Parker walked into his hotel room, and there was a guy in there going through his suitcase laid out on his bed. He looked over when Parker came in and calmly said, "That'll be all right." He had some kind of accent.
And he hadn't been talking to Parker. Parker looked behind himself, and number two was shutting the door. Number three was to the left, over by the window; he was the only one with hardware showing, an automatic held negligently in his right hand pointed nowhere in particular.
The faces were all strangers. They were all about forty, tall, in good physical condition, well dressed, deeply tanned. They might be law, but they didn't smell like it. They smelled like something new, something Parker didn't know anything about.
He said, "Where's the woman?" because Claire was supposed to be in here; she was here when he'd gone out, and he didn't like the idea of her being around guns.
The one at the suitcase nodded his head toward the closed bathroom door. "In there," he said. "On a promise of good behavior."
Number two, standing directly behind Parker, said, "Hold your arms out from your sides, please." He had the same sort of accent as the first one, and the "please" was a surprise. Like some levels of law, maybe federal. But not with the accents. And not with the feel of them, the general manner.
Parker put his hands out to his sides, and number two patted him up and down. It was a thorough frisk but not a professional one. He took too long to cover the territory, as though he wasn't sure of his ability to get it right. When the patting was done, number two said, “Right.” Parker put his arms down again.
“If you don’t mind,” number one said, “I’ll just finish up here.”
Parker looked at number three’s gun. He didn’t say anything.
Number one didn’t wait for an answer. He kept on poking through Parker’s suitcase, not being unnecessarily sloppy but not trying to be too careful either. Most of the drawers in the room were partly open, so the suitcase was the last thing to be searched.
What were they looking for? Parker had no idea, so he stood in the middle of the room and waited to find out who they were and what they wanted and what his best move was.
Number one poked at his gear in the suitcase, number two stood with his back against the hall door, and number three leaned against the wall near the window, the automatic in his hand filling the room with a silent buzz. Outside the window and seven stories down, the New York City traffic inched along making muffled noises. The sky out there was gray, mid-March gray. Wherever these three had picked up their tans, it wasn’t in New York.
Parker looked at the closed bathroom door. What shape was Claire in? Violence shook her up, even the hint of violence; it reminded her of a time she didn’t want to think about. If they’d leaned on her she was probably having silent hysterics in there now. She could do anything, react in a million different ways. She might come screaming out with a pair of nail scissors in her fist; it was impossible to say.
Parker said, “Let me talk to my woman while you’re doing that.”
“Just finishing up.” He turned away from the suitcase, leaving it open on the bed, and gave Parker a wintry smile. “She hasn’t been hurt, I assure you,” he said. “Not so far, at any rate.”