Backflash. Part 18

"He set you up to do it, so he could turn you in. That isn't even entrapment, I don't know what the f.u.c.k that is."

"Stupidity."

"All right." The guy was more relaxed now, as though Cathman being an amateur and an idiot had created a bond between the two of them. He said, "So if you didn't come here to divvy up the money, or anything like that, why did you come?"

"To kill him."

"Hah. No loose ends."

"That's right."

"I wish I'd done it that way myself, years ago," the guy said. "All right, Mr. Parker, I want in. I've got you, but I don't want you, I want money. Are your partners dead, too?"

"No. We know each other, we work together."

"So they're waiting for you to come back, mission accomplished, the loose cannon dealt with."

"Right. And we divvy the money and go our ways."

"So if I kill you," the guy said, "I can't find them, and I can't get any money. But if I let you live, I've got to have money. I need money, that's what it comes down to."

"I could see that."

"So what's your offer?"

"We got over four hundred thousand," Parker said.

The guy frowned. "The radio said three and a half."

"I don't know about that. Usually they estimate high. All I know is, we got over four." Because, to make his story work, there had to seem to be enough for everybody. "There's five of us, so that's eighty apiece, a little more than eighty. You help me in two ways, and-"

"Like letting you live."

Parker shook his head. "You aren't gonna kill me, because I'm not a threat to you like this, and I'm no use to you dead. Don't talk as though we're both ignorant."

"Well, f.u.c.k me," the guy said, with a surprised laugh. "You talk pretty tough for somebody sitting under my gun. You think I never killed anybody?"

"I think you never killed anybody when you didn't have a reason for it," Parker said. "Do you want to listen to my proposition?"

The guy shrugged. "Help you two ways, you said."

"First, kill Cathman. I need him dead. I can't do it myself laced up like this, so either you do it or unhook me so I can do it myself."

"We'll work on that," the guy said. "What's the other?"

"For that, I do need to be unhooked," Parker said.

"I don't think so. For what?"

"I've got to search in here and in the office. I've got to see what else he put on paper that could make trouble for me."

"I'll search for you. You tell me what you're looking for."

"No."

The guy looked at him, and waited, and then said, "No? That's it, no?"

"That's it. No. Do you want to hear what your side is?"

"This should be good."

"Why not? If you kill Cathman, or let me do it, and let me run my search in here, that makes you a partner. I won't have trouble with the others, so neither will you. We'll each be getting a little over eighty. So we take twelve out of each of us, that still gives us almost seventy apiece, which is still good, and sixty for you. Is sixty enough for you?"

Clearly, the guy would try to figure out how to get it all, how not to have any partners at the end of the day, but just as clearly he'd also try to figure out how to make it look as though he was content with a piece. Should he pretend to think sixty was enough? Parker watched him think it through, and at last the guy grinned a little and said, "If things'd worked out the way I wanted, I'd have it all. Tell me why didn't you come back to the cabins."

"You were there?" Parker said. "Did you by any chance run into some bikers?"

The guy's hand moved toward his wounded ear, but then lowered again. He said, "You know about them."

"We had a guy with a boat," Parker told him, "for when we left the ship. He sold us out to those people, but when we got in his boat it didn't feel right, so we made him tell us what he'd done."

"So where did you go instead?"

"His landing. He's got a place upstream from the cottages, we went there. He had a whole operation up there, a shack by the water, he grows marijuana in peat moss bags suspended on the water. That's his link with the bikers, he's the farmer, they're the processors."

"A shack on the water," the guy said. "I've heard about that peat moss business, it's been tried before. Is that where your partners are, the shack?"

"Yes."

"Telephone there?"

"Of course not."

"And where's the boat guy?"

"In the river."

The guy thought it over. Parker let him have a minute, but then figured it was time to distract him: "Cathman's been gone quite a while."

"What?" Startled, the guy called, "Cathman!" When there was no answer, he strode over to the shut door and hit it twice with the gun b.u.t.t. Then he pulled open the door and took one step in, and stopped.

Parker said, "Pills?"

The guy stepped back from the doorway. "Well, there's one from your wish list. Or almost. The color of his face, the sounds in his throat, if we called nine one one right now and got the EMT over here on the double, they just might save him. What do you think?"

"I think," Parker said, "we should respect his wishes."

10.

Parker thought he was probably a cop. The way he handled himself, some of the things he'd said, turns of phrase. And the shotgun in the truck being from a police department. And that he just happened to be traveling with handcuffs.

Some kind of rogue cop, running away from trouble he'd made for himself, needing a bankroll to start over. Somehow, he'd heard about the ship heist, decided to deal himself in. Wound up at the cottages, same as the three bikers, so all they did was screw up each other's ambush.

The question was, where was his road in? It seemed as though it had to be one of the other four people in the job, but none of them looked right for the part. It hadn't been Cathman, who'd had a different agenda, it wasn't Parker, so who else could it be?

Dan Wycza; Lou Sternberg; Mike Carlow; Noelle Braselle. He couldn't see this mangled cop cozying up with any of them.

Anyway, if it was one of them, wouldn't this guy know more than he does? But what else could it be?

Maybe, a little later, he'd get a chance to ask that question. But for now, they still had to negotiate their way through this matter of the search. Parker needed to make that search, because the alternative was to uproot Claire and start all over again somewhere else, and if he did that this time he'd be doing it again, and Claire wouldn't be happy on the constant go. Claire liked a nest.

"In here," Parker said, meaning in the bedroom, "you can do it for me. Open drawers, take out anything that's paper, throw it on the bed, let me look at it, and we take away what I want. In the office down the hall there, we could do it this way. I go first, and stop in the doorway. You undo the cuffs, and I walk forward to the desk, so you're always behind me. You stay in the doorway with the gun on me. I do my search. Then I walk backward to the door with my wrists behind my back, you cuff me again. Or you could just cuff me in front, then I could-"

The guy laughed at him. "Sure," he said. "Cuff you in front. I could ask you to hold my gun for me, too."

"Then the other way. You're behind me, you're armed, if I try to do something you don't have to kill me, just wound me. What am I gonna do about you at the desk? Throw a pen at you?"

"I'll have to search it first," the guy said. "Maybe you happen to know there's a gun in one of those drawers."

"Cathman, with a gun? Search away. You want to help me to my feet?"

"No," the guy said, and backed into the hall. "I don't need to be that close to you, you'll work it out."

Of course he would. Well, it had been worth a try. Using the foot of the bed to push against, Parker turned himself partway around, got one leg under his torso, and pushed upward against the bed until he was on one knee. From there it was easier, except for one second when he wasn't sure he'd keep his balance. But he did, again by leaning on the bed, and there he was, standing.

"I knew you could do it," the guy said. "Come on out, lead the way. We'll do this office first."

They went down the hall and into the office, and the guy had Parker stand in the corner between the two windowed walls, facing the wall, while he did a quick open-slam of all the drawers in the desk. Then he said, "Okay, good. A lotta s.h.i.t in here, you ask me. Back up to the door."

Parker did, and felt the vibrations of metal sc.r.a.ping on metal as the key moved around the lock.

"Stand still, I'm doing this one-handed."

"Right."

The cuffs came off. "Walk."

Parker walked. His head still ached, and now his wrists were sore. He rubbed them as he walked across the room, giving himself a fireman's grip and kneading the wrists, and then sat at the desk.

A lot of s.h.i.t in the drawers, as the guy had said, but not all of it useless. He palmed a paper clip, one of the larger thicker ones, and when he bent to open the bottom drawer he clipped it to the front of his shirt, below desk level. There were also ballpoint pens, simple plain ones that didn't retract. He held one up, showing it to the guy in the doorway, saying, "I could use a pen. Okay?"

The guy snickered at him. "To throw at me?"

"Sure."

"You want it, keep it."

Parker dropped the pen in his shirt pocket, and kept searching, and at the end he had two pages from this year's weekly memo book, one with Marshall Howell's name and his own written there (the name "Parker" was followed by a question mark), and one with that phone number of his that Howell had given away. He had also smeared his palms over everything he'd touched. There was nothing else here either of danger or of use.

He held up the two torn-off pieces of paper and said, "I want to pocket these."

The guy shrugged. His carelessness meant it didn't matter what Parker did to avoid the law, he was dead meat anyway. He said, "Go ahead, you aren't armed."

Heisters don't say armed, they say carrying or heavy, because a gun will be heavy in the pocket. Cops are armed. They don't carry their guns in a pocket.

"I'm done," Parker said, the two papers stowed away.

"Show me your hands."

"Sure." Parker held up empty hands, turned them to show the palms and the backs, fingers splayed out.

"Okay. Now do like we said. Stand up, turn around, back over to me."

Parker stood, and as he turned he slid the paperclip into his right hand, held between the ball of the palm and the side of the thumb. The fingers of both hands were curled slightly. He backed across the room, seeing the guy indistinctly in the window ahead of him and to the right, and the guy backed across the hall. Very careful, very anxious.

"Okay, stop there."

Parker stopped. The cold metal closed on his wrists again, and he heard the double snap. The guy tugged once on the cuffs to be sure they were locked in place, then said, "Okay, let's go."

"The bedroom."

"Fine, fine."

Parker went first, and in the bedroom he said, "I need those papers you dropped on the floor. Don't tell me to pick them up, all right?"

The guy laughed. "I'll help you out," he said. "Go stand on the other side of the bed." Too far away to kick him in the face, in other words.

"Sure," Parker said, and walked over there, and through the open bathroom doorway he could see the mound of yellow and green striped cloth huddled between sink and toilet, like the laundry waiting for the maid. Well, you made a lot of trouble, Cathman, Parker thought, but tomorrow people will still pay money to see the next card.

The guy picked up Cathman's four-page fantasy and put it in his own left side trouser pocket. He said, "Anything else?"

"Drawers. Dresser, bedside table. Anything paper."

"I know, I know, toss it on the bed. You stay over there."

"Naturally."

While the guy was opening and closing drawers, Parker carefully shifted the paperclip to a more secure position, inside his curled fingers. The search was indifferent, but complete, and produced very little paper. Theater tickets, a medical prescription, a crossword puzzle magazine. Parker looked at it all, scattered on the bed, and thought at least some of this stuff would give this guy's fingerprints to the law; the shiny magazine cover, for instance. He had to know it himself, so he had to already be in too deep s.h.i.t to worry about such things. Which meant he wasn't exactly careless in fact, he was very careful but he was reckless. So he'd be a little more hair-triggered and dangerous, but also possibly more readily confused and manipulated.

"Okay," Parker said. "I'm ready."