“That’s right.”
“That means we can work out a deal.”
“Maybe,” Parker said.
Uhl shrugged. “Why not? If I’m dead you’ll never get the money. If I don’t give you the money I’m dead. So why can’t we work out a deal? Should be the simplest thing in the world. You had breakfast?”
Uhl was being calm too, showing casual, unruffled, untroubled surface, and that had to mean he was waiting to see where his edge was coming from. Parker told him, “Don’t think about breakfast, think about the money you took. Where is it?”
Uhl shook his head. “Uh-uh. It isn’t going to work that way, Parker. I tell you now where to find it, and what happens? You go bang and you walk out of here and go get the cash, and I’m not breathing anymore. I said a deal, Parker, and I meant a deal. I meant I’m going to buy my life from you, and the whole question is how much it’s going to cost me.” Uhl smiled with one side of his mouth. “I’m going to go on living, Parker,” he said, “and that means I’m going to be needing breakfast. Don’t shoot me while I go through this doorway here.”
Uhl started through the doorway and Parker stepped over quickly in front of him and slapped him across the face with the barrel of the gun. Uhl flipped over backwards onto the floor and Parker kicked him and then stood back and watched him again. He felt very patient, very measured. He had all the time in the world.
Uhl came up slowly. His cheek was bleeding, and his face finally looked frightened. His voice was a little shaky now too, but what he said was, “Parker, that way don’t do it. You won’t kick it out of me, you really won’t, because I’ll keep remembering that as soon as I tell you where the money is you’ll stop kicking and start shooting. You won’t get it that way, Parker, I swear you won’t.”
“You may be right,” Parker said. He switched the gun to his left hand. “Get up,” he said.
“Sure I’m right,” Uhl said. A relieved smile flashed across his face. Starting awkwardly to his feet he said, “Just let me make myself some break— “
He was halfway up, bent forward. Parker swung from the floor and hit him across the jaw with his dosed fist. Uhl jerked around in a half circle, his arms flopping out in front of him, and fell face down across the foot of the bed, his feet hanging back pigeon-toed on the floor.
Parker checked him and he was out. He dragged him all the way up onto the bed and rolled him over onto his back, then took from his jacket pocket the small bottle of serum he’d found at Brock’s place and a hard-pack cigarette box, and shook out the hypodermic needle, now in its two parts. He screwed the parts together and put the hypo on the table beside the bottle.
He’d brought this along just in case, though he would have preferred not to use it. He wasn’t one hundred per cent sure it was the same stuff that had been used on him, and he had no idea what the right dose was or what an overdose might do. But there’d been a good chance Uhl would react the way he had, and in that case there was the serum to fall back on.
He rolled Uhl’s sleeve up, exposing his arm all the way to the shoulder. Judging from the small puncture mark in his own arm after the serum had been used on him, it was injected directly into the vein in the inner part of the elbow. Parker turned Uhl’s limp arm on the sheet, saw the faint blue line beneath the skin, touched it with one finger. A slight ridge, almost too slight to feel. But if he could see it he could hit it.
He’d never worked with a hypodermic needle before, but he’d seen it done in the movies and on television, and a few times he’d watched doctors getting ready to give him a shot. He didn’t have the usual interest in sterile precautions, so that simplified matters. He picked up the bottle and needle and studied them. If he had it figured right, he should depress the plunger all the way in the syringe, poke the needle through the cork in the top of the bottle, then gradually pull the plunger out again, filling the syringe with the fluid from the bottle. Then pull the needle out of the cork, stick it in Uhl’s arms, and depress the plunger again. No. Squirt a little first, to be sure he wasn’t injecting air in the vein, because that would kill Uhl before he could talk.
There was about two-thirds left in the bottle. Assuming he’d been the first one it had been used on, he should now take about half the remainder. He did, having no difficulty, and injected it ; slowly into Uhl’s arm. The plunger resisted him, not wanting to shove the fluid into Uhl’s vein quickly, and he just kept a slow and steady pressure on it and quit while there was still a trace of fluid in the syringe. Then he took the hypo apart again, put the parts back in the cigarette box, and tucked the box and bottle back into his pocket.
Uhl hadn’t moved. Parker leaned over him and said, “George.”
Nothing.
“George, wake up.”
No reaction.
Parker slapped his face and called his name again. He tugged at Uhl’s hair, slapped him harder. Still nothing.
So he’d have to wait. That was all right, he had time. He went over to a chair and sat down.
Three
When the front door banged open, Parker got out of the chair fast and stepped behind the bedroom door. His pistol was in his hand, his back against the wall, his head turned so he could look through the crack between door and jamb and see whoever it was before they got all the way into the room.
But he heard her before he saw her. “George!” she cried, running through the apartment. “George, wake up!”
Joyce Langer.
There had always been the chance she’d change her mind, and she was the type to do it too late. Parker waited where he was.
She came running into the room and skidded to one knee beside the bed. “George!” she started to shake his shoulder. “George, you’ve got to wake up! There’s a man after you! There’s a man named Lynch after you!”
Parker shut the bedroom door. “He knows me under a different name,” he said.
She spun so fast she almost lost her balance and fell over, grabbing Uhl’s upper arm at the last second to help her keep her balance. “You!”
“You should have phoned,” Parker told her. “You wouldn’t be in trouble now.”
“I couldn’t tell him on the phone,” she said. “What I did, I couldn’t tell him what I did.”
“Second guessers always make trouble for themselves,” Parker said. “Get up from there.”
She said, “Don’t do anything to — I shouldn’t have. Don’t do anything to him because of what I did. Please.” She turned and shook his arm again. “George, wake up!” Then she stared at him, struck finally by his lack of response, by the way he was just lying there. “George? George?”
He could hear panic and hysteria building in her voice. He said, “He’s alive. Don’t worry about him, he’s alive.”
“What did you do to him? What in the name of God did you do to him?”
He walked closer to her. “You shouldn’t have come back here.”
She stared up at him. “What are you going to do? What am I involved in? What’s going on?”
Uhl groaned, startling them both. Immediately she was all over him, tugging at his shoulders, shouting into his face: “George, George, wake up, please wake up!”
He mumbled something. His face was frowning, but other than that he still wasn’t moving.
Parker took the girl by the arm. “Up out of there,” he said. “You came at a bad time.”
She didn’t want to go. He had to tug harder. He knew she’d start screaming soon, and he couldn’t have that. In any case, he couldn’t have her in this room listening when he started asking his questions. He said, loud and commanding, “Joyce!”
She automatically turned her head to look up at him and he clipped her with a short, hard right hand. She bounced back against the edge of the bed and would have fallen to the floor if he hadn’t held on to her.