Parker turned around, and the guy had retreated to the middle of the living room. The keys to the Lexus were in his left hand, the .38 in his right. “Nowwe go,” he said. “I’ll open the front door and step to the side. You go out, I follow. You stay just ahead of me and we walk to your car.”
“A block and a half, in cuffs? What if somebody sees them?”
“Maybe I’m arresting you.”
“And what if the somebody’s a patrol car? This is a middle-class neighborhood, no crime but a lot of voters. This is where the cops like to patrol.”
The guy started to sneer, as though about to defend cops, but then must have realized how stupid that would be. Instead, he looked around, saw the shut closet door over near the front door, and went over to open it. He rummaged around and brought out a raincoat. “You’ll wear this,” he said. “Over your shoulders. Stand still.”
Parker stood still. The guy brought the raincoat to him, draped it on his shoulders, and stepped back to consider him. “Works fine,” he decided.
It probably did, though too short. “Okay,” Parker said. “Now what?”
“Now we walk,” the guy said, and opened the door.
The gray day was still gray, the neighborhood still mostly empty, people now off to their jobs or schools. Parker, with the guy to his left and one pace behind him, walked down the street, crossed to the other side after they’d passed where the pickup was parked over there, and stopped at the Lexus.
“Is it locked?”
“Of course.”
The guy unlocked it, and said, “Get in.”
“Two things,” Parker said. “Could you take this coat off me? Throw it in the back seat or on the ground or whatever you want. And just give me a hand on the elbow to help me in.”
“I’m your goddam nurse,” the guy said, and yanked the coat off him, and let it drop to the curb. “Get in the car, I’ll help if you need it.”
He needed it; balance was impossible, to shift from standing outside the car to sitting inside it. As he was about to topple, the guy grabbed his right elbow with his left hand, his right hand staying in his pocket with the .38. He pulled back, helped Parker get into position, seated there against his own arms pulled back behind him, and said, “Don’t move.” He reached across him to strap him in with the seat belt.
Parker said, “Safety first?”
“Mysafety first,” the guy said. Then he shut the door, and went around to get behind the wheel.
Parker said, “Where’s your truck?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I thought you wanted things from it.”
The guy started the engine. “Where to?” he said.
12
The question was gasoline. It had been a while since the Lexus had been refueled. Parker had planned to do that after he finished with Cathman and got his day’s sleep, and as he remembered, the last he’d looked at the gas gauge it had shown just under a quarter tank. It was hard to see that little arrow from this angle, in the passenger seat, and he didn’t want to be obvious about it.
He was trying now to go through the trips he’d taken with Mike Carlow, when they were looking for a place to stay, when they’d wound up at Tooler’s cottages. Different real estate agents had shown them different things, driven them on different back roads. It was important now to remember them right, which road led where.
He needed a destination that would fit in with the story he’d told, in case they were still together that long. But it would be best if he could arrange the route so they arrived at the right kind of gas station when the needle was looking low. A small station, isolated, not too many customers, one guy on duty, no mechanics. So remember those places, too, and the different roads, and the different places the real estate agents had shown them.
Tiredness kept trying to creep in on him, distract him, but the discomfort of having his arms pulled around behind him, and then the weight of his torso against his arms, kept him from getting groggy. He thought about undoing the cuffs now, but he was afraid the freedom would make him careless, permit him to move his arms a little to relieve the pressure, and alert the guy beside him. So he left the cuffs where they were.
At first it was all major highways, across the Hudson River out of Albany and then due east toward Massachusetts. This was called the Thruway Extension and at the state line it would met up with the Massachusetts Turnpike, one hundred fifty miles due east to Boston. A little before that, there was the north-south highway called the Taconic Parkway, the oldest major highway in the state, built in the twenties so the state government people in Albany would have easy access to New York City, one hundred fifty miles to the south and screw the rest of the state, which didn’t get a big road until the thruway came in, thirty years later.
The Taconic was the road Parker and the others had been using between the Tooler cottages and Albany, but not today. Some miles before that turnoff was State Route 9, also north-south. “We take that exit,” Parker said.
The guy was suspicious of everything. “Isn’t there a bigger road up ahead?”
“Out of our way, too far east,” Parker told him. “We crossed the river, remember? Now we gotta go south, and then back west to the river. This is the turn.”
The guy frowned, but took it, and they drove southward through low hills covered with trees wearing their bright green new spring leaves, and here and there a little town with one intersection and a traffic light. And a gas station, usually, but not the kind Parker wanted.
Time to get off this road. “You’ll take the next right,” he said. “There’s a dark brown church at the corner, little graveyard.”
But there wasn’t; a different intersection appeared, with a farm stand on the corner, all its display shelves empty, not yet open for the season, nothing yet grown ripe enough to sell.
The guy pulled to a stop in front of the empty stand and said, “All right, what’s the story?” He was driving with the .38 tucked into his belt, just behind the buckle, and now his right hand rested on the butt.
“It must be the next one,” Parker said.
“Where we headed? Just tell me where we’re going, and I’ll go there.”
“I can’t tell you that,” Parker said. “This isn’t my neighborhood, I just came here a few weeks ago to do the ship. I don’t know the names of things and route numbers and all that, I just know how to get from one place to another. I forgot about this intersection, that’s all, it’ll be the next one.”
“If it isn’t,” the guy said, “we’ll try a different idea.”
“Fine. It’s the next one.”
The guy started the Lexus forward, and three miles farther on they came to the intersection with the old brown church. “See?” Parker said. “I’m not an old-time native here, that’s all. But I know where I’m going. You take this right, and it comes to a T, and then you take the right off that.”
“The right? That sends me north again.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Parker said. “These roads twist all over the place, because of the hills, and because they laid out the farms before they laid out the roads. We won’t go north any more, don’t worry about it.”
But they would. The second right would send them north, to a different road that would send them west again, if they went that far. Parker was grateful for the cloud cover; if the sun was out, it would be a lot harder to move this guy around into the right position.
Before they reached the T, Parker glanced over at the dashboard to see the fuel-low warning light gleaming red. “How long’s that been on?”
The guy didn’t look down from the twisty road. “What?”
“Low on gas, the light’s on.”
The guy gave it a quick look. “We’re all right,” he said. “It isn’t far now, is it?”
“In and back out? I don’t know. How long’s the light been on?”
“Not long,” the guy said, but out of irritation, not conviction.