Nobody Runs Forever (13 page)

7

F
rom the rear of the Trails End Motor Inne, where Parker and the others had been placed by Jake Beckham, you could see and hear the MassPike, just to the south, beyond a chain-link fence and a wooded gully. The sound was undifferentiated rush, steady enough to become white noise, and the constant streaming by of toy-size vehicles was soothing to watch, in its own strange way. Most of the regular customers of the motel were around on the other side, facing the local road and the swimming pool, which was still open though too cold for anybody to swim. Their three rooms were not contiguous, but spaced apart half a dozen units or so, along the ground floor. This time of year, there were no customers at all upstairs.

The day after they’d cooled off Dr. Madchen, in the middle of the afternoon, Parker sat in the open doorway of his room, looking out toward the MassPike, doing nothing but wait until tomorrow, when the work would be done. He’d been there for a while, empty and relaxed, when McWhitney drove slowly past in his red Dodge Ram pickup. He pointed at Parker, as though to say, don’t move, wait for me, and Parker nodded. McWhitney went on, parking the pickup in front of his own room, then came walking heavily back to where Parker had now gotten to his feet.

“This woman cop of yours,” McWhitney said, by way of greeting.

“What about her?”

“Describe her to me.”

“Blonde, late twenties, good-looking, dresses well.”

“I don’t know about the ‘dresses well,’” McWhitney said.

Where they stood, facing south, the MassPike a flat barrier wall in front of them, the thin September sun shone down at them from a slant. Parker turned away from it to look more closely at McWhitney. “What do you mean?”

“I think she’s tailing me,” McWhitney said.

“You? Why does she even know you?”

“That’s the question in my mind, all right.”

“Where did you see her?”

“There’s a town near here with a drugstore with a phone booth in it,” McWhitney said. “A real phone booth, for a little privacy, I went there to check in with the guy who’s taking care of my bar while I’m gone. On the way out, I noticed this woman, because she’s the kind of woman you’ll notice—”

“Sure.”

“And then,” McWhitney said, “coming out of the drugstore, there she was, parked across the street, looking at a roadmap.”

Parker frowned. “I’d think she was smarter than that.”

“Maybe she figures I’m not worth all her smarts. Anyway, I’m walking back to my truck, I see her, I remember seeing her before, and all of a sudden I’m thinking, wait a minute, I saw her before this, too. Before today.”

“You’re sure it’s the same woman.”

“Good-looking blonde, late twenties. Could be a cop, I suppose, how can you tell?”

“You can’t.”

“No.” McWhitney scratched his head, looking aggravated. “The question is, what’s she doing bird-dogging
me
?”

“Makes no sense,” Parker said.

“With you there’s a link,” McWhitney pointed out. “She’s got you through your car here, your car there. I’m not around any of this stuff, I showed up late. How come she made
me
all of a sudden?”

“I don’t get it,” Parker admitted.

“Neither do I.” McWhitney glowered back at the sun. “It’s making me mad,” he said. “But who the hell am I mad at? And for what? If somebody screwed up, who was it? Nick? You? But how would you even screw up?”

“I want to see this woman,” Parker said.

“Be my guest.”

“Drive out again. I’ll come with you.”

“That links us pretty tight.”

“If she’s tailing you,” Parker said, “she’s already linked us. I just want to see what she’s doing, try to figure out why she’s doing it.”

McWhitney considered. He was angry, and wanted to relieve his feelings somehow, but couldn’t figure out how. “Fuck it,” he said. “Come along.”

Parker closed his room door and walked with McWhitney down the row of closed green doors, past his own Dodge and Dalesia’s Audi to the pickup. He slid in on the passenger side, and McWhitney said, “Anywhere in particular?”

“Do your drugstore run again.”

“Fine.”

They left the motel, and McWhitney took his time on the local roads, constantly checking his rearview mirror. “I don’t know where the hell she is,” he said.

“She’ll show up.”

McWhitney stopped at a stop sign, took his time, looked all over the place, started through the intersection, then looked down to his left and said, “Son of a bitch, there she is! Parked down there, see? Here she comes.”

Parker looked past McWhitney’s jutting jaw and saw the car down there pulling away from the shoulder, saw the blonde at the wheel. “I see her,” he said.

“So?” McWhitney’s belligerence was increasing, now that she was actually there, hanging discreetly back in his mirror. “What do you think now?”

“Head back to the motel,” Parker said. “I think you and Nick and I have to talk.”

McWhitney gave him a quick look. “Why? Something wrong? What is it? Isn’t that your cop?”

“No.”

“I give up,” McWhitney said. “Do you know her? Who is she?”

“I’ve seen her,” Parker said. “Her name is Sandra. She was a friend of Roy Keenan.”

8

W
e don’t need this,” Dalesia said.

“Well, we got it,” McWhitney growled. Now that he’d found out the one he should be mad at was himself, he sat hunkered, beetle-browed, as though waiting for a chance to counterattack.

The three sat in Dalesia’s room, the door closed against the evening view of the MassPike. There were two chairs, flanking the round fake-wood table, and Dalesia and McWhitney sat there, each with an elbow on the table, while Parker stood, sometimes paced, sometimes stopped to watch one or the other face.

“That’s a few hundred miles,” Dalesia complained. “From Long Island to here. But you never saw her before today.”

“I think I did,” McWhitney said, and beat the side of his fist gently on the table. “I think I probably saw her, maybe a few times. What do you think to yourself when you see that? ‘There’s a good-looking blonde.’ Not, ‘There’s the good-looking blonde I saw yesterday.’ You aren’t
looking
in that kind of way.”

Dalesia, as though grudgingly, said, “That’s true, I guess. Good looks can make a woman anonymous.” He grinned at McWhitney, apparently deciding to make nice. “Anybody looks at an ugly beak like
you
two days in a row,” he said, “they’re gonna notice.”

Parker said, “What does she want, that’s the question.”

“Good,” McWhitney said, rather than have to answer Dalesia. “You tell us. What
does
she want? She can’t still be waiting for her partner to show up.”

Dalesia said to Parker, “You saw her before, when Keenan braced you, but you didn’t talk to her.”

“No, Keenan used her as a decoy to get me in position where he could suddenly show up. Then she left. He said her job was to be somewhere around, out of sight with a three fifty-seven Magnum.”

“Christ on a crutch,” McWhitney said.

Dalesia said, “So that’s what happened. Keenan went into Nels’s bar, and this Sandra woman stayed outside as backup. Didn’t help him much, but there she is.”

As though reluctant to say it, or to say much of anything, McWhitney told them, “He had a walkie-talkie in his pocket.”

Parker said, “But he didn’t use it.”

“He didn’t get the chance.”

Dalesia said, “That was at night. What, around eleven?”

“A little earlier. That bar doesn’t get a late-night bunch, not even on weekends.”

Dalesia said, “All right. Whatever happened between you and Keenan happened that night. Then what? In the morning, you came out to look for me?”

“Yeah, I went to Stratton first, and got you from him. Told him I wanted to bring you in on a job.”

Dalesia laughed. “You sure did.”

Parker said, “When you leave there, does anybody else live in the building?”

“No, I’ve just got this guy comes in to open and close the bar, run the place. He’s got a home to go to.”

“So when you left,” Parker said, “this woman followed you until you landed somewhere, until she could leave you for a while, and then she went back and tossed your place. What did she find?”

“Nothing!” McWhitney looked as though he might get insulted.

Parker shook his head. “Come on, Nelson,” he said. “This woman’s a pro, she’s at least as much a professional as Keenan was. She went into your place when it was empty. She didn’t have a lot of time because she had to get back in position behind you, but she spent a little time, and what did she find?”

McWhitney furrowed his brow, thinking. He wasn’t thinking about what the woman had found; he was thinking about what he would say. “All right,” he said. “She found some patted-down dirt in the cellar. And she found some empty acid bottles. That’s all.”

“She didn’t find any walkie-talkies, any wallets.”

“I’m not a complete idiot,” McWhitney said. “You want to find those things, you have to walk into Long Island Sound.”

Dalesia said, “Parker, go back to your question. What does she want?”

McWhitney said, “She wants to know what happened to her guy.”

“I don’t think so,” Parker said. “She knows Keenan is dead. She’s not gonna be into revenge, or justice, or take care of your partner, or any of that. She’s a pro. She’s here because she wants something else.”

Dalesia said, “Maybe she just wants to know what we’re all up to.”

McWhitney, growling again, said, “We all know what she wants. It’s the same as ever. She wants Harbin.”

They studied that. “The reward,” Dalesia said. “It’s still the reward. We’re busy over here, and she’s still working her agenda.”

McWhitney said, “She thinks what’s going on, we’re protecting Harbin. We think Harbin is in the past, she thinks he’s in the present.”

Parker walked to the door, opened it, looked out, saw running lights now on the trucks streaming along the highway. He shut the door and said, “We can’t have her here when we’re working.”

Dalesia looked at McWhitney, who nodded, then shrugged. “I always think,” he said, “it’s a waste to kill a good-looking woman.” He shrugged again. “But we live in a wasteful world.”

9

T
he phone rang. Parker opened his eyes, and the LED readout on the bedside clock radio read 2:17. The red numbers also gave enough light so he could see the phone. He unhooked it, put it between pillow and ear while he looked around to be sure nothing had changed since he’d switched the lights out, and said, “Yes.”

It was McWhitney’s voice: “Your Sandra’s here. She drew down on me. She wants a meet, the four of us. She says, don’t bring a gun.”

“Of course I’ll bring a gun.”

Sitting up, Parker kicked the crumpled newspapers away from the bed while he listened to McWhitney breathe and then say, “Hold on.”

There were faint voices away from the phone in McWhitney’s room, and then the clatter of the receiver being put down; and then a female voice, hoarse and impatient, said, “If you carry it in your hand, I’ll kill you. If you carry it in your pocket, what’s the point?”

“I don’t leave home without it.”

“If you make me nervous,” she said, “it won’t be good.”

He had nothing to say to that, and after a bit the receiver clattered again and then McWhitney said, “I gotta call Nick.”

“I’ll be there.”

Parker walked down the line of green motel doors. Off to the right, the running lights on the highway had thinned out but still drew a yellow-white-red scarf across the throat of the night.

Ahead of him, a door opened. He paused, but it was Dalesia coming out. He saw Parker, grinned, and said, “The lady’s taking things into her own hands.”

“I don’t need this,” Parker said. Twenty-four hours from now, they would be waiting for the armored cars. No, Parker would be at the stop sign, waiting for Elaine Langen and the number of the truck they’d want.

“Nobody needs it,” Dalesia said, as they walked down the line together. “But it’s what we got.”

Dalesia knocked, and the door was opened by McWhitney. He was barefoot, wearing dark trousers with a white T-shirt hanging loose, and his expression was disgusted. “Do you believe this shit?”

They entered, and the hard-faced blonde was seated at the round table, which she’d pulled back into the front corner opposite the door, leaving the hanging swag light to dangle over air. She wore black leather slacks and boots, a bright green high-neck sweater, and a black leather jacket with exaggerated shoulders. Her left hand was on the table, palm down. Her right hand held a pistol, loosely, pointed no-where, its butt on the back of her left hand.

“Come in, gentlemen,” she said. “I like you all over there.”

Meaning the diagonally far corner of the room, straight back from the door. They went over and stood in a row, leaning their backs against the rear wall of the room, the bathroom door immediately to their left, and the bed beyond it.

McWhitney said, “Okay, we’re all here. Just say it.”

“I’ve got a mortgage,” she said, “on a nice little house on the Cape. I’m helping to keep my friend’s daughter in private school. I made good money with Roy Keenan, all in all, sometimes fat, sometimes thin, but now that’s done.”

Dalesia said, “You need another Roy Keenan.”

“As a matter of fact,” she said, “I was always better than he was, and we both knew it. The way the business works, it was better for him to be in front. I’ll find another front man, that isn’t the problem. The problem is, the current job. I need it for my cash flow, before I can move on to something else, but there’s been too much time wasted on it.”

McWhitney, surly and rebellious, said, “What the fuck do we care about
your
problems for?”

“You made my problems,” she said. “That asshole Harbin should have been in our kill jar weeks ago. There’s no way for him to go that far out of sight and still be breathing. It’s been obvious for a long time that one of you put him down and knows where the remains are, and that’s all I need. I don’t need to point any fingers, I just need to get this job off the books.”

Parker said, “Why should we deal with you?”

“Because I’ve got dossiers on you,” she said. Pointing at McWhitney, she said, “I can give the law very good reasons to dig around in that cellar of yours.” To the others she said, “I don’t have convictable stuff on either of you, but I have
interesting
stuff, and I have every one of you in the room where Michael Harbin was last seen alive. I’m pretty sure you were all in that room to plan a robbery that then didn’t happen, for whatever reason, and I know damn well you’re all hanging around in this place because you’ve got some other robbery worked out.”

She lifted the gun hand and waved it, not threatening but betraying impatience, rubbing away their misconceptions. “I don’t give a shit what crimes you people get up to,” she said. “I know you’re wide boys, and I want nothing to do with your play, including informing on you. When I saw yesterday, you two in the pickup truck, that you’d made me, I knew it was time to come talk.”

“God damn it,” McWhitney said.

She said, “If you cold-shoulder me tonight, I’ll walk away and I’ll eat the loss, and I
hate
to walk away from time invested with no return. I hate it so much I’ll turn in those dossiers just out of spite. And if you think you can take me down, my friend has the dossiers and you’ll never find her, and she’ll know what to do with them the day I don’t phone in.”

Parker said, “To find a dyke on Cape Cod with a daughter in private school and a canary-yellow-haired roommate would not be impossible.”

Quietly, Dalesia said, “There’s three of us and one of her and it’s a small room.”

“No, fuck that,” McWhitney said. “Wait a minute, I’m trying to think.” But then he frowned at the woman and said, “Just to satisfy my curiosity, do you know why Harbin was wired?”

Parker said, “What difference does that make?”

“I just want to know.”

“So that’s what happened,” she said. “Somebody did have a handle on him, and you people found the wire.”

Disappointed, McWhitney said, “But you don’t know why it was there.”

“No, I get it,” she said. “I didn’t know he had it on, but it makes sense.” She gestured a little with the gun. “The state reward money on Harbin is for killing a trooper during the commission of a crime. The crime was smuggling, off the Jersey coast.”

“Drugs,” Dalesia said.

She nodded. “That’s what was coming in, from Central America, that’s what made it state. What made it federal was, what was going out was guns. You know, down there the rebels and the drug guys are all mixed together.”

Parker said, “That doesn’t add up. If they wired him, they know where he is, so how can there be reward money out on him?”

“One of the things that helps guys like you,” she said, “is, the law is a lot of little competing offices. Turf battles. So one bunch got hold of Harbin, and for a while they’d rather run him than turn him in.
They
don’t get the reward. And they know he’s got to do what they want for as long as they let him walk around loose. Like wear a wire whenever there’s a meet.”

“Turns out, they didn’t do him any favors,” McWhitney said. “Let me make you a suggestion. You go away for two days, just two days.”

“No,” she said.

Parker said to McWhitney, “Why? What are you offering?”

“Take it easy,” McWhitney told him, and turned back to the woman. “It happens,” he said, “I know where Harbin is.” Hastily he added, “I didn’t kill him, I just want you to know that. It doesn’t matter, but I just want you to know.”

“Noted,” she said. Clearly, to her it really didn’t matter.

“But I know,” McWhitney went on, “where he is. Take a powder out of here, lady, you’re too distracting. Give me a place to reach you, day after tomorrow, I’ll take you to where Harbin is. I’ll point and say
there,
and then you go your way and I go mine.”

The woman considered, then shook her head. “You just want two days to try to find my friend.”

Parker said, “No, McWhitney’s right. We’re busy. We’re too busy to go looking anywhere tomorrow or the next day. But after that, we got all the time in the world.”

Dalesia said, “Add two days to your cost-time equation. A small percentage, right?”

Again she thought it over, and this time she frowned at McWhitney and said, “The body’s available. It isn’t burned or at the bottom of the ocean.”

“There’s probably some acid damage,” said McWhitney.

She shook her head. “You and your acid. You going back to that bar, when you’re done here?”

“Oh, yeah.”

She got to her feet. “I’ll get in touch,” she said. “Don’t come outside for a few minutes.” And she walked sideways to the door, watching their hands, and left.

McWhitney sighed. “I sure hope it doesn’t come down to her or me,” he said. “I think I’d lose.”