“I’m calling for George,” Parker said. “You know who I mean?”
“Of course,” said the voice. “Where is George?”
“He thinks it would be safer for you if you didn’t know,” Parker said. “But he wants the money. You know, the suitcase?”
“The suitcase? Oh. Yes, the suitcase.” But the voice seemed doubtful. And it was reminding Parker of something or somebody.
“He wants you to bring it up to New York,” Parker said.
“Sure,” said the voice. “Where is it?”
It wasn’t Saugherty. Saugherty knew where the money was; Saugherty was the only one on earth who knew where the money was. This wasn’t Saguherty.
Then Parker recognized the voice at last, and without saying anything more he hung up and headed for the bedroom.
The voice had been Paul Brock’s.
Four
Uhl was lying there like the body at a wake, his face expressionless. Parker stood beside the bed and said, “Can you open your eyes?”
In a faraway voice Uhl said, “I don’t know.”
“Try.”
Uhl’s eyelids raised. His eyes looked up toward the ceiling, but they didn’t seem to be focused on anything.
“Try sitting up,” Parker said.
Uhl seemed very uncoordinated. He moved clumsily, his arms and legs beating ineffectively as he tried to get up off his back. Parker finally had to help him, but once he was sitting up he could stay there on his own, though he tilted a bit to one side. His arms hung down and his eyes were still looking straight ahead, still unfocused.
Parker got him on his feet. He was very weak, though willing to do whatever he was told to do. With Parker helping to support him, they walked out of the bedroom and through the apartment.
The problem was, he couldn’t leave Uhl here because he didn’t know how long it would take for the drug to wear off enough to let Uhl start making phone calls to Philadelphia, and he didn’t want anybody down there any more alerted than they already were. And he didn’t want Uhl on his back again coming down to Philadelphia in his wake.
On the other hand, he couldn’t take the simple way out and kill Uhl here unless he was willing to kill Joyce Langer too, and so long as things weren’t impossible otherwise, he wasn’t willing to kill Joyce Langer. Her worst sin was stupidity combined with fluctuating emotionalism, and he didn’t feel like-doing anything about her except leaving her alone. And calling the building superintendent several hours from now, when this was all squared away, telling him to come up to this apartment to let her loose. If he didn’t do that, considering how popular Joyce Langer seemed to be, she’d probably starve to death up here before anybody noticed she was missing.
The end result was that he had to rake Uhl with him and finish the job somewhere on the road. Which was a little complicated, a little troublesome, but not impossible.
She had regained consciousness now. Parker saw her eyes open, saw her watching them walk through the living room. Uhl’s head lolled, he shambled; he was obviously doped up. Over the gag around her mouth, her eyes were wide as she looked at Uhl.
They left the apartment and rode down in the elevator, Uhl leaning against the wall on the way down. They got out of the elevator on the first floor, and an old woman with a full shopping cart gave Uhl an odd look as she got aboard the elevator to go up.
Parker dropped Joyce Langer’s key in the superintendent’s mailbox, then led Uhl outside to where his car stood illegally close to a fire hydrant. There was a ticket on the windshield.
Uhl was still as docile as a lobotomized monk. Parker walked him around the car and settled him the passenger seat, then went around to the driver’s side, plucked the ticket from the windshield and dropped it in the gutter, got in behind the wheel, and drove away from there.
Uhl quickly sagged against the door on his side. His eyes remained open, but he gave no indication of consciousness.
Parker went down the West Side Highway and through the Lincoln Tunnel and down the Jersey Turnpike from exit sixteen to exit fifteen, where he got off and took a lot of slum like city streets until he wound up on a bumpy blacktop road past nothing but weeds. He was driving into a part of the Jersey swamp, where over the years a lot of things no longer wanted in New York have wound up. George Uhl wouldn’t be the first man among them.
Parker stopped in a deserted area. The swamp was II m .mil green. Far away he could see bridges, factories, junkyard, oil refineries; but around here nothing but the flat green.
He got Uhl out of the car and walked him out across a soggy field through waist-high weeds. After a while he stopped and said, “Lie down,” but when he let go of Uhl’s arm Uhl just went limp and fell down, lying in a crumped heap in the weeds.
Parker took out his pistol and aimed it at Uhl’s head, but he didn’t fire.
It was stupid. There was no sense in it, and things without sense in them irritated him. Uhl was too docile, too easy. Somehow he was too much like a trusting child. Today or tomorrow he would wake up with a blinding headache and he would be again the guy who had twice tried to kill Parker, who had turned a very sweet job sour, who had killed his partners and stolen money that belonged to Parker, who had caused him trouble and discomfort of all kinds for five days in a row. That’s who he’d been yesterday and that’s who he’d be tomorrow, and Parker wouldn’t think twice about exing that George Uhl out of the human race. But that wasn’t who George Uhl was today. Today he was a docile child, and with angry irritation Parker realized that today he wasn’t going to kill George Uhl.
But neither was he going to leave Uhl capable of getting back into the action. Nothing could make him quite that stupid. He put his pistol away again and bent over Uhl and broke three bones, all fairly important. Uhl groaned once and frowned, but that was all.
Parker walked back to the car and set off for Philadelphia.
Five
Twenty past one on a sunny spring Saturday afternoon in Philadelphia. Parker drove past Ed Saugherty’s house, noticing the blue Datsun with New York plates parked out front, noticing the drapes wide open in the picture window. He went by without slowing, knowing they’d be watching, not wanting anybody on the inside to pay any particular attention to his car. They shouldn’t be able to recognize him from over there; the house was set well back from the street.
The houses were widely spaced, but there was activity around more than half of them. Children rode bicycles, men mowed lawns or washed automobiles — all the weekend business of the straight world. Parker continued along the curving street until the Saugherty house was just out of sight in the rearview mirror but the blue Datsun could still be seen partway around the curve, and then he pulled to the curb and parked.
This was the worst possible place and the worst possible time for private business. If he parked here more than ten minutes the people in the neighboring houses would start to wonder about him, and within half an hour some busybody wife would send her husband out to smile at him in artificial friendliness and ask could he help, was Parker lost, was there anything in particular he wanted around here. But if he went away and waited till tonight to come back, Rosenstein and Brock might already be gone. It depended on how long it took them to squeeze the money out of Ed Saugherty. They didn’t have it yet, which was lucky, but how long would Ed Saugherty hold out against a Matt Rosenstein and a Paul Brock?
But if he could neither go away and come back tonight nor stay here and keep them under surveillance, for many of the same reasons he couldn’t break into the house right now. They would be on the alert in there, and green lawn spread out bright and empty on all four sides of the house. The houses were well separated here, and between Saugherty and his neighbors there were no hedges, no privacy fences, nothing but lawn. Parker wouldn’t make it to the house alive, and a gun battle in the middle of a Saturday afternoon in this neighborhood wouldn’t be the brightest idea in the world anyway.