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“At least we get to keep some of it,” Harvey utters, grinning beneath his mask.
“Before you take your share,” Parker says, rising to his feet and facing Harvey, “I want to talk about something.”
Parker bores into him with his glare, which, even in the starlit darkness, is intimidating.
“You talking about the cop?” Harvey says, his voice noticeably nervous even muffled by the mask.
Parker rips off his own mask and tosses it into the septic tank. “We vowed never to hurt or kill anyone,” he says.
Harvey’s eyes move to Ellis’s, who looks away and shifts his feet uncomfortably, then back to Parker.
“Look,” Harvey says. “What were we supposed to do? Get arrested?”
“And what about sending people to go after Rory?” Parker says. “You did that without consulting me.”
Harvey shrugs. “I know you and that Ranger go way back,” he says, “but he was getting all up in our business and needed to be taken care of. They were never going to kill him. Just hurt him a bit.”
“When we started this,” Parker growls, “we vowed to do this to help people. Not hurt them.”
Harvey huffs. “In this line of work,” he says, “things get messy. Sometimes you gotta make hard choices. I was just making the hard choices you weren’t willing to.”
“You think I can’t make hard choices?” Parker snarls. “You might be right—because this is an easy choice.”
With that, Parker’s hand flashes to his holster, and he draws his pistol and aims it at Harvey’s face.
Harvey puts his hands up in surprise.
“Hey, wait a minute, bud. Let’s talk about—”
“I told you when we started this,” Parker snarls, “if you ever hurt an innocent person, I’d kill you myself.”
Without another word, he squeezes the trigger.
The bullet punches a dime-sized hole through Harvey’s mask, and he slumps to the ground like a marionette with its strings cut. A dark stain spreads through the mask, turning the white fabric a dark crimson.
Parker turns his attention to Ellis.
“You got a problem with what just happened?” he says, holding his gun at his side.
“No, man,” Ellis says, his voice trembling. “You said from the start—no hurting anyone innocent.”
“Good,” Parker says. “Give me a hand.”
They lean down and shove and pull Harvey’s corpse until his upper body is next to the septic tank hole. Parker pushes him over the edge, and Harvey’s head sinks into the muck.
The rest of his body follows, disappearing inch by inch until it’s gone.
CHAPTER 42
CARLOS AND I race into Parker’s driveway, skidding to a halt in the gravel.
Parker’s Bronco is gone. The house is completely dark. The front screen door is open and hanging ajar. The whole property has an air of abandonment.
Carlos runs around the house to go in through the back door, and I open the screen door, gun in hand. We sweep through the ground floor, then Carlos searches the upstairs while I go down into the basement. It looks like it was when the search team left it. Open boxes scattered around the room. Parker’s model train set sits on the sheet of plywood, a sad reminder that even if Parker is a robber, he’s still an ordinary guy with hobbies and interests.
I meet up with Carlos in the backyard.
“Goddamn it,” Carlos says. “We missed them.”
