Uhl started through the doorway and Parker stepped over quickly in front of him and slapped him across the face with the barrel of the gun. Uhl flipped over backwards onto the floor and Parker kicked him and then stood back and watched him again. He felt very patient, very measured. He had all the time in the world.
Uhl came up slowly. His cheek was bleeding, and his face finally looked frightened. His voice was a little shaky now too, but what he said was, “Parker, that way don’t do it. You won’t kick it out of me, you really won’t, because I’ll keep remembering that as soon as I tell you where the money is you’ll stop kicking and start shooting. You won’t get it that way, Parker, I swear you won’t.”
“You may be right,” Parker said. He switched the gun to his left hand. “Get up,” he said.
“Sure I’m right,” Uhl said. A relieved smile flashed across his face. Starting awkwardly to his feet he said, “Just let me make myself some break— “
He was halfway up, bent forward. Parker swung from the floor and hit him across the jaw with his dosed fist. Uhl jerked around in a half circle, his arms flopping out in front of him, and fell face down across the foot of the bed, his feet hanging back pigeon-toed on the floor.
Parker checked him and he was out. He dragged him all the way up onto the bed and rolled him over onto his back, then took from his jacket pocket the small bottle of serum he’d found at Brock’s place and a hard-pack cigarette box, and shook out the hypodermic needle, now in its two parts. He screwed the parts together and put the hypo on the table beside the bottle.
He’d brought this along just in case, though he would have preferred not to use it. He wasn’t one hundred per cent sure it was the same stuff that had been used on him, and he had no idea what the right dose was or what an overdose might do. But there’d been a good chance Uhl would react the way he had, and in that case there was the serum to fall back on.
He rolled Uhl’s sleeve up, exposing his arm all the way to the shoulder. Judging from the small puncture mark in his own arm after the serum had been used on him, it was injected directly into the vein in the inner part of the elbow. Parker turned Uhl’s limp arm on the sheet, saw the faint blue line beneath the skin, touched it with one finger. A slight ridge, almost too slight to feel. But if he could see it he could hit it.
He’d never worked with a hypodermic needle before, but he’d seen it done in the movies and on television, and a few times he’d watched doctors getting ready to give him a shot. He didn’t have the usual interest in sterile precautions, so that simplified matters. He picked up the bottle and needle and studied them. If he had it figured right, he should depress the plunger all the way in the syringe, poke the needle through the cork in the top of the bottle, then gradually pull the plunger out again, filling the syringe with the fluid from the bottle. Then pull the needle out of the cork, stick it in Uhl’s arms, and depress the plunger again. No. Squirt a little first, to be sure he wasn’t injecting air in the vein, because that would kill Uhl before he could talk.
There was about two-thirds left in the bottle. Assuming he’d been the first one it had been used on, he should now take about half the remainder. He did, having no difficulty, and injected it ; slowly into Uhl’s arm. The plunger resisted him, not wanting to shove the fluid into Uhl’s vein quickly, and he just kept a slow and steady pressure on it and quit while there was still a trace of fluid in the syringe. Then he took the hypo apart again, put the parts back in the cigarette box, and tucked the box and bottle back into his pocket.
Uhl hadn’t moved. Parker leaned over him and said, “George.”
Nothing.
“George, wake up.”
No reaction.
Parker slapped his face and called his name again. He tugged at Uhl’s hair, slapped him harder. Still nothing.
So he’d have to wait. That was all right, he had time. He went over to a chair and sat down.
Three
When the front door banged open, Parker got out of the chair fast and stepped behind the bedroom door. His pistol was in his hand, his back against the wall, his head turned so he could look through the crack between door and jamb and see whoever it was before they got all the way into the room.
But he heard her before he saw her. “George!” she cried, running through the apartment. “George, wake up!”
Joyce Langer.
There had always been the chance she’d change her mind, and she was the type to do it too late. Parker waited where he was.
She came running into the room and skidded to one knee beside the bed. “George!” she started to shake his shoulder. “George, you’ve got to wake up! There’s a man after you! There’s a man named Lynch after you!”
Parker shut the bedroom door. “He knows me under a different name,” he said.
She spun so fast she almost lost her balance and fell over, grabbing Uhl’s upper arm at the last second to help her keep her balance. “You!”
“You should have phoned,” Parker told her. “You wouldn’t be in trouble now.”
“I couldn’t tell him on the phone,” she said. “What I did, I couldn’t tell him what I did.”
“Second guessers always make trouble for themselves,” Parker said. “Get up from there.”
She said, “Don’t do anything to — I shouldn’t have. Don’t do anything to him because of what I did. Please.” She turned and shook his arm again. “George, wake up!” Then she stared at him, struck finally by his lack of response, by the way he was just lying there. “George? George?”
He could hear panic and hysteria building in her voice. He said, “He’s alive. Don’t worry about him, he’s alive.”
“What did you do to him? What in the name of God did you do to him?”
He walked closer to her. “You shouldn’t have come back here.”
She stared up at him. “What are you going to do? What am I involved in? What’s going on?”
Uhl groaned, startling them both. Immediately she was all over him, tugging at his shoulders, shouting into his face: “George, George, wake up, please wake up!”
He mumbled something. His face was frowning, but other than that he still wasn’t moving.
Parker took the girl by the arm. “Up out of there,” he said. “You came at a bad time.”
She didn’t want to go. He had to tug harder. He knew she’d start screaming soon, and he couldn’t have that. In any case, he couldn’t have her in this room listening when he started asking his questions. He said, loud and commanding, “Joyce!”
She automatically turned her head to look up at him and he clipped her with a short, hard right hand. She bounced back against the edge of the bed and would have fallen to the floor if he hadn’t held on to her.
She was out. He picked her up and carried her into the living room and dumped her on the sofa, then went back to the bedroom and went through dresser drawers and found stockings and belts and a clean handkerchief. He took these back to the living room and bound and gagged her. She would keep now, for a while. But she still complicated things; her presence here still made the situation too difficult.
But he could work all that out later. He went back to the bedroom and Uhl had faded back down into sleep again, the frown lines gone from his face. Parker took the chair he’d been sitting in and pulled it over beside the bed and sat down. He already had a pencil and a piece of paper on the bedside table.
He said, “George.”
A faint frown.
“George, listen to me. Wake up and listen to me.”
The frown deepened; it became petulant, like a child not wanting to wake up from a nap. Uhl’s head moved slowly back and forth, once to the left and once to the right, as though he wanted to shake his head in a no gesture but couldn’t because it was too much effort.
“Wake up, George. Listen to me. Can you hear me? George? Can you hear .me, George?”
He wasn’t getting all the way through. He reached over and slapped Uhl’s face, not hard, and Uhl said, “U
nn-nn,” the frown deepening even more into an exaggerated grimace, the eyes squeezing shut as though a bright light had been aimed at them.
“George? Can you hear me?”
“Ohh,” said Uhl, still grimacing, the sound petulant.
“Can you hear me?”
“Yes.” As though to say leave me alone.
“This is Parker. Do you know who I am?”
“Yes.” Said more calmly now, as though he was getting more resigned to answering questions.
“Who am I?”
“You’re Parker.”
“And who are you?”
“George. George Uhl.”
“You took some money away from me.”
No answer.
Parker looked at him, wondering if he’d faded out again, but then remembered his own session with this drug. It was necessary to phrase the sentences as direct questions, obviously requiring an answer. Statements weren’t answered, only questions were answered.
All right. He said, “Do you remember taking some money away from me?”
“Yes.” Very prompt, and without any emotional reaction at all. Uhl’s eyes were still closed but in a more relaxed way now, no longer squeezed shut. He seemed calm now, his answers calm, almost mechanical.
Parker said, “Where is that money? The money you took from me.”
“I don’t know.”
That couldn’t be the right answer. Was the drug not working? Had he given too little? He looked at Uhl’s face, but he couldn’t believe Uhl was acting. The drug was affecting him, it had to be. Then how could he come up with an answer like that?
Was it true? Had the damn fool managed to lose the money sometime in the last five days?
Parker said, “What did you do with the money?”
“Left it with Ed.”
That was better. There was an explanation in here somewhere. All he had to do was work out the right questions to ask. He picked up the pencil and wrote Ed on the paper, then said, “Ed who?”
“Saugherty.”
“Spell it. Will you spell that name?”
Uhl spelled it, slowly and steadily, like a talking computer, and Parker wrote it down.
Parker said, “You left the money with Ed Saugherty. What did Ed Saugherty do with the money?”
“Hid it.”
“He hid it from you?”
Uhl frowned. The question was too complicated for him somehow.
Parker found another way to phrase it. “Did he hide the money for you?”
Uhl’s expression cleared. He was contented again. He said. “Yes.”
“Do you know where he hid it?”
“No.”
“When did he hide it?”
“Friday.”
That would be yesterday. Parker said, “Were you staying with Ed Saugherty before you came here?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you leave there?”
“Matt Rosenstein was after me.”
“How do you know?”
“He beat up Barri.”
“Did you see Barri?”
“Yes.”
“Did you call the doctor for her?” “Yes.”
Parker grimaced. He and Uhl had been doing a long-distance dance up and down the eastern seaboard for three days. He’d gotten to Pearson before Uhl, but Uhl had caught up. And then Uhl had gotten to Barri Dane before Parker, but Parker didn’t catch up. But that was all right, because Parker had gotten to Joyce Langer before Uhl, and that meant everything was caught up.
But if only the timing had been a little different somewhere along the line.
Parker said, “Did Barri Dane tell Matt Rosenstein anything?”
“Phone number.”
“What phone number?”
“Ed’s phone number.”
“Could Rosenstein get to Ed through that phone number?”
“Yes.”
Which meant Rosenstein was now a full day ahead of him. Had he gotten the money away from this Ed Saugherty?
Parker said, “Where do you know Ed Saugherty from?”
“High school.”
Parker frowned. It was another strange answer. He said, “What does Ed Saugherty do?”
“Works for a computer company.”
“You mean he’s legit?”
“Yes.”
Another problem. It had been smart of Uhl to do that, pick somebody on the outside to hole up with, somebody that didn’t have any connections to his bent life, but now that everything was blown open it made for complications. With Rosenstein and Parker both descending on him, this Ed Saugherty would probably be calling copper or anyway confusing the issue.
Parker said, “Where does Ed Saugherty live?”
“Philadelphia.”
Another drive. Ninety miles this time. If it weren’t such a time-consuming pain in the ass it would be comic.
Parker asked for the address and wrote down Uhl’s answer. He then had Uhl describe the house, give physical descriptions of Saugherty and the other members of his family, and give a general description of the neighborhood.
A solid, middle-class family in a solid, middle-class development. All very straight, all very innocent, all having no idea how to handle the kind of situation they were in now. With Saugherty’s wife already giving her husband static about Uhl, according to Uhl. What would she be doing with Rosenstein and Parker descending on the household?
In fact, with Rosenstein a day ahead of him, there was no telling what sort of situation existed down there now. The thing could have blown wide open to the cops. Rosenstein could have been in and gotten the money and gone away already. A lot could have happened. Parker could pick Uhl’s brain clean and he’d still be going down there to a blind situation. He could be walking to a house full of law, or a house full of Rosenstein, or even a house where Ed Saugherty had grabbed himself a gun and gone on the alert. Anything could have happened; anything could happen next.
Parker next asked, “Who else knows about the money besides you and me arid Rosenstein and Ed Saugherty?”
“Nobody.”
“Not Barri Dane?”
“No.”
“Not Joyce Langer?”
“No.”
“You’ve been with Ed Saugherty, and Barri Dane, and Joyce Langer. You went to Lew Pearson’s, when you shot him. Where else have you been?”
“Nowhere.”
“Haven’t you seen anybody else?”
“No.”
All right. At least he now was sure of how many were in the game. The odds were still against him, but at least he knew how many were playing. He folded the piece of paper and put it away in his pocket. Then he got to his feet and left the bedroom.
The phone was in the living room, beside the sofa. Joyce Langer was still unconscious. Parker sat down near her feet and dialed the Philadelphia number he’d gotten from Uhl.
It was answered on the second ring by a noncommital voice that asked, “Hello?”
“Ed Saugherty?”
“Speaking,” said the voice. It was vaguely reminiscent.
“I’m calling for George,” Parker said. “You know who I mean?”
“Of course,” said the voice. “Where is George?”
“He thinks it would be safer for you if you didn’t know,” Parker said. “But he wants the money. You know, the suitcase?”
“The suitcase? Oh. Yes, the suitcase.” But the voice seemed doubtful. And it was reminding Parker of something or somebody.
“He wants you to bring it up to New York,” Parker said.
“Sure,” said the voice. “Where is it?”
It wasn’t Saugherty. Saugherty knew where the money was; Saugherty was the only one on earth who knew where the money was. This wasn’t Saguherty.
Then Parker recognized the voice at last, and without saying anything more he hung up and headed for the bedroom.
The voice had been Paul Brock’s.
Four
Uhl was lying there like the body at a wake, h
is face expressionless. Parker stood beside the bed and said, “Can you open your eyes?”
In a faraway voice Uhl said, “I don’t know.”
“Try.”
Uhl’s eyelids raised. His eyes looked up toward the ceiling, but they didn’t seem to be focused on anything.
“Try sitting up,” Parker said.
Uhl seemed very uncoordinated. He moved clumsily, his arms and legs beating ineffectively as he tried to get up off his back. Parker finally had to help him, but once he was sitting up he could stay there on his own, though he tilted a bit to one side. His arms hung down and his eyes were still looking straight ahead, still unfocused.
Parker got him on his feet. He was very weak, though willing to do whatever he was told to do. With Parker helping to support him, they walked out of the bedroom and through the apartment.
The problem was, he couldn’t leave Uhl here because he didn’t know how long it would take for the drug to wear off enough to let Uhl start making phone calls to Philadelphia, and he didn’t want anybody down there any more alerted than they already were. And he didn’t want Uhl on his back again coming down to Philadelphia in his wake.
On the other hand, he couldn’t take the simple way out and kill Uhl here unless he was willing to kill Joyce Langer too, and so long as things weren’t impossible otherwise, he wasn’t willing to kill Joyce Langer. Her worst sin was stupidity combined with fluctuating emotionalism, and he didn’t feel like-doing anything about her except leaving her alone. And calling the building superintendent several hours from now, when this was all squared away, telling him to come up to this apartment to let her loose. If he didn’t do that, considering how popular Joyce Langer seemed to be, she’d probably starve to death up here before anybody noticed she was missing.
The end result was that he had to rake Uhl with him and finish the job somewhere on the road. Which was a little complicated, a little troublesome, but not impossible.
She had regained consciousness now. Parker saw her eyes open, saw her watching them walk through the living room. Uhl’s head lolled, he shambled; he was obviously doped up. Over the gag around her mouth, her eyes were wide as she looked at Uhl.
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