Firebreak

1

Lloyd's car was a black Honda Accord, several years old, with a dented right front fender, hair-thin lines of red in the dents to suggest he'd one time run into a fireplug. Parker drove, Lloyd in the front seat beside him, happy to be a passenger. Elkins and Wiss were on their way home, outside Chicago, to wait to learn what Parker and Lloyd had found at Claire's house.

They had to make this trip in the other direction first because Lloyd needed some equipment to bring with him. Part of the equipment was to find the base linked to that camera at the house, and the rest of it was to keep the state of Massachusetts from learning that Lloyd had broken his parole again.

Lloyd lived outside Springfield, about forty-five miles east of Great Barrington. There was a more direct state road, but in the latter part of a weekday afternoon that would be full of shoppers and salarymen, so Parker took them north first to the Mass Pike, then east. The early part of the trip, Lloyd threw out a few more apologies and I'm-stupids, but then Parker said, 'That's done. Now we're doing what we're doing now," and after that Lloyd calmed down.

The next time he broke the silence was just after they made the turn onto the Mass Pike, amid the lanes of thundering trucks and rushing imports, when he said, "I'm wondering if Otto ever mentioned you."

"Mainzer? Why would he?"

'There were two things Otto liked to do in prison," Lloyd said. "Fight and talk. He liked to tell stories about his great capers, the ones where he didn't get caught. I wondered if you were ever in those stories."

"Did he put names in the stories?"

"Not usually, no."

"He wouldn't," Parker said.

Lloyd studied Parker's profile a minute, digesting that, and then he looked out at the yellow-gray world ahead, backlit by the late-afternoon sun behind them, the black shadows of all these vehicles leaping forward, and what he said was actually a continuation of the conversation, though it didn't sound like it: "I think I'm learning more about this new world since I've been out here than in all the time I was inside."

"You're a quick study," Parker told him. "You'll learn."

"I don't have much choice," Lloyd said. Which was true.

* * *

"I don't think you should come in," Lloyd told him, as they neared his neighborhood. 'You're a bad companion, you know. In fact, you probably shouldn't even stop at the house. Just let me off at the corner and circle a couple times."

"Fine."

Lloyd reached under the dash, between them, and hit some sort of switch. "That's my two-way to the house," he said. "When I'm ready to come out, I'll tell you."

"Good."

"If you need to speak to me about anything," Lloyd went on, "you see the white button over by the side vent?"

The hole for the button had been drilled neatly, but it was still clearly a non-factory add-on. 'Yeah," Parker said.

"Push that and just speak. I'll hear you."

"Who've you got at home?"

"No one any more." Lloyd seemed embarrassed. "My wife decided on a divorce two years after I went in."

"That happens."

"The counselor said so, yes. Also, I have cousins that visit sometimes, so we use the radio."

"Uh-huh."

'You'll let me off two blocks from here."

This part of West Springfield, just west of the Connecticut River, was a neat working-class grid of older

two-story one-family homes, most with porches and cropped lawns, many with children's toys scattered around the front. Traffic was light, and very local. A stranger wouldn't get to stay here long without being noticed.

Parker said, "How long do you think? Before you come out."

"Oh, ten minutes, no more."

"I'll drive out of the neighborhood and then back."

"All right, fine. Up ahead here, by that brick church."

Parker pulled to the curb, looking around. "And where are you from here?"

Lloyd pointed away to the right. "Half a block, number three-eighty-seven. But don't come to the house!"

"No, I'll wait back here."

"Okay, good."

Lloyd got out and walked away, a bedraggled but earnest figure, a guy who'd had a wife and a house in this modest neighborhood, when he was supposed to be rich instead, and had gone nuts when he'd found out, and was still trying to become some new guy, not yet sure who that new guy was. His openness and malleability had clearly helped him survive inside, but would do less for him out here. He was what Wiss and Elkins needed on the technical side, but Parker wondered how much of a liability he was going to be on the personal side.

He drove the Honda away from there, straight for half a dozen blocks, then a left for a few blocks, then another left, and then faintly heard crackling noises, static inside the car. Lloyd's radio? Had he turned it on in the house?

Yes. And was speaking: .. nobody gets hurt... how can it get back to you} It can't." And wasn't Lloyd.

"If I knew where he was, I'd tell you." That was Lloyd. "I'm not a brave man, look at me, I'm scared to death of you two. If I knew, I'd tell."

So Brock and Rosenstein's second team had decided Parker wasn't going back to the house on the lake, not right away, so they might as well try to get at him through one of the other names they'd picked up from Lloyd's computer. And they'd gone straight to the weakest link.

"I tell you what," said a third voice, as Parker made the left and saw the brick church some distance ahead. "You tell us another story first, just to get into the mood for it."

"Story? What story?"

"The job you're pulling with the other three. Tell us about that."

"Oh, I can't do that!"

"Sure you can."

Parker pulled to the curb a block short of the church, by a branch library. His pistol was in his inside jacket pocket. The electric garage door opener from the visor he put into the right outer pocket, then got out of the Honda, left it unlocked, and went for a walk.

* * *

There wouldn't be time to come at this with indirection. Lloyd wouldn't stand up to those people for a second, and once they'd squeezed him, why not kill him? Even if they didn't do that, once he'd failed he'd have one more defeat to brood about when he should be thinking about Paxton Marino's security instead.

There is a thing called loser mentality, and losing is both its cause and symptom. It's clearly what had sent Lloyd on his rampage once before, and if he got another bout of the same illness he'd be no good to Parker and the others. Which was bad because, the way it looked, there was no job without Larry Lloyd.

The house was dark shingle, up ahead on the left, set back from the sidewalk behind a neat lawn, like all the other houses along here. Its wide front porch had a green shingle roof held up by square stone pillars, inside which the house looked muffled, almost abandoned. On its left side, nearest Parker as he approached, a one-car attached garage had been added at a later date, done in the same style but somehow not the same at all. The blacktop driveway to the garage was obscured on this side by a low privet hedge, put in by the neighbor. On a block where most of the houses were clapboard, in white or pastels, Lloyd's house looked like the one with secrets.

Parker didn't pause. Rounding the hedge, he strode up the driveway, trusting that the two inside would concentrate on Lloyd and not look out the windows. As he neared the brown-painted wooden overhead door, he pulled the opener from his pocket and thumbed the button. The door jerked, started its slide upward, and he went down to the blacktop, landing on his left side. He rolled through the gap under the door, thumbing the opener again—the door stopped—and again—it started down—then rolled across the empty concrete floor to the right wall, near the house, dropping the opener and reaching inside the jacket for his gun.

Would the few seconds of the opener motor have been heard inside the house? Would it have been recognized, in that short a time? Parker got to his knees then, holding the pistol in both hands aimed at the connecting door to the house. In that posture, he slid his right shoulder up the wall until he was on his feet.

No sound, no apparent movement. There was no time to be sure of anything; he slipped along the wall, listened for two seconds at the door, turned the knob with his left hand, pushed.

Sounds, some distance away. Blubbering. Broken already.

Parker went through a messy kitchen, without really seeing it, concentrating on the doorway beyond, the sounds from beyond that. Into a dark hall, a dining room through a doorway opposite, some muddied daylight from the lace-curtained glass in the front door down to the right. Sobbing from down that way.

The hall carpet silenced his feet. He came swiftly down the hall, pistol ahead of himself, spun into the living room doorway, and put a bullet into the knee of the one on the left.

The tableau froze for one second, paralyzed by the sound of the shot Making the turn, he'd seen Lloyd's back to him as he slumped on his knees at the coffee table fronting the sofa on the far wall, shoulders heaving as he wept, arm moving as he wrote on a sheet of paper on the coffee table. The two strangers hulked on either side of him and back a pace, both standard-issue thugs, big but ordinary. He needed one of them alive at the end of this, to answer questions. The one on the right held a sap, long and flexible, that would hurt wherever it hit, but the one on the left held the 9mm Beretta, so it was the one on the left Parker brought down first.

The other was a surprise. He heard the shot, he saw the tableau dissolve as his partner began to crumble and Lloyd's head jerked upward, and without ever looking in Parker's direction he wheeled on his right foot, folded his forearms over the top of his head, and launched himself through the living room's picture window.

"Get the gun and keep that one!" Parker yelled at Lloyd, turned, and ran out the front door.

The other one was just vaulting the porch rail. Parker snapped a shot at him, but knew it was no good, and knew he couldn't do any more shooting, not here, not now. The other guy, face and forearms bleeding, ran across the lawn, and Parker saw a passing driver give the scene a curious look.

He wanted them both, he needed them both, but he couldn't chase a bleeding man in a family neighborhood in the middle of the afternoon. And how long could he trust Lloyd to keep the first one, even with a bullet in him? Reluctant, but knowing there was no choice, Parker went back into the house.

Lloyd was alone in the living room, curled up in a fetal position on the floor, face into the carpet. He heard Parker come in, and lifted a tear-stained face that was astonishingly smiling; but then he uncurled enough to show he still had the Beretta, clutched in both hands. That was the reason for the smile; he hadn't let a knee-shot man take the pistol away from him.

Parker spread his hands, asking the question, and Lloyd nodded jerkily at the connecting doorway to the dining room. Parker started toward that doorway, then realized that was the mistake. The guy's knee was gone; how fast could he move, and for how long?

Parker went out to the hall and down to the dining room that way. When he eased his head around the frame, he saw the guy just to the right of the other door, Lloyd still visible through there on the floor, the guy leaning heavily against the wall, blood soaking his right pants leg from the knee down, his hands clenched on a chair he'd dragged over from the dining room table. He wanted Parker to come through that doorway and take the chair in the face.

No. Parker stepped into the dining room, showed the pistol, and said, "Sit on it. You'll feel better."

The guy looked at him. He was in pain, but he was still trying to find a way out of here. His eyes flicked at the side windows.

Parker said, "I don't think so. You want him to come back, and so do I, but I don't think so. Sit down, it's still question time."

The guy thought about that, then shook his head. "I'm just the heavy lifter," he said, wheezing as he talked. "My partner knows everything."

"You know some—"

Lloyd came erupting out of the other room, face twisted, grimacing with hatred and shame and revenge. 'You bastard)." he yelled, and stuck the Beretta into the middle of the guy's face, and pulled the trigger.