Ричард Старк - Flashfire [= Parker]

So this must be their stash of guns. Parker switched on the garage light long enough to study the footlocker and its padlock, then he switched the light off again, left the garage, left the house, climbed down the neighbors’ chain-link fence, and walked back to the Four Seasons. He walked toward the Jaguar, stashed among a dotting of other cars in the dim-lit parking area, then veered off, away from the Jag, moving around into another section of the lot.

There was someone in the Jag. A dark mound, in the passenger seat.

Parker, empty-handed, came slowly at the Jag from the rear, trying to keep out of any mirrors the passenger might see. At the end, he crouched against the rear bumper and moved his head slowly to the left until he could see the rearview mirror, see the reflection of the person, move farther left, see the person better...

Leslie.

When he straightened and moved around to her side of the car, she saw him coming and reacted by opening the door. The interior light came on and she squinted, smiling up at him. “Have a nice walk?” she said.

He said, “Who knows you’re here?”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said, still smiling, pretending to be unconcerned, but clutching tight to the handle of the open door to hide her nervousness. “I’m no threat to you,” she said, “so you don’t have any reason to be a threat to me.”

He said, “Who knows you’re here?”

She was still in uniform, the beige suit and the dolphin pin. She shifted her legs to get out of the car, saying, “Buy me a drink at the bar over there.”

He reached out and cupped his palm over the top of her head, feeling the tight blond curls. He didn’t exert pressure, just held her there, so she couldn’t go on getting out of the car. “Leslie,” he said, “when I ask a question, you answer it.”

She tried to move her head, to twist out from under his hand, so she could look up at him, but he wouldn’t let her move. “You’re hurting my neck,” she said.

He knew he wasn’t, but it didn’t matter. “Who knows you’re here, Leslie?”

“No one! All right? No one.”

He released her and stepped back a pace so she could get out of the car. She did so, tottering a bit as she got to her feet, leaving the door open so she could lean on it and there’d be some light. Sounding resentful and flustered, she said, “You want to know who I told your business , is that right?”

That was half of it. The other half was, how complicated would it be if he had to kill her. He said, “What is my business, Leslie?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” she said.

“You smelled something.”

“I certainly did.” She was getting her self-confidence back, feeling they would deal in words now and words were her territory. She said, “Everything you did in the car today was almost right, almost, but I didn’t buy it. Is Daniel Parmitt your real name?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Because you’re less than two months old,” she said. “When we finished driving around today, I thought, That man doesn’t really want a house here, but he wants something , and the only thing he showed any interest in at all was the house Mr. Roderick bought.”

“Roderick.”

“Also a Texan, or so he says,” she reminded him. “And I looked into him, too, and he’s only six months old. The two of you, there isn’t a paper, not a line of credit, a history of any kind that goes back even a year.”

“I’ve been out of the country,” Parker said.

“You’ve been off the planet,” she told him. “Listen, do we have to stand here in the parking lot? If you won’t buy me a drink, I’ll buy you one.”

He said, “Where do you live?”

“Me?” She seemed surprised at the question. “With my mother and sister,” she said, “over in West Palm.”

He didn’t want a drink with her in a hotel bar, because it was seeming as though she might have to die tonight, and he didn’t want to have been seen with her just before. But visiting the mother and the sister in West Palm was also no good, and taking her to his room at the Breakers would be worst of all.

On the other hand, had she talked to people about this strange new man? Had she left a note somewhere? He said, “Let’s go to your office.”

That surprised her. “What for?”

“You have keys, you can get in. We’ll have the talk you want to have, and we won’t be interrupted.”

“I really do want a drink, you know.”

“Later.”

She frowned at him, trying to work him out.

“Leslie,” he said, “where’s your car?”

“Over there,” she said, and pointed generally toward the hotel.

“I’ll meet you at your office,” he said, and walked around to the driver’s side of the Jag.

She hadn’t moved. She went on standing there, in the V of the open door, her beige suit bouncing the light, her face in semi-darkness as she frowned at him over the top of the car.

“Shut the door, Leslie,” he said. “I’ll meet you at your office.”

He got into the Jag, and she leaned down to look in at him. “Daniel Parmitt is not your real name,” she said, and straightened, and shut the door at last, and walked away across the parking lot.

He left the Jag in the other long block of Worth Avenue, among the very few cars parked there, and walked to the office, where she was waiting for him on the sidewalk. “You could have parked here,” she said.

“I like to walk.”

She shook her head, turned away, and unlocked the office door. “We’ll use Linda’s office in the back,” she said. “It’s more comfortable, and we won’t have to leave a lot of lights on in front.”

“Fine.”

An illuminated clock on the sidewall, gift of an insurance company, served as the office night-light. In its glow, he followed her through the desks to a doorway at the back. She stepped through, hit a switch, and overhead fluorescents came stuttering on.

He said. “Aren’t there better lights?”

“Hold on.”

The office was wider than deep, with a large desk on the right, filing cabinets across the back, and shelves and cabinets on the left. A dark brown vinyl sofa, with a coffee table, stood out from the cabinets, facing the desk across the way.

While he stood in the doorway, she turned on a brass desk lamp, a tulip-globed floor lamp in the corner behind the desk like something in a funeral parlor, and a group of muted strip lights under the shelves. “You can turn the overheads off right there,” she told him, pointing to the switch beside the door.

Now the room was comfortable, illuminated in pools of amber. Crossing to sit on the right side of the sofa, he said, “Tell me what you think you’ve got so far.”

“You’re a wooden nickel, that’s all I know right now,” she said. “Linda usually keeps white wine in the refrigerator here. Want some?”

She herself did, of course: keeping the tension held down below the surface was hard work. He said, “If you do.”

She smiled. “At last, a human response.”

The refrigerator, a low one, was in a cabinet behind the sofa. Real estate magazines and old newsmagazines were on the black Formica coffee table. She brought a bottle of California chardonnay and two water glasses and shoved magazines out of the way to put them down. The bottle was already open, cork stuck back in, not much gone. She pulled the cork and poured for them both. “To truth,” she said, toasting him.

He shrugged, and they both drank, and she sat at the other end of the sofa, knees together, holding the glass in her left hand, body angled toward him. “You’re new at your bank,” she said, “you’re new at your house. One thing you get good at in this business is credit checks, and your credit doesn’t exist. You never owned or leased a car before the one you have now, never had a credit card, never had a mortgage, never had a bank account until the one you just started in San Antonio.”