Dirty Money

1

When the silver Toyota Avalon bumped down the dirt road out of the woods and across the railroad tracks, Parker put the Infiniti into low and stepped out onto the gravel. The Infiniti jerked forward toward the river as the Toyota slewed around behind it to a stop. Parker picked up the full duffel bag from where he’d tossed it on the ground, and behind him, the Infiniti rolled down the slope into the river, all its windows open; it slid into the gray dawn water like a bear into a trout stream.

Parker carried the duffel in his arms and Claire got out of the Toyota to open its rear door and say, “Do you want to drive?”

“No. I’ve been driving.” He heaved the duffel onto the backseat, then got around to take the passenger side in front.

Before getting behind the wheel, she stood looking toward the river, a tall slender ash-blonde in black slacks and a bulky dark red sweater against the October chill. “It’s gone,” she said.

“Good.”

She slid into the Toyota then and kissed him and held his face in her slim hands. “It’s been a while.”

“It didn’t come out the way it was supposed to.”

“But you got back,” she said, and steered the Toyota across the tracks and up the dirt road through scrub woods. “Was one of the men with you named Dalesia?”

“Nick. They nabbed him.”

“He escaped,” she said, paused at the blacktop state road and turned right, southward.

“Nick escaped?”

“I had the news on, driving up. It happened a couple of hours ago, in Boston. They were transferring him from the state police to the federal, going to take him somewhere south to question him. He killed a marshal, escaped with the gun.”

Parker looked at her profile. They were almost alone on the road, not yet seven AM, she driving fast. He said, “They grabbed him yesterday. They didn’t question him yet?”

“That’s what they said.” She shrugged, eyes on the road. “They didn’t say so, but it sounded to me like a turf war, the local police and the FBI. The FBI won, but then they lost him.”

Parker looked out at this hilly country road, heading south. Soon they’d be coming into New Jersey. “If nobody questioned Nick yet, then they don’t know where the money is.”

With a head gesture toward the duffel bag behind them, she said, “That isn’t it?”

“No, that’s something else.”

She laughed, mostly in surprise. “You don’t have that money, so you picked up some other money on the way back?”

“There was too much heat around the robbery,” he told her. “We could stash it, but we couldn’t carry it. We each took a little, and Nick tried to spend some of his, but they had the serial numbers.”

“Oh. That’s why they caught him. Do you have some?”

“Not any more.”

“Good.”

They rode in silence for a while, he stretching his legs, rolling his shoulders, a big ropy man who looked squeezed into the Toyota. He’d driven through the night, called Claire an hour ago from a diner to make the meet and get rid of the Infiniti, which was too hot and too speckled with fingerprints. Now they passed a slow-moving oil delivery truck and he said, “I need some sleep, but after that I’ll want you to drive me to Long Island. All my identification got wasted in the mess in Massachusetts. I’d better not drive until I get new papers.”

“You’re just going to talk to somebody?”

“That’s all.”

“Then I can drive you.”

“Good.”

She watched the road; no traffic now. She said, “This is still something about the robbery?”

“The third guy with us,” he said. “He’ll know what it means, too, that Nick’s on the loose.”

“That the police don’t know where the money is.”

“But Nick knows where we are, or could point in a direction. Are we all still partners?” He shook his head. “You kill a lawman,” he said, “you’re in another zone. McWhitney and I are gonna have to work this out.”

“But not on the phone.”

Parker yawned. “Nothing on the phone ever,” he said. “Except pizza.”

2

Once or twice, Claire had gotten too close to Parker’s other world, or that world had gotten too close to her, and she hadn’t liked it, so he did his best to keep her separate from that kind of thing. But this business was all right; everything had already happened, this was just a little tidying up.

She drove them eastward across New Jersey late that afternoon, and he told her the situation: “There was a meeting that didn’t pan out. A guy there named Harbin was a problem a lot of different ways. He was wearing a wire—”

“A police wire?”

“Which got him killed. Then it turned out there was federal reward money out on him, and it attracted a bounty hunter named Keenan.”

She said, “This didn’t have anything to do with you in Massachusetts.”

“Nothing. This was just an annoyance, Keenan trying to find everybody at the meeting, so somebody could lead him to Harbin, which nobody was going to do. He got hold of some phone records, Nick Dalesia made two calls to our place here, that brought him around.”

She glanced at him, then looked out at Interstate 80, pretty heavy traffic in both directions, a lot of big trucks, the kind of traffic where you didn’t change lanes a lot. “You mean,” she said, “the law might come around now, using those same records.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Keenan was looking for connections. The law’s looking for Nick, and they’ll know he’s too smart to go hole up with somebody he knows. They won’t be spending time looking at phone bills.”

“Well, where are we going now?”

Parker was rested, most of the day asleep, but this car still felt too small. Maybe it was because he wasn’t at the wheel. He stretched in place and said, “Keenan’s partner, a woman named Sandra Loscalzo, caught up with us in Massachusetts just before the job. McWhitney convinced her to go away, and when he got back to Long Island he’d lead her to Harbin.”

“Who’s already dead.”

“Yes.”

“And McWhitney lives on Long Island?”

“He’s got a bar there, and lives behind it.”

“And that’s where we’re going.”

“And when we get there, the next part is up to you.”

She frowned out at the traffic and the eastern sky darkening ahead of them. “Is this something I won’t like?”

“I don’t think so. When we get there, I can go in and talk to McWhitney and you can wait in the car, or you come in, we have a drink, it’s a social occasion.”

“There isn’t going to be any trouble.”

“None. We’ve got to decide what to do about Loscalzo, and we’ve got to decide what to do about the money. There’s too much heat up in that area right now—”

“Because of what you people did.”

“They’re looking close at strangers,” Parker said, and shrugged. “So we’ll have to leave the cash where it is for a while, but if we leave it too long either they find Nick again and he trades the money for a better sentence, or he gets to it himself and cleans it out because he’s desperate. Being on the run the way he is uses up a lot of cash.”

“You said they have the serial numbers,” she said, “so he can’t use it, can he?”

“He’ll leave a wide backtrail, but he won’t care.”

“But you won’t be able to use it.”

“Offshore,” he said. “We can sell it for a percentage to people who’ll take it to Africa or Asia, it’ll never get into the banking system again.”

“There are so many ways to do things,” she said.

“There have to be.”

She said, “Before, you said you have to decide what to do about what’s-her-name? The bounty hunter’s partner.”

“Sandra Loscalzo.”

“Why don’t you have to decide what to do about the man? Keenan.”

“He’s dead, too.”

“Oh.”

He looked out at the traffic, which was thickening as they got closer to the city. They were both silent a while, and then he was surprised when she said, “I’ll come in with you.”

3

“We can’t go there yet, you know,” McWhitney said, by way of greeting.

Standing at the bar, Parker said, “Nelson McWhitney, this is my friend Claire.”

“Hello, friend,” McWhitney said, and dealt two coasters onto the bar, saying, “Grab a stool. What can the house buy you?”

“I would take a scotch and soda,” Claire said, as she and Parker took the two nearest stools.

“A ladies’ drink,” McWhitney commented. “Good. Parker?”

“Beer.”

McWhitney’s bar, in Bay Shore on Long Island’s south shore, was deep and narrow, its dark wood walls and floors illuminated mostly by beer-sign neon. At eight-thirty on a Monday night in October it was nearly empty, two solitary men finishing whiskey along the bar and a yellow-haired woman hunched inside a black coat at the last dark table along the other side.

McWhitney himself didn’t look much livelier, maybe because he too had had a rough weekend. Red-bearded and red-faced, he was a hard bulky man with a soft middle, a defensive lineman gone out of shape. He made their drinks, brought them over, and leaned close to say, “Those two will be outa here in a couple minutes, and then I’ll close up.”

Parker said, “What do you hear from Sandra?”

Raising an eyebrow toward Claire, McWhitney said, “Your friend’s up to speed on you and me?”

“Always.”

“That’s nice.” Nodding his head toward the rear of the bar, McWhitney said, “Sandra’s not quite that good a friend, but there she is, back there, waiting on a phone call.” He raised his voice: “Sandra! Look who dropped by.”

When Sandra Loscalzo rose to come join them, she was tall and slender, in heels and jeans and the black coat over a dark blue sweater. She walked in a purposeful way, taking charge of her territory. She wasn’t carrying a glass. At the bar, she said to Parker, “The last time I saw you, you were driving a phony police car.”

Parker said, “The police car was real. I was the phony. You were there?”

“Fifty-yard line.” She sounded admiring, but also amused. “You boys are cute, in a destructive kind of way.” Looking at Claire, she said, “Is he destructive at home?”

“Of course not,” Claire said, and smiled. “I’m Claire. You’re Sandra?”

“G’night, Nels,” called one of the customers, rising from his seat, waving a hand over his shoulder as he left.

“See you, Norm.”

Parker said to Sandra, “You’re waiting for a phone call.”

Sandra made a disgusted headshake and gestured at McWhitney. “This fellow and Harbin,” she said. “Where’s he stash him? In Ohio. I’m not going to Ohio, eyeball the fellow, that means, what I’ve got to do, I call my guy in DC, I pass along my tip, and I’m not even sure Nelson here isn’t pulling my chain. What if Harbin isn’t there? I don’t keep a reputation with dud tips.”

McWhitney said, “I don’t give you dud tips. What’s in it for me? He’s right exactly where I told you.”

“Have a good one, Nels.”

“You too, Jack.” McWhitney waved, then said to Parker, “About halfway between Cincinnati and Dayton, Interstate 75, they’re putting in a new restaurant, rest area. There’s a spot they’re gonna blacktop for the parking lot very soon now but not yet, not till the structure’s a little further along. A month ago, it was just messed-up fill in there, bulldozed a little, a lot of wide tire tracks. A few more weeks, they gotta lay that blacktop before winter freezes the ground, but not yet.”

“I hate it when somebody’s plausible,” Sandra said. “Everything fits together like Legos. Life doesn’t do that.”

“Every once in a while,” McWhitney told her, “the plausible guy has the goods.”

Parker said, “So McWhitney gave you the tip, and you gave it to somebody you know in DC—”

“In the US marshals’ office.”

“And they’re sending somebody to check it out. If the body’s there, you get your reward money. They’re calling you here?”

“Not on the bar’s phone,” she said. “On my cell.”

“All right.”

“Pretty soon, they’ll call,” Sandra said. She did all her talking with her right hand in her coat pocket. “If they say Harbin’s there, fine. If they say Mr. Harbin’s still among the missing, I’m gonna feel very embarrassed.”

“He’s there,” McWhitney said.

“But I’ll get over my embarrassment,” she told them, “because I’ll still have a little something to give them, make up for the inconvenience. Originally, I just had Nelson here.” She smiled around at them all. “But now,” she said, “I got a twofer.”

4

McWhitney said, “I’d better lock up.”

He had to walk down to the end of the bar and open the flap there to come out, then walk back past the others on this side. Sandra stepped back against the line of booths so he wouldn’t pass behind her, then said to Parker, “Funny you should happen by.”

“Is it?”

“You find yourself in the neighborhood, just the same day Dalesia slips his bonds.”

Returning to the others, staying now on this side of the bar, McWhitney said, “Sandra, don’t excite yourself. We aren’t helping Nick. He isn’t gonna let us know where he is.”

Skeptical, Sandra said, “Why? Because you’d turn him in?”

“That’s the last thing we’d do,” McWhitney said, “and he knows it. Unless it was turn him in like you’re turning in Harbin.”

She shook her head. “You were a team.”

“Not any more.”

Parker said, “If they take him again, all he has for bargaining chips is the money and us.”

“Well, it’s me more than you,” McWhitney said. “He knows this place here.”

“I think,” Claire said carefully, “he knows our phone number.”

Sandra looked at her with a little smile. “You mean, he knows your phone number. He’s used your phone number. Roy Keenan and me, we looked at that number. Nick Dalesia never did have a wide range of telephone pals. Ms. Willis stood out.”

Claire shrugged. “I never actually met the man,” she said. “I have no real link with him at all. I was looking for somebody to blacktop my driveway. I forget who said they’d have Mr. Dalesia call me. I talked to him twice, but I thought he sounded unreliable.”

“That’s nice,” Sandra said. “As long as Nick isn’t there to say it didn’t happen that way.”

“That’s what we’re saying,” McWhitney told her. He had taken the stool next to Parker, with Claire beyond, the three facing Sandra with her right hand in her pocket and her back braced against the booth’s tall coatrack.

“All right,” Sandra said. “But while we’re waiting here, it might be we could do some other business together. I mean, if this Harbin thing turns out to be on the up-and-up.”

McWhitney said, “What kind of business?”

“You people took a lot of money up there in New England,” Sandra said, “but then you had to leave it. That’s only three days ago, too soon for you to dare to go back.” To Parker, she said, “But Dalesia might go for it, that’s why you came here to see McWhitney. How to keep the money safe from your friend without exposing yourselves to the law.”

Parker said, “I think Nick’s pretty busy right about now.”

“I think your Nick needs money bad right about now,” Sandra said.

McWhitney said, “You aren’t, I hope, gonna say we should tell you where it is, so you can go get it and bring it back to us.”

Sandra’s free left hand made a shrugging gesture. “Why not? One woman could get in there and out, and then you’ve got something instead of nothing.”

“If you come back,” McWhitney said.

Parker said, “We’ll take our chances. If you don’t get in and out, if they grab you with the money, they’re gonna ask you who told you where it was. What reason would you have not to tell them?”

Sandra thought about that, then nodded. “I see how it could look,” she said. “All right, it was just an offer.”

McWhitney said, “I can’t give you people meals in this place. How much longer you think we’re gonna wait?”

“Until they call me,” she said.

Parker said, “Call them.”

Sandra didn’t like that. “What for? They’ll do what they’re doing, and then they’ll call me.”

“You call them,” Parker said. “You tell them, speed it up, your tipster’s getting anxious, he’s afraid there’s a double-cross coming along.”

“It won’t do any good to push—” she said, and a small, flat, almost toneless brief ring sounded. “At last,” she said, looking suddenly relieved, showing an anxiety of her own she’d been covering till now. Her right hand stayed in the coat pocket while her left dipped into the other pocket and came out with the cell phone. Her thumb clipped into the second ring and she said, “Keenan. Sure it’s me, it’s Roy’s business phone. What have you got?”

Parker watched McWhitney. Was the man tensing? Had he given the bounty hunter the truth?

Suddenly Sandra beamed, the last of the tension gone, and her right hand came empty out of the pocket. “That’s great. I thought my source was reliable, but you can never be sure. I’ll come into the New York office tomorrow for the check? Fine, Wednesday. Oh, Roy’s around here somewhere.”

McWhitney looked very alert, but then relaxed again as Sandra said into the phone, “My best to Linda. Thanks, she’s fine. Talk to you later.” She broke the connection, pocketed the phone, and said to McWhitney, “It worked out. He’s who he is, he’s where you said.”

“Like I said.” Now that it was over, McWhitney suddenly looked tired. “Let me throw you people out of here now.”

As they walked down the bar toward the door, Sandra said, “You got any more goods like that stashed around, you know what I mean, goods with some value on them, give me a call.”

“What I should have done,” McWhitney said, as he unlocked the door to let them out, “I should have held out for a finder’s fee.”

Sandra laughed and walked away toward her car, and McWhitney shut the door. They could hear the click of the lock.

5

Claire’s place was on a lake in north-central New Jersey, surrounded mostly by seasonal houses, only a fifth or so occupied year-round. In several of these houses were hollow walls, crawl spaces, unused attic stubs, where Parker kept his stashes.

Two days after the overnight trip to Long Island, he finally stashed the duffel bag he’d brought from upstate New York, then drove to put gas in Claire’s Toyota, paying with cash from the duffel, money on which nobody had a record of the numbers. Heading back, he was about to turn in at Claire’s driveway when he saw through the trees another car parked down in there, black or dark gray. Instead, then, he went on to the next driveway and steered in there, stopping at a house boarded up for the winter.

He probably knew this house better than the owners did, including the whereabouts of the key that most of the seasonal people hid near their front doors where workmen or anybody else could find them. He didn’t need the key this time. He walked around the side of the house opposite Claire’s place and on the lake side came to a wide porch that in summer was screened. Now the screens were stored in the space beneath the porch.

Parker moved past the porch and across a cleared lane between the buildings kept open for utility workers and on to the blindest corner of Claire’s house. Moving along the lake side, not stepping up on the porch, he could see across and through a window at the interior. Claire was seated on the sofa in there, talking with two men seated in chairs angled toward her. He couldn’t see the men clearly, but there was no tension in the room. Claire was speaking casually, gesturing, smiling.

Parker turned away and went back to the next-door house, where he stepped up onto the porch, took a seat in a wooden Adirondack armchair there, and waited.

Five minutes. Two men in dark topcoats and snap-brim hats came out of Claire’s front door, and Claire stood in the doorway to speak to them. The men moved together, as though from habit rather than intention. With the hats, they looked like FBI agents from fifties movies, except that in the fifties movies one of them would not have been black.

The two men each touched a finger to the brim of his hat. Claire said something else, easy and unconcerned, and shut the door as the men got into their anonymous pool car, the white driving, and went away.

Parker went back around this house to the Toyota, drove to Claire’s place, and thumbed the visor control that opened the garage. When he stepped from the garage to the kitchen Claire was in there, making coffee. “Want some?”

“Yes. FBI?”

“Yes. I told them my blacktop story, and said I’d try to remember who gave me Mr. Dalesia’s name, but it had been a while.”

He sat at the kitchen table. “They bought it?”

“They bought the house, the lake, the attractive woman, the sunlight.”

“They gave you their card, and that was it?”

“Probably,” she said. “They said they might call me if they thought of anything else to ask, and I said I thought I might be going on an early-winter vacation soon, I wasn’t sure.” Bringing Parker’s coffee to the table, she said, “Should I?”

“Yes. We’ll go together.”

Surprised, she sat across from him and said, “You have a place in mind?”

“When I was in Massachusetts last week,” he said, “they were talking about something called leaf peeping.”

Even more surprised, she said, “Leaf peeping? Oh, that’s because the fall colors change on the trees.”

“That’s it.”

“People go to New England just to see the colors on the trees.” She considered. “They call them leaf peepers?”

“That’s what I heard.”

She looked out the kitchen window toward the lake. Most of the trees around here were evergreens, but there were some that changed color in the fall; down here, that wouldn’t be for another month, and not as showy as New England. “It makes them sound silly,” she said. “Leaf peepers. You make a whole trip to look at leaves. I guess it is silly, really.”

“We wouldn’t be the only ones there.”

She looked at him. “What you really want to do,” she said, “is be near the money.”

“I want to know what’s happening there. You have to drive and pay for the place we stay, because I don’t have ID. And if I’m a leaf peeper, I’m not a bank robber.”

“You’re a leaf peeper if you’re with me.”

“That’s right.”

“On your own, nobody would buy you for a leaf peeper,” she said, and smiled, and then stopped smiling.

Sensing a dark memory rising up inside her, he said, “Everything’s all finished up there. It’s done. Nothing’s going to happen except we look at leaves and we look at a church.”

“A church,” she echoed.

Rising, he said, “Let me get a map, I’ll show you the area we want. Then you can find a place up there—”

“A bed-and-breakfast.”

“Right. We’ll stay for a week.” Nodding at the phone on the wall, he said, “Then you can make your answering machine message be that you’re on vacation for a week, and you can give the place you’re gonna be.”

“Because,” she said, “what’s going to happen up there already happened.”

“That’s right,” he said.

6

“You folks here for the robbery?”

The place was called Bosky Rounds, and the pictures on the web site had made it look like somewhere that Hansel and Gretel might have stopped off. Deep eaves, creamy stucco walls, broad dark green wooden shutters flanking the old-fashioned multipaned windows, and a sun god knocker on the front door. The Bosky Rounds gimmick, though they wouldn’t have used the word, was that they offered maps of nearby hiking trails through the forest, for those leaf peepers who would like to be surrounded by their subject. It was the most rustic and innocent accommodation Claire could find, and Parker had agreed it was perfect for their purposes.

And the first thing Mrs. Bartlett, the owner, the nice motherly lady in the frilled apron and the faint aroma of apple pie, said to them was, “You folks here for the robbery?”

“Robbery?” Claire managed to look both astonished and worried. “What robbery? You were robbed?”

“Oh, not me, dear,” and Mrs. Bartlett offered a throaty chuckle and said, “It was all over the television. Not five miles from here, last week, a week ago tomorrow, a whole gang attacked the bank’s armored cars with bazookas.”

“Bazookas!” Claire put her hand to her throat, then leaned forward as though she suspected this nice old lady was pulling her leg. “Wouldn’t that burn up all the money?”

“Don’t ask me, dear, I just know they blew up everything, my cousin told me it was like a war movie.”

“Was he there?”

“No, he rushed over as soon as he heard it on his radios.” To Parker she said, “He has all these different kinds of radios, you know.” Back to Claire she said, “You really haven’t heard about it?”

“Oh, us New Yorkers,” Claire said, with a laugh and a shrug. “We really are parochial, you know. If it doesn’t happen in Central Park, we don’t know a thing about it.” Handing over her credit card, she said, “I tell you what. Let us check in and unpack, and then you’ll tell us all about it.”

“I’d be delighted,” said Mrs. Bartlett. “And you’re the Willises,” she said, looking at the credit card.

“Claire and Henry,” Claire said.

Mrs. Bartlett put the card in her apron pocket. “I put you in room three upstairs,” she said. “It really is the nicest room in the house.”

“Lovely.”

“I’ll give you back your card when you come down.” She turned to say to Parker, “And you’ll have tea?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

It was a large room, with two large bright many-paned windows, frills on every piece of furniture, and a ragged old Oriental carpet. They unpacked into the old tall dresser and the armoire, there being no closet, and Parker went over to look out the window toward the rear of the house. The trees began right there, red and yellow and orange and green. “I’ll have to look on the map,” he said. “See where this is.”

“You mean, from the robbery site,” Claire said, and laughed. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Bartlett will tell you, in detail. Will you mind sitting through that?”

“It’s a good idea,” Parker said, “for me to know what the locals think happened.”

“Fine. But one thing.”

He looked at her. “Yeah?”

“If she gets a part wrong,” Claire said, “don’t correct her.”

Over tea and butter cookies in the communal parlor downstairs, Mrs. Bartlett gave them an exhaustive and mostly accurate description of what had gone on up in those woods last Friday night. It turned out, she said, that two of the local banks were going to combine, so all of the money from one was going to the other. It was all very hush-hush and top secret and nobody was supposed to know anything about it, but it turned out somebody knew what was going on, because, just at this intersection here — she showed them on the county map — where these two small roads meet, nobody knows how many gangsters suddenly appeared with bazookas, and smashed up all the armored cars — there were four armored cars, with all the bank’s papers and everything in addition to the money — and drove off with the one armored car with the money in it, and when the police found the armored car later all the money was gone.

Parker said, “How did the gangsters know which armored car had the money in it?”

“Well, that,” Mrs. Bartlett told them, leaning close to confide a secret, “that was where the scandal came in. The wife of the bank owner, Mrs. Langen, she was in cahoots with the robbers!”

Claire said, “In cahoots? The banker’s wife? Oh, Mrs. Bartlett.”

“No, it’s true,” Mrs. Bartlett promised them. “It seems she’d taken up with a disgraced ex-guard in her husband’s bank. He went to jail for stealing something or other, and when he came back they started right up again where they left off, and the first thing you know they robbed her own husband’s bank!”

“But the law got them,” Parker suggested.

“Oh, yes, of course, the police immediately captured them,” Mrs. Bartlett said. “They’ll pay for their crimes, don’t you worry. But not the robbers, no, not the people who actually took the money.”

“The people with the bazookas,” Parker said, because the Carl-Gustaf antitank weapons from Sweden had not been bazookas.

“Those people,” Mrs. Bartlett agreed. “And the money, too, of course. There’ve been police and state troopers and FBI men and I don’t know what all around here all week. I even had three state police investigators staying here until Tuesday.”

“I’m sorry we missed them,” Claire murmured.

“Oh, they were just like anybody,” Mrs. Bartlett said. “You wouldn’t know anything to look at them.”

“I suppose,” Claire said, turning to Parker, “we ought to go see where this robbery took place.”

“It’s still traffic jams over there,” Mrs. Bartlett said. “People going, and stopping, and taking pictures, though I have no idea what they think they’re taking pictures of. Just some burned trees, that’s all.”

“It’s the excitement,” Claire suggested. “People want to be around the excitement.”

“Well, if you’re going over there,” Mrs. Bartlett said, “the best time is in the morning. Before nine o’clock.” She leaned forward again for another confidence. “Tourists, generally, are very slugabed,” she told them.

“Well,” Claire said, “they are on vacation.”

Parker said, “So, when we go out to dinner, we shouldn’t go in that direction.”

“Oh, no. There are some lovely places... Let me show you.”

There was a specific route Parker wanted, but he needed Mrs. Bartlett to suggest it. He found reasons not to be enthusiastic about her first three dinner suggestions, but the fourth would be on a route that would take them right past the church. “New England seafood,” he said. “That sounds fine. You want to give Claire the directions?”

“I’d be very happy to.”

7

It was still a couple of hours before sunset, and Claire wanted to walk outside a while, to work off the stiffness of the long car ride. They stepped out the front door, and a young guy was just bouncing up onto the porch. “Hi,” he said, and they nodded and would have passed him but he stopped, frowned, pointed at them, and said, “I didn’t talk with you folks, did I?”

“No,” Claire said.

“Well, let me—” He was patting himself all over, frisking himself for something, while he talked, a kind of distracted smile on his face. He looked to be in his early twenties, with thick windblown brown hair, a round expectant face, and large black-framed glasses that made him look like an owl. A friendly owl. He wore a dark gray car coat with a cell phone dangling in front of it from a black leather strap around his neck, and jeans and boots, and it was the car coat he searched as he said, “I’m not a nut or anything, I wanna show you my bona fides, I’ve got my card here somewh— Oh, here it is.” And from an interior pocket he plucked a business card, which he handed to Claire.

The card was pale yellow, with maroon letters centered, reading

laureled with phone, fax and cell phone numbers, plus an e-mail address. There was no terrestrial address.

Claire said, “It doesn’t say who you’re a journalist for.”

“I’m freelance,” Mulcany said, smiling nervously, apparently not sure they’d be impressed by his status. “I specialize in true crime. No, keep it,” he said, as Claire was about to hand the card back. “I’ve got boxes of them.” The grin semaphored and he said, “I lose them all the time, and then I find them.”

“That’s nice,” Claire said. “Excuse me, we were just—”

“Oh, no, I don’t want to take up your time,” Mulcany said. “I just— You heard about the robbery, here last week.”

“Mrs. Bartlett just told us all about it.”

“Oh, is that her name, the lady here?”

Claire bent to him. “You aren’t staying here?”

“Oh, no, I can’t afford this place,” and the smile flickered some more. “Not until my advance comes in. I’ve got a deal with Spotlight to do a book on the robbery, so I’m just here getting the background, taking some pictures.”

“Well, I’m sorry, we can’t help,” Claire told him. “We just heard about the robbery ourselves half an hour ago.”

“That’s fine, I don’t expect—” Mulcany interrupted himself a lot, now saying, “You’re here for the foliage, aren’t you?”

Claire nodded. “Of course.”

“So you’ll be out, driving around, walking around,” Mulcany said. “If you see anything, anything at all, anything that seems a little weird, out of the ordinary, let me know. Call me on my cell,” he said, holding it up for them to look at. “If you find me something and I use it,” he said, grinning in full, letting the cell phone drop to his coat front again, “I’ll give you the credit, and I’ll put you in the index!”

“Well, I don’t know what we might see,” Claire told him, “but that’s a tempting offer. I’ll keep your card.”

“Great.” He was suddenly in a hurry to move on. “And I gotta check a couple details with— What was her name again?”

“Mrs. Bartlett. Like the pear.”

“Oh, great,” Mulcany said. “That I can remember. Thanks a lot!” And he hurried into Bosky Rounds.

Claire laughed as she and Parker started away from the B and B and down the town road with its wide dirt strip instead of a sidewalk. “Isn’t that nice?” she said. “You lost money on that expedition, but he’s going to make some. So it’s working out for somebody, after all.”

“I don’t like him being here,” Parker said.

“Oh, he’s harmless,” she said.

Parker shook his head. “On some wall,” he said, “that guy’s got those wanted posters tacked up. This time, he looked at you. Next time, maybe he looks at me.”

8

As they drove toward their New England seafood dinner, Parker said, “Nick’s the one found the church. It’s abandoned for years, off on a side road. The original idea was, we’d spend the first night there, split up the cash, head out in the morning. But the law presence was so intense we couldn’t move, and we couldn’t take the cash with us. So we left it there.”

“In the church.”

“We’ll be going by it in a few minutes.”

“I won’t see much in the dark.”

“I don’t want you to even slow down,” Parker told her. “The story the law is giving out is that Nick escaped before he could tell them anything, but they don’t always tell the truth, you know.”

“You think they might know the money’s there, in the church?”

“And they might have it staked out, waiting for us to come back. So we’ll just drive by. In daylight, I’ll try to get a better look at it.”

They kept driving, on dark, small, thinly populated roads, until he said, “It’s on the right.”

A small white church crouched in darkness, with parking around it. Claire looked at it as she drove by and said, “I don’t see anybody.”

“You wouldn’t.”

They passed the church again on their way back from the not-bad seafood dinner, and still didn’t see any sign of anybody in or near the place. But then they walked into Bosky Rounds and there in the communal parlor they did see somebody they knew: Susan Loscalzo.

She got to her feet with a big smile when they walked in, tossing Yankee magazine back onto the coffee table as she said, “Well, hello, you two. Fancy running into you guys here.”

9

There were five guest rooms at Bosky Rounds, and with Sandra’s arrival late this afternoon all five were occupied. Now, in another corner of the communal parlor, two couples murmured together, planning their itinerary for tomorrow. Glancing toward them, ignoring the fact that Parker and Claire hadn’t said anything to her greeting, Sandra said, “I saw a bar on the way here looking like it had possibilities. Want to check it out?”

“Sure,” Parker said, and to Claire he said, “You want to come along?”

“Absolutely.”

Nodding, with a little smile at Claire, Sandra said, “One car or two?”

“We’ll follow you,” Parker said.

As they turned toward the front door, Sandra looked around and said, “Where’s Mrs. Muskrat?”

Claire said, “I think we’re on our own till morning.”

“It’s the kind of place,” Sandra said, “I feel I oughta check in with the proctor before I do anything.”

Her car, in the gravel lot beside the building, was a small black Honda Accord that would have been anonymous if it weren’t for the two whip antennas arcing high over its top, making it look like some outsized tropical insect in the wrong weather zone. Sandra got behind the wheel with a wave, and Claire started the Toyota to follow.

Driving down the dark road with that humped black insect in front of her, Claire said, “Tell me about Sandra. Does she have a guy?”

“She isn’t straight,” Parker said. “She lives with a woman on Cape Cod, and the woman has a child. Sandra supports the child. She thought she was the brains behind Roy Keenan and maybe she was. We got linked to her because she wanted the Harbin reward money and we led her to it. What she wants now I don’t know.”

“The bank money?”

“Maybe.” Parker shook his head, not liking it. “It’s not in her line,” he said. “I’d think she’d be out looking for another Roy Keenan now. I don’t know what she’s doing.”

“Was Roy Keenan straight?”

“Oh, yeah. That was just a business arrangement. She’d be out of sight with the handgun while Keenan asked the questions.”

Claire said, “I don’t mean to be a matchmaker, but why wouldn’t McWhitney be a good new Roy?”

“Because he’s too hotheaded and she’s too hard,” Parker said. “One of them would kill the other in a month, I don’t know which. This looks like the place.”

It was. The Honda, antennae waving, turned in at an old-fashioned sprawling roadhouse with a fairly full parking lot to one side. The main building, two stories high, was flanked by wide enclosed porches, brightly lit, while the second floor was completely dark. A large floodlit sign out by the road, at right angles to the parking lot, told drivers from both directions WAYWARD INN.

They parked the cars next to one another and met on the gravel. “I didn’t go inside the place before,” Sandra said. “It seemed to me, big enough for some privacy, dining rooms on both sides, bar in the middle.”

“Bar,” Claire said.

“You’re my kind of girl,” Sandra told her, and led the way as Claire lifted an eyebrow at Parker.

The entrance was a wide doorway centered in the front of the building, at the end of a slate path from the parking area. Sandra pushed in first, the others following, and inside was a wide dark-carpeted hall with a maître d’s lectern prominent. To left and right, wide doorways showed the bright dining rooms in the enclosed porches, the customers now thinning out toward the end of the day. Behind the lectern a broad dark staircase led upward, and next to that a dimly lit hall extended back to what could be seen was a low-lit bar. Atop the lectern a cardboard sign read PLEASE SEAT YOURSELF.

“That’s us,” Sandra said, and led the way past the lectern and down the hall to the bar, which was more full at this hour than the dining rooms, but also quieter, with lower lighting. The room was broad, with the bar along the rear, high-backed booths on both sides, and black Formica-top tables filling the center.

Sandra pointed toward a booth on the left: “That looks pretty alone.”

“Good,” Parker said.

They went over there, Sandra sitting to face the front entrance, Claire opposite her, Parker beside Claire. From where he sat, the bar’s mirrored back wall gave him a good view of the hall down toward the entrance.

A young waitress in black appeared almost immediately, hugging tall black menus to her breast. “Supper menu?”

“We ate,” Claire said. “Just drinks.”

“I might as well look at it,” Sandra said.

Claire and Parker both ordered scotch on the rocks while Sandra decided on the popcorn shrimp and a glass of red wine. When the waitress went away, Sandra explained, “I didn’t really have dinner, I just drove up.”

“You were in a hurry,” Parker told her.

Sandra gave him a frank look. “I wasn’t out to make trouble for you boys last time,” she said, “and I’m not now. But now the situation is different than it was.”

“Keenan’s dead,” Parker suggested.

“And my government,” Sandra said, “is jerking me around.”

Parker said, “They want your source?”

“Absolutely not. That isn’t the way it works.” To Claire she said, “Sometimes the government needs information. The deal is, if you’ve got that information and you’re a legitimate licensed investigator, and you give them that information, or you sell it to them, they don’t turn around and use it against you. It’s kind of immunity plus a paycheck.”

“Not bad,” Claire said.

Parker said, “So what went wrong?”

“Harbin was too popular,” Sandra said, and the waitress arrived with their orders. “I gotta eat just a minute,” Sandra said.

She was hungry. She scarfed down a couple large mouthfuls of popcorn shrimp, with a swig of red wine as though it were beer, and Parker looked at the other customers in this room.

Tourists. Nobody that looked like a local, only visitors not ready for this day to end. Conversations were low and easy, but here and there punctuated by a yawn. Nobody looked like law.

Sandra waved at the waitress, then called to her, “Same again,” and said to Parker, “Three different agencies had money out on Harbin, and a fourth had a leash on him, and none of them knew anything about any of the others. So right now they gotta sort that out so they can decide, when they pay me, which agency budget does it come out of. Right now, they’re fighting about it.”

“They’re fighting about which of them has to pay you.”

“That’s about it.” Sandra shrugged, and now she sipped a little wine. “In the meantime, you know I’ve got expenses.”

“I know,” Parker said.

“Roy took too long on the Harbin thing,” Sandra said. “That’s why he got careless at the end there. He figured, no penny-ante punk could really just disappear like that. So we were pretty much running on empty when I finally got my answer to the question, and the bitch of it is, I’m still running on empty until they get their official heads out of their official asses.”

“That’s too bad,” Parker said.

“Meaning,” Sandra said, “why should you give a shit. The only other two places for cash money I know of right now, to tide me over, is your bank score and Mr. Nicholas Dalesia.”

Parker said, “Dalesia?”

“You don’t think there’s reward money out on him, right now?” Sandra asked. “And only one agency, no waiting.”

“I don’t know where he is,” Parker said. “I told you that.”

“You did, and I believe you, and I believe if you found out where he was he wouldn’t live long because he’s a lot more dangerous to you than I am or anybody else.”

“Maybe.”

The waitress brought Sandra’s seconds and she ate a while more, then said, “You know Dalesia isn’t ten miles from here right this minute.”

“Probably.”

“He’s got no money, no ID, no transportation. Does he have anybody around here he can go to?”

“Not that I know of.”

Sandra considered. “Maybe a shut-in, take over a house for a few days.”

Parker said, “Even shut-ins get visitors, phone calls. Medicine delivered.”

“Well, he’s a bad penny, he’ll show up.” Sandra used the paper napkin on her lips and said, “The point is, you see where I am.”

“In my face,” Parker said.

“Sorry about that,” Sandra said. “I need cash, and this is where it is, or where it’s gonna be. You know I’ve got dossiers on you and your partners.”

“That your lady friend is holding, out there on Cape Cod.”

“Well, she’s gone visiting,” Sandra said.

Parker nodded. “Is that right.”

“Maybe with family, maybe with friends. Maybe here, maybe there. She’s hoping she’ll hear from me pretty soon.”

Claire said, “Sandra, you seem like a smart person.”

“Thank you,” Sandra said, and gave Claire a cool look with not much question in it.

“Which means,” Claire said, “you already know what you want out of this talk here.”

“Sure,” Sandra said, and shrugged. “A partnership.” She switched the cool look to Parker. “Think of me as the successor firm to Nick Dalesia,” she said.

Parker said, “You want his share?”

“I don’t deserve his share,” Sandra said, “because I wasn’t around for the first part. But I deserve half of his share, and you and McWhitney split the other half.” Waving toward the waitress again, giving her the check-signing signal, she said, “We’re just doing a little business here, so I’ll pick up the tab. You don’t have to agree or say anything. I’m in, that’s all. It’s not your fault, and it’s not mine, and we’ll learn to live with it. And you’ll find I have my uses. In the meantime, we’ll all be cosy together, over at— What do they call that place?”

“The waiting room,” Claire said.

10

Following Sandra out the front door of Wayward Inn, Parker said quietly, “Let her go first.”

“All right.”

They said good night, said they’d see one another tomorrow, and got into the cars. It took Claire a while to decide the best place to put her handbag, and by then Sandra had backed out, spun around, and headed for the exit.

As they followed, Parker said, “Hang back. She won’t let you disappear out of her mirrors, but she’ll let you hang back.”

“You aren’t going to do anything to her, are you?”

“I can’t. When she and her partner Keenan were first looking for Harbin, they made dossiers of what they could find out about the people at that meeting where he disappeared. Nelson’s bar, Nick phoning you. If something happens to Sandra, her friend on Cape Cod gives that stuff to the law.”

“They already know my phone number.”

“Getting it again, from a second direction, means they’ll take a closer look. You don’t want that.”

Claire shook her head, eyes on the taillights out in front of her. “If I have to give up my house, I will,” she said. “Be Claire somebody else, I will. But I won’t want to.”

“We’re trying to make it not happen,” Parker said. “Right now, Sandra’s on guard, something could kick her off. Her friend I don’t know anything about. But so far, we can deal with it. The worst would be if McWhitney found out she was here.”

“Why?”

“He’d kill her, right away, first, worry about dossiers later. Then everybody has to move.”

Claire brooded about that. “Do you think he’ll come up?”

“Not now, not over the weekend, he’s still got that bar to run. Early next week, he might. Up ahead there, at the intersection, you’re gonna turn left. There’s a deli on the right, parking lot beyond it. Make the turn, go in there, shut everything down.”

Claire nodded and said, “I thought maybe we weren’t going straight back.”

The intersection ahead was topped by a yellow blinker signal. Sandra’s Honda drove under it and through. Claire, without a signal, made the left, made a right U-turn into the deli’s parking lot, tucked the Toyota in next to a Dumpster back there, and switched everything off. They waited, and then a black car went by out there, from left to right, accelerating.

Parker said, “Give her a minute, then go back out and go straight through the intersection.”

“All right,” she said. “Where are we going?”

“To visit the money,” Parker said. “Start now,” and she did. As they jounced out onto the road, he said, “We don’t wanna do all this dance and the money’s long gone.”

“Stop at the road up there on the right. Then just drive around a while. Give me half an hour.”

“All right,” she said, and when she stopped at the corner, the two visible houses both dark for the night, she said, “Will you bring some out?”

“No,” he said. “We don’t want samples. We just want to know it’s there. And alone.”

He got out of the Toyota and walked down the dark side road. There was partial cloud cover above, but some starlight got through, enough to see the difference between the blacktop and the shoulder.

It was not quite midnight now, a Thursday in October, nothing happening on this secondary road at all, no lights in the occasional dwelling he walked past. Soon, ahead of him on the right, he could make out the white hulk of the church. It was a small white clapboard structure with a wooden steeple. Across the road, difficult to see at night, was a narrow two-story white clapboard house that must have been connected to the church. Both buildings had been empty a long time.

Parker started with the house first. If there were a law presence here, watching the place, this would be the most comfortable spot to wait in.

But the house was empty, and when he crossed the road, so was the church. There was no sign that anybody had been in it since he and Dalesia and McWhitney had quit it a week ago.

Finally, he went up to the choir loft to check on the money. The bank had been transporting its cash in standard white rectangular packing boxes, and the church had stored its missals and hymnals up in the choir loft in the same way; not identical boxes, but similar. Parker and McWhitney and Dalesia had mixed the bank’s boxes in with the church’s boxes and left them there, arranging them so that, if anybody came upstairs and started looking in these boxes, the first three would contain books.

They still did. And the ones behind and beneath them still contained the close-packed stacks of green. Nothing had changed. The money still waited for them.

When they got back to Bosky Rounds, someone was seated in the dark on the porch, in a rocking chair. Rocking forward into the light, Sandra said, “Visiting our money?”

“Your part is still there,” Parker told her.

11

Breakfast at Bosky Rounds was in a room smaller than the communal parlor, an oblong crammed with square tables for two, at the right front corner of the building, with a view mostly of the road out front. Friday morning, Parker and Claire ate a late breakfast, each with a different part of the New York Times, Parker facing the doorway through which the entrance foyer and Mrs. Bartlett’s desk could be seen.

The small bell over the entrance tinkled and a woman appeared, stopping in front of Mrs. Bartlett’s desk, her profile to Parker. She was a good-looking blonde in her twenties, tall, slim in a tan deerskin coat over chocolate-colored slacks and black boots, with a heavy black shoulder bag hanging to her left hip. Parker knew her, and she would know him, too. Her name was Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa.

Quietly, Parker said, “Lift your paper. Read it that way.”

She did so, her expressionless face and the room behind her disappearing behind the newsprint. Out there, Mrs. Bartlett and Detective Reversa talked, pals, greeting one another, discussing something. Parker couldn’t quite hear what they were saying, and then the bell tinkled again, and when he said, “All right,” and Claire lowered the paper, only Mrs. Bartlett was there.

Claire said, “Can I look?”

“She’s gone.”

Claire looked anyway, then said, “She’s a cop.”

“State, plainclothes. You could hear what they were saying.”

Claire shrugged. “She was just checking in. Wanted to know if Mrs. Bartlett had seen anything interesting since last time they talked.” Without irony she said, “The answer was no.”

“Good.”

“But she’d recognize you?”

“She made a traffic stop on me, before the job. She’s the reason you had to report the Lexus stolen and get this rental.”

“I liked the Lexus,” Claire said.

“You wouldn’t have.”

“Oh, I know.” Claire looked around again at the space where the detective had been. “But she was here.”

“She’s part of the search,” Parker said. “She was on that heist from the beginning. She and a bunch more are still around because they know Nick’s got to be somewhere around here and the money’s got to be somewhere around here.”

“You can’t stay here,” Claire said. “Not if she knows what you look like.”

“I know,” he said. “We’ve got to get this over with.”

There was a low flower-pattern settee in the corner of Mrs. Bartlett’s office, and Sandra Loscalzo was seated on it, looking at local maps and brochures from a display rack mounted on the wall. Mrs. Bartlett was at her desk doing puzzles in a crossword book, and Parker stopped to say to her, “We wondered if you could give us some advice.”

“If I can,” she said, putting down her pencil.

“We thought,” he said, “we’d like to look at the countryside from a height somewhere that we could get a sense of the whole area.”

“Oh, I know just the place,” Mrs. Bartlett said, and took one of the maps from the display rack near Sandra, who did not look up from her own researches. “It was a Revolutionary War battle site. Just wonderful views. Rutledge Ridge.”

With a red pen, she drew the route on the map, naming off the roads as she went. They thanked her and took the map out to the Toyota.

Sandra drove up to the lookout five minutes after they arrived. Seemingly unbroken forest fell away on three sides in clumps and clusters of bright color, rising only in the north. A few other tourists were up here, but the parking and observation area was large enough for everybody to have as much privacy as they wanted.

Sandra got out of the Honda and came over to the low stone wall that girdled the view, Claire seated on the wall, Parker standing next to her. “You know that cop,” she said, as a greeting.

“She knows me,” Parker said.

“I get that.” To Claire, Sandra said, “Very smooth, with the newspaper.”

“You noticed.”

“Well, I take an interest.” To Parker, she said, “You looked the place over last night. Can we go and get it? How much longer do we wait?”

“I don’t want to wait at all, with that detective around,” Parker told her. “But if she’s still here, that means we’ve still got a lot of law to deal with. The law is looking for a lot of heavy boxes of cash. You rent a truck around here right now, somebody’s gonna stop you just to see who you are.”

“What about three or four cars? You, me, Claire, and McWhitney.”

“Four strangers, all going off the tourist trails, getting together, making a little convoy.”

Sandra frowned out at the view, not seeming to see it. “If I knew where this goddamn stash was—”

“In a church,” he said.

She looked at him, wanting to be sure he was serious. “A church?”

Nick Dalesia found it. Long time abandoned. Water and electricity switched off but still there. The idea was to just hole up overnight, but the heat was too intense, we had to leave the cash behind.”

“In boxes.”

“Up in the choir loft. Already church boxes up there, hymns and things.”

“That’s nice.” Sandra paced, rubbing the knuckles of her right hand into her left palm. “I know you don’t want to tell me where this church is, not yet, but that’s okay. The time comes, we’ll go there together.”

“That’s right,” Parker said.

“Unless,” Claire said, “you just can’t stay here any more.”

“Well, he can’t stay here any more,” Sandra said.

“If I go away and come back when the law is gone,” Parker said, “a lot of things can happen.”

Sandra paced, rubbing those knuckles, then stopped to say, “I tell you what. You and me, we drive down to Long Island, six, seven hours, we talk it over with McWhitney.”

Parker looked at her. “You want to see McWhitney?”

Sandra shrugged. “Don’t worry, I’m no Roy Keenan, I won’t turn my back on him. But we’ll tell him, you and me, we got an understanding, right?”

“Half of Nick.”

“We’ll go now,” Sandra said. “Get there in daylight. Claire can hold the fort, let Mrs. Muskrat know we’re coming back. Right?”

“Sure,” Claire said. “But why do you want to do the driving?”

“Because you are,” Sandra told her. “And you are because he isn’t sure his license would play nice with cop computers. Me, I’m so clean they give me a gold medal every time they see me.” She cocked a brow at Parker. “Ready?”

Parker looked at his watch. Nearly ten. He said to Claire, “I’ll be back late tonight.”

She nodded. “I’ll be here.”

12

Sandra was not so much a speeder as permanently aggressive, taking what small openings the road and the traffic gave her. It wasn’t yet three-thirty in the afternoon when she parked diagonally across the street from McWhitney’s bar, named in neon in the front window MCW. “Surprise,” she said, and gave Parker a twisted smile.

“Not too many surprises,” Parker said.

Three-thirty on a Friday afternoon McW was a lot livelier than last time, about half full but with the clear sense that a greater crowd was on its way. McWhitney had a second bartender working, though he didn’t really need him quite yet. McWhitney was busy, eyes and hands in constant motion, but he saw Parker and Sandra come in and immediately turned away, saying something to his assistant. Stripping off his apron, walking away, he pointed leftward at an empty booth and came down around the bar to join them at it.

“The lion lies down with the lamb,” he said, not smiling.

Sandra grinned at him. “Which is which?”

“You got your Harbin,” McWhitney told her, not hiding his dislike. “We got no more specials.”

Sandra turned to Parker. “Tell him.”

“She’s in on the church with us,” Parker said. “For half of Nick.”

“In on the church?” McWhitney was offended. “She’s been there?”

“Don’t know where it is,” Sandra said. “He won’t tell me. But I think I can help you get the money out.”

McWhitney frowned at Parker. “I don’t like this.”

“It isn’t what any of us had in mind,” Parker agreed. “But that neighborhood up there is still a hornet’s nest, and the hornets are still out.”

“There’s a cop up there can make him,” Sandra said, “And almost did.”

McWhitney looked at Parker. “The woman cop?”

“Her.”

McWhitney leaned back as his assistant bartender brought three beers, then left without a word. Taking a short sip, McWhitney said, “So we all just gotta go away for a while.”

“Until what?” Parker asked him. “Until they get Nick again? Until Nick gets in there on his own and cleans it out? Until some kids fool around in there one night and find it?”

McWhitney nodded, but pointed a thumb at Sandra. “So what’s she doing in it? She just happens to be this place, that place, and every time we see her we give her money? Half of Nick? What if Nick shows up?”

“You’ll kill him,” Sandra said.

McWhitney shook his head. “I still don’t see what you’re doing in here.”

“I’ll help dig,” Sandra said, and nodded at the floor. “Probably in that basement of yours.”

“Never mind my basement.”

“Also,” Sandra said, “I have a way to get your money.”

Parker said, “You didn’t say that before.”

“I wanted to see how this meeting was gonna go, do I want to go through the trouble, or just screw you people and score it on my own.”

“Listen to this,” McWhitney said.

Parker said, “You’ve figured out a way to get the money out.”

“I think so.” To McWhitney she said, “You pretty well know the business operations around this neighborhood.”

“Pretty well.”

“Do you know a used-car lot, maybe kind of grungy, no cream puffs?”

McWhitney grinned for the first time since he’d laid eyes on Sandra. “I know a dozen of them,” he said. “Whadayou need?”

“A truck. A small beat-up old truck, delivery van, something like that. Black would be best, just so it isn’t too shiny.”

“A truck.” McWhitney sounded disgusted. “To move the stash.”

“That’s right.”

“What makes this truck wonderful? It’s invisible?”

“Pretty much so,” she said. “Whatever color it is, and I really would like black, we use the same color to paint out whatever name might already be on it. Then, on both doors, in white, we paint Holy Redeemer Choir.”

“Holy shit,” McWhitney said.

“We’re the redeemers,” Sandra told him. “It’s okay if the name on the doors is a little amateurish, but we should try to do our best with it.”

McWhitney slowly nodded. “The choir’s coming to get their hymnals.”

“And we’ll get some, too,” Sandra said, “in case anybody wants to look in back.”

“Jesus, you always gotta insult me,” McWhitney said. “Here I was thinking you weren’t so bad.”

“I was used to dealing with Roy,” she said, and shrugged.

Now McWhitney laughed out loud. “You should thank me for breaking up the partnership.”

Parker said, “Can you get this truck? Fix it up about the name?”

“It’s gotta be me, doesn’t it,” McWhitney said. He didn’t sound happy.

“You’ve got the legal front,” Sandra said, and gestured at the bar around them. “This needs to be a truck with clean title, because you will be stopped, once you get up in that area.”

Parker said, “Can you do all that this afternoon, or do we have to wait till Monday?”

“If I start now and find it in the next hour,” McWhitney said, “the dealer can still deal with Motor Vehicles today, and I can come up there tomorrow. Maybe with dealer plates, but all the paperwork.”

Taking out a business card, Sandra wrote the Bosky Rounds name and phone number on the back. As she pushed it across the table, she said, “Call us when you get there, we’ll go out to the place together. I’m looking forward to see this truck you get.”

“What you’re looking forward to,” McWhitney told her, “is what’s in that church.”

Sandra smiled. “Answered prayers,” she said.

13

Parker drove the first half of the trip back, because his ID wasn’t likely to be an issue before they got to the search zone. They stopped for dinner midway, at a chain restaurant along the road, where no locals would look at them and remember them. While they waited for their food, Parker said, “This whole thing is the wrong side of the street for you.”

Sandra grimaced. “I don’t think of it like that,” she said. “What I think, there’s no sides to the street because there is no street.”

“What is there?”

She studied him, trying to decide how much to tell him, moving her fork back and forth on the table with her left hand. Then she shrugged, and left the fork alone, and said, “I figured it out when I was a little girl, what my idea of the world is.”

“What’s that?”

“A frozen lake,” she said. “Bigger than you can see the end of. Every day, I get up, I gotta move a little more along the lake. I gotta be very careful and very wary, because I don’t know where the ice is too thin. I gotta listen and watch.”

“I’ve seen you do it.”

She grinned and nodded, as though more pleased with him than with herself. “Yeah, you have.”

They were both silent a minute, and then their food came. The waitress went away and Sandra picked up her fork, but then she paused to say, “You go see a war movie, the guy gets hurt, he yells ‘Medic!’, they come take him away, fix him up. Out here, you get hurt, you yell ‘Medic!’, you know what happens?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“There’s no sides,” she said. “No street. We just do what we’ve got to do to get across the lake.”

14

They got back to Bosky Rounds a little before nine that night. As Sandra pulled into a parking space beside the building, Claire came down off the porch, shaking her hand at them not to get out of the car. They waited, saying nothing, and she came over to slide into the backseat and say, “We have to leave.”

He twisted half around in the seat to look at her, shadowed back there, far from the light on the porch. “Why?”

“That woman detective was here again,” Claire said. “I heard her talking to Mrs. Bartlett. Because they haven’t found Nick Dalesia, they’re convinced all three of the robbers came back here, to get their money.”

Parker said, “Why would they have an idea like that?”

“Because,” Claire said, “they don’t believe Nick could hide this long without help, and who else would there be to help him?”

Sandra said, “I’d figure it that way, too.”

“Nick’s running a string of luck,” Parker said. “For him. Not good for the rest of us.”

“She brought wanted posters,” Claire said. “Pictures of Nick, but drawings of the other two.”

“I’ve seen them,” Parker said. “They’re not close enough.”

“Not if you’re just walking by,” Claire told him. “But if you’re sitting in that place having breakfast, and out in the office on the wall there’s a drawing of you, people will make the connection.”

Parker said, “She put posters on the wall?”

“They’re papering the whole area, every public space.” Claire leaned forward to put her elbow on the seatback and say, “I packed all of our things. Everything’s in the car. I’ve just been waiting here for you to get back and then we can leave.”

“No,” he said.

“You can’t stay,” she insisted.

“But not that way,” Parker said. “They’ve got your name, they’ve got your address, they’ve got your credit cards. You stay here tonight, tomorrow morning you check out. If you leave here tonight, you’re just pointing an arrow at yourself.”

Claire didn’t like that. “What are you going to do?”

“McWhitney’s coming up tomorrow with a truck, we’re gonna take that cash out of there. You’ve got my stuff in the car?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll move it over to this car. You go back to the room until tomorrow. I’ll show Sandra where the church is and I’ll stay there tonight.” To Sandra he said, “When McWhitney gets here, you can lead him to the church.”

Sandra said, “That probably won’t be until tomorrow afternoon.”

“When you come to the church,” Parker told her, “bring me a coffee and Danish.”

Claire said, “Then how will you get home?”

“I’ll find a way,” he said.

15

“There won’t be any twenty-four-hour delis around here,” Sandra said.

“That’s all right,” Parker said. “I won’t starve to death between now and tomorrow afternoon. Take the right at that yellow blinker up there.”

“The right,” she said, with some sort of edge, and looked sidelong at him. “That’s where you lost me last night.”

“Thought I lost you.”

Now she laughed and made the right, and said, “McWhitney’s sore because McWhitney’s a sorehead. You know better.”

“We’ll see how it plays out.”

“Don’t fool around,” she said. “We’ve got a deal.”

“I know that.”

“It’s better for you. It’s better for you and McWhitney both.”

“You mean,” Parker said, “we get our own pieces, and part of Nick.”

“You get more than you were going to get,” she said, “and now you’re partners with somebody who can help you get it.”

“Don’t sell me any more,” Parker said. “I get the idea.”

“Sorry,” she said.

He said, “I know, you were used to Keenan.”

“I’m getting over it.”

Till now there’d been no other traffic along this road, but a wavering oncoming light turned out to be a pickup truck, moving slowly and unsteadily, tacking rather than driving, with a driver fighting sleep. Sandra pulled far to the right to let him by, then looked in the rearview mirror and said, “The funny thing is, most fools get away with being fools.”

“Until they count on it,” Parker said. “There’s a left turn coming up. Do you have a blanket or something in the trunk?”

“I keep a mover’s pad back there,” she said. “It’s quilted, so I guess it’s warm, but it’s kind of stiff.”

“Doesn’t matter. We’re coming up on the church now. I don’t want you to stop. Church on the right, house on the left, both white. See?”

“Very remote,” she said, as they drove on by.

“One of Nick’s better ideas,” Parker said. “Will you be able to find it tomorrow?”

“Oh, sure.” She laughed. “I can usually find money.”

“Up ahead here,” he said, “there’s a little bridge over a stream. The road curves down to the right to the bridge, and just before it there’s a parking area on the right.”

“For fishermen,” she suggested.

“Probably. Stop there, and I’ll get out and take the blanket and walk back. And do you have a bottle of water?”

“Right under your elbow there.”

The road curved down and to the right, and ahead the old iron latticework of the bridge drew pale lines against the black. Sandra stopped the Honda. “See you sometime tomorrow.”

“Right.” Carrying the bottled water, he got out of the car and opened the trunk to pull the stiff pad out. He shut the trunk, rapped his knuckles on it once, and she drove away, over the bridge, taking all the light with her.

It would take a minute to adjust his eyes to the night. While waiting, he did his best to fold the blanket-size quilted pad into something he could carry. Finally, the simplest way was over his shoulders, like a cloak, which made him look more like a Plains Indian than anything else. But it was warm and not awkward, and easy to walk with.

Twice on the way back he saw headlights at a distance and stepped off the road till they went by, once into some woods and the other time along a one-lane dirt road meandering uphill.

And then, there ahead of him, were the two small pale buildings in the dark. Both were empty, but the house might be warmer and just a bit more comfortable, without the church’s high ceilings. He went there and let himself in and decided on the smaller of the bedrooms upstairs.

It had been a long day; he spread the moving pad on the floor, rolled himself in it, and was soon asleep, and when he woke muddy daylight seeped through the room’s one window. He was stiff, and not really rested, but he got up and drank some of the water, then went outside to relieve himself. While he was out there, he went over to look at the church again, and nothing had changed.

It was a long empty day. For part of it he walked, indoors or out, and other parts he sat against a wall in the empty house or curled into the moving pad again and slept. He woke from one of those with the long diagonals of late afternoon light coming in the window and Nick Dalesia seated cross-legged on the floor against the opposite wall. The revolver in his right hand, not exactly pointing anywhere, would belong to the dead marshal.

Parker sat up. “So there you are,” he said.

16

“Where’s your car?” Nick sounded strained, jumpy, a man without time for conversation.

That’s the reason I’m alive, Parker thought. He came across me here, he would have killed me, but he needs wheels and he couldn’t find the ones that brought me here. “Don’t have one,” he said.

Nick was all exposed nerve endings. Any answer might make him start shooting, just to do something. Twisting his lips, he said, “What did you do, walk? How’d you get here?”

“Somebody dropped me off.”

“Who?”

“You don’t know her.”

“Her? Don’t know her?”

“It was just somebody gave me a ride,” Parker said. “What difference does it make?”

“I need a car,” Nick said, low and fervent, as though giving away a secret. Leaning forward, his whole body tense, he said, “I’ve got to get away from here. North, I can get into Canada, I can stop running for a while, figure out what to do next.”

There was only one way Nick would stop running, but Parker didn’t say so. Nodding at the gun, he said, “You’ve got that. That should help.”

Nick looked at the gun with dislike. “I paid a lot for this, Parker,” he said.

“I know that.”

Nick made an angry shrug. “Some people,” he said, “would rather be a hero than alive.”

“That’s not us.”

“No.” Nick stared at Parker, as though something about him were both mysterious and infuriating. Then, abruptly, he punched the gun butt onto the floor next to his leg, with a hollow thud that made him blink. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, as though it mattered.

“I wanted to look at the money.”

“You wanted to take the money.”

“Too soon for that,” Parker said. If he kept showing Nick this bland face, reasonable, no arguments, maybe Nick would calm down a little, just enough to listen to sense. But probably not.

So, how to get to him from across the room? Five feet of wooden floor between them, with a gun at the far end.

Still calm, still with the same even voice, Parker said, “The law put it out that you got away from them before they could ask you anything. I didn’t know if that was true or not. I figured, if the money’s still here, it’s true.”

“It might have helped me with those people before,” Nick said. “But not now.”

“No, not now.”

Nick shook his head, moving from anger to disgust. “You know how they got me.”

“It was almost me,” Parker told him. “If I hadn’t heard about you, I would have been passing that stuff myself.”

“I’d rather it was you,” Nick told him, too caught up in his problems to pretend. “And I was the one that said, uh-oh, better throw that cash away.”

“Just what I did.”

“And came back here.” Nick’s confusion and exasperation and need were so intense he was forgetting the revolver, letting it point this way and that way as he gestured, trying to explain the situation to himself. “That’s what I don’t get,” he said, staring hard at Parker. “That was over a week ago. You were out, you were free and clear, and you came back.” Suddenly suspicious, he threw a quick wary look toward the door and said, “Is Nelson here?”

“No, Nick.”

“Did he drive you? He’s off getting some food, is that it?”

“I don’t travel with McWhitney,” Parker said. “You know that.”

“I know you got a ride here,” Nick said. “You got a ride here, and you’re gonna stay a while, you’re gonna sleep— Somebody’s got to bring you food. Somebody with a car. Why don’t you have a car?”

“I’m not gonna drive around this part of the world, Nick. I’m not gonna draw attention. I don’t have good ID.”

“You wouldn’t even be—” Nick stopped and frowned, then said, as though suddenly seeing the answer to some riddle, “You’re waiting.”

“That’s right,” Parker said, and flipped the mat off his legs.

Nick clenched, the gun now pointing at Parker’s eyes, trembling only a little. “Don’t move!”

“I’m not moving, Nick. I got stiff, that’s all, sleeping here.”

“You could get stiffer.”

“I know that, Nick.” He’s getting ready to shoot, Parker told himself. There’s nothing more he’s going to get from talking and he knows it. And he doesn’t dare let me live.

“Parker...” Nick said, and trailed off, sounding almost regretful.

“We could help each other, Nick,” Parker said. “Better for both of us. And I got water,” he said, holding the bottle up in his left hand. “To keep me going till my ride gets here. It’s just water. Check it out for yourself,” he said, and slowly lobbed the bottle underhand, in an arc toward Nick’s lap.

Nick looked at the bottle rising and falling through the air and Parker’s right hand grabbed up a corner of the mat. He snapped the mat around at Nick’s head, and his body lunged after it.

The bullet first went through the quilted mat.