Nobody Runs Forever (8 page)

5

I
t was all taking too long. Roy Keenan was not some soft salaryman somewhere, get paid every Friday whether he produces jackshit or not. A bounty hunter lived on bounties, and bounties were what you got when, and only when, you found and hog-tied and brought in your skip. The days and weeks you spent looking for your skip didn’t earn a dime and if you never
did
find your quarry and lasso him home, you were just working for air all those days, brother, and let’s hope it smelled sweet.

It didn’t smell sweet, not to Roy Keenan. This Michael Maurice Harbin was turning out to be as hard to find as a deep-cover mole spy in the Cold War, which was ridiculous, because he wasn’t any spy; he was a heister and a hijacker and a gunman. A lone wolf, like Roy Keenan himself. No connections, no goddam underground railway to keep you moving and out of sight. So why couldn’t Roy Keenan, who could find the devil at a prayer meeting, come up with the son of a bitch?

The worst of it was, this time Keenan would be working for
less
than nothing if he came up empty-handed after all this. He had given a state cop in Cincinnati one hundred dollars for the information he had on Harbin and that famous meeting of seven men, which was the last time Harbin had been seen on this Earth. So he had
more
invested than just his own time here.

Sandra, Keenan’s right hand, who would remain in a second car as backup tonight, a radio beside her that matched the one in Keenan’s pocket, had come to the conclusion that Harbin was dead, and maybe she was right. Fine. Keenan didn’t need the guy singing and dancing. A body was as collectible as a man, and easier to deal with. As he’d told that one wide boy, the one who wasn’t really named Willis, if Harbin’s dead, okay, just show me where to dig.

If he could figure out what those seven guys went to that meeting for, it might help. The few he knew anything at all about had records, and were all like Harbin: loner career criminals. But was it a heist they’d been planning? If so, they sure changed their minds. The seven had separated right after that meeting, about as far apart as if a hand grenade had been set off in their midst, and Keenan still hadn’t found two of
them.

Well, enough was enough. This time, he had a guy named Nelson McWhitney. He had him working as a bartender in a town called Bay Shore on Long Island, and living in rooms behind the bar. McWhitney had a nice, long record of arrests, and two falls. Apparently, he’d traveled to that meeting
with
Harbin, so why wouldn’t he have traveled away from it with the same guy?

The nice thing about dealing with somebody who’s already done two terms inside is that he’s likely to be snakebit, to be wary and nervous and ready to give up most anything to avoid going back. So this time, Keenan decided, with this one he would press. He had too much invested in this fellow Harbin, time
and
money, and it was far too late to just let it go.

It sometimes helped if you seemed to already know all the answers to all the questions. It was bluffing, so it could be dangerous; it could backfire, but Keenan was desperate. He was ready to try anything.

And what he was going to try was the name Nick Dalesia. He had that name, and he had Alfred Stratton, and he had the guy who was or was not named Willis. He didn’t know enough about Willis to use him as a source, and Stratton, as the organizer of that damn meeting, was just too obvious. The name Nick Dalesia should sound inside enough.

The bar in Bay Shore, deep and narrow, dark wood, lit mostly by beer-sign neon, was probably lively enough on weekends, but at nine thirty-five on a Thursday night it was as dead as Sandra believed Harbin to be. Three loners sat at the bar, some distance from one another, nobody talking, and what must be McWhitney read a
TV Guide
as he leaned against the backbar. Red-bearded and red-faced, McWhitney looked like a bartender: a bulky, hard man with a soft middle.

Keenan took a position along the bar as separate from the other customers as possible, and McWhitney put his magazine open, facedown on the backbar before he came over to slide in front of Keenan a coaster advertising a German beer called DAB and say, “Evening.” His eyes were surprisingly mild, but maybe that was because he was working.

“Evening,” Keenan agreed. “I believe I’ll have a draft.”

“Bud or Coors Light?”

“Bud.”

McWhitney went away to draw the beer, and Keenan thought how strange it was, even in a joint like this they offered you a light beer. The world was filling up with people, it seemed to him, who pulled their punches everywhere they went in life. Light beer, decaf coffee, low-sodium seltzer. About the only thing along that line that hadn’t found a market was the grass cigarette.

McWhitney brought the Bud, and Keenan slid a ten onto the bar. McWhitney picked it up, tapped the bar with a knuckle, and went away to make change. When he brought it back, Keenan said, “I’m lookin for a fella.”

McWhitney paused, hand above the dollar bills. The eyes got less mild, more concentrated. Moving his hand down to his side, he said, “Yeah?”

“Mike Harbin. I was told you—”

McWhitney leaned back, holding on to the edge of the bar with one hand as he looked left and right at his other customers and called out, “Anybody here know a Mike Harbin?”

The grunted nos that came back seemed to rise from people who were asleep. Before McWhitney could relay that response, Keenan grinned at him, pals together, and said, “No,
you,
man. You’re Nelson McWhitney, am I right?”

The eyes now were not mild at all. They peered at Keenan as though trying to read behind his eyes, into his brain. “That’s who I am,” he said.

“Well, then,” Keenan said, grinning as though there were no tension anywhere in the room, “you’re an old pal of Mike Harbin. I’m Roy Keenan, by the way. Nick Dalesia told me you know where I could find Mike.”

Puzzlement entered McWhitney’s expression—puzzlement and something else Keenan couldn’t quite read. “Nick
Dalesia
told you that?”

A small voice inside told Keenan this might be a mistake he was making here, but he’d started now, so he kept on with it: “Sure. I talked to him on the phone yesterday, at his place up in Massachusetts.”

“You’ve got Nick Dalesia’s phone number.” Said flat.

“Right here in my pocket,” Keenan told him, patting the pocket. “Why, you need to call him, check up on me?”

“I don’t need to call Nick Dalesia,” McWhitney said. “But he told you, did he, I know where Mike Harbin is?”

“Sure. He said you could help me. I mean, there’s no trouble for anybody in this, I’m just looking him up for a friend.”

McWhitney leaned back again to look at his other customers, then came closer to say, “I’ll be closing pretty soon. Stick around, drink your beer, we’ll talk after I close up.”

“Fine.”

Keenan sipped his beer and wondered if he should call Sandra to come in. To switch the radio in his pocket on and off would make one click on her radio, and she’d know from that to come in but not to know him, to be just another customer.

No, the problems with that were too many. A beautiful woman walking into this place at this moment would be just too strange. McWhitney would have to know that he and Sandra were connected somehow, and their pretending not to be connected would make him even more suspicious than he already was. And he wouldn’t be able to shut the place if he suddenly had this new customer.

No, the thing to do was leave her out there for now, sip his beer, and wait for the other customers to realize it was time to go home.

Which took about fifteen minutes, during which time the drinkers at the bar peeled off one by one, calling, “Night, Nels,” on the way out, and McWhitney responding to each by name. After the last one wandered out, McWhitney went around to lock the front door, and Keenan got off his bar stool to say, “You know your customers.”

“I know most people who come in here.” Done with the door, he turned away and said, “Come on in back, we can get more comfortable. Lemme show you the way.”

“Sure.”

McWhitney led the way to the end of the bar, where he paused to click off the lights behind them. Ahead were the restrooms and, on the left, a third unmarked door. McWhitney went to that one, pulled it open, and said, “Shut it behind you, okay?”

“Sure.”

Keenan saw a small, cluttered living room as McWhitney switched on lights, then turned to shut the door. He turned back, and the baseball bat was just coming around in its swing, aimed at his head. He flinched more than ducked, so that instead of hitting his cheekbone and ear, the bat slammed into bone higher on the side of his head.

He staggered rightward, against the wall, throwing his arms up to protect himself, yelling, “Wait! No! You got this wro—” and the bat came around again, this time smashing into his upraised left arm, midway between elbow and armpit, snapping the bone there, so that the arm dropped, useless, and amazing pain shot through him.

McWhitney stood in a tree axer’s stance, not a baseball stance. “So Nick Dalesia’s got a big mouth, does he? Thinks he’s a comical fellow, does he?”

“No, no, not like that! Let me—”

“I’ll see to Dalesia.”

This time the bat smashed his jaw and flung him again into the side wall. “Naa!” he screamed. “Naa!”

But the jaw wouldn’t work. He’d always used words; he was a talker; words got him into places and out of trouble, got him answers, got him everything he wanted; words had always saved him and protected him, but now all the words were gone, the jaw couldn’t work, and all he could bleat was, “Naa! Naa!” Even he didn’t understand himself.

“Say hello to Mike Harbin,” McWhitney said, so at least he got the answer to that question, and the bat was the fastest thing in the world.

6

I
know, I know,” Wendy Beckham said into the phone, “I was supposed to be here yesterday. Things came up.”

“That’s okay,” her brother Jake said, from some hospital bed. “I ain’t going anywheres.”

Wendy pursued her own thought. A comfortably hefty woman in her mid-fifties, sensible from her neat gray hairdo to her flat shoes, Wendy Beckham Rodgers Beckham-again was used to pursuing her own thoughts, taking her own advice, making her own decisions, and helping out with the lives of those around her who needed help, whether they knew it or not. Like brother Jake, for instance.

“Family things,” she told him, “got in the way. Family things always come up, irritating but they’re your family, so you gotta do it. You wouldn’t know about things like that.”

“Come on, Wendy, not while I’m down.”

“You don’t sound down.”

“Then bring my tap shoes, we’ll go dancin.”

She took a deep breath. As usual, she had to fight aggravation just thinking about her baby brother, who would never stop being her brother, but would also never stop being a baby. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m busting your chops, and I shouldn’t do that.”

“Not till I’m on my feet.”

“I’ll just write everything down,” she said, “so I can wham you with it all at once, when you’re feeling better.”

“Then I’ll feel even better. When you coming over?”

“When are your visiting hours?”

“Eight a.m. to six p.m.”

“All day?”

“Well, I’m in a private room here. Wait’ll you see it. Better’n my house.”

“Jake, if you can afford that,” she said, judgmental and suspicious and not caring if she was, “I don’t wanna know
how
you can afford it.”

“Hey, listen, I got shot,” he told her. “
I
don’t pay for all this. I’m a crime victim over here.”

“There’s a new role to play. Listen, I gotta unpack, buy a couple groceries—you don’t stock up much around here—”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Okay, I’m not busting your chops. I’ll get there around two, okay?”

“Unless family things come up.”

“Now who’s busting whose chops?” she said, and hung up, and turned to the job of unpacking.

She’d never been in Jake’s mobile home before, but wasn’t surprised by what it looked like: a neat, compact, old-fashioned design with an overlay of Jake-the-slob. There were more dishes in the sink than on the shelf, and it had been a
long
time since anyone had cleaned the toilet or mopped the floor. Catch
me
being your housemaid, she silently announced, but she knew, before she got out of here, she would have done a lot of tidying up. And the worst of it was, Jake wouldn’t even notice.

Fortunately, he didn’t have that much clothing, so she could shove it all out of the way and put her own garments on hangers and shelves. His bathroom gear was at the hospital, leaving plenty of room—filthy sink—for hers.

She was just finishing up when a knock sounded, weirdly, on the metal door. Mistrustful, expecting no one, Wendy inched to the door, leaned against it, and called, “Who’s there?”

“Police.” But it was a woman’s voice.

Police? Something to do with the crime victim, no doubt. Wendy opened the door, and this didn’t look like any cop to
her.
A blonde stunner, tall and built, in a peach satin blouse under a brown leather car coat and black slacks. But she did hold up her shield for identification as she said, “Wendy Beckham?”

“That’s me.”

The cop smiled as though she knew a good joke about something, and said, “I’m Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa, I’m assigned to your brother’s shooting. May I come in?”

“Sure. I just got here,” Wendy explained as the detective entered and Wendy shut the door. “Sit down anywhere. I’m still unpacking.”

“I asked the beat cop to keep an eye on the place,” Detective Reversa said, “let me know when you showed up.”

They both sat in Jake’s sloppy yet comfortable living room, and Wendy said, “I was supposed to get here yesterday, but there’s always last-minute fires to put out on the home front. I just called Jake at the hospital, he certainly sounds okay.”

“It’s not a bad wound,” the detective told her. “The bullet’s still in there, in the flesh, but it didn’t hurt anything serious. They’re supposed to take it out tomorrow. I’m looking forward to getting it to the lab.”

“I bet you are. You got any suspects?”

“As a matter of fact, yes, two of them,” the detective said, with another pleased smile. “But before I say anything about
my
idea, let me hear yours. Do you have any suspects?”

“Me, no.” Wendy hesitated, but the detective’s silence encouraged her to go on. “I don’t know how much you know about my brother.”

“Military police, bank security, stole from his employer, went to jail, got out, on parole, works for a motel not far from here. No more black marks on his record.”

Laughing, Wendy said, “I’d say, you know him about as well as I do. The thing is, since Jake and I both grew up, I’m talking about thirty years now, we haven’t exactly lived in each other’s pocket. Our parents are dead, neither of us lives in the old neighborhood. When I have family get-togethers these days, it’s
my
family, my kids and my in-laws. I got a divorce a while ago, but it was a strange kind of settlement. I got the kids, the house, the car, and his parents, who can’t stand him. He got the bank account, but that’s okay, I get it back in alimony and child support.”

“He’s good about that.”

“He’s one day late, his parents are all over him. He’s a lawyer, he makes good money, he doesn’t want that trouble, and also he can afford it. Can you imagine you’re talking with an important client, your secretary says your mother’s on the phone, you have to say ‘No! Tell her I’m out!’?”

The detective laughed, and then said, “The point is, Jake really isn’t very much in your life, or you in his.”

“Almost nothing, until this getting-shot business. It happened I had time on my hands. I was probably feeling a little guilty anyway, so I said I’d come here, help out while he was laid up. But who his friends are, who his enemies are, all of that, I haven’t known that kind of thing about him since we were both in high school. And he didn’t much want me knowing even then.”

“Sibling rivalry.”

Wendy shrugged. “He was a shortcutter, and I wasn’t. So who are your suspects?”

Again the detective laughed. “You know,” she said, “you just don’t seem too much like a Wendy to me.”

“I don’t?” Wendy didn’t get it. “Why? What’s a Wendy supposed to be like?”

“Not so forceful.” Smiling, the detective said, “You ought to become a Gwen, like me. They’re both from the same name, you know. Gwendolyn.”

“I didn’t know that,” Wendy said. “What is it, you don’t want to tell me about your suspects?”

Another laugh: “There, you see? Forceful. No, I’m happy to tell you, because so far, they’re only suspects. Before your brother went to jail, he was having an affair with the wife of the owner of the bank.”

Wendy said, “What? His employer? He’s dipping
and
he’s dipping?”

“It all came out when they caught his embezzlements,” the detective said. “Everybody insists it’s all over, and maybe it is, but when I went to see Mrs. Langen yesterday—”

“The wife.”

“The wife. She has a pistol permit, and is registered with a Colt Cobra thirty-eight-caliber revolver. It’s a very light, small defense gun, it weighs less than a pound, she probably carries it in her purse, when she carries it.”

“Doesn’t sound much like a banker’s wife.”

“Some women got into that women’s self-defense idea some years ago. That’s when she got the gun. The trouble is, yesterday, when I asked to see it, she said she’d lost it.”

“Sure she did,” Wendy said.

“Up to that point,” the detective said, “I really wasn’t considering her at all. If there are guns in the story, you want to see them, have they been fired recently, is the serial number one that will show up here or there. So when she said it was lost . . .”

“Oh ho, you thought,” Wendy said. “It’s her.”

“Well, there’s also the husband,” the detective said, “which is why I said I had two suspects. Either of them could have taken the gun and shot it at your brother. If the husband did it, and then threw the gun away, then the wife is telling the truth. As far as she knows, it’s lost.”

Wendy said, “So what are you gonna do?”

“Wait for the bullet to come out of his leg, first thing tomorrow morning. If it’s a thirty-eight caliber, we’ll bear down.” Looking around the room, she said, “I know you want to unpack and get over to see Jake. Tell him I’ll drop in on him tomorrow afternoon, when we know about the bullet.”

“I will. But first, shop.”

When she came back from the supermarket, Wendy found herself envying those residents of Riviera Park who had those rusty little red wagons chained behind the office, for carrying their groceries home. As it was, she had two plastic sacks of necessities, and nothing to do but lug them on down Cannes Way and around the corner onto Nice Lane, where a tall man in a dark gray suit stood outside Jake’s pea-green mobile home.

She kept on, though she didn’t like the look of him, but then saw a big candy box in his hand and thought, Oh, it’s a get-well present for Jake. How unexpected.

Yes. “This is for Jake,” he said when she reached him, and lifted off the top of the candy box, and inside was a gun.

“Oh!” Startled, she jumped back, the grocery sacks dragging her down; she expected him to take the gun out of there and shoot.

But he didn’t reach into the box. Instead, he said, “Tell him, this is the one did it.”

Wide-eyed, she stared at the gun again. “Shot Jake? This is the gun?”

“Somebody told me Jake thinks I’m the one put the plug into him,” the man said. “Tell him, if I had a reason for him to be dead, he’d be dead.”

Now that the gun wasn’t being used to threaten her, she leaned closer to it, studying it. It was black. The handle was crosshatched, with a white circle at the upper end that showed a rearing horse under the word
COLT
. The same design, without the circle, was cut into the black metal of the gun above the crosshatching and below the hammer. The cylinder was the notched fat part, where the bullets would be and would revolve one step every time the gun was fired. The barrel was a stubby thing, with a simple sight on top and the word
COBRA
etched into the side.

“Oohh,” she breathed, “It’s
hers.
”

“You know about her.”

“The police said.” Still wide-eyed, she gazed at the man’s cold face. “She’s a suspect.”

“She didn’t do it to put him down,” the man said, “but to get him out of the way for a while. You tell him when you go see him.”

“I will.”

He closed the box and tucked it between her left side and left arm. “You keep this,” he said.

“I will.”

And later, at the hospital, in the very clean private room, she said, “Jake, you have some bad companions.”