Ричард Старк - Flashfire [= Parker]

Jeddings said, “Mrs. Fritz, I’ll have staff put a tablecloth over them — you won’t even notice them.”

“Good. You do that.”

Jeddings did do that, and the amplifiers disappeared under a snowy damask tablecloth, and nobody gave them another thought.

“I don’t want to,” Loretta whined.

Loretta always whined, but her whines were different, sometimes merely expressing her general attitude toward life, other times standing for specific emotions, like anger or fear or petulance or weariness. This one right now was her bullheaded stubborn whine, with that extra twang in it, and rumbles of mutiny.

Time to put a stop to that. Leslie turned to her mother, across the table. “Mom,” she said, “I don’t ask much.”

Her mother, Laurel, put down her fork and frowned deeply, her leathery beige face creasing like a supermarket paper bag, because she never liked to have to mediate disputes between her daughters, between Leslie the quick one and Loretta the slow one, slightly retarded, badly overweight, never quite grasping what was going on.

The three were seated together at the dinner table on Wednesday evening, and Leslie knew she had to force the issue now because tomorrow would be the last day to try to get Daniel Parmitt out of the hospital. She’d thought and she’d thought, and this was the only idea she’d come up with for a way to slip him out of there, and it just simply required Loretta’s cooperation. No other choice.

But her mother was making trouble, as well. “Leslie,” she said, “if only you’d tell us why you want to do this.”

Which, naturally, she could not. But why should she have to? She was the provider in the family, she was the one who held it all together, how dare they question her? “Mom,” she said, forcing herself to be calm and reasonable, “this man is a friend. Not a lover, it’s not like that, a friend. He’s in trouble, and he asked me to help, and I’m going to help, and I need Loretta.”

“I don’t want to get in trouble,” Loretta whined.

“You won’t get in trouble,” Leslie told her, not for the first time. “You just do what I say, and it’ll be easy.”

“Mom,” Loretta whined.

Leslie looked at her mother. “Or,” she said, slow and deliberate, to let her mother know she was serious about this, “I could move out.” She didn’t mention, nor at this moment did she more than barely think about it, that if this all happened the way it was supposed to, she’d be moving out anyway.

Loretta looked stricken. She had only the vaguest idea what life would be like without Leslie in the house, but she understood it would be in some way horrible. Worse than now.

Their mother looked from one to the other. She sighed. She said, “Loretta, I think you have to do it.”

Loretta lowered her head to aim her put-upon look at the food on her plate. Her mother turned to Leslie: “What time will you want to leave?”

“At four,” Leslie said. “And it really will be easy, Mom. Nothing to it.”

Alice Prester Young knew she was a herd animal, and enjoyed the knowledge, because the herd she moved with was the very best herd in all the world. For instance, here she was, at five-thirty on this Thursday afternoon, in her chauffeured Daimler, on her way to the bank with her new husband, the delicious Jack, to pick up just the perfect jewelry for tonight’s pre-auction ball, and she knew when she arrived at the bank she would be surrounded by her own kind, chauffeured and cosseted women with attractive escorts, all coming to the bank (the only bank one could use, really) because this particular bank stayed open late whenever there was an important ball in town, just so the herd could come get its jewelry out of the safe-deposit boxes. And the bank would open again, later tonight, when the same herd left the ball and returned to redeposit their jewelry all over again.

The ritual of the bank was almost as enjoyable as the ritual of the ball itself, though shorter. The staff was quiet, methodical, servile without being obsequious. The herd cooed greetings to one another and exclaimed with pleasure over each other’s choice of which pieces to wear to this special occasion. The mirrors that the bank had installed in the rooms outside the safe-deposit vault were very special mirrors, not clear like common mirrors but tinted the most delicate gray, so that when the ladies of the herd looked at themselves as they put on their jewelry, they did not see as many wrinkles or age spots or other flaws as a common mirror might unfeelingly display. The bank cared about the feelings of the herd, and Alice Prester Young liked that, too.

How was it phrased, in that little map and pamphlet the tourists could pick up? The people of Palm Beach were “those who feel they have earned the right to live well.” Yes. Precisely. That’s exactly how Alice felt. She had — somehow — earned the right to move with this plump and comfortable herd, to ride in the Daimler with her brand-new husband, to the beach, to the ball, to the bank.

Another glorious night!

Five-thirty. Trooper Sergeant Jake Farley sat in a side booth at Cindy’s Luncheonette and drank coffee with FBI Agent Chris Mobley, a big spread-out Kentuckian with an easy grin and cold eyes. They were discussing, yet again, the wounded man from Texas, Daniel Parmitt.

“I just don’t know where else to get at this thing from,” Farley said. “The shooters are a blind alley, but every time I try to talk to Parmitt he gets all vague on me, can’t remember a damn thing. I asked him would he mind if I bring in a hypnotist, and he said yeah he did, so here I am, still stuck.”

Mobley said, “Why’d he nix the hypnotist?”

“Said he didn’t like ’em, thought they were phony.”

“If they’re phony,” Mobley said, “they can’t do nothing to him.”

“You can’t reason with a man in a hospital bed,” Farley said. “I’ve learned that a good long time ago. Man in a hospital bed feels sorry for himself and sore at the world. You can’t reason with him.”

Mobley sipped coffee and squinted toward the front of Cindy’s and the street outside. “You think he’s a wrong one somehow?”

Farley frowned at him. “How’d you mean?”

“Somebody shot him,” Mobley pointed out. “Man gets shot, usually it means somebody had a reason. How come he don’t know what the reason is?”

“He doesn’t remember the last week at all,” Farley said.

“Well, how about two weeks ago?” Mobley asked. “Wouldn’t the people with a reason have a reason back that far?”

Farley frowned deeper at that. “You think he’s fakin? Lyin? Stallin?”

“You’ve seen him, I haven’t,” Mobley said. “But the man oughta know who’s mad at him, oughta know at least that much.”

“Mmm,” Farley said, and frowned at his coffee.

“I tell you what,” Mobley said. “Tomorrow, you run off a set of his prints, fax ’em to me in Miami, we’ll check ’em up at SOG.”

Farley thought that over and slowly nodded. “Couldn’t hurt, I suppose,” he said.

Six o’clock. Leslie drove south on Interstate 95, Loretta an unhappy lump on the passenger seat beside her. Loretta was already dressed in the long tan raincoat and the wide-brimmed straw hat with the pink ribbon, and she was staring mulishly out the windshield. She wouldn’t look at Leslie and certainly wouldn’t talk to her. Loretta would go along with the plan, because she had no choice and she knew it, but she was definitely in a grade-A snit.

Well, it didn’t matter, just so she did her part. Everything was falling into place, starting with this car. Another rep at Leslie’s firm, Gloria, was what is called a soccer mom, which meant she spent all her nonworking time transporting masses of small children and all their necessary gear to sub-teen sporting events. For this purpose, her second car was this Plymouth Voyager, with the middle line of seats removed and a ramp installed that could be angled out from the wide side door to accommodate wheeled trunks full of basketballs or hockey sticks or whatever was needed. Leslie had arranged to borrow this vehicle from Gloria for this afternoon and evening, explaining she had to take her sister to a complicated medical procedure that would leave her unable to walk for a few days, and now they were on their way.