Ричард Старк - Flashfire [= Parker]

It was then two-thirty in the afternoon, time enough to get to a bank and open a checking account for Daniel Parmitt, using the address of the house he hadn’t rented yet, starting the account with a thirty-eight-hundred-dollar check from Charles O. St. Ignatius in Houston and a forty-two-hundred-dollar wire transfer from Charles Willis’s money market account in Galveston, so the money would be available at once. From there he went to the post office and the Department of Motor Vehicles, putting in a change of address from the office building to the new house at both.

Next day, he said to the real estate agent, “Let’s look at that yellow house again.”

“I thought you’d like it,” she said, and this time he did.

Daniel Parmitt signed a two-year lease and left a check for two months’ rent plus one month deposit. Parker bought a sleeping bag, the only furnishing he’d need in the house, and settled down to wait.

What he mostly had to do now was move money through his bank accounts, gradually cleaning out all the St. Ignatius accounts in Houston, emptying the two accounts Charles Willis had in Galveston, and concentrating the money into Parmitt’s checking and money market accounts in San Antonio.

While doing that, he also went shopping. Daniel Parmitt was a rich Texan with a background in the oil business, a man who may have worked at some time in his life but happily doesn’t have to anymore, and Parker should dress the way Daniel Parmitt should look. He bought casual slacks and blazers, gaudily colored dress shirts with white collars, shoes with tassels or little gold figures attached to the vamp, yachting caps and white golf caps. He also bought obviously expensive luggage to put it all in.

During this time, he waited to see what the Department of Motor Vehicles would do. If Parmitt’s license was real, as Norte had promised, the change of address would go through without a hitch, and he’d be safe to show that license anywhere. If Norte had lied, or made a mistake, the request would bounce back to him.

But it didn’t. Two weeks into his stay at the turreted yellow house in San Antonio, Daniel Parmitt got his first piece of mail at his new address: his revised driver’s license.

His local Jaguar dealer was happy to talk about leases. There was a little frown of doubt when, on the credit application form, he put down that he’d been at his present address for one month, and gave his previous address as Quito, Ecuador, but then he said, “I was in the oil business down there,” and it was all right. Texans understand the oil business.

Six weeks and two days after Melander and Carlson and Ross had made their mistake in Evansville, Daniel Parmitt got behind the wheel of his yellow Jaguar convertible, top down, rear full of luggage, left his yellow home in San Antonio, and drove eastward on Interstate 10. Three days later he’d covered the thousand miles to Jacksonville, Florida, taking his time, not pushing it, and there he turned southward onto Interstate 95. A day and a half later he turned off at Miami.

Claire was not in her room. He found her out by the pool in a two-piece red bathing suit, on one of the white chaises there, ignoring the interest she aroused and reading a biography of Aphra Behn.

It had been a while since he had seen her at a different angle like this, coming upon her as though she were a stranger, and it reminded him of the first time they’d met, when he’d opened a hotel room door expecting some flunky driver and had seen this cool and beautiful woman instead. When he told her then he hadn’t expected a woman in the job because it was unprofessional she’d said, “It doesn’t sound like a very rewarding profession,” and already he’d been snagged. Closed off before then, indifferent to the world except as it had to be tamed and manipulated, he hadn’t known he could be snagged, but here she was. And here again. Still here.

In his dark blue yachting cap, sunglasses, mustache, pale green blazer, candy-striped dress shirt, white slacks, and tan shoes with tassels, he walked through the sun and the people and the coconut smells of sunblock to sit on the chaise next to her, sideways, to face her. Without looking away from her book, she said, “That’s taken.”

“By me,” he said.

She, too, was in sunglasses, dark green lenses and white plastic frames. She turned her head to give him her cool look through those lenses, then frowned, removed the sunglasses, looked him up and down in astonished distaste, and said, “Good God!”

He grinned. She was the only thing that made him grin. He said, “It works, I guess.”

She studied him, detail by detail, then gave him a small quirk of a smile as she said, “This person. Can he be any good in bed?”

“Let’s find out,” he said.

“Now I remember you,” she told him, smiling, and ran her finger along the purplish furrow on his left side, just above the waist, where a bullet once had passed him by, fired by a man named Auguste Menlo, now dead. “My human target.”

“I haven’t been shot for a long time,” he said, and stretched beside her on the bed.

“Not since you met me. I’m good luck for you.”

“That must be the reason I’m here,” he said, and reached for her again.

He’d been shot eight times, over the years, with puckered reminders still visible on his body, but the only one that showed when he was dressed was the little nick in the lobe of his right ear, as though he’d been docked for branding. A man named Little Bob Negli, who hadn’t yet figured out that his Beretta .25 automatic was shooting high and to the right, had made that nick, firing at him from behind. Negli, too, was dead, but Parker was alive, and in the cool dimness in Claire’s hotel room he felt that life quicken.

In the morning, she said, “The mustache is wrong.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s a policeman’s mustache, too bushy. What you want is a lounge lizard’s mustache, smaller, daintier. Think of David Niven or Errol Flynn.”

“You do it.”

“All right.”

They stood in the shower together, she very intent with her nail scissors, and he watched her eyes, how the light took them.

Later he put on his strange clothes, and she watched him, amused. “Is that what you’ll wear when you come back?”

“No.”

“Don’t get shot any more,” she said, and kissed him, which covered the fact he didn’t have an answer for her. But she hadn’t asked him any questions, and she still didn’t.

At two-thirty that afternoon, in bright sunlight, temperature 76, humidity not too bad, he drove in the yellow Jaguar over the Flagler Memorial Bridge onto Royal Poinciana Way, in Palm Beach.

“Welcome to the Breakers, sir.”

“I have a reservation. The name is Parmitt.”

“Yes, sir, here it is. You’ll be staying with us three weeks?”

“That’s right.”

“And what method of pay — oh, I see. We will be billing your bank in San Antonio, is that right?”

“They keep all my money. I’m not permitted to walk around with it myself.”

The clerk offered an indulgent smile; he was used to the incompetent rich. “It must take a worry off your mind,” he said.

Parker touched the tips of two fingers to his lounge lizard mustache; it felt like half a Velcro strip. “Does it?” he asked, as though the idea of having a worry on his mind had never occurred to him. “Yes, I suppose it does,” he decided. “In any case, I’m not worried.”

“No, sir. If you’d sign here.”

Daniel Parmitt.

“Will that be smoking or non, sir?”

“Non.”

“And will you be garaging a vehicle with us during your stay, sir?”