at the paler rectangle of the window and thought about Parker, and began to think sexually about Parker. She was lying on her back, but the sexual images involving Parker grew so insistent she rolled over on her side, trying to find a position without sexual connotations.
It was strange, this feeling. When she was involved with a man, and he was with her, she had very strong and healthy sex urges, but when she was alone she never thought very much about sex at all. She had always been glad to welcome Parker back after one of his jobs, because his own sexual appetites were always at their strongest then, but the time spent waiting was usually empty of sexual frustration. Yet tonight her mind was crowded with remembered incidents, moments, expressions, and she couldn’t get rid of them, couldn’t get to sleep.
After a long while the window rectangle began to lighten. “This is ridiculous,” she said, aloud, and got out of bed. She went to the kitchen and brought back the radio and turned on an all-night music station from New York. Listening to the music, the announcer, the commercials, she finally began to relax toward sleep. During the five A.M. news her mind at last shut down and she slept. And in her dreams Parker mounted her and stroked long and deep and endless, and it kept being spoiled for her because there was someone else just over his shoulder.
4
None of the dogs were any good. Today was Sunday, so no pet shops were open, and Claire had been limited to the private owners advertising in the local Sunday paper. Most of the dogs listed were puppies, and though under normal circumstances she would have liked to start with a puppy and watch it grow, what she needed was a dog that would be a guardian and defender of the house right now.
Three of the advertised dogs were full-grown, and calls to their present owners had made them seem possible choices. Around noon Claire had driven away in the Buick to look at the dogs, and none of the three of them was any good for her purpose. Feeling cranky and irritable at the waste of time and lack of success—and feeling worse because of the less than six hours’ sleep she’d had—she got back to the house at two o’clock to be doubly irritated by the problem of the locked garage door.
The problem was, the doors could only be locked or unlocked from the outside. It made it very awkward. Sooner or later they’d have to install modern overhead doors, but in the meantime there didn’t seem to be any way to have a lock on these doors that could be gotten at from both sides.
Now she unlocked and opened the doors, drove the Buick in, went back outside, closed and locked the doors again, and walked crunching across the stone driveway to the front door. Another key unlocked that, and she went in.
The only thing that bothered her about solitude was the absence of sound. She had brought the radio back to the kitchen when she’d gotten up this morning, and now she turned it on first thing, and started a pot of tea. In one of the Scandinavian countries they had recently introduced all-night radio for the first time, and the suicide rate dropped by an amazing percentage.
She ate a carton of vanilla yogurt while waiting for the tea. Dinner was the only true meal she ever ate, snacking the rest of the day on foods that were supposed to be good for dieters.
She poured a cup of tea to carry into the living room, and going down the hall past the open bedroom door she saw from the corner of her eye that a man was lying on the bed, on his back, his head propped up by a pillow; he was smiling dreamily through the window at the lake.
She went on another step before the image registered, and then stopped. A T-shaped iron bar of dread appeared within her back and shoulders, bowing her back, hunching her shoulders. The cup slopped tea on her thumb and fingers. She found she was blinking uncontrollably, and she made herself turn back, turn around and look at him again, in hopes that he wasn’t really there.
She had gone beyond the doorway; it was necessary to take one dragging underwater step back in the direction she’d come, and then she could see him. His shoes were off, showing black socks. He was wearing plaid bell-bottom slacks in shades of yellow and green, very dirty-looking. Some clothing was crumpled like laundry on the floor beside the bed, and above the trousers he was wearing only a gray-looking T-shirt, partly pulled out of the trousers. He wore a watch on his left wrist, with a very wide brown leather band; the wide band made her think of Roman slaves. He looked to be in his middle or late twenties and had long straight brown hair, very much like her own, only less well combed. He was slender, reasonably well built, but his face was fat, with puffy cheeks and protruding lips. She stood in the doorway, staring at him, and he made no move.
A sound behind her made her spin around, and she spilled more of the hot tea. She made a small high-pitched sound of terror in her throat, and looked at the other one, in the living-room doorway. He was wearing a fringed Davy Crockett jacket over a blue shirt streaked with gray as though Clorox had been dribbled over it. His black trousers were tucked into brown paratrooper’s boots. He had a wild friz of hair, blondish-brown, a Caucasian equivalent of the hair-style called Afro, and he was smiling at her. He had the laughing eyes that go with sudden cruelty.
His voice was light, his manner flippant. He said, “Don’t bug Manny, he’s trippin’ out. Come on in here. What you got in the cup?”
She didn’t move. She shook her head
, not intending to.
He looked at her, and his expression became suddenly mean, though he still smiled. He said, “You want pencils in the cup? I don’t need you able to see, you know. Just so you can hear and talk, that’s all I need.”
She didn’t understand the specifics of the threat, but knew it was a threat and had no doubt he would do it, whatever it was. I have to move, she thought, I have to do what he says. She took one step forward, and the second was easier, and she walked toward him, the bones of her face standing out prominently around deep-set eyes.
He stepped to one side, grinning, bowing her into her living room. As she went by he lifted a hand, saying, “What’s in the cup?” He took it, tasted it, laughed in delight. “Son of a bitch, it’s tea! Isn’t that cute? You take sugar in your tea, honey?”
Under the things he said, things moved that he didn’t say. She shook her head. “No, I don’t.”
“That’s too bad. Well, different strokes for different folks. Sit down on your sofa, honey, let’s talk. Here, take your tea.”
She took the tea, went to the sofa, sat down. The fireplace was directly in front of her, with yesterday’s dead fire in it. The stones looked cold.
He didn’t sit. He went over and stood at the corner of the fireplace, one foot up on the hearth, one elbow up on the mantelpiece with his hand dangling down, his other hand casually on his hip as he faced her. He said, “We’re looking for a friend of yours. Tell the truth, we thought we’d run into him here. When’ll he be back?”
Cool, she thought. Cunning. She remembered what she’d said to Parker on the phone last night: “I know how to be a little mouse.” Did she? She was blinking again, very badly, and was afraid that would betray her; he’d see the blinking and know she was lying. But it wouldn’t stop, and she said, “I don’t know who you mean. I’m sorry, you have me frightened, but—” She raised her free hand and rubbed her eyelids hard with thumb and forefinger.
Deadly Edge: A Parker Novel Page 10
