Firebreak

A Parker Novel

The University of Chicago Press

When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man. His knees pressed down on the interloper's back, his hands were clasped around his forehead. He heard the phone ring, distantly, in the house, as he jerked his forearms back; heard the neck snap; heard the phone's second ring, cut off, as Claire answered, somewhere in the house.

No time to do anything with the body now. Parker stood and was entering the kitchen from the garage when Claire came in the other way, carrying the cordless. "He says his name is Elkins," she told him.

He knew the name. This would have nothing to do with the interloper. Taking the cordless, he said, "I'll have to go out for a while." Then, moving into the dining room, where the windows looked away from the lake, out toward the woods where the stranger had come from, he said, "Frank?"

It was the familiar voice: "Ralph and I maybe have something."

Parker didn't see anybody else out there, among the trees, where the first one had come crouching, a long-barreled pistol held against his right leg; long because it was equipped with a silencer. Parker had first seen him from this room, tracked his moves, met him when he came in the side window of the garage. Into the phone, still watching the empty woods, he said, "You want to call me, or do I call you?"

"Either way."

Parker gave him the number, backward, of the pay phone at the gas station a few miles from here, then said, "Give me a little while, I've got something to finish up here." The woods stayed empty. Now, early October, the trees were still fully leafed out, though starting to turn, and too dense for him to see as far as the road.

Elkins said, "Eleven?"

"Good."

Parker hung up, went back to the garage, and searched the body. There were a wallet, a Ford automobile key, a motel room key, a five-inch spring knife, a pair of sunglasses, and a Zippo lighter but no cigarettes. A green and yellow football helmet was embossed on the lighter. The wallet contained a little over four hundred dollars in cash, three credit cards made out to Viktor Charov, and an Illinois driver's license to the same name, with an address in Chicago. The picture on the license was the dead man: fiftyish, rail-thin, almost bald with a little pepper-and-salt hair around the edges, eyes that didn't show much.

Parker kept the wallet and the key to the Ford, put the rest back, and stuffed the body into the trunk of the Lexus. Then he crossed to the button next to the kitchen entry that operated the overhead garage door, but first slid open the concealed wood panel above it and took out the S&W Chiefs Special .38 he kept stashed there. Finally, then, he pushed the button, and kept the bulk of the Lexus between himself and the steadily lifting view outside.

Nothing. Nobody.

Hand and revolver at his side, like the other one, he stepped out to the chill sunshine and walked at a normal pace out the driveway to the road, watching the woods on both sides. There were other houses around the lake, none of them visible from here, most of them already closed for the winter. Parker and Claire were among the few year-rounders, and they always moved somewhere else in the summer, when the city people came out to their "cottages" and the powerboats snarled on the lake.

The road was empty. Down to the right, fifty paces, stood a red Ford Taurus. Parker walked toward it and saw the rental company sticker on the bumper.

The dead man's Ford key fit the Taurus. Parker started it, swung it around, and drove back to the house, turning in at the driveway where the mailbox read WILLIS.

The garage door stood open, as he'd left it, the dark green Lexus bulking in there. Parker swung the Ford around, backed it to the open doorway, and switched off the engine. Getting out, he put the S&W away, then took a pair of rubber gloves from the Lexus glove compartment and slipped them on. Then he opened both trunks and moved the body into the Ford.

The dead man's gun was a .357 Colt Trooper with a ribbed silencer clamped behind the front sight. Snapping off the silencer, he put both pieces in a drawer of the worktable under the window where the stranger had come in, his balance between table and floor thrown off just long enough.

On the way into the house, he shut the garage door, its wood sections sliding down between the Lexus and the Ford. He went through the kitchen and found Claire in the living room, reading a magazine. She looked up when he came in, and he said, "I'd like you to pick me up, at the Mobil station, five after eleven."

"Fine. Can we go somewhere for lunch?"

"You pick it."

"I will. See you then." She didn't ask, and wouldn't ask, not because he didn't want to tell her but because she didn't want to know. Whatever happened out of her sight didn't happen.

Three miles beyond the Mobil station a dirt road led off to an old gravel quarry, used up half a century ago by the road building after World War II. The chain-link fences surrounding the property were old and staggering, a joke, and the Warning and No Trespassing and Posted signs had been so painted over by hunters and lovers down the years that they looked like Pollocks.

Parker drove through a broken-down part of the fence and stopped, in neutral, engine on, all the windows open, at the lip, where the stony trash-laden ground ran steeply down to the water that had filled the excavation as soon as work had stopped. Getting out, shutting the door, he moved around behind the Ford and leaned on it. As soon as it started to move, he stepped back, peeling off the gloves, putting them in his pocket, and watched the car bounce down through the rocks and trash till it shoved into the water, making a modest ripple in front of itself that opened out and out and didn't stop till it pinged against the stone at the far side of the quarry. As the car angled down, the black water all around it became suddenly crystal clear as it splashed in through the open windows. The roof sank, a few bubbles appeared, and then only the ripple, going out, slowly fading.

He walked back along the state road to the Mobil station, getting there five minutes early, and leaned against the pay phone, at the outer corner of the station property. A couple of customers came in for gas, paying no attention to him. It was self-serve, so the attendant stayed inside his convenience store.

At two minutes after eleven, the phone rang. Parker stepped around into the booth, which was just a three-sided metal box on a stick, picked up the receiver, and said, "Yes."

It was Elkins' voice: "So I guess you're not too busy right now."

"Not busy," Parker agreed.

"I got something," Elkins told him. "Me and Ralph." Meaning the partner he almost always paired with, Ralph Wiss. "But it won't be easy."

They were never easy. Parker said, "Where?"

"Soon. Sooner the better. We got a deadline."

That was different. Usually, the jobs didn't come with deadlines. Parker said, "You want me to listen?"

"Not now," Elkins said. He sounded surprised.

"I didn't mean now."

"Oh. Yeah, if you wanna take a drive."

"Where?"

"Lake Placid."

A resort in northern New York State, close to Canada. If that was the spot for the meet, it wouldn't be the spot for the work. Parker said, "When?"

"Three tomorrow afternoon?"

Meaning a seven-hour drive, from eight in the morning. Parker said, "Because of your deadline."

"And we don't like to keep things hang around."

Which was true. The longer a job was in the planning, the more chance the law would get wind of it. Parker said, "I can make that," and the Lexus turned in from the road.

"At the Holiday Inn," Elkins said. "Unless you know anybody up that way."

"I do," Parker said. "Viktor Charov. You want to meet there?" Claire swung the Lexus around to put the passenger door next to the phone.

"Viktor Charov," Elkins said. "I'll find him."

"Good," Parker said.

I made a reservation yesterday," Parker said. "Viktor Charov."

"Oh, yes, sir," the clerk said. "I think we even have a message for you."

"Good."

He checked in, writing different things on the form, signing Charov's small crabbed signature, while she went to get the message from the cubbyholes. It was in a Holiday Inn envelope, with VICTOR CHAROV hand-printed on the front. While she ran Charov's credit card, he opened the envelope, opened the Holiday Inn stationery inside, and read "342."

He pocketed the message, signed the credit card form, and accepted the key card for 219. He left his bag in that room, then went down the hall to 243 and knocked on the door. He waited a minute, the hall empty, and then Frank Elkins opened it. A rangy, fortyish man, he looked like a carpenter or a bus driver, except for his eyes, which never stopped moving. He looked at Parker, past him, around him, at him, and said, "Right on time."

"Yes," Parker said, and stepped in, looking at the other two in the room while Elkins shut the door.

The one he knew was Elkins' partner, Ralph Wiss, a safe and lock man, small and narrow, with sharp nose and chin. The other one didn't look right in this company. Early thirties, medium build gone a bit to flab, he had a round neat head, thinning sandy hair, and a pale forgettable face except for prominent horn-rim eyeglasses. While Parker and the other two were dressed in dark trousers and shirts and jackets, this one was in a blue button-down shirt with pens in a pen protector in the pocket, plus uncreased chinos and bulky elaborate sneakers. Parker looked at this one, waiting for an explanation, and Elkins came past him to say, "You know Ralph. This is Larry Lloyd. Larry, this is Parker."

"Hi," Lloyd said, coming forward with a nervous smile to shake hands. "I knew Otto Mainzer on the inside," he added, as though to prove his bona fides. "I think you used to know him, too."

This was a double surprise. First, that somebody who looked like this had ever been in prison, and second that Mainzer still was. Parker said, "Otto isn't out?"

"He hit a guard," Lloyd said, and shrugged. The nervous grin seemed to be a part of him, like his hair. "He hit people a lot, but then he hit a guard."

"Sounds like Otto," Parker said.

"Larry's our electronics man," Elkins said, as Wiss said, "We're having bourbon."

"Sure," Parker said, and turned to Elkins: "You need an electronics man?"

"Let me tell you the story."

This was the living room of a suite, doors open in both side walls leading to the bedrooms, the picture window looking out over the steeply downhill town of Lake Placid, away from the lake. Coming in, Parker had driven past the two ski jump towers left from the Olympics, and even without snow the town out there had the look of a mountain winter resort, with touches of Alpine architecture scattered among the American logos.

When they sat around the coffee table, Parker noticed that Lloyd's glass contained water. He looked away from it, and Elkins said, "Ralph subscribes to the shelter magazines, you know what I mean."

Parker nodded. He knew other people who did that, bought the glossy architecture magazines because mostly they were color pictures of the insides of rich people's houses. Here's the layout, here are the doors and windows, here's what's worth taking. Parker wasn't usually interested in looting living rooms, but would go to places like banks, where the value was more concentrated; still, he knew what the shelter magazines were for. "He found a house," he said.

Wiss laughed. "I found the palace," he said, "Aladdin went to with his lamp."

"What it is," Elkins said, "there's this billionaire, one of the dot-com people, computer whizzes, made all this money all at once, yesterday he's a geek, today he's giving polo fields to his alma mater."

"He was always a good boy," Wiss said.

Parker said, "This guy got a name?"

"Paxton Marino," Elkins said.

Wiss said, "If you want to call that a name."

"You won't have heard of him," Elkins said. "He got into the dot-com thing early, made his billions, got out, now he's having fun. And he built a house. Actually, I think, so far he's built about eight houses, here and there around the world, but this one's in Montana."

"His hunting lodge," Wiss said, and laughed again.

"Twenty-one rooms," Elkins said, "fifteen baths, separate house down the hill for the staff."

"Isolated," Wiss said.

"He used to go there more often," Elkins said, "maybe five or six separate weeks around the year, but now with all his other stuff it's down to just once a year, ten days, in elk season, believe it or not."

Wiss said, "His elk hunting license is in Canada, but his land extends over the border, he's built a road up into the woods."

Parker said, "You said hunting lodge. What's there gonna be in a hunting lodge?"

"Gold," Wiss said, with a big smile.

"This isn't a hunting lodge," Elkins added, "like a hunting lodge. Antlers and stone fireplaces and all that shit. Ralph's right, it's like a palace."

"Full of gold," Wiss repeated.

"The guy loves gold," Elkins explained. "Every bathroom is gold. Fifteen baths. Not just the faucets, the whole sink."

"The toilets," Wiss said.

Elkins said, "This is where the guy is in his life, him and his friends shit on gold."

"Gold is heavy," Parker pointed out.

"Not a problem," Wiss said.

"We look to see," Elkins said, "when isn't it elk season. Ralph and me and two other guys, we go up there with two trucks and a forklift, like the kind they use in warehouses. You know, slide it under the pallet, move a ton of crap."

"I did blowups of some of the pictures," Wiss said, "I worked out the alarm system. We went up there, and we watched, freezing our asses off, and a guy from the staff house comes up once a day, in the afternoon, goes through the house, turns on and off every light, flushes every toilet, drives back down the hill. That's it. They figure the road's private, and it goes up past the staff house, and they got motion sensors in the house, signal both the staff and the state cops, so they're covered."

"So we went in," Wiss said. "We got rid of all the alarm shit, and then the first thing we wanna do is turn off the water, because we're gonna be ripping out a lotta toilets."

"And sinks," Elkins added.

"So we go into the basement," Wiss went on, "and Frank noticed it, I didn't."

"I was standing right," Elkins explained, "for the light."

"The big main room in the basement," Wiss said, "is wall-to-wall carpet, and there's rooms off it, wine collection, VCR tape collection, one room's like a whole sporting-goods store. But Frank noticed, there's a pale line in the carpet, a lotta travel along one line, the nap's like a little beaten down there, and it goes straight to a blank wall."

"There's something inside there," Parker said.

"This is a guy," Wiss said, "puts his gold in the bathrooms. What's he hide?"

"Not the porn," Elkins said, "that's out, too, where you can see it."

Parker said, "So you broke in."

"Hell to find the door," Wiss told him. "We really had to pry shit out of that wall. But then there it was."

"An art gallery," Elkins said.

"Three rooms," Wiss said, "pretty good-size rooms."

"Oil paintings," Elkins said. "What you call Old Masters, famous European artists. Rembrandt, Titian, like that."

"We're walking through," Wiss said, "we're wondering, is this a better deal than the gold toilets, it's a lot lighter, it's worth who knows how much, three rooms of Old Masters."

"And then we recognize three of them," Elkins said.

"That's right," Wiss said, with another laugh. "All of a sudden, here's three old friends."

"We stole them once before," Elkins explained.

"Three years ago," Wiss said, "out of a museum in Houston, a special European show, traveling through."

"Very famous paintings," Elkins said. "Nobody could try to sell them."

"Our fence," Wiss said, "had a guy, wanted just those particular three pictures, and would pay a lot for them. And it was a guarantee, he'd never peddle them, or deal with insurance companies, or show them anywhere, but just keep them hidden, a little secret stash for him and his friends."

"Bingo," Elkins said.