The Jugger (4 page)

If
the call had anything to do with Parker at all.
If
there was anything going on between Younger and Rayborn and Gliffe.

Rayborn, having ended the conversation, came back across the room. 'A patient,' he said, smiling, and shrugging. 'We're always on call, we general practitioners. Now, where were we?' He sat down again in the same sagging armchair.

'I was out of touch with Joe the last three years,' Parker said, lying. 'I wondered how long he'd had this heart trouble.'

'Two years or more,' the doctor said, lying right back at him. 'In fact, I think it was his increasing blood pressure that first brought him to me.'

Joe Sheer didn't have any history of heart trouble, right up to three months ago, Parker knew that for sure. He also knew Joe had a doctor down in Omaha. A sudden unexpected heart attack could have taken him here, and then this doctor would be in charge instead of the doctor in Omaha, but that was the only way. The story the doctor was telling was bushwah.

Which meant Captain Younger was headed this way, no question.

Parker wanted to talk to the captain, wanted to find out what the captain was trying for, but not yet. There was still more to be done first.

He got to his feet and said, 'Well, I won't keep you. You must be busy.'

'Not at all, not at all.' The doctor struggled out of the chair, trying to look casual, saying, 'I have plenty of time, office hours don't begin till two.'

'I have to get back to the hotel,' Parker told him, and started walking towards the front door.

The doctor trotted after him. 'I haven't even offered you coffee yet. Or a drink? Surely you can spare ten minutes, I'd love to talk with you about Joe Shardin, a fine old man, there really can't be any reason for you to rush away, you just barely got here, we'll have a drink and—'

Parker opened the door. 'Maybe I'll come back when I've got more time,' he said. He looked at the doctor, who was blinking and looking winded, and still trying to be casual. 'We'll have a lot to talk about,' Parker told him. 'Some other time.' He stepped out on to the porch and let the door close behind him.

When he was a block away he looked back and saw the black Ford pulling to a stop in front of the doctor's house. But then he turned the corner and didn't see what happened next.

IT was a smallish white clapboard house on a narrow lot in the middle of the block, flanked on both sides by houses larger than itself, but with vacant lots and fields and unfinished streeting in the block behind it. There was a driveway in from the street, running beside the house, but no garage. A gnarled apple tree stood in the middle of the back yard.

Parker had come the front way the last time, and by night. This time he was coming the back way, by day, walking across the scrubby weedy fields with his hands tucked deep in his coat pockets and his shoulder hunched against a cold breeze blowing across from his left. He came in at an angle, so he could see past the apple tree to the blank, black rear windows of the house and along the driveway to the kerb out front. No face showed in the windows, and no car was parked at the kerb.

In retirement, Joe had gone the whole way, even getting interested in the things retired types were supposed to be excited about, including gardening. The back yard was half lawn and half flower garden, broken up into alternative squares of each like a checkerboard, with a red slate walk meandering through it and around the apple tree and eventually to the back porch, a narrow affair with three creaking steps. A milk-company box stood on this porch, along with a broom, two empty beer cases, and a hoe. A clothes-line pulley hung from a hook on one of the porch uprights, but there was no clothes-line attached to it.

The screen door was unlocked, but the inner door wasn't. Parker tried the knob, then tried leaning on it a little, then stood and considered it a few seconds. He'd brought no tools along, nothing at all, not expecting to have to work.

There was no point fooling with it. He held the screen door open, raised his right foot, and slammed the flat of his heel into the door just above the knob. It made a hell of a racket, and the glass in the door trembled as though thinking about breaking. The second time Parker kicked it, the door gave up and opened, springing back so far and so hard it slammed into the wall. Parker stepped in, latched the screen door, and shut the door again. It wouldn't close all the way, but good enough.

He was in the kitchen, a small square room with green-check linoleum on the floor and chintz curtains over the windows. The refrigerator was small and old and had been repainted; Parker could see the brush marks from across the room. The small wooden table and the sideboard were both clean, but in the sink were one plate, one set of silverware, one coffee cup, and two glasses. Parker opened the refrigerator and found it still working; so the electricity had never been turned off. That was stupid. The refrigerator contained some TV dinners, some hot dogs and hamburgers, a head of lettuce, an opened bottle of milk, a few twelve-ounce battles of beer, and a quarter-pound stick of butter.

Parker shut the refrigerator door again and looked around the room. What was he looking for? He didn't know himself, exactly; just something to tell him what was going on, something to tell him how Joe had died, who had helped him if he had been helped, and what Captain Younger was up to. There might not be anything here at all, but it was the first place he should look.

He searched the rest of the kitchen and found only the stuff you'd expect to find in a bachelor's kitchen. He was all finished and ready to start on another part of the house when he remembered something. He got a table knife from the silverware drawer, took down the flour canister from its shelf, and took the top off. He poked the knife down into it, poked and pried around, and there wasn't anything in there but flour.

That wasn't right. There should have been a tobacco pouch down in there, with twenty fifty-dollar bills rolled in it; Joe Sheer's run-out money. He'd kept it there just in case he ever had to leave here too fast to close out bank accounts, and a couple of years ago he'd mentioned to Parker where he had it stashed.

Now it was gone, and it didn't make any sense for it to be gone. There was no sign anywhere around that anybody else had searched this place, which meant it wasn't taken by somebody just stumbling on it but by somebody who knew it was there all along. Who else could that be but Joe Sheer? But if Joe had taken that money, five minutes later he'd have been out of town; the thousand bucks in the flour canister was getaway financing exclusively, not to be used for anything else.

Parker put the canister back where it belonged, washed the flour from the knife, dried the knife and put it away again in the silverware drawer. Then he left the kitchen, going through a doorway that led to a central hallway about six feet long. Every room in the house led off this hallway; living-room, two bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen. The cellar stairs were off this hallway, and a trap-door in the hallway ceiling led to the narrow cramped attic.

Parker went into the living-room next. It was a small room, made to look even smaller because of the bulkiness and darkness of the furniture. Joe Sheer had liked an older style of furniture, the kind of heavy round stuff that went with tasselled lamp shades and fringed shawls. Parker stood just inside the doorway and looked around, and the room looked no different from the last time he'd been here. There was a new television set, but it was in an old-style cabinet that blended in well with the furniture already there.

Looking around the room, Parker happened to see the thermostat on the wall near the front door, and it occurred to him that the house was warm. He hadn't paid any attention to that when he'd first come in, because it only seemed natural that the house should be warm; but it wasn't natural at all. This house was supposed to be empty now, was supposed to have been empty for the last two or three days. Somebody should have come along by now to shut the place up.

He went over and looked at the thermostat. It was set for seventy, and the little thermometer on it read the same. So the furnace was still going, and the electricity was still turned on.

And the phone?

It was over on a rickety-looking end table next to the sofa. Parker went over and picked it up and listened for a second to the sound of the dial tone. It was still working.

He hung up the phone and looked around at the room. Somebody wanted this place to stay liveable, and he didn't know why.

He couldn't get a corner on it, not a corner.

He went on searching the place, for whatever he might find. The living-room had nothing more beyond the thermostat and the telephone of interest to him. He poked and pried and found nothing. Nothing under the chairs, nothing under the sofa cushions or behind the small water-colour landscapes on the walls, nothing written or hidden in any of the few books on the shelf behind the sofa, nothing anywhere of interest.

Parker limited himself to looking in places he could get at without taking anything apart, so there still could be a million dollars in jewels hidden inside the sofa back or ten pounds of uncut heroin in the speaker cavity of the television set or several notes in invisible ink written on the lamp shades, but he doubted any of it. He finished the living-room, found nothing, and went on.

Next was the bathroom, where the medicine cabinet told him Joe Sheer had been having physical trouble of all kinds in recent years, though maybe not heart disease. But, according to the junk in the medicine cabinet, he'd had piles and he'd been constipated and he'd had trouble sleeping and he'd had various troubles for which he'd been taking prescription medicines. Parker looked at the prescription bottles and they were all from the Five Corner Drug Store in Omaha, all with the name Dr. Quilley on them. According to the evidence of the medicine cabinet, Dr. Rayborn had never prescribed anything for Joe.

Before leaving the bathroom, Parker took the top off the water tank, because that was such a favourite place for people to hide things, either down in the water tank itself, wrapped in something waterproof, or taped to the inside of the top. This time there was nothing in either place.

The next room he went into was the spare bedroom, the smaller of the two. It had a bed, a dresser, a throw rug, and a kitchen chair in it, because Joe did, every once in a great while, have company that stayed over, somebody like Parker. He preferred most of the time to meet with his friends from his old life down in the apartment in Omaha, but every once in a while — particularly when the weather was good — he brought a house guest out to see him living the good life in the little town of Sagamore.

Now, the bed was made, the dresser was empty, and the closet was emptier. There was nothing in this room at all, no messages for Parker about anything. Except maybe that Joe hadn't had any company that stayed over for some time.

Joe's own bedroom was a different proposition. It wasn't as neat as the rest of the house. From the looks of it, it could have been searched two or three times already, and every time by impatient slobs. But Parker knew this was normal, the way Joe had always kept his bedroom. The rest of the house could be neat and clean, and usually was, but his bedroom had to be a mess. Maybe it was because he'd taken one fall, back when he was young, and had spent four years sleeping in the barren metallic neatness of a jail cell.

It took a long time to go through Joe's bedroom, and when he was done Parker had learned nothing. Throughout the whole house, nothing he knew of was missing except the thousand bucks from the flour canister. The telephone and utilities were still on, there was additional proof that Dr. Rayborn had been lying, and there was no sign at all that anyone else had made a search through here. He knew a few facts and no reasons.

There were still two places to look, the attic and the cellar. He stood in the central hall and considered, looking up at the trap-door in the ceiling but finally deciding to let the attic wait till last. He turned and opened the cellar door, and something with a sack over its head came lunging up out of the darkness, swinging something that whistled like the wind as it came around and smashed into the side of Parker's head. Parker had time to feel his hand scrape along burlap, time to see the cellar stairs rushing in on a long curve towards him, getting bigger and bigger, and then he went out like a burned-out bulb.

THE voice was a centipede, a long twisty bug with needle-sharp feet running back and forth on the left side of his face, driving its needle feet into the bone beside his eye and into his cheekbone and into the bone above his ear. His face hurt like fury; it hurt every time the voice sounded, and the voice sounded all the time. He thrashed a little in impotent rage, wanting the voice to stop hurting the side of his face.

Moving like that brought him up out of it a bit more, far enough out so he could begin to separate sensations, differentiate between hearing the voice in his ears and feeling the pains on the side of his face, begin to know they weren't connected, not two parts of the same thing after all but just two separate sensations that had both helped to drag him back to consciousness.

From there, it was practically no step at all to come up far enough to begin to wonder what the voice was saying, and almost immediately to begin to separate the words and discover what they meant: