Comeback (13 page)

Thorsen said, "Midwest Insurance. Who's your client? The stadium?"

Parker put his wallet away. "Nobody," he said. "Not on this one."

Thorsen nodded, considering that. "What you mean is, you were already on their trail, for something else."

"One of them," Parker said. "A fellow named George Liss."

"That's a name I know," Thorsen agreed.

So Carmody had broken; not a surprise.

Thorsen went on, "Seems to be his real handle, Liss. What do you have on the others?"

"Nothing," Parker said. "They're not part of my job. Or they weren't. I guess they are now. Do you have names on them?"

"Not names I like," Thorsen said. 'Jack Grant.

Ed and Brenda Fawcett." He waggled a hand, to show doubt. "That's what they told Carmody, for what it's worth."

Parker decided an insurance investigator following George Liss would have some knowledge of Carmody. He said, "Carmody. He's something in Liss's parole, isn't he?"

"He's also the inside man on the robbery," Thorsen said.

"It looked like there had to be somebody inside," Parker agreed. "And they holed up in that trailer that blew apart, I suppose."

"From there," Thorsen said, "God knows where they went."

"Who's running the investigation?"

Thorsen shook his head. "I don't like him," he said, "and you won't either. Detective Second Grade Calavecci."

"Is that why you're looking around here yourself? He's incompetent?"

"No, he's good at the job," Thorsen said. "I think the whole department's good. He just enjoys himself a little too much."

"Maybe I'll stay out of his way," Parker said.

"That's what I'm doing," Thorsen said. "Came over here to see what's what, when I couldn't stand him any more."

"You knew about this place from Carmody?"

"And also from another bunch, trying to cut themselves a piece. Calavecci didn't want to come here, said they wouldn't be back, but you never know. Their stuff is here."

Parker said, "Another bunch?" That must be the trio in the car in the stadium parking lot. Who
were
those clowns? And where were they now? Parker said, "I don't know any other bunch."

"It's a sad story," Thorsen told him. "Carmody had a girlfriend. He told her what was going down here."

"Everybody talks to everybody," Parker said.

"They do," agreed Thorsen. "The girlfriend talked to her brother, who's an asshole. He talked to two other assholes he knew, and they decided to come hit the hitters."

"Did they," Parker said.

"Before they left," Thorsen went on, "the other two assholes went to see what else the sister might know, and killed her. Not meaning to, I guess."

Parker said, "The sister?"

"They didn't mention that part to the brother," Thorsen said. "They just all came here."

"To the motel, you mean. So they could follow the heisters."

"That's right."

"Liss told Carmody this was the motel, Carmody told the girlfriend, the girlfriend told the brother."

"As you say," Thorsen said, "everybody talks to everybody."

"The question is," Parker said, "who do I talk to?"

"The second bunch is in custody," Thorsen told him. "Calavecci was teasing the brother about the sister's death, not quite telling him, when I left."

"Uh huh."

"But I don't know that that bunch has much you want to know."

"They're nothing to me," Parker said. He was thinking, trying to find a way to turn this meeting into something useful. "I might want Carmody," he decided. "He could know associates of Liss, people Liss might go to if he has to go to ground."

"Calavecci and his people squeezed him pretty good, I think," Thorsen said.

"But they're thinking about the stadium, and the money. I'm thinking about Liss."

"That's true." Thorsen thought it over, and said, "I could phone, say we want to drop by—"

"You and the insurance man."

Thorsen grinned. "That's right. Just get an okay, a phone call from Calavecci to the hospital saying we're cleared to go in. That way, Calavecci won't have to come with us."

"He's a busy man anyway," Parker suggested.

Thorsen got to his feet. "I'll just make the call."

Also rising, Parker said, "Give me a minute in the john, and I'll be with you."

As Thorsen went over to the telephone on the bedside table, Parker went into the bathroom, shut the door, and looked through Brenda's cosmetics until he found a round black compact. He opened it, and the inside of the top was mirrored. With eyebrow pencil, he wrote on the mirror
11
PM.
Then he closed the compact and put it down a different place from where he'd found it, then flushed the toilet before leaving the room.

The one place he was sure Brenda would look was in a mirror.

Thorsen was still on the phone, saying, "Yeah," and, "I see," and, "How about that." He held a finger up toward Parker—one minute—and went on listening to the phone. Then he said, "Well, we'll come over and hang around until you're done," and hung up, and said, "I could grow to dislike that slime ball."

"The detective? Whatsisname?"

"Calavecci. He's waiting for the doctors to say he can go over and have a conversation with Carmody himself, probably by ten o'clock. When he's done, then we can go in."

The clock radio in the room read 9:23. "So we wait a while," Parker said.

"The thing is," Thorsen said, "what he's waiting to do. He wants to bring Quindero over there, let him and Carmody have a conversation."

"Quindero?" This was a new name to Parker.

"The brother," Thorsen explained. "This is just the sadistic son of a bitch wanting to turn the knife a little more. Let Quindero and Carmody reminisce together about good old Mary."

"A nice guy, your detective."

"Let's get out of here," Thorsen said, looking around, disgusted. "There's more, I'll tell you in the car."

"Fine."

Thorsen nodded at the connecting door. "Nothing in there?"

"Same as here. They didn't leave any address books."

'These are not people with address books," Thorsen said. "Come along— What do I call you? John, or Jack?"

'Jack."

"And I'm Dwayne."

"Fine."

They went out, switching off the lights, and Thorsen said, "I parked across the street."

In the Professional Building parking lot, which was now half full. Thorsen's car was a rental, a blue Chevy Celebrity. He unlocked them into it, and on the console between the front seats was a black scanner, which he immediately switched on, saying, "I've got this fixed to the local police band. I'm not official, so Calavecci won't tell me anything unless I ask, and then he has to play around a little."

Thorsen had the volume low, so that the police dispatcher's voice was a raspy buzz that wouldn't interfere with conversation. Parker said, "There's more?"

Thorsen started the car, and drove out of the parking lot, and as they headed across the city he told Parker about the mess at the gas station this morning, and the kid hospitalized with a bullet in his leg, and the description of the station wagon and the duffel bags and the two men and a woman.

"The thing is," he finished, "my security people in the money room where it happened, they say it was three men. The kid's sure it was two men and a woman. During the robbery, the hitters had ski masks on, so maybe one of them was a woman all along."

"Wouldn't be the first time," Parker said.

"Then the other thing," Thorsen said. "Nobody knows if it's connected or not, but the locals have lost a cop. And his car."

Knowing this was Liss's work, Parker said, "Lost a cop? How do you mean?"

"The guy was on duty at an on-ramp someplace, by himself. When the relief showed up at six this morning, he and the car were gone. He doesn't respond to radio calls—you'll hear them, from time to time, they're still trying to raise him—and they don't know what it means."

"If the heisters have a police car," Parker said, "they could probably just drive on out of town and nobody think twice."

'Then why are they still in that gas station an hour later, with a station wagon? That's why nobody knows if it's connected."

'They'll find him," Parker said. 'Their cop. Sooner or later. One way or another."

"What's driving them nuts is," Thorsen said, "if the hitters have that car, they've got the radio, just like this. They're listening to the pursuit."

"They're probably not enjoying it much," Parker said.

The hospital was well across town. Parker sat in the passenger seat as Thorsen drove from traffic light to traffic light, and the radio kept talking. From time to time, it called for an Officer Kendall, who never answered. Sometimes there was stuff about who would be on duty in and around the hospital, to guard Carmody. Then they found the station wagon.

Thorsen said, "What? Turn it up."

Parker turned it up, and they listened to the reports. A woman had reported her car stolen, a Toyota Tercel, from in front of her apartment building, discovering it when she went out to go to her morning class at the local college, and when the officers responded they found the battered station wagon in front of a fire hydrant directly across the street. So now the fugitives were presumed to be traveling in a dark green Toyota Tercel, license number S46 8TJ.

Except that Parker knew they weren't. He knew what Mackey would do now, because they'd both done it before, when they needed to buy time and they didn't dare travel in stolen wheels. Mackey and Brenda and the duffel bags, in the Toyota, would drive directly to a downtown parking garage, the kind where a machine gives you the ticket on the way in. There they'd park the Toyota, grab another car, wait in it twenty minutes or so, and pay on the way out with the ticket they'd got on the way in. This new car would take them to a motel, either the old one or more likely a new one. Once they had a room, Mackey would bring the new car back to where he'd got it, leave it there, and take a cab to the new hidey-hole.

Somewhere in this city. All Parker had to do was find them.

Up ahead, on the right, a patrolman strolled his beat, slow and relaxed, showing that not the entire local law was all caught up in the excitement. Parker saw him up ahead, from the back, saw how casual he was, then noticed how sloppy the uniform looked.

They drove by. Parker turned his head to look. It was Liss.

Stop? Get out of the car? Go after Liss right now?

No. Too complicated to strip away Thorsen. At this point, Thorsen was Parker's only way to find out what the law knew and what they were doing and whether or not anybody was close to Mackey and Brenda. There was time to reach out for Liss, if the law didn't scoop him up first. Carmody might know just the one thing that would lead Parker to Liss after this was all over. In the meantime, if Liss was killing time and nothing else, strolling around in the sunlight with his cop imitation, that meant he was just as far away as Parker from the duffel bags full of money. Liss could wait.

There was excitement at the hospital. Television news vans, sprouting antennas like the whiskers on a witch's chin, lined both sides of the curved entrance road. Police vehicles took up the rest of the space in front, and cops were a heavy presence both inside and outside the main entrance. Thorsen left the Chevy in the very full visitors' parking lot, then talked himself and Parker into the main hospital building past any number of cops with questions, some of them local and some of them state. Everybody had to walkie-talkie to somebody else to get approval to let Thorsen through, but nobody questioned it when Thorsen vouched for Parker: Jack Orr, the insurance investigator.

In addition to Carmody, in a private room on four, there was also the kid from the gas station, Bill Trowbridge, in his own room on three. Trowbridge, having answered every question the cops could think of to ask, was now doing press and TV interviews and grinning like a goof at his mother, seated on an uncomfortable nearby chair, being firmly kept out of camera range. Among the reasons he gave for climbing the bins in the storage room and ripping his way through the roof, he did not mention his need to pee.

The hall leading from the elevator to Carmody was also full of cops. One of them, that Thorsen seemed to have met before, was a plain-clothesman named Macready, who gave Parker a hello and a handshake at Thorsen's introduction, then said, "Lew's on his way here with Quindero. He wants everybody else to wait."

Thorsen said, "Not here yet?"

"The Quindero family's lobbed a lawyer in," Macready said. "It's delaying things a— Oh, here they are."

Out of an elevator and down the hall came a group of four, led by a big self-satisfied man who'd have to be Calavecci. Behind him came a skinny young scared guy with hands cuffed behind his back, and flanked by two serious-looking uniforms, each of them holding one of the cuffed guy's elbows. Parker looked at him past Calavecci and thought the young guy was probably one of the people from that car in the stadium parking lot.

But Calavecci was the point here. He said a smooth word to Thorsen, then was introduced to Jack Orr, insurance investigator. He shook hands too hard, grinned, and said, "So you've been chasing our boys longer'n we have."

"Just one," Parker said. "George Liss."

"A real piece of work," Calavecci said, with a pleased shake of the head. "I'm looking forward to a discussion with him. What a rap sheet."

"Yeah?"

"Got a record in the top ten," Calavecci said. "With a bullet. Why don't you and Dwayne wait in the dayroom over there, they got coffee and stuff for the nurses. We'll just have a little conversation, Ralph and me, with his pal Tom."

Parker saw that Ralph Quindero was trying not to cry. When he got in front of Carmody, he'd quit trying. They'd have a nice little tearfest in there, with Calavecci lapping it up, like a cat.

The dayroom was too bright, with fluorescents. A few nurses, trying to be cool but sneaking looks at the strangers, were clustered over coffee at a table in the corner. Thorsen and Parker got coffee of their own, both passing up the powdered near-milk, and carried the cardboard cups to another of the green Formica tables. They sat there in silence, waiting, the taste and smell of the coffee both a little obnoxious, and then Thorsen said, "This fella Liss."