Ричард Старк - Flashfire [= Parker]

The boots had been too big for Loretta; they were the right size for Daniel. The hat, the long coat, and the boots covered him completely. As long as he kept his head down and his hands in his lap, he would look exactly like the person Leslie had wheeled in here.

Loretta stood up from the bed, wearing the blue pumps. She had on a shapeless blue-and-white-print dress. “Do I go out now?” she asked.

Leslie considered her. “Don’t forget your glasses.”

“Oh!” Loretta took her black-framed glasses from her purse and put them on, becoming again the owlish, gawky person Leslie knew.

Leslie said, “You just walk out. We’ll be along in a minute.”

“All right.” Now that they were doing it, and nothing bad was happening, Loretta’s mood had improved considerably. She very nearly smiled at Leslie, and when she looked at Daniel in the wheelchair her expression became concerned. “He should stay here,” she said.

“He has his reasons,” Leslie assured her. “We’ll be along.”

Loretta left, and Leslie looked in the closet, expecting to find his clothes, surprised to see nothing in there at all. “Where’s your things?”

“Cops kept.”

“Oh. Well, let’s get you out of here.”

The return journey was simple, and outside, there was Loretta, waiting for them, standing over there beside the Voyager. As she pushed him across the parking lot, Leslie said, “I don’t know what you expect to do tomorrow night.”

“Kill some people,” he whispered.

Jack Young really did care for his new (old) wife, Alice, felt affection for her, enjoyed more about her than her money, though of course the money had come first. In fact, it had been just a joke at the beginning, when he’d met Alice Prester Habib up in New Jersey, where he’d worked for Utica Mutual as a claims examiner, and where, when he first became aware that this particular insured had the hots for him, it was nothing more than the subject of gags around the office.

It was Maureen, an older woman with the firm, computer processor, who’d put the bee in his bonnet. “You could do worse,” she’d said, and when Jack thought about it, he could do worse, couldn’t he? He’d almost done worse, two or three times.

It had been almost a year, at that time, since he’d broken up with his last serious girlfriend, or, more accurately, since she’d broken up with him. His life was a little boring, a little same-old same-old, and the idea of shaking it up in this really different and outrageous way came to appeal to him more and more. And don’t forget the money.

But the fact is, Alice was okay. God knows she was older than his mother, almost older than his grandmother, but she kept herself in shape like an NFL quarterback, and she was of an age where she had no timidity left in bed at all. So that part wasn’t so bad, and for the rest — the knowledge that people laughed at him behind his back, the term “boy toy,” which seemed to hover in the air around him like midges — fuck ‘em if they couldn’t take a joke.

Because you can take the boy out of the actuarial business but you can’t take the actuarial business out of the boy, and Jack was fully aware that he was (a) Alice’s only heir, attested to in the prenuptial agreement, and (b) likely to outlive her by forty to fifty years. Forty to fifty rich years.

So all he had to do was pay attention, in and out of bed, and otherwise be discreet. For instance, when he and Alice walked into the big ballroom at the Breakers Thursday evening for the pre-auction ball, with the tall gleaming mirrors reflecting the posh crowd, and the radiant chandeliers, and the band’s swing oldies echoing in the high-ceilinged space, and the swirl of revelers in their sprays of bright colors and gleaming gold and winking silver and sparkling jewels, the very first person he saw was Kim Metcalf, and he barely gave her a smile of recognition. She, too, with her shrewd blue eyes under the cloud of fluffy yellow hair, returned only the briefest of impersonal nods, including Alice as much as himself, before she moved on, holding to the arm of her husband, Howard, a retired tax lawyer she’d met as a stew on a first-class flight New York to Chicago. (She was still so much a stew in her heart that to this day she preferred the label “flight attendant.”)

As the Metcalfs moved on, Jack turned his eyes firmly away from Kim’s twitching creased behind within the shimmering pale blue satin, but his mind said: Saturday. The apartment Alice would never know about, down among the condos, where he and Kim managed to meet once or twice every week, came surging into his memory. Kim’s body was softer than Alice’s, which was also nice, but by now, for the both of them, the main point was to be able to have a conversation with somebody whose memory bank had not become full before you were born.

Turning to Alice and away from all temptation, Jack said, “Do you want to dance, darling, or meet people first?”

“We’ll dance, darling,” she decided. “We can always meet people.”

True enough.

The new red paint on the fire engine doors was dry, and the doors no longer read

It’s a good thing Crystal City, a sparsely populated area down near Homestead, had an Eng #2 as well, or the good folks there would be shit out of luck if a fire were to start up anywhere around town in the next couple of days. It was a volunteer fire department, like so many in the sticks, so there was never anybody around the small brick fire house except for fires and meetings, so it had been very easy, at five this morning, to bypass the alarm system and ease into the fire house and come roaring out with old Eng #1. By the time anybody started looking for it, Melander and Carlson and Ross would have finished with it.

At nine P.M., with the pre-auction ball in full swing up at the Breakers, Ross stood beside the driver’s door of Eng #1, an open quart of gold enamel paint in his left hand and an M. Grumbacher fine-line brush #5 in his right, with Melander just behind him to hold the flashlight. The fire engine now stood on the lawn at the right side of the house, out of sight from anywhere off the property. Ross, who had learned to be a passable sign painter during the first of his two stretches inside, leaned close to the door and drew the first vertical, then the U-shape to the right:

P

Farley’s wife had learned to sleep through the late-night phone calls, and Farley had trained himself to wake right up at the beginning of the first ring, his hand snaking out from under the covers toward the phone before his eyes had completely focused on the bedside clock: 1:14 . There’d been worse.

“Farley.”

“Higgins here, Sarge,” being one of the deputies on night shift at the office. “We got a report of a missing man out to the hospital.”

“Parmitt,” Farley said.

“That’s right, Daniel Parmitt. The night administrator just called. They did their usual late-night check on the patients, and that one’s gone.”

How? He didn’t walk out, Parmitt, he wasn’t up to it. Somebody helped him. The real estate woman? Farley said, “You sent somebody over there?”

“Jackson and Reese.”

“Call them, tell them I’m on my way.” There wouldn’t be anything there; still, he’d have a look.

Damn; should’ve taken those prints yesterday.

He drove into Snake River at two in the morning in the rented Buick Regal. He’d be done here in an hour, then drive back to Miami International, have breakfast, take the morning flight west, be swimming in his own pool by midafternoon.

The woman who gave him his assignments, once or twice a year, was a lawyer in Chicago. They spoke guardedly on the phone, almost never met face-to-face, and unless he was on assignment he lived a quiet life indeed, writing occasional album reviews for music magazines. On assignment, he had a different name, different identification, different credit card, different everything. Different personality. He didn’t even listen to music, driving south and west from Miami.