She got up and crossed to the refectory table near the stone fireplace, and brought back a day-old newspaper turned to the national news page. Handing it to him, sitting again beside him, she said, “Why would they kill him?”
“They were in a hurry,” Parker told her. “They wanted names, they wanted to know where we’d be. Especially because they lost the rockets. Howell was hurt, but he wouldn’t tell them anything. We talked about it before I left, and he said he wouldn’t tell them anything, and I believed him, and it turns out I was right. And they were in such a hurry, they didn’t wait to see how much he was wounded, maybe hurt inside, before they leaned on him, and he died.”
“Poor Mr. Howell,” she said.
“He wasn’t really much of a reader anyway,” Parker said, and turned to the newspaper, which told him several things he knew and nothing he didn’t. Three rogue Marines had been trading with a terrorist group, selling them weapons stolen from a military depot. There was to be an exchange, rockets for cash. The two groups didn’t know there were two other groups involved as well; the Feds, who’d got wind of the thefts at the depot and were trying to follow the trail, and the four professional thieves who showed up at the transfer point meaning to take everything from everybody. Which they did, at the cost of one of their own, a man named Marshall Howell. The Feds expected to round up the other three momentarily.
Parker put the paper down and said, “That’s the end of it. The other two keep the rockets, sell them to somebody else. I keep this.” And he nodded at the money.
Claire pointed at the newspaper. “That could have been you.”
“It always could,” he said. “So far, it isn’t. I go away, and I come back.”
She looked at him. “Every time?”
“Except the last time,” he said.
She put her arms around him, touched her lips to the spot where the pulse beat in his throat. “Later,” she said, “let’s have a fire.”
3
The best place to hide money is in somebody else’s house. The morning after he got back, Parker filled seven Ziploc bags with ten thousand dollars each, put them in the pockets of his windbreaker, and went for a walk along the lakefront.
There were five houses along here he’d previously set up for himself, both as drops and as potential backup sites if trouble ever came too close. He’d made simple clean access to each house and prepared banks for himself in all of them. A false joist in a crawlspace; an extra ceiling in a closet; a new pocket in the wall behind a kitchen drawer. These people all liked their summer houses just the way they were, but it would pay them, though they didn’t know it, to remodel.
He was gone not quite an hour, a householder taking a long casual walk along the lake in the thin spring sunlight, and when he got back to the house Claire said, “Mr. Howell called.”
Parker looked at her, and waited.
She smiled slightly. “Mr. Marshall Howell.”
“Did he.”
“He left a number where you could call him.”
He made a bark of laughter. “That must be some number,” he said, and took off the windbreaker and read the phone number on the pad in the kitchen, then opened the phone book to see where that area code was. 518. Upstate New York, around Albany.
He used the kitchen phone to make the call, and after four rings a recorded woman’s voice, sounding like somebody’s secretary, announced the number he’d just dialed, then crisply said, “Please leave a name and number after the tone. Thank you.”
No. Parker waited for the tone, then said, “Mr. Howell will phone at three o’clock,” and hung up, and at three o’clock he stepped into the phone booth at the Mobil station out on the highway to New York, the only enclosed phone booth within eight miles, and dialed the number again.
One ring, and the man who answered sounded fat, middle-aged, wheezy. “Cathman,” he said.
“Not Mr. Howell,” Parker said.
A wheezy chuckle. “Not really possible,” Cathman said. “That’s Mr. Parker, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know anybody named Cathman,” Parker said.
“We’re meeting now, in a way,” Cathman pointed out. “The fact is, Mr. Howell was going to be doing something for me, but he told me he had this other project with you first, and then we could get together to plan our own enterprise. Unfortunately, he didn’t survive that earlier obligation.”
Parker waited. Was he supposed to be responsible for this fellow’s plans coming apart?
Cathman said, “I don’t want to sound forward, Mr. Parker, but I believe you share much of the expertise I found so valuable in Mr. Howell.”
“Possibly.” If this was an entrapment call, it was the flakiest on record.
“I expect,” Cathman said, “you’re not particularly looking for work at the moment, since I believe your part of the activity just completed was rather more successful than our friend Howell’s.”
“Oh,” Parker said. “You want me to take Howell’s place.”
“If,” Cathman said. “If you’re interested in further work in, well, not the same line. A similar line. If you’d prefer to rest, take time off, of course I’ll understand. In that case, if you could recommend someone
“
This fellow, whoever he was, was recruiting people for some sort of criminal undertaking over the telephone.Had Howell really taken this clown seriously? Or had Howell been interested in something else, that Cathman didn’t realize? Parker said, “I don’t make recommendations.”
“But would you be Well, would you care to meet? There are things, you understand, one doesn’t say on the phone.”
Well, he knew that much, though he didn’t seem to understand the concept in its entirety. Parker said, “A meet. For you to tell me what Howell was going to do for you.”
“Just so. You could come here, or if you prefer I could go to you. I’m not exactly sure where you are
“
Good. Parker said, “Howell gave you this phone number?”
“His wife did. I presume she’s his wife.”
“I’ll come to you,” Parker decided, because Cathman sounded more dangerous than interesting. He had no sense of self-preservation, and he was walking around with knowledge that could hurt other people. If he turned out to have something interesting, Parker might go along with it, take Howell’s place. If not, Parker might switch him off before his broadcasting interfered with anybody serious.
“Oh, fine,” Cathman said. “We could do lunch, if you”
“A meet,” Parker said. “Your territory. Outside. A parking lot, a farmer’s market, a city park.”
“Oh, I know,” Cathman said. “The perfect place. Amtrak comes up the Hudson. Could you take the train, from Penn Station? In New York.”
“Yes.”
“It’s less than two hours up, the stop is called Rhinecliff. Wait, I have the schedule here. What would be a good day?”
“Tomorrow.”
“That’s wonderful. All right, let me see. Yes, you take the train at three-fifty tomorrow afternoon, you’ll get to Rhinecliff at five twenty-eight. I’ll come down from Albany, my train gets there at four fifty-one, so I’ll just wait on the platform. You’ll find me, I’m heavyset, and I have about as much hair as our poor friend Howell, and I’ll be wearing a gray topcoat. Oh, and probably a gray hat as well, so the baldness doesn’t help, does it?”
“I’ll find you,” Parker said.
4
Amtrak was new, but the station at Rhinecliff was old, one end of it no longer in use, rusted remains of steel walkways and stairs looming upward against the sky like the ruins of an earlier civilization, which is what they were. At the still-working end of the platform, a long metal staircase climbed to a high enclosed structure that led above the tracks over to the old station building. The land here was steep, coming up from the river, leveling for the tracks, then continuing sharply upward.