Back in the house, he went to the dining room, the only other downstairs room beside the kitchen that they’d furnished, with a simple black Formica Parsons table and three mismatched armless kitchen chairs, all probably bought used over in West Palm. Two floor lamps in the corners gave light, the original chandelier having been messily removed.
If he were in here with them, it would be because they were in control and they wanted a conversation. Would they sit and have him stand? No, they’d rather be the ones on their feet. On which side of the table?
There were three doorways in three walls in here, two broad ones opposite each other opening onto living rooms at the front and rear, and a narrower one with a swing door leading to the kitchen. They would want him with his back to the fourth wall because, without thinking about it, they wouldn’t want to be looking at escape routes behind him.
The good thing about a Parsons table is that it has a strip of wood all around, just under the top, that creates a recess. Parker taped the Sentinel to the underside of the tabletop, on the side where there was no door. Then he went looking for a window.
The exterior doors, upstairs and down, were all large expanses of plate glass, too big to be of use. But on the road side of the house, flanking the front door, were pairs of double-hung windows with panes, four over four. Going outside, he chose the corner window farthest from the door and the garage. First he fixed the suction cups onto the top right pane of the lower half of the window, then used the glass cutter to slice the glass through just inside the wooden sash bars, scoring it four times all the way around before he got completely through. Tugging on the suction cups, he removed the rectangle of glass, then made sure he could reach the lock inside. Then he put the pane back in place, fixing it there with small pieces of the clear tape. The suction cups he buried under the shrubbery along the footing.
Walking back along the beach toward the Four Seasons, one by one he threw into the sea the drill, the routing bit, the hacksaw, the glass cutter, the pliers, and the roll of tape. The shoulder bag he left on the ground in the parking lot; some tourist would take it home.
10
The question was Leslie. She’d been useful, but she was an amateur, and an amateur is never entirely reliable. Could she be useful again? Or could she be a problem?
So far, she was doing everything right. She came up with the answers he needed, and she didn’t ask a lot of her own unnecessary questions. She didn’t try to push herself closer to the job. She showed patience. All of these were rare qualities in an amateur and were keeping her alive.
So the real question was, how tight a leash should he keep on her until the day? He finally decided the answer was to keep no leash at all. If she kept herself to herself, as she’d been doing, fine. If she started phoning, or coming around, he’d deal with it.
It was ten days till the job. There was nothing to do now but wait, and make sure that when Melander and the others came back they didn’t notice Parker in the neighborhood. So why not go back to Miami for a few days, spend some time with Claire?
He left in late morning, took Interstate 95 south, and got off the highway at Fort Lauderdale to find a diner lunch. After, he came out of the diner to the bright sunlit parking lot, and the Jaguar was gone.
Stupid; to let that get ripped off. He looked around the parking lot for another car to take, and a guy came out of the diner behind him, working at his mouth with a toothpick. He said, “Hot day.”
“Yes,” Parker said. He waited for the guy to go away.
But the guy pointed across the parking lot with his toothpick and said, “You see that white Toyota Land Cruiser over there?”
Parker didn’t look at the white Toyota Land Cruiser, he looked at the guy with the toothpick. He was bulked up, tanned, about forty, grinning like a man with a secret. He nodded, not looking at Parker, and said, “There’s a guy in there with a thirty ought six — you do anything he doesn’t like, any single thing at all, he’ll blow your head off.”
“Maybe he’ll hit you,” Parker said.
“Funny thing about Herby,” the guy said. “He never misses what he aims at. Never been known to happen. Why don’t we go over there, he can tell you about it himself.”
Now Parker looked at the Land Cruiser, a Land Rover clone, then back at the guy. These people weren’t from Melander and Carlson and Ross; that trio would handle their own problems. He didn’t see how they could be connected with Leslie. So who were they and what was their interest?
The guy said, “I’m walking over there now myself. If you don’t walk with me, they’ll be hosing down the pavement here later.”
Parker said, “We’ll walk together. I’m trying to remember where I know you from.”
The guy chuckled, not as though he thought Parker had said something funny, but as though it was a skill he’d learned one time, chuckling, and he liked to practice from time to time. As they walked across the parking lot to the Land Cruiser, that was the only answer he gave.
Herby, a sharp-nosed skinny man in a wrinkled white dress shirt and black pants and mirror-lensed aviator sunglasses, sat in the back seat, the big hunting rifle on his lap, right hand loose near the trigger, left hand loose under the barrel. There was no way to tell if he was looking at Parker or not, but it really didn’t make any difference.
The first guy, still cheerful, said, “You can ride up front with me.”
They were willing to kill him in public, if they had to, but they’d rather do it in private. So there was still a little time. Parker went around to the right side of the Land Cruiser and opened the door, and saw a small square photo on the passenger seat. He picked it up, slid onto the seat, shut the door, and looked at the photo. It was himself, one of the pictures Bobby had taken for his driver’s license.
He looked from the picture to the guy, now behind the wheel, grinning at him around the toothpick. “So Norte’s dead,” Parker said, and dropped the photo out the window.
The guy stuck the key in the ignition. “Hell, pal,” he said as the engine started, “everybody’s dead. Some people just don’t know it yet.”
11
They were going to kill him in the Everglades. A good place for it, obviously; the idea had been thought of before.
The white Land Cruiser headed out westward along Alligator Alley, the Everglades Parkway, a two-lane black binding tape laid on the uncertain green land, straight as a rifle shot across the flat landscape. Big trucks groaned along, and the smaller cars zipped around them and sped on. The guy with the toothpick in the rear corner of his mouth moved the Land Cruiser along at a steady unhurried speed. There was time enough to get the job done.
Parker thought about the Sentinel, now taped to the underside of the Parsons table in Melander’s dining room. There were two guns stashed in the Jaguar, but he had nothing on his body. Here there was Herby in the back seat with his rifle and maybe some other things. The driver wasn’t obviously armed, but he could have a pistol in a pants pocket or in a spring-loaded holster under the dash on the far side of the steering column.
They couldn’t do anything on this road, with this traffic. There were always at least half a dozen vehicles in sight. They’d have to turn off, and that was the point where he’d have to make his move. They were pros, and they would know that was when he’d have to move, but he had to anyway. And they knew that, too.