He heard the car start. He went forward to the edge of the woods, looking up, and saw Uhl back his Chevy out of the barn. He left the motor running and hurried into the house, and a minute later he came out with two small cardboard suitcases. They’d had four of those, one for each of them to carry his share away in, but it had apparently taken only two to transport the entire haul.
Uhl put the two cases in the trunk of the Chevy and then came by the side of the barn to look downslope at the woods. He didn’t see Parker, and Parker couldn’t make out the expression on his face. After a minute he turned and went back into the house.
Go up the slope? Try to get to the car? It looked too much like a trap, left out there running with the money in it. Parker waited.
Uhl came running back out. Why running? He suddenly seemed to be feeling much more urgency than before. He ran around the Chevy and into the barn.
What was he up to? Parker’s hands were closed into his fists, but there was nothing he could do; he could only stand and watch and wait to see what Uhl did next.
Smoke. Curling out the broken windows of the house.
The son of a bitch had set the house on fire.
Parker moved out of the woods and ran crouching to the right until the barn was between him and the house, and then he ran up the hill. He knew what Uhl was up to in the barn, and if he could get there before Uhl was set, there was still a chance.
He couldn’t. He heard the roar of Uhl’s car before he got up as far as the barn, and as he came running around the barn he saw the Chevy bumping and slewing down the farther slope toward the dirt road.
The house was really burning now, the old wood catching fast and burning hot. Flames stuck their tongues out all the empty windows. He could feel the heat on his face.
The barn. He turned toward the entrance to the barn, and when the car in there blew up it knocked him flat.
Five
Nighttime. Parker sat in darkness, his back against a tree. It was cold now, and even damper in the woods than it had been in daytime.
The fire was long since out, but there was still light on top of the hill. Arc lights had been set up around the perimeter of the hilltop, all pointed inward, glaring their harsh, shadowless light on the burnt-out wreckage like the illumination of the infield during a night game. In that glare men moved back and forth like actors in the movie, and it was impossible to believe there were any rational reasons for all that activity up there. It was as though a director somewhere had told them to mill around, and that’s what they were doing, but none of them knew why.
It had been a long wait down here, and it wasn’t over yet. When the Mercury had blown up it had spread the fire to the grass all around, and when Parker had come out of a semi-daze and staggered back to his feet it was to find both the barn and house sheets of flame and the whole hilltop running orange. He’d been standing on bare ground in the middle of it all, the heat evaporating the sweat off his face.
He’d come leaping and jumping through the flames and down the slope into the woods again, knowing some sort of fire department would have to respond to this sooner or later before it got downslope and set the whole woods ablaze. A man dressed in a suit and white shirt and tie, carrying identification that could quickly be proved phony, should not be found here with the burned bodies of two murdered men and one blown-up car — not half an hour after a robbery in a town twelve miles away. Parker worked his way deep into the woods, the ground sloping gradually downward, till he came to a small, quick, cold, shallow stream that ran down the bottom line of the valley. He went across that and a little ways farther, and when he found a dry grassy spot he sat down to wait.
He heard the sirens when the fire engines arrived, but he was too far away to see them or see how much work they had to do. He waited, listening, hearing nothing more, and by early afternoon he was hungry. Were there any edible berries in season now? He didn’t know. He’d been born and raised in cities; these woods were another world.
When his watch said three o’clock he got up and stretched and moved again. He drank some water at the stream, washed his face, and moved on. He came to the edge of the woods and looked up, and both house and barn were gone; nothing left but a few blackened sticks jutting up. The grass was charred and black halfway down the slope.
The fire engines were gone too, but they had been replaced. The hilltop was full of police cars, and as Parker watched, a white closed van arrived with blue lettering on the sides: mobile lab.
So it was going to be a wait. But he wasn’t likely to get anywhere striking off blindly into those woods behind him. It was the road or nothing, and until the law finished up there it was going to be nothing.
But it was taking them a while. They swarmed over the hill like ants. Cars came and went, trucks arrived, men roamed back and forth, and at one point toward twilight a roaring, fluttering helicopter even dangled down out of the sky and visited for a few minutes before being reeled up and away again like a noisy fishing lure.
In a way, the length of time they were taking up there irritated Parker, because they were delaying him and causing him trouble; but in another way it pleased him, because it meant Uhl and the money were still at large. They were hunting here for something to tell them where to look next, and Parker knew they wouldn’t find a thing.
Parker usually could be patient, but this was the worst kind of waiting. He was cold and stiff, the air was damp, he hadn’t eaten since this morning before the robbery plus one can of beer after, and he had no way of knowing how much longer the wait would last. It was now past midnight, and they were still there.
From time to time he moved around at the edge of the woods only to keep limber and help the circulation. He was moving now, when light suddenly flashed past the trees all around him, and he dropped at once to the ground and lay there not moving.
The flash wasn’t repeated. He waited and nothing more happened, and finally he raised himself up behind a tree and looked up the slope and saw that the arc lights were being taken down and stored in a truck. One of them, being moved while still lit, had happened to be pointed in his direction for a second; that’s all it had been.
It took them ten minutes more, but finally there were no lights left but the headlights of a few cars and trucks, and then those swung away and disappeared down the farther slope and there was darkness.
Parker cautiously came up the slope. The night was clear, with a quarter moon giving silver-blue light, enough so he could make out shapes in the darkness. Parker made it to the top, saw nothing but beaten-down emptiness and burned-down husks, and moved on.
There was no point looking for the thin track up here. He went wading down through thick dew-wet grass until he came to the dirt road and then turned left. He walked half a mile to the highway and turned left again. He didn’t like going back to the town where they’d knocked over the bank, but it was the only one close enough to walk to.
He saw headlights far away and got off the road and crouched behind bushes in a field. The car went by, red tailights receding, and then he got up and moved on again. Far away he could see the pale dome of light in the sky where the town was.
Six
Parker let the police car go by and then stepped out of the doorway and moved on around the corner. It was after midnight — cars on the streets were few, all the bars were shut, there was no one out walking.
In the center of town there would still be some activity. The bus depot would be open, and an all-night diner. There would be plenty of action around police headquarters. But Parker was staying away from all that. He was a stranger in town; he had thirty-seven dollars in his pockets; he carried identification claiming he was Thomas Lynch from Newark, New Jersey, but one phone call would expose that as false. He wasn’t about to show himself if he could help it.