Flashfire

1

“Welcome to the Breakers, sir.”

“I have a reservation. The name is Parmitt.”

“Yes, sir, here it is. You’ll be staying with us three weeks?”

“That’s right.”

“And what method of pay — oh, I see. We will be billing your bank in San Antonio, is that right?”

“They keep all my money. I’m not permitted to walk around with it myself.”

The clerk offered an indulgent smile; he was used to the incompetent rich. “It must take a worry off your mind,” he said.

Parker touched the tips of two fingers to his lounge lizard mustache; it felt like half a Velcro strip. “Does it?” he asked, as though the idea of having a worry on his mind had never occurred to him. “Yes, I suppose it does,” he decided. “In any case, I’m not worried.”

“No, sir. If you’d sign here.”

Daniel Parmitt.

“Will that be smoking or non, sir?”

“Non.”

“And will you be garaging a vehicle with us during your stay, sir?”

“Yes, I left it with the fellow out there. He gave me a — wait, here it is.”

“Yes, very good, thank you, sir. You keep this, you’ll show it to the doorman whenever you want your car.”

Parker held the ticket, frowning at it, then sighed and nodded and put it away in his trouser pocket. “I can do that,” he decided.

“And will you be needing assistance with your luggage, sir?”

“The fellow put it on a cart, over there somewhere.”

“Very good. Front! Do enjoy your stay with us, Mr. Parmitt.”

“I’m sure I will,” Parker said, and turned to find a bellboy at his elbow, who wanted to know what room he was in. Parker didn’t know until the bellboy helpfully read it aloud for him off the little folder containing his keycard.

“I’ll meet you up there, sir, with your luggage.”

“Fine. Thank you.”

He stood where he was until the clerk said, “The elevators are just over there, sir.”

“Thank you.”

He rode the elevator up, alone in the car, and strode down the quiet hall to his room. Entering, he faced a wide window, thinly curtained, with the ocean and the bright day visible outside. When he looked at the king-size bed, he thought of Claire, whom he would see again... when? In three weeks? Sooner? Never?

A rapping at the door meant the bellboy with the luggage. Parker went through the usual playlet with him, being shown the amenities, the luggage placed just so, lights switched on and off, then the bellboy accepting the rich tip Parker gave him and smiling himself back out the door.

About to start unpacking, Parker caught sight of himself in one of the several mirrors and stopped. He studied himself and knew that what he was doing was the thing to do, the way to be here without being seen, without causing questions to be asked, but still, it felt strange and it looked strange. This person, in these clothes, in this room, on this island.

Well. Whatever tactics he decided on in the next couple of weeks, he knew one thing for certain: he wouldn’t be intimidating anybody.

2

“This is my first time in Palm Beach,” Parker told the real estate woman, “and I find I’m taking to it quite a bit.”

The real estate woman was pleased. A round-faced blonde of about forty, an ex-cheerleader with padding, she wore a beige suit, matching shoes, paler plain blouse, a gold pin of a leaping dolphin on her right breast, and a simple strand of pearls at her throat. She was one of an interchangeable half dozen of such women in this spacious cool office on Worth Avenue, where the only difference was in the color each woman had chosen for today’s suit (skirt, not pants); there was peach, there was avocado, there was coconut, there was canary yellow, and there was royal blue. It was a garden of padded real estate women, and how did they decide each morning which one would be Kim, which Susan, which Joyce? The one talking with Parker had chosen to be Leslie today.

“Palm Beach isn’t for everyone,” she said, though still with her welcoming smile. “Those who will find it the place in their lives tend to know that right away.”

“I don’t know as how it could be the place for me,” Parker told her, leaning into the characterization, knowing he would never be as seamlessly plausible as Melander, talking about the little Mexicans, but thinking he could do it well enough to pass. “I have other places I like,” he explained. “South Padre Island. Vail. But Palm Beach has something that appeals to me.”

“Of course,” she said with that smile. Her teeth were large and white and even.

“To have a place here, oh, for a month a year, January or February, that might not be bad.”

She made a note, on the form on which she’d already filled in his particulars: name, home address, bank, staying at the Breakers. She said, “Would you be entertaining?”

“You mean, how big a place would I need. Yes, of course, I’d have guests, I’d want room to spread out.”

“Not a condo, then,” she said.

He already knew that much about Palm Beach. “Leslie,” he said, “the condos aren’t Palm Beach. They’re south on the island, their own thing, little places for retired accountants. I’d want something — well, you tell me. What’s the neighborhood I want?”

She opened a desk drawer, pulled out a map, and laid it in front of him. With a gold pen, she made marks on the upside-down map as she described the territory. “The most sought-after section, of course,” she told him, “is what we call between-the-clubs, because real Palm Beachers want to belong to both of the important clubs, so to have a place between them is very convenient.”

“Sounds good.”

“The Everglades Club, at the north, is here on Golf Road. Then the area of County Road and Ocean Boulevard here is the section I’m talking about, down to the Bath and Tennis Club, here where Ocean Boulevard turns inland at the Southern Boulevard Bridge.”

“These are all oceanfront?”

“Well, they’re both,” she said. “Lake Worth runs along here, on the mainland side of the island. Here, just below Bath and Tennis, where Ocean Boulevard curves in away from the sea, we have estates with ocean frontage, but some of them have tunnels under Ocean Boulevard to the beach on Lake Worth, so the property actually extends through from ocean to lake.”

“And the lake is more protected than the ocean.”

“Exactly.” Then she smiled and said, “One of our ladies, some years ago, to keep from being served papers in a divorce, ran through the tunnel to escape. Unfortunately, they were waiting on the other side.”

He saw that that was gossip that was supposed to make them more comfortable with one another, and that he was supposed to laugh now, so he laughed and said, “Too many people know about the tunnels, I guess.”

“Not that they aren’t secure,” she assured him. “No one you don’t want could get in.”

“But if you go out,” he said, “they’ll be waiting for you.”

She smiled, a bit doubtfully. “Yes,” she said.

“But this area,” he said, running his finger along it on the map, “isn’t between the clubs, it’s south of them.”

“But very close,” she said. “It would be in the same range.”

“And what is that range? What are we talking about along there?”

“When something’s available, and nothing is at the moment, you could expect to pay fourteen or fifteen.”

Parker shook his head, looking solemn. “My bank wouldn’t let me do that,” he said. “For a month a year? No. I wouldn’t even raise the issue.”

“Then you’re not going to be between the clubs,” she said. She was very sympathetic about it.

“I understand that,” he assured her. “But there’s got to be something that’s not all the way up to these places but not all the way down to the condos.”

“But with ocean frontage, you mean.”

“Naturally.” He shrugged. “You don’t come to Palm Beach not for the water.”

“Well, you can go south of Bath and Tennis,” she said. “For quite a ways along there, you’ll find some very nice estates, mostly neo-Regency, on the sea, or some facing it across the road. Of course, the farther south you go, the closer you are to the condos.” As though to say, the closer you are to the Minotaur.

“I tell you what,” he said. “Take half an hour, show me these neighborhoods, give me some idea what’s out there.”

“That’s a good idea,” she agreed, and pulled her purse out of the bottom drawer of her desk. “We’ll take my car.”

“Fine.”

It took more than half an hour; they spent almost two hours driving up and down the long narrow island in bright sunshine. Her car was a pale blue Lexus, heavily air-conditioned, its back seat full of loose-leaf ledgers and stacks of house-description sheets, many with color photos.

She drove well, but didn’t give it much attention; mostly, she talked. She talked about the neighborhoods they were going through, about the history of Palm Beach, the famous people connected with the place, who mostly weren’t famous to Parker, and the “style” of the “community.” Style and community were apparently big words around here, but both words, when they were distilled, came down to money.

But not just any money, not for those who wanted to “belong” — another big word that also meant money. Inherited money was best, which almost went without saying, though Leslie did say it, indirectly, more than once. Married money was okay, second best, which was why people here didn’t inquire too much into new spouses’ pasts. Earned money was barely acceptable, and then only if it acknowledged its inferiority, and absolutely only if it wasn’t being earned anymore.

“Donald Trump never fit in here,” Leslie said, having pointed out Mar-a-Lago, which for many years had belonged to Mrs. Merriweather Post, who definitively did fit in here, and which after her death had been for years a white elephant on the market — nobody’s inherited money, no matter how much of it there was, could afford the upkeep of the huge sprawling place — until Trump had grabbed it up, expecting it to be his entrée to Palm Beach, misunderstanding the place, believing Palm Beach was about real estate, like New York, never getting it that Palm Beach was about money you hadn’t earned.

“I should be pleased Mr. Trump took over Mar-a-Lago,” Leslie said, “I think we should all be pleased, because we certainly didn’t want it to turn into Miss Havisham’s wedding cake out there, but to be honest with you, I think a place must be just a little déclassé if Donald Trump has even heard of it.”

Parker let all this wash over him, responding from time to time with his Daniel Parmitt imitation, looking out the windshield at the bright sunny day, looking at the big blocky mansions of the unemployed rich. Neo-Regency style in architecture, when it was pointed out to him, seemed mostly inspired by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier: molded plaster wreaths on the outside walls, marching balustrades, outsize Grecian urns dotted around like game pieces.

But although Daniel Parmitt was supposedly looking at all this with the eye of someone who just might want to buy into it, into the whole thing, the property, the community, the style, in which case Leslie would be the real estate agent, the mentor, and the guide, what Parker was looking for was something else. What he wanted was the house Melander had bought, partly with Parker’s money.

And there it was.

They’d traveled south, out of the commercial part of town, through between-the-clubs, where the big houses were mostly hidden behind tall hedges of ficus and, less successfully, sea grape. They’d driven on south beyond the Bath and Tennis Club, driving over the tunnels that let the ocean-facing residents swim in the lake, then past Mar-a-Lago, and past one of the very few public beaches on the island, Phipps Ocean Park, and then more big houses, and in the driveway of one of them, just barely visible past towering sea grape and a closed wrought-iron gate, squatted a Dumpster.

“Work being done there,” he said.

“Oh, there’s always renovation, here and there,” she told him. “There’s a more than adequate workforce over in West Palm, and people add things to their houses constantly. Lately, people have been putting lots of lights outside, to light up the ocean, so they can have their view all night long.”

“And no burglars,” Parker said.

Leslie laughed, dismissing that. “Oh, no, there aren’t any burglars,” she said. “Not here.”

“The paper says there’s burglars.”

She was still dismissive. “Oh, every once in a while, some idiots come up from Miami, but they never last long, and they always get caught. And the city keeps wanting to put some sort of control on the bridges, to get identification on everybody who comes to the island. There’s some sort of civil rights problem with the idea, but I really believe they’ll figure out how to do it someday. And you know, just here in Palm Beach, we have a sixty-seven-man police force.”

Parker had been seeing patrol cars in motion every minute or two since they’d started to drive. “A lot of cops,” he said.

“More than enough,” she assured him. “Crime is not the problem here.” Then she giggled and said, “Liver transplants are more the problem than crime in Palm Beach.”

“I suppose so,” Parker said. “But that place back there got me to thinking. The bank might like it if I found a fixer-upper.”

Surprised, she said, “Really?”

“Well, they always talk about value-added, you know,” he explained. “God knows I don’t want to work, I wouldn’t even oversee the job, but my man at the bank does like it if I put my money somewhere that it grows itself.”

“Oh, I see what you mean. You’d put money into that kind of house, but then when you were finished it would be worth more than you put in.”

“That’s what they like,” Parker said.

“Well, we don’t get that sort of thing very much, not around here,” she said. “People tend to take care of their places in Palm Beach.”

“Oh. That one back there just looked — I suppose they were just renovating.”

“No, you have a very good eye,” she told him. “That place was a wreck. A very sad history. They’d had a fire, and I don’t know, it had just been left alone too long.”

“But somebody got there before me.”

“I believe,” she said, remembering, pleased by the memory, “I believe he’s also a Texan, like yourself.”

Melander and his little Mexicans. “Lucky him,” Parker said.

“There’s nothing else like that around right now.”

“Just a thought,” he said.

“You know,” she said, “I might still have the sheet on that. I didn’t sell it, but — let me pull in at Monegasque.”

That was a restaurant, not far ahead, a rare spot on this road where it was possible to pull off to the side. Leslie stopped in front of the place, ignored the valet parkers watching her, and grabbed the stack of house-description sheets from the back seat. She riffled through them and pulled one. “Here it is. You can see the trouble you missed. I don’t think fixer-uppers are worth the trouble, frankly.”

Here it was. Color photo, taken from an angle to minimize the neglect. Floor plan. Entrances. Description of alarms.

“I’ll keep this, if it’s okay with you,” Parker said.

“Go ahead,” she said. “I don’t need it. That house is sold.”

3

A mile or so south of Melander’s house, the private estates began to give way to the hotels: Four Seasons, Hilton, Howard Johnson, all tending down toward the condos. Parker left the Jaguar, top up, in a parking area of the Four Seasons a little after midnight, made his way out to the beach, and walked north. Far ahead, he could see lights along the shore, probably for the nighttime views of the sea Leslie had talked about, but along here the land and sea were both dark, the estates as private and closed away on this side as on the roadside.

There was no moon, but starshine bounding from the sea outlined everything in shadowed silver. Walls and gates marked the properties, with more of those big urns looming at the corners. Almost all the houses tucked far back in there showed interior lights, but they were far away, screened, indirect; only twice did he see doors open to terrace or lawn, lights and sound spilling seaward, small parties in progress. Both times, he kept his head down so his pale face wouldn’t show, and moved closer to the shush of the waves, out of reach of the lights.

He wasn’t carrying tonight and was dressed in dark but casual clothing and carried Parmitt’s identification. If he were to have a confrontation at all tonight, it would be with cops or private security, and with either one a gun would be more of a problem than a help.

He had tried to count the number of estates down from Melander’s, driving here, and now he tried again to count, walking north, but wasn’t sure he’d seen them all in either direction. When he came to the one he thought was probably Melander’s, it showed toward the sea a seven-foot-high pale concrete wall. In the middle of the wall was a fairly narrow opening, in which a wrought-iron gate stood shut and locked, with concrete steps behind it leading upward, flanked by walls of more concrete.

At the northern edge of the wall, it met the next property’s barrier, which was sea grape entwined with chain-link fence, stretching even higher than the neighboring wall. It looked to Parker as though the people who’d built the Melander place, if this was the Melander place, had put up this wall along the beach, and sidewalls back, then filled in behind it to make a high terrace at the same level as the road out front. Instead of that, the people next door had left the slope of the land as it was, down toward the sea, and merely fenced it.

Chain-link fence is a ladder, even when encumbered with sea grape. Seeing only a few lights in the house behind the fence, Parker climbed it at the corner, moving slowly, not wanting to make a lot of noise and also not wanting to leave a trail for Melander and the others to notice tomorrow.

When he was a few feet off the ground, he could see over the top of the wall, and it was lawn at that upper level, stretching back to the house. A few lights glowed inside the house, but there was no sound, no movement. An ornamental wrought-iron fence was fixed along the top of the wall, waist-high, and was most likely there to keep guests from falling off the lawn onto the sand seven feet below.

Parker stepped over the fence onto the ground above and behind the wall, and crouched there, waiting for a response. He knew the kind of security this sort of place could have, but he doubted Melander and Carlson and Ross were keeping it up; they weren’t the type. Still, it would be better to be cautious, especially if he’d counted wrong and this wasn’t their place after all.

What he waited for now was a motion sensor. That would be the first line of defense for these estates, and it should react to his presence as soon as he was on the property. If this house had such a thing, it would not only sound alarms, it would most likely also switch on floodlights around the exterior of the house, because the residents would be less interested in capturing anybody than in repelling them. If anything happened now, Parker would go over the wrought-iron fence, jump to the sand below, and move south, back toward the car.

But nothing happened. He stood there, waiting, listening, and looked around. The ground where he stood had once been lawn, but hadn’t been cared for in a long time; ocean air had killed it, leaving hard crumbly earth. So this was probably the right house.

It loomed ahead of him, pale in the starlight, centered on its property, with broad open swaths that had been lawn on both sides. Screens of tall ficus along both sides blocked any sight of the neighbors, but the ficus wasn’t being cared for; instead of the smooth wall-like appearance the professional gardeners would give them, the lines of trees had a messy, shaggy, unshaven look.

After a long minute, Parker moved forward toward the house. It looked as though only two lights were burning in there, one upstairs and one down; almost a guarantee that nobody was home. The lights were dim, amber, deep in the house, but they showed the rectangles of windows and glass doors.

Lawn gave way to stone patio closer to the house. There was no furniture, and sand scraped underfoot. Ahead, a line of glass doors like a theater entrance showed a large dim room. Parker stepped close to the glass to look in.

The light in there came through a broad doorway at the far end. This had once been the main public room of the house, but now there was nothing in it but a piano, pushed at an angle into a far corner, with no bench or stool in front of it.

The doors were locked; naturally. Would the alarm system be functioning, and would it connect with the local police station? Parker didn’t think Melander and the others would want police coming around, not for any reason, but there was no need to be hasty or careless.

He stepped back to the outer edge of the patio to look at the second floor. There was a setback up there, and a terrace. And where the house was not glass it was large rectangular blocks of pale stone; not much harder to climb than a chain-link fence.

Parker went to the right rear corner of the building and climbed the stones to the second-floor terrace. Here there were signs of occupancy: three cheap chrome and strap chaises, an upside-down liquor carton used as a table, an empty beer bottle standing on the floor near one of the chaises.

Glass doors led to three rooms up here. The center one had been a library and television room, but was now stripped, the shelves bare. Beyond its interior open door he could see the second-floor light source: a chandelier at the head of a flight of stairs.

The two side doors led to what had been and still were bedrooms, though now very simply furnished with nothing but mattresses. These doors were also locked, but the locks were a joke. Parker opened the one to the bedroom on the right, then stepped back to the outer edge of the terrace to wait for a response.

Nothing. No lights came on, no alarm sounded. Two minutes, three minutes, and no sound of police sirens headed this way. The door he’d opened hung ajar.

Parker crossed the terrace and entered the house. He closed the door behind himself.

It didn’t take long to search the place. There were fifteen or sixteen rooms, but Melander and Carlson and Ross were only using five: three bedrooms upstairs, the kitchen and dining room downstairs. They were getting along with a minimal amount of furniture.

And they weren’t here. The refrigerator was switched on, but it contained only half a dozen beer bottles, nothing perishable. There was almost no clothing in the bedrooms. There were no towels hanging in any of the bathrooms, though a stack of folded towels was on the floor at the head of the central staircase, as though they’d just come back from a laundry.

So they’d moved in here, they’d established the place, and then they’d gone away. They wouldn’t come back until it was time for the heist. Parker could make his own presence here, be waiting for them.

He found two alarm systems, the main one with its control pad by the door from the attached garage, and a supplemental one with a control box in a closet near the front door. Both were switched off. Parker rewired them so that, if they were armed, they would seem to be working but were not.

He went out the front door, leaving it open. He studied the grounds, then went over to look into the Dumpster, which was the largest size, big as a long-haul truck. It was a third full of trash: broken chairs, mirrors, wadded mounds of curtains, things the previous owners had not wanted to take with them. There was no construction debris, though, from the road, this big container would make it look as though construction or reconstruction had to be going on.

Back in the house, he shut the front door and went to the garage, big enough to hold three cars but now standing empty, except for a metal footlocker in a rear corner. The footlocker seemed strange, and was padlocked. Parker crossed to it and studied the padlock, which was new and serious. He lifted one end of the footlocker, and it was very heavy; something metal slid inside there.

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.

4

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.”

“I’m an American citizen,” he told her, “but I was born in Ecuador. I don’t know if you saw my birth certificate.”

“That isn’t one of the things I can get at.”

“Well, you’ll see I was born in Quito of American parents. I’ve still got family down there, I’ve lived most of my life down there. The family’s in oil.”

“Banana oil,” she said. “Who is Roderick to you?”

“Nobody.”

“That’s why you were looking for his house? That’s why you walked to his house in the middle of the night?”

“Who says I walked to his house?”

“I do.”

He glanced at her shoes, which were medium-heel pumps, not much use on sand. “I just went for a walk,” he said.

“Coincidence, you headed straight for Roderick’s house.”

“Coincidence,” he agreed. “You say you’ve got problems with this Roderick, too.”

“Well, I didn’t have, until I started thinking about you and looking into who you really are. That led me to run the same thing on Roderick and he’s another guy out of a science-fiction movie, suddenly dropped onto the planet from the mother ship five or six months ago.”

“Why don’t you ask him about himself?”

“I don’t know the man, I didn’t handle the sale. We carried the house, but it was a different broker made the deal.” She sipped wine, put her glass down, leaned toward him. “Let me tell you what I know about Mr. Roderick,” she said.

“Go ahead.”

“He wanted a presence here on the cheap. There was a house nobody wanted because it should be a teardown, but he wanted it, and now he’s got it, and he isn’t doing anything with it.”

“No?”

“No. There’s a general contractor Mr. Roderick was going to hire, to do the renovation work. I called him this afternoon, and Mr. Roderick hasn’t got around to starting the work yet. Says he’s still dealing with his architect.”

“Maybe he is.”

“What architect? There’s nobody there. The place is empty. Nothing’s happening at all.”

“Architects are slow sometimes,” he said.

“Particularly when they don’t exist.” She finished the wine in her glass, looked at his, poured herself a second. Before drinking, she said, “Now you show up, and you want to know about Roderick, but you don’t want Roderick to know about you.”

“You watch too much television,” he told her.

“Yes, I do,” she said. “And I drink too much. And I worry too much. And I live with my mother and my sister. I’m divorced, and I don’t want that son of a bitch back, and I don’t need any other son of a bitch to take his place, in case you were wondering, but I want more than this.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I want more than driving obnoxious fat cats around to show them empty houses, fending off gropes from ninety-year-olds wearing white ascots — oh, yes, white ascots, and they’re all wonderful dancers — sitting at my goddam desk out there every day, waiting for my life when my life is over.”

“Now you’re watching too much daytime television,” he told her.

“I would if I didn’t have to work.” Her glass was empty again; she refilled it and said, “I look at you, and I say, what does this man want? He playacts to be somebody that belongs here, but he doesn’t belong here. And Roderick doesn’t belong here. So who are these people and what do they want?”

“You tell me,” Parker said.

“Palm Beach has only got one thing,” she told him. “Money.”

“Sun and sand,” he said. “Parties. Charity balls. Shopping on Worth Avenue.”

She laughed. “I’d like to see you shopping on Worth Avenue,” she said. “I really would. You could buy a white ascot.”

“I might.”

“Daniel — I’m going to call you Daniel, because I have to call you something, so, Daniel, what I need, to get out of here, to get a running jump on a new life, is money. And what you are here for, and what Roderick is here for, is money.”

“You want me to give you some money,” he suggested.

“Oh, Daniel,” she said, and shook her head. “Dan? No, Daniel. Daniel, I don’t want you to give me money. Do you really think I’m stupid? Do you really think I don’t know why you parked a block away and didn’t want to be seen with me in a public place?”

“Why’s that, Leslie?”

“Because if I’m a problem,” she said, and sat up straight, and looked evenly at him, “you intend to kill me.”

“Leslie,” he said, “while you’re watching all this television, I think you’ve also been smoking some weed.”

She brushed that aside. “I’m being serious,” she said. “I want to earn the money. Do I go to you, or do I go to Roderick? I’ve met you—”

“And Roderick isn’t here,” he pointed out. “At least you tell me he isn’t here.”

“So here’s what I’m telling you now,” she said. “Whatever you have in mind, robbery, I suppose, or maybe a kidnapping, kidnap one of these dowagers here, whatever it is, you need somebody who knows the territory.”

“You.”

“Why not me? I sell real estate, I’ve been in probably a third of the important houses around here, and I know the rest. I know the town, I can answer questions, and I can tell you what questions you’re forgetting to ask. Roderick doesn’t have anybody local, and I think you and Roderick are competitors, so if you have me you have an advantage over him.”

He watched her, thinking about what she was saying, who she was, what she wanted.

She gave him another level look; she didn’t show any nervousness at all now. “To even find Roderick,” she reminded him, “you had to come play that roundabout game with me. And all it did was make me suspicious. How many people do you want wondering about you?”

“None,” he said.

“It’s too late for none, but I can help you limit it to one.”

He picked up his glass and sipped from it. She watched him, and then said, “One thing. I’m not talking about sex.”

He looked at her. “I didn’t think you were.”

She said, “I find it a strain just to talk with you. I certainly don’t ever want to take my clothes off in front of you.”

“But you’re going to have to,” he said.

She shook her head. “No, I—”

“I mean, you’re going to have to now,” he said.

She stared at him, panic leaching through. “I can’t — I thought you—”

“Leslie,” he said, “I have to know if you’re wearing a wire.”

She gaped, trying to make sense of the words. “What?”

“A wire. I have to know. One way or another, Leslie, I have to know.”

“You mean—” She was blinking a lot, catching up with the situation. “You mean you think I could be taping you?”

“Come on, Leslie.”

“But — I wouldn’t, I don’t — honestly, no.”

“Now, Leslie. You stand up over there, and I’ll sit here, and you’ll show me whether or not you’re wearing a wire.”

“I’m not,” she said, her voice fainter.

“Good. Show.”

“And then what?”

“If you’re not wired, I leave here and walk back to my car, while you turn the lights off and lock the place. Tomorrow, you bring Linda another bottle of wine, and I’ll be in touch. Now, Leslie.”

She wasn’t wearing a wire.

5

Her last name was Mackenzie. The phone book gave her a listing on Utica Street in West Palm Beach. The reverse phone book also gave a listing for Laurel Simons at the same address.

Parker left the phone company building and drove the Jag across Flagler Bridge out of Palm Beach and through West Palm to the airport, where he left it in long-term parking and walked around the lot until he found a red Subaru Outback station wagon, a much less noticeable car than a yellow Jaguar convertible, in any neighborhood except Palm Beach. It had almost no dust on it, so it hadn’t been here long. Breaking into it, he hot-wired the ignition and drove to the exit, where he turned in the ticket he’d just picked up.

The tollbooth clerk, a Hispanic who looked or tried to look like Pancho Villa, frowned at the ticket: “You don’t stay long.”

“I forgot my passport,” Parker told him. “I’ve gotta go back and get it, screwed up my whole day.”

“Tough,” the clerk said, gave Parker his change, and Parker drove to Utica Street.

It was a neat but inexpensive neighborhood of single-family homes on small plots, most with an attached garage. Basketball hoops over the garage doors, neatly maintained lawns, tricycles and toys around some front doors. A lot of aluminum siding in shades of off-white or pastels.

Number 417 was ranch-style, two stories on the left with the garage below and most likely bedrooms above, one story on the right. The garage door was closed, with a green Honda Accord parked at the edge of the blacktop driveway, out of the way of access to the garage. So Leslie’s Lexus, being more important to their livelihood, got the garage, and the mother’s car got the weather.

Parker circled the block once, then stopped in front of a house half a block short of 417. There was a Florida map in the driver’s door pouch; he opened it on the steering wheel.

This was a working-class neighborhood, and everybody was away working. Very few cars drove down Utica Street, and no pedestrians appeared at all. It was now eleven-thirty in the morning; Parker was ready to wait until schoolchildren started to return this afternoon.

But he didn’t have to. At twenty to one, the front door at 417 opened and two women came out. One was an older, bulkier version of Leslie, with a harsher blond in her short hair and an angry thrust to her head and a similar conservative taste in clothing. The other was gross; she wore a many-colored muumuu and she waddled. Her black hair was fixed in a bad home permanent, a thousand tight ringlets like fiddlehead ferns, as though in a lunatic attempt to distract from the body. She tripped on the driveway, over nothing at all, and her mother snapped at her. The daughter cringed and lumbered on.

The two women got into the car, the mother at the wheel, and drove away. After lunch, they go out and shop for dinner. Parker drove the Subaru closer, stopping in front of the house next door, then got out of the car, walked around to the back of the house, and forced the kitchen door.

There wasn’t much he needed to know — Leslie was hardly a mystery woman — and he found it all in fifteen minutes. Her former husband was named Gerald Mackenzie, he lived in Miami, and there was cold, correct, formal communication between them if something like old taxes caused them to make contact with one another.

Leslie kept small debts going in several credit card and department store accounts. She didn’t seem to have a man in her life, and maybe hadn’t since the no-fault divorce from Gerald eight years earlier. She had occasional correspondence with a woman friend in New Jersey.

She had not written anything anywhere about her discoveries concerning Daniel Parmitt. She didn’t seem to own a gun, unless it was in the glove compartment of the Lexus.

She was the alpha member of the family. Her room, facing the backyard from above the garage, was larger than the other two bedrooms up here, and had its own bath. She’d made an office out of a corner of the room, with a small desk and a low filing cabinet and a computer hooked to the Internet. She had done her best to make herself comfortable and at home here, and her mother and sister had done what they could to help, but it hadn’t worked. Her room was impersonal, and she was willing to take a leap into the unknown rather than stay in this life.

What she had said last night, about him needing somebody local to smooth the way, made sense. The question was, did she make sense? The move she’d made was a strange one; did it mean more strange moves ahead?

Most people in Leslie’s position wouldn’t have been bothered by his Daniel Parmitt imitation, wouldn’t have noticed anything wrong with it. Of the few people who might have picked up his errors, or seen a glimpse of his actual self under his performance, what were the likely reactions? First, most common, to do nothing, to chalk it up to eccentricity. Second, if really snagged by some false note somewhere, to mention it to a friend, somebody in the office, or a member of the family at home, and maybe even follow up with a conversation with a local cop; more likely if the person already knew a local cop. But the least probable reaction, Parker thought, was what Leslie had done: follow the ringer, try to figure him out, try to use him for her own purposes, which was to get out of this dead-end life and start over somewhere else.

So she was quick, and she didn’t let her fear hold her back. And she didn’t intend to get cute and try to use sex as a weapon, as she’d demonstrated last night by her awkwardness and discomfort when she’d had to very briefly strip.

So did all that mean she was reliable, or did it mean she was a loose cannon? There was nothing in her house to tell him for sure. For the moment, then, make use of her, but keep watch.

Before he left the house, he phoned her at the real estate office. “Leslie, it’s Daniel Parmitt.”

“Oh, Mr. Parmitt,” she said. “I was wondering if I’d hear from you again.”

“Today,” he said, “I’m interested in looking at some condos.”

“Very different.”

“Very. Around four o’clock? You have a nice one to show me?”

“Does it need to be furnished?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Good,” she said, sounding relieved. “There’s a lovely two-bedroom in the Bromwich, ocean view. I could meet you in the lobby.”

“Fine,” he said, and hung up, and drove the Subaru back to the airport. He left it in its old spot in long-term parking, picked up the Jaguar, and drove to the exit.

This clerk was a Hispanic woman, chunky and bored, who said, “You come in today? This the long-term.”

“I forgot my passport, gotta go back for it, screws up the whole day.”

“Tough,” she said, and gave him his change.

6

The condos along the narrow strip of island south of the main part of Palm Beach yearn toward a better life: something English, somewhere among the landed gentry. The craving is there in the names of the buildings: the Windsor, the Sheffield, the Cambridge. But whatever they call themselves, they’re still a line of pale concrete honeycombs on a sandbar in the sun.

Parker arrived at the Bromwich at five after four. Two Hispanic gardeners worked on the long bed of fuchsia and impatiens along the low ornamental wall in front with the place’s name on it in block gold letters. Signs at the entrance indicated residents’ parking to the right, visitors’ to the left. The visitors’ area was farther from the building.

Parker drove to the gleaming blacktop expanse of the visitors’ parking lot and left the Jag next to Leslie’s blue Lexus. He walked through the sun to the boxy cream-colored building, seeing none of the residents, though the other lot was full of their cars, mostly big old-fashioned boats, traditional Detroit iron.

The lobby was amber faux marble with a uniformed black security guard at a long chest-high kidney-shaped faux-marble desk. The lobby seating was several round puffs of magenta sofa; Leslie rose from one of them. Today her suit was peach, her pin a gold rose. “Mr. Parmitt,” she said with her working-hours smile, and came forward to shake his hand. “Right on time.”

“Afternoon, Ms. Mackenzie,” he said. Her hand was soft and dry and without pressure.

She turned to the guard to say, “We’re looking at 11-C, Jimmy.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He gave Parker a disinterested look, then looked downward again. He had the Globe newspaper open on his desk, among the phone systems and security screens.

The elevators were around behind the desk. As they rode up together, she said, “You don’t want a condo, you want a place to talk.”

He shrugged. “What else?”

“So I’m hired,” she said with a bland smile, as though it hardly mattered.

He said, “It doesn’t work exactly that way.”

“You’ll explain it,” she said, and the elevator slowed to a stop.

He waited for her to lead the way, but instead of leaving the elevator she held down the button that would keep the door open and said, “If you have to check me for a wire again today, we’ll leave now.”

He shook his head. “Once was enough.”

“It certainly was,” she said, and led the way out of the elevator and down to unlock them into 11-C.

It was completely empty, as bright and bare as the beach down below. Their shoes made echoing sounds on the blond wood floor, bouncing off the hard white walls and, in the living room, the uncurtained wall of glass doors that opened to the balcony. The place had been repainted, to make it ready for sale, and the smell of the paint was a faint tang in the air.

Parker crossed to open the sliding balcony door. It was hot out here, but with a breeze. The afternoon shadow of the building lay on the beach down below, where no one sat or swam.

Pink plastic-sheet walls on both sides shielded the view of the balconies to right and left, and openwork iron benches were built into both of those walls. Pointing to one of them, “We’ll sit here,” he said.

“You have to know,” she told him, “that wall isn’t soundproof.”

The outer edge of the balcony was a waist-high pink plastic-sheet wall, with a black iron railing along the top. Parker held to it, leaned forward, and looked around the outer edge of the privacy wall at the balcony next door. Potted plants filled the bench he could see over there, and the rest of the space was occupied by a white plastic table, four chairs to match, a gas grill, and a StairMaster. That apartment’s glass wall was completely shielded inside with white drapes. There was no one on the balcony.

He leaned back to turn and say, “There’s nobody there.”

She was wide-eyed, both hands pressed to her chest. “Don’t do that,” she said.

“Sit down, Leslie.”

They sat side by side on the iron bench against the pink wall, he facing inward, she facing the view. He said, “I’m going to tell you what’s going on.”

“All right,” she said. Now she looked solemn, as though she were being inducted into somebody’s secret rites, like the Masons or Cosa Nostra.

He said, “Don’t ask me any questions, because I’m only going to tell you what I want to tell you.”

“I understand.”

“All right. The guy you know as Roderick owes me some money.”

She looked disappointed. “It’s some kind of debt?”

“Some kind. He’s with two other guys. Have you seen them?”

“I’ve never even seen Roderick.”

“Well, the three came here with just enough cash to put the down payment on that house. Some of the cash they used was mine.”

She said, “Do they intend to roll it over? Don’t tell me they have a buyer.”

“Leslie, listen,” he said. “What they are is thieves. I don’t mean from me, I mean that’s what they do, who they are.”

“You, too,” she said.

He said, “They want the house because there’s a job going down and they know they can’t get off the island afterwards.”

“If anything big happens,” she said, “they raise all the drawbridges. And they patrol the Waterway very seriously.”

“That’s why they don’t want to have to leave. They want to be established here, already known and not suspect. If I rented this condo here right now, and two weeks from now it happens, the cops would be at the door, they’d want to know all about me.”

“And you two months old,” she said.

“So that’s why Melander — he’s Roderick — that’s why he wanted to be already in place, nobody wondering about him.”

“They’re going to do a big robbery,” she said, “and then go back to that house and wait for the excitement to die down.”

“That’s right.”

“But they used your money to buy the house.”

“A quarter of it.”

“For the down payment,” she said. “So when they do this robbery, you’re going to be there to get your part of the money back.”

“To get it all, Leslie,” he said. “They shouldn’t have taken my money.”

She studied him. “You mean that.”

“Of course I mean it.”

She nodded, thinking about this. “So it’s a lot of money.”

“Yes.”

“And some of it will come to me, because I’m not cheating you, I’m helping you.”

“Yes.”

“If they hadn’t cheated you, you would take a quarter.”

“Yes.”

She looked past him, out at the ocean. “This is a little scarier than I thought,” she said. He waited, and she looked at him again. She said, “You’re here to find out if you can trust me, and I’m here to find out if I can trust you, and if either of us guesses wrong, we’re in trouble.”

“That’s right.”

“But I think,” she said, “if I guess wrong, I can be in a lot worse trouble than you.”

“Trouble is trouble,” he said.

“Maybe so. What is this robbery?”

“That’s the first thing you can do for me,” he said. “You can tell me what the robbery is.”

“You don’t know?”

“I know some things about it. I know it’s a charity thing.”

“There are charity events all season,” she told him. “There are balls here that are five thousand dollars a ticket. But that isn’t cash.”

“Neither is this,” he said. “It’s a charity auction of jewelry. It’s sometime probably in the next two weeks, and they told me the market value of the jewelry was twelve million dollars. Can you tell me what it is?”

She looked surprised, and then she laughed. As though disbelieving, she said, “Mrs. Clendon’s jewels?”

“Is that it?”

“That’s it, oh, absolutely, that’s it.” She seemed to find the whole thing very funny. “Oh, Daniel,” she said, “and I had such hopes.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s nothing there to help anybody, Daniel,” she said. “There’s nothing for me, and there’s nothing for you, and there’s nothing for your friend Roderick.”

“They’re gonna do it.”

“Then they’re going to jail,” she said. “And if you’re there, you’ll go to jail.” She rose, stood facing him. “But I won’t be there,” she said. “Don’t worry, Daniel, I’m going to forget this entire conversation.” She turned away, toward the living room.

He said, “Leslie.” When she looked back at him, he said, “Unless you want to go off the balcony, Leslie, you’ll sit down.”

She gave a frightened look at the air beyond the balcony railing. “They’d know you’re in the building,” she said.

“Let me worry about that.”

They looked at each other. He was deciding to stand when she came over and sat beside him. “If I tell you about it,” she said, “and if you see it can’t work, will you let me go?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Daniel,” she said, “I really wish it was something that could work. I could taste it, Daniel.”

“Freedom.”

“The new me.”

Parker said, “Tell me about Mrs. Clendon, Leslie.”

7

The first thing you ought to know, Leslie told him, is that there are no basements in Palm Beach, the water table is too high. And the rich people are seasonal, they’re never here between May and November, so they need somewhere to store all their valuables while they’re gone, and for the last fifty years that place has been the First National Bank.

The First National Bank doesn’t just have safe-deposit boxes like other banks, they have entire vaults down under the bank. They store about three thousand fur coats down there every summer, and everything else people don’t want to leave in their empty houses: rare wines, gun collections, paintings, silverware and goldware, even furniture, antique chairs and things like that.

You don’t want to break in there, believe me you don’t; the bank is very serious about its responsibilities. The closest anybody ever came to robbing that bank was back in 1979, when a college student got into a crate and had himself shipped into the bank as antiques. His idea was to come out of the crate at night, fill it up with valuable things, and then wait to slip out of the bank during regular business hours. Then he’d come back later to get the crate. Except the bank is guarded at night, and he was found before he could get out.

Even now, during the season, the bank is full of valuables. The rich women keep all their most expensive jewelry in the bank, and the bank opens up late every night that there’s one of the important charity balls. They open so the women can come get their stuff, and then they open again later that night so they can bring it all back. Somebody told me the mirror down there by the vaults isn’t regular glass; it’s tinted gray because that makes people look better when they’re trying on their jewels. So the bank takes very good care of its customers.

One of the most important customers the bank ever had was Miriam Hope Clendon. On the Hope side, her family was important in transatlantic shipping up till the Second World War, when they sold everything and became the idle rich. The same thing on the Clendon side, except they were railroads out west.

By the time you got to Miriam Hope Clendon, the money was so old it didn’t have any bad suggestions of trade on it anymore; it was as though Miriam Hope Clendon had money only because God wanted her to. So naturally she was very important in Palm Beach, and important to the bank. And also she lived longer than anybody — she was something like ninety-seven when she finally died, in Maine, last August.

Her family didn’t live as long as she did, and most of her children didn’t have children, or if they did the children died in accidents or suicide, so when she passed away she was the last of her line except for some very distant cousins, none of whom had ever even met her or had ever been to Palm Beach. Still, they’ll get most of what she left.

But not all of it. One of the assistant managers in the bank had become a kind of pal of hers in her last years, when she didn’t have anybody else except employees, and he was very interested in raising money for the library here. It’s only the last few years there even is a library in Palm Beach. He talked to Miriam about the library sometimes, and she contributed some money every once in a while, but it wasn’t much of a big deal.

But then she died, and in her will she left all the jewelry she’d kept in the bank to this manager, not for himself, but to do a charity auction and raise money for the library. They’d known each other in the first place because of her jewels, so that’s what made her think about doing it that way.

The auction and the ball — there has to be a ball, of course — were set up by a couple of the women who do all that sort of thing here, with the man from the bank to consult. Everybody wants some of the Miriam Hope Clendon jewelry, because she used to knock their socks off at the charity balls, glittering like a chandelier. And the ball is going to be a week from this Thursday, with the auction the next night.

So right now, all that jewelry is still in the vault in the bank, and you aren’t going to get at it in there, and neither is Roderick, or whatever his name is. On the Wednesday before the ball, the jewelry is all going to be transported by armored car to the Breakers, because the Breakers has the biggest ballroom on the island, and that’s where it’s going to be displayed, under heavy guard, during the ball on Thursday, so people can see it all, under glass and behind electrified fencing.

Then on Friday, the display will be taken down and it will all be moved over to the Fritz estate, because now Mrs. Helena Stockworth Fritz is the most important person in Palm Beach society, now that Miriam Hope Clendon is dead, and Mrs. Fritz insisted the auction be held at her house. Hundreds of people are invited to the ball on Thursday, but to go to the auction on Friday you have to make a contribution to the library fund and you have to make a sealed bid on at least one piece in the collection. So no freeloaders.

I’m not sure exactly when the jewelry’s all going back to the bank, either late Friday night or early Saturday morning, but that’s what’s going to happen. The successful bidders won’t get to take the jewelry home with them from the auction; they’ll have to go to the bank the next Monday morning and show their bidding slip and collect their jewelry then.

So what’s going to happen is, this huge collection of very important and very valuable jewelry is going to leave the bank on Wednesday, under extremely heavy guard. It’s going to the Breakers to be set up along the sides of the ballroom. Then after the dance it’s going to be moved to Mrs. Fritz’s house, still with the same armored car and guards, and it’ll be guarded all the time it’s there, and after the auction it’s going back, all together, to the bank. I don’t know what your friends have in mind, but if they’re going to try to break into the bank, they’ll be caught. If they try to steal it all from the Breakers or from Mrs. Fritz’s house, they’ll never get out. If they try to attack the armored car on any one of its three trips, they’ll probably be shot. The people here know what Mrs. Clendon’s jewels are worth — they’re not going to just leave them lying around.

I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Leslie finished, because I’d like them to get their money, so you can get your money, so I can get my money. But it isn’t going to happen. Forget it.

8

The shadow of the building was a little longer, reaching out across the sand toward the sea. Out near the horizon two boats, widely separated, both slid south. Parker stood and paced, and she watched him. After a minute, he stopped and put his hand on the railing and looked out at the sea. He said, “This Mrs. Fritz’s house. I’m thinking it’s on the ocean but it doesn’t have a beach.”

“No, it doesn’t,” she said, sounding a little surprised. “It’s a seawall along there. It’s not far from where that drifting cargo ship ran onto somebody’s terrace a few years ago.”

“I know these guys,” Parker said. “They’re gaudy. They’re going to like Mrs. Fritz’s house because it isn’t a commercial space, it’s a private space, so control can never be one hundred percent. They’re going to like it because they can come in from the sea, go back out to the sea, and duck right back in again down at their own place, while everybody’s searching the Atlantic Ocean for them.”

“It isn’t that easy,” she insisted.

“They don’t expect it to be easy,” he told her. “They expect it to be tough, and that’s why they’ll be gaudy. I don’t know what they have in mind, but it’ll shake people up.”

“If you mean scare them,” Leslie said, “it would take a lot to scare people in Palm Beach. Not so long ago, you had a militia of these octogenarians on the beach, still in their white pants, with their big-game hunting rifles, marching back and forth on the sand, drilling, ready to repel Castro.”

“Good thing for them Castro didn’t show up,” Parker said. “But the point is, Leslie, I’m not going to steal the package, Melander and the others are. I don’t have to have a plan, I just have to know what theirs is. But I know them, I know what business they’re in, I know they’re sure enough of themselves to sink all their cash into this thing, and I know how their minds work. They won’t mess with bank vaults, and they won’t try to get into the middle of a huge hotel on its own acres of grounds. An armored car on this island is hopeless — where would you take it? So that leaves Mrs. Fritz, in a private house on the ocean with a seawall. That’s where they’re going to do it, so the question is when.”

“After everybody’s gone home,” she suggested, “and before the jewels are loaded back into the armored car.”

“No. I told you, these guys are gaudy, they won’t want to sneak in and out. A lot of rich people all dressed up in one confined place, wearing their own big-dollar jewels. That’s the time to come in, when you can make the maximum trouble, the maximum panic. What are guards gonna do if there’s a thousand important people running back and forth screaming?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“They won’t do a lot of shooting,” he said.

“No, I suppose not.”

He said, “Show me Mrs. Fritz’s house.”

“I can’t take you in there,” she said, surprised. “It isn’t on the market.”

“Drive me by it.”

“You won’t see much, but all right. We’ll take my car. We’d better find a place where you can put yours in some shade.”

“Good.”

She stood and looked out at the ocean. “Are they really going to do that, do you think? Come in from the sea?”

“That’s their style.”

“Like James Bond,” she said.

He shook his head. “More like Jaws” he told her.

9

Mrs. Fritz’s mansion was invisible from anywhere, except, probably, the ocean. Parker and Leslie drove past it twice, first northbound and then southward again, and both times she drove as slowly as she could when they went by, but there was nothing to be seen.

An eight-foot-high stucco-covered wall in a kind of beige color, dappled with climbing ivies, faced the road and ran back both sides of the property. In the dead middle of the road-facing wall a broad opening was filled by massive wood-beam doors, vertical planks held together with thick black bands of iron. These must be electrically operated, and would only be opened when Mrs. Fritz or some other acceptable person was going in or out.

“You see what I mean,” Leslie said, the second time they drove by it.

“Those doors will be open the night of the auction,” Parker said.

“With security standing there and a Palm Beach police car in the driveway. You don’t crash Mrs. Fritz’s parties.”

“Melander will.”

She dropped him back at the Jaguar, in the corner of a real estate office parking lot where tall sea grape offered some shade. “What now?” she said.

“We wait for party time,” he said, and got out of the car.

To get where he was going next, he had to drive past Mrs. Fritz’s estate one more time, and the thing was just impossible. There was no parking along here, no useful shoulder, nowhere even to stop. You couldn’t find anywhere to sit and watch the place.

Well, that wasn’t Parker’s problem. That was somebody else’s problem.

He drove over to West Palm, parked the Jag a little after five-thirty, and found a hardware store open, where he bought a cordless drill and an inch-wide metal-routing bit and a small hacksaw and a glass cutter and a pair of pliers and a roll of clear tape and two rubber suction cups with handles. Then he drove back to the Breakers and, in one of the shops off the lobby, bought a bright blue canvas shoulder bag with a flap. Everything from the hardware store went into it.

That night, with the shoulder bag, he left the Jag in the Four Seasons parking lot and walked to Melander’s house. This time he was armed, carrying the Sentinel in his hand so he could toss it into the sea if he had to.

But he didn’t have to, so when he got to the house he put the Sentinel in the shoulder bag with the rest of the tools. He went in through the same second-floor bedroom as the last time and then down to the kitchen, where the refrigerator was exactly as it had been before, nothing added or subtracted. So they hadn’t yet come back.

He switched lights on as he moved through the house to the garage, where he tipped the footlocker onto its face and drilled an inch-wide round hole through the metal as close as possible to the bottom right corner.

The rear of the footlocker was stiffened with bands of metal that divided it into six sections. Parker hack-sawed three sides of the lower right section, then peeled it open and looked inside at the six guns lying in a jumbled heap: three shotguns and three Colt.45 automatics.

One by one he snaked the guns out of the footlocker, then carried them all away to the kitchen. He put them on the table there, sat in front of them, and misaligned the firing pins on the automatics and drained the shot from the shotgun shells. Then he carried them all back to the garage and dropped them into the footlocker. He bent the opened flap down flush again and used the clear tape to put the round plug he’d cut out back into position. If anybody were to open the footlocker and study the interior, the cut would be obvious, but the three wouldn’t be looking at the footlocker, they’d be looking at the guns.

Back in the house, he went to the dining room, the only other downstairs room beside the kitchen that they’d furnished, with a simple black Formica Parsons table and three mismatched armless kitchen chairs, all probably bought used over in West Palm. Two floor lamps in the corners gave light, the original chandelier having been messily removed.

If he were in here with them, it would be because they were in control and they wanted a conversation. Would they sit and have him stand? No, they’d rather be the ones on their feet. On which side of the table?

There were three doorways in three walls in here, two broad ones opposite each other opening onto living rooms at the front and rear, and a narrower one with a swing door leading to the kitchen. They would want him with his back to the fourth wall because, without thinking about it, they wouldn’t want to be looking at escape routes behind him.

The good thing about a Parsons table is that it has a strip of wood all around, just under the top, that creates a recess. Parker taped the Sentinel to the underside of the tabletop, on the side where there was no door. Then he went looking for a window.

The exterior doors, upstairs and down, were all large expanses of plate glass, too big to be of use. But on the road side of the house, flanking the front door, were pairs of double-hung windows with panes, four over four. Going outside, he chose the corner window farthest from the door and the garage. First he fixed the suction cups onto the top right pane of the lower half of the window, then used the glass cutter to slice the glass through just inside the wooden sash bars, scoring it four times all the way around before he got completely through. Tugging on the suction cups, he removed the rectangle of glass, then made sure he could reach the lock inside. Then he put the pane back in place, fixing it there with small pieces of the clear tape. The suction cups he buried under the shrubbery along the footing.

Walking back along the beach toward the Four Seasons, one by one he threw into the sea the drill, the routing bit, the hacksaw, the glass cutter, the pliers, and the roll of tape. The shoulder bag he left on the ground in the parking lot; some tourist would take it home.

10

The question was Leslie. She’d been useful, but she was an amateur, and an amateur is never entirely reliable. Could she be useful again? Or could she be a problem?

So far, she was doing everything right. She came up with the answers he needed, and she didn’t ask a lot of her own unnecessary questions. She didn’t try to push herself closer to the job. She showed patience. All of these were rare qualities in an amateur and were keeping her alive.

So the real question was, how tight a leash should he keep on her until the day? He finally decided the answer was to keep no leash at all. If she kept herself to herself, as she’d been doing, fine. If she started phoning, or coming around, he’d deal with it.

It was ten days till the job. There was nothing to do now but wait, and make sure that when Melander and the others came back they didn’t notice Parker in the neighborhood. So why not go back to Miami for a few days, spend some time with Claire?

He left in late morning, took Interstate 95 south, and got off the highway at Fort Lauderdale to find a diner lunch. After, he came out of the diner to the bright sunlit parking lot, and the Jaguar was gone.

Stupid; to let that get ripped off. He looked around the parking lot for another car to take, and a guy came out of the diner behind him, working at his mouth with a toothpick. He said, “Hot day.”

“Yes,” Parker said. He waited for the guy to go away.

But the guy pointed across the parking lot with his toothpick and said, “You see that white Toyota Land Cruiser over there?”

Parker didn’t look at the white Toyota Land Cruiser, he looked at the guy with the toothpick. He was bulked up, tanned, about forty, grinning like a man with a secret. He nodded, not looking at Parker, and said, “There’s a guy in there with a thirty ought six — you do anything he doesn’t like, any single thing at all, he’ll blow your head off.”

“Maybe he’ll hit you,” Parker said.

“Funny thing about Herby,” the guy said. “He never misses what he aims at. Never been known to happen. Why don’t we go over there, he can tell you about it himself.”

Now Parker looked at the Land Cruiser, a Land Rover clone, then back at the guy. These people weren’t from Melander and Carlson and Ross; that trio would handle their own problems. He didn’t see how they could be connected with Leslie. So who were they and what was their interest?

The guy said, “I’m walking over there now myself. If you don’t walk with me, they’ll be hosing down the pavement here later.”

Parker said, “We’ll walk together. I’m trying to remember where I know you from.”

The guy chuckled, not as though he thought Parker had said something funny, but as though it was a skill he’d learned one time, chuckling, and he liked to practice from time to time. As they walked across the parking lot to the Land Cruiser, that was the only answer he gave.

Herby, a sharp-nosed skinny man in a wrinkled white dress shirt and black pants and mirror-lensed aviator sunglasses, sat in the back seat, the big hunting rifle on his lap, right hand loose near the trigger, left hand loose under the barrel. There was no way to tell if he was looking at Parker or not, but it really didn’t make any difference.

The first guy, still cheerful, said, “You can ride up front with me.”

They were willing to kill him in public, if they had to, but they’d rather do it in private. So there was still a little time. Parker went around to the right side of the Land Cruiser and opened the door, and saw a small square photo on the passenger seat. He picked it up, slid onto the seat, shut the door, and looked at the photo. It was himself, one of the pictures Bobby had taken for his driver’s license.

He looked from the picture to the guy, now behind the wheel, grinning at him around the toothpick. “So Norte’s dead,” Parker said, and dropped the photo out the window.

The guy stuck the key in the ignition. “Hell, pal,” he said as the engine started, “everybody’s dead. Some people just don’t know it yet.”

11

They were going to kill him in the Everglades. A good place for it, obviously; the idea had been thought of before.

The white Land Cruiser headed out westward along Alligator Alley, the Everglades Parkway, a two-lane black binding tape laid on the uncertain green land, straight as a rifle shot across the flat landscape. Big trucks groaned along, and the smaller cars zipped around them and sped on. The guy with the toothpick in the rear corner of his mouth moved the Land Cruiser along at a steady unhurried speed. There was time enough to get the job done.

Parker thought about the Sentinel, now taped to the underside of the Parsons table in Melander’s dining room. There were two guns stashed in the Jaguar, but he had nothing on his body. Here there was Herby in the back seat with his rifle and maybe some other things. The driver wasn’t obviously armed, but he could have a pistol in a pants pocket or in a spring-loaded holster under the dash on the far side of the steering column.

They couldn’t do anything on this road, with this traffic. There were always at least half a dozen vehicles in sight. They’d have to turn off, and that was the point where he’d have to make his move. They were pros, and they would know that was when he’d have to move, but he had to anyway. And they knew that, too.

Although it didn’t matter now, he couldn’t help but wonder if it would have made a difference if he’d decided not to let Julius Norte live. He’d thought the man could handle himself against the fellow who’d sent those killers after him, but maybe without Bobby, Norte hadn’t been so invulnerable anymore.

It seemed to Parker that this guy, whoever he was, who’d hired these two in the Land Cruiser, would have been on Daniel Parmitt’s trail whether he’d left Norte dead or alive. There would have been papers in Norte’s office, evidence, things Parker wouldn’t have had the time or knowledge to find and destroy, to tell who the other customer had been that day, who’d dealt himself a hand. It was revenge that guy wanted now, as well as his grim determination to leave nobody alive who could possibly lead back to him. Nothing to do with Parker, but he was stuck in it anyway.

They drove for over an hour, passing the occasional tourist place, offering cold drinks or airboat rides into the swamp or views of caged alligators, and no one in the car spoke. The air-conditioning kept everything cool and dry. They passed small side roads from time to time, bumping away on rough bridges over the canals, and Parker waited.

Over an hour. The driver lowered his visor because the afternoon sun was rolling down the sky, dead ahead, and Parker did the same. There were warnings on notices attached to this side of the visor, but he didn’t read them.

The driver tapped the brake. Parker squinted, and maybe that was a road out there, still some distance off, leading to the right. He became very still, and the driver tapped the brake again, and the rifle barrel came to rest against the base of Parker’s skull, just below and behind his left ear, a cold hard smoothness of metal.

Parker sensed, but didn’t turn his head to see, the driver grin. Still facing front, feeling the steel against his skull, he said, “Try not to jounce on the turn.”

The driver practiced his chuckle again, and slowed some more, flipping on his directional.

It was a dirt road, heading north over the scrub near the highway, then going on into the ripe green of the swamp shrubbery. Parker watched it coming and knew he couldn’t do the move, not now. He’d have to wait until they thought he wasn’t going to do anything. Eventually, they’d believe he’d given up the idea of doing anything, because eventually everybody gives up, and they’d know that. Eventually, he, too, might give up.

The driver made the turn, smooth and slow, but then they bumped a little when they crossed the wooden bridge over the nearby canal, and the rifle barrel jounced hard against his skull, but the gun didn’t go off. And a minute later, with the car up to a good speed again and the mangroves and palmettos getting closer, the rifle barrel went away.

Parker adjusted the air-conditioner vent so it wouldn’t blow directly on him. He looked at the driver, who concentrated now more completely on his driving on this imperfect road, then twisted around to look back at Herby, who was seated sideways in the left corner back there, so he could hold the rifle with its trigger handy to his right hand and its barrel aimed at the back of Parker’s seat. The aviator glasses reflected Parker, darkly. He faced front again.

Once in the swamp, the road veered left and right to keep on the dry ground. Water glinted among the trunks on both sides. The road was one lane wide, but here and there were wider spots where one car could pass another.

A straight stretch, and down at the end a sharp curve to the left. The driver accelerated, and Parker watched his foot on the pedal. At the end of this stretch, he’d have to brake.

There. The foot started to lift, and Parker moved everything at once. His left foot mashed down on the driver’s foot and the accelerator, jolting them forward, maybe spoiling Herby’s aim for just a second. His right hand shoved the door open against that acceleration as his left hand swung up backhanded to mash that toothpick into the driver’s mouth. And his right foot shoved down and leftward, propelling him backward out of the Land Cruiser, as the crack of the rifle shot banged around inside the car.

He landed hard on his back, the Land Cruiser spraying dirt back at him as the driver tried to brake, to steer, to keep the Land Cruiser from running off into the swamp. Herby was rolling out of the car on the other side, not waiting for it to stop, rolling with the rifle cupped against his chest under his crossed arms.

Parker rolled away from the road, hoping for water, but a low berm had been built along here to keep the swamp away from the road, and it stopped him. He had to rise, not wanting to, if he would get over the berm, and as he came up on his knees he heard the crack behind him, much smaller in the outer air, just a firecracker. Except that a punch in the back threw him forward across the top of the berm, and when he lifted himself, suddenly very heavy, there was blood spreading across the front of his shirt. The bullet had gone through him.

He shoved with his arms, but they were heavy as trees and he only dropped forward, rolling onto his back. There was no sky, only the darkness of the leaves.

He felt their feet when they rolled him down into the water, but when he hit the water he wasn’t feeling anything anymore.