Dirty Money

1

Parker reached for that fleeing body, but the hours spent asleep on the floor had left him too stiff, his movements less coordinated than he was used to. He missed Nick entirely, and watched him crash through the window, the force of his impact taking out the wooden crosspieces and mullions, shattering the glass, leaving a jagged hole with fresh wind blowing in.

Cursing the stiffness, Parker turned the other way and grabbed the automatic off the floor. Then he used the wall to help him to his feet, and hobbled to the gaping window.

Nick was out of sight. He’d landed on weedy lawn back here, twelve feet down, with the woods half a dozen fast paces away.

Fresh blood hadn’t yet darkened on the zigzag edges of glass. Nick was hurt out there. How badly?

A sound on the stairs, behind him. Had Nick come in? Without his gun?

Parker moved to the corner farthest from the doorway and waited. He heard the heavy steps coming up the stairs, and then silence. He waited.

“Parker?”

Parker leaned against the wall behind him. “Nelson,” he said.

McWhitney appeared in the doorway, his own gun loosely in his hand, but reacted when he saw what Parker was carrying: “Whoa! What’s this?”

“Nick’s gun,” Parker pointed at the slashed window. “That was Nick.”

“He was here?”

“In and out.”

“We heard the crash. Sandra went around back.” Crossing to the wrecked window, he said, “How come he didn’t do you?”

“He wanted to know where my car was.”

McWhitney laughed, first surprised and then amused. “The greedy bastard. Where’s he been keeping himself the last week?”

“He didn’t say.”

McWhitney leaned forward to look out the window and down, and call, “What do you see?”

“Broken glass,” Sandra called back. “Broken wood. What happened up there?”

“Nick went out the window.”

“Nick?”

“We’ll come down,” McWhitney told her.

They went downstairs and around to the back, to find Sandra standing where Nick must have landed, frowning away to the woods behind and to the right of the house. Turning to them, she said, “What happened here?”

“I was asleep,” Parker said, “and then Nick came in. He wanted a car.”

“You don’t have a car,” Sandra told him.

Parker shrugged. “We discussed it. Then I got his gun, and he went out the window.”

“You didn’t push him out.”

“I didn’t want him out. I wanted him in there.”

McWhitney said, “We gotta find him now, Parker.”

“I know.”

“Wait a second,” Sandra said. “We’re here, we’ve got the van. Let’s pick up the money and get out of here.”

“Sandra,” McWhitney said, “Nick has run out his string. Wherever he was holed up, he isn’t there any more. He’s on foot, he’s cut up from that window, he’s a dead duck. If the cops get their hands on him, he puts me right out of business. The bar, everything. I’m on the run the rest of my life.” To Parker he said, “You, too.”

“Not so much.”

“Enough. Enough to give your friend Claire some nervous moments.”

“That’s true.”

Sandra said, “What are you gonna do, run around in the woods? You’re not gonna find him in there. Maybe he’s bleeding to death.”

“We can’t take the chance,” McWhitney said.

Sandra thought about it, and realized she had to bend on this. “Five minutes.”

Parker said, “Sandra, we’ll give it what it takes.”

“I’ll be with the cars,” she told them. She was disgusted.

“With your piece in your lap,” McWhitney advised.

“Now you’re insulting me.”

She headed off around the house and Parker walked over to where dry fallen leaves had been recently scuffed, showing streaks of wetter leaves beneath. The streaks pointed at an angle away from the right rear corner of the house.

Parker and McWhitney, both with guns in their hands, followed the streak line’s direction, away from the house. They kept parallel to each other, but a few paces apart. Away from the house, the narrow tall scrubby second-growth trees were like an army of lancers, all upright, with daylight in vertical strips between. The ground was rocky and uneven, but trended upward, with clusters of thorny shrubs intermixed with nearly bare areas of grass and weed.

They walked along the scrub ground for two or three minutes, watching in every direction, and then McWhitney stopped and said, “I’m not seeing anything.”

“Neither am I.”

Parker looked back and the house was almost completely hidden back there, just a few hints of white. “We don’t have him,” he said.

Complaining, McWhitney said, “I’m not a tracker, I’m a bartender. This isn’t where I do my best work.”

They turned around, headed back to the house, and Parker said, “When you get home, just in case, you gotta start building an alibi.”

“Oh, I know. What’s that?”

Ahead and to their left, a piece of dark gray cloth flapped, its corner stuck to the thorny lower branch of a wide-spread multiflora rose. They went over to look at it, and Parker said, “That’s the pants he was wearing.”

“The road’s right over there.”

“I know it. There’s blood on these thorns here.”

“The son of a bitch is hurt,” McWhitney said, “but he won’t stop. Can we get to the road this way?”

“If we want to bleed like Nick. Easier back around by the house.”

They retraced their steps to the house, and when they came around the side of it Sandra got out of her Honda and said, “Give me some good news for once.”

“We’re alive,” McWhitney told her.

“Try again.”

Parker looked at the van with holy redeemer choir on the doors. “Looks good.”

Sandra said, “So why don’t we use it?”

Parker told her, “You drive your car and the van over to the church, we’ll take one look along the road for Nick.”

She heaved a sigh, to show how patient she was. “Done,” she said.

They walked along the road while she shuttled the vehicles behind them. A red pickup went by, with two guys in hunting caps in it, neither of them Nick; everybody waved.

In a ditch there was a space of tangled smears where somebody or something had slid down out of the roadside scrub, maybe fallen here, then moved on. Impossible to say which direction he had taken.

McWhitney said, “I could take Sandra’s car, follow down this road. Or she could, while we move the boxes.”

“Waste of time,” Parker said. “You can’t find a man on foot with a car. We just get the cash, and clear out of here.”

As they walked back toward the church McWhitney, sounding irritated but resigned, said. “Alibi. Parker, I’m gonna have to call in every marker I got out. And just hope it turns out enough people owe me something.”

2

Sandra had everything ready. The van, its rear doors open, was backed against the concrete landing and steps that led to the side door McWhitney had kicked in more than a week ago. She’d moved her Honda farther forward along that side wall of the church, facing out, tucked in close enough to the church to block from the road much of the view of what would be going on between doorway and van.

McWhitney approved: “Good work.”

“You boys do the heavy lifting,” she said. “I’ll sit in my car and watch. If I see something I don’t like, I’ll honk twice. And then probably drive like hell.”

Parker said, “If they’re that close, you shouldn’t run away. You should draw on us and make a citizen’s arrest.”

“That’s right, Sandra,” McWhitney said. “You’re the upright citizen. You’ve got licenses and everything.”

“Just what I always wanted,” she said. “Caught in the cross fire. Start: let’s get out of here.”

They started. They had a lot of weight to carry, boxes of money and boxes of hymnals, out of the choir loft, down the stairs and into the van. To their right, Sandra sat in her Honda with the engine on, the radio playing soft rock as she read a Forbes magazine.

The money boxes and hymnal boxes were different brands of the same kind of mover’s carton, white, rectangular, with deep-sided lids fitting over them, like the boxes seen carrying evidence into federal courtrooms. Since the hymnals had been on top upstairs, for camouflage, most of them had to be moved first and set aside so the money boxes could be loaded into the van. They developed a two-man bucket brigade system, so they wouldn’t get in each other’s way on the stairs, and within half an hour the van was two-thirds full, with more money boxes still upstairs.

“We’ll have to leave those,” Parker said. “We need space for the other boxes in front and on top, to show at the roadblocks.”

“I hate to leave any of it,” McWhitney said, “but you’re right.”

There were four money boxes still upstairs. They restacked hymnal boxes on top of them, then went down to finish loading the van and, as they did, Parker saw a streak of mud on the floor that hadn’t been there before. It was near the closed door to the basement, a place they’d holed up in after the robbery, a one-time community room from which all the appliances had been removed.

They each carried a carton of hymnals out to the van and Parker said, “You keep working, I got something to do.”

McWhitney was curious, but kept working, as Parker moved forward to Sandra in the Honda and said, “I need a flashlight.”

“Sure,” she said, and took one from a small metal box of supplies she kept bolted to the floor in front of the seat, to the right of the accelerator. “What for?”

“Tell you when I get back.”

The basement, as he remembered it, would be pitch-black, because it had plywood panels that slid across in front of the windows, for when they used to show movies down there. That meant he wouldn’t be able to open the door at the head of those stairs without Nick, down below, knowing he was coming down.

Why would Nick come back here, of all the places in the world? Maybe he still thought there was some chance he could find an edge for himself. Or maybe he just didn’t have any place else to go any more. Maybe his life was a maze, and this was the far end of it, and he didn’t have any other choices.

Parker opened the door, slid through, shut the door behind himself. As dark as he remembered. He silently went down two steps, then sat on that step and waited. Nick wouldn’t have another gun, but he might have something.

No light down there, no sound. Parker waited, then abruptly there was a sound, and an instant later light; gray daylight. Nick was sliding back one of the plywood panels, baring a window. Maybe he thought that would level the playing field somehow.

Parker put the unnecessary flashlight on the step behind him, stood, and took the marshal’s automatic from his pocket.

Nick said, “Hold it, Parker. You want to see this. Take a look out there. I mean it, take a look.”

“At what?”

Nick backed away from the window, gesturing for Parker to help himself. “Do yourself a favor,” he said.

Parker went down the rest of the stairs, crossed to the head-high window, and looked out at a state police patrol car, stopped in front of Sandra’s Honda, just blocking it. Two uniforms were getting out of the patrol car, shrugging their gunbelts at their waists as they moved toward Sandra, one of them a man, the other a woman, both white.

Looking at the automatic in Parker’s hand, Nick said, “You don’t want to make any loud noises. Not now.”

3

Had Sandra honked twice, when she saw the patrol car, as she’d said she would? If so, Parker hadn’t heard it down here. Concrete-block walls, room mostly underground, plywood over the windows. But a shot would be something else. Cops would hear a gunshot.

“We don’t want them looking in that window,” he said, and slid the plywood closed with his right hand as his left hand reached for Nick.

“Hey!”

Nick had backpedaled, but his shout told Parker which way he was moving. And then his ragged breath gave him the spot, and then Parker had his hands on him.

This had to be fast, and then he had to find that window and slide the plywood open just far enough so he could find his way back to the stairs and collect the flashlight. Bring it back, shut out the daylight again, switch on the flash, shine it quickly around.

There. Across the rear end of the room had been a kitchen. The appliances were long removed, making broad blank insets in the Formica counter that ran all across the back, but the sink was still there, set into the counter, with closed cabinet doors beneath. They opened outward to the left and right, with no vertical post between them.

Parker opened the cabinet doors and saw that the pipes for the sink were under there, but nothing else. Plenty of room.

He dragged Nick across the linoleum floor, bent him into the space under the sink, and shut the doors. Then he went back upstairs and outside, where the male cop was giving McWhitney back his license and registration and the female cop was looking at one of the hymnals from a carton in the van.

“Hello,” Parker said, and they all looked at him. He nodded at Sandra and said. “There’s nothing down there.”

“Good,” she said, and explained to the cops, “This is Desmond. He’s the other volunteer.”

“I’m in recovery,” Parker said.

The male cop said, “You were in the basement?” Nobody interrogates somebody in recovery.

“We wanted to know if there was anything useful down there,” Parker said. “But it’s been cleaned out.” To Sandra he said, “The refrigerator’s gone, dishwasher, everything.”

The female cop pointed at the flashlight Parker carried. “No electricity in there?”

“No water, nothing.” He looked over his shoulder at the building. “Empty forever.”

“Not forever,” she said, and surprisingly smiled. “I went to this church when I was a little girl.”

Sandra, delighted by the news, said, “You did? What was it like?”

They all had to discuss that for a while. Parker saw that Sandra had toned herself down, made herself look softer, and that both cops had bought into the idea that she was connected to some sort of religious mission on Long Island, and that he and McWhitney were rehabilitated roughneck volunteers.

After the reminiscence about the old days at the church wound down, the male cop said, “Louise, do we have to toss this place? These people have been all through it.”

“Maybe I’ll just peek in,” Louise said. “See what it looks like now.”

“It looks sad,” Sandra told her. “Been empty a long time.”

Louise frowned, then shook her head at her partner. “Maybe I don’t wanna go in.”

“I think you’re right,” he said, and told the others, “We’ll let you people finish up here.”

Louise said, “I’m glad the hymn books are going to a good home anyway.”

Sandra said, “Would you want one? You know, as a reminder.”

Louise was delighted. “Really?”

“Sure, why not?” Sandra grinned at her. “One hymn book more or less, you know?”

Louise hesitated, but then the male cop said, “Go ahead, Louise, take it. You can sing to me while I drive.”

Louise laughed, and Sandra handed her a hymnal, saying, “It couldn’t go to a better person.”

McWhitney said, “Could I ask you two a favor?”

“Sure,” said the male cop. His partner hugged the hymnal to her breast.

“We’re driving a little truck,” McWhitney pointed out. “Just what everybody’s looking for. If we’re gonna get stopped by all these roadblocks, we’re not gonna get back to Long Island until Tuesday. If you could get the word—”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Louise told him. “The roadblocks are stopped.”

“They are?”

“That’s why we’re out here,” Louise said. “We’re searching every empty building in this entire area.”

“Not for the fugitives,” the male cop said. “For the money.”

“It has to still be somewhere around here,” Louise explained. “So this is a change of policy. The idea is, if we find the money, we’ll find the men.”

“That makes sense,” Sandra said. “Good luck with it.”

“Thanks.”

The cops moved off, Louise holding her hymnal. They got into their patrol car, waved, and drove off. McWhitney watched them go, then said, “Good thing they didn’t start that new policy yesterday.” Looking at Parker he said, “We can throw those prayerbooks out of the van now. We get to take the rest of the money after all.”

4

“No, you don’t,” Sandra said.

McWhitney glowered at her. “How come?”

“You’re still two guys in a truck,” she told him. “They don’t have to have roadblocks to see you drive by and wonder what you’ve got in there.”

“Sandra’s right,” Parker said. “And we’ve got to move. Those two are going into the house across the way.”

They watched as, across the road, the two cops left the patrol car, went up on the porch, tried the door, and stepped inside.

Sandra said, “What do they find in there?”

Parker said, “A broken window, and your mat.”

“I can live without the mat.”

McWhitney said, “What if Parker drives your car? Then we’re a man and a woman in a truck.”

“I’ll drive my car,” Sandra told him.

Parker said, “I’ll ride with Sandra. We’ll follow you, and we’ve got to go now. They’re gonna find blood on the broken window. New blood.”

McWhitney was fast when he had to be. He nodded, slammed the van doors, and headed for the cab of the truck. Parker and Sandra passed him on their way to the Honda, and Parker said, “Head east.”

“Right.”

Sandra got behind the wheel, Parker in on the other side. She started the engine, but then waited for McWhitney to drive around her and turn right, toward the bridge over the little stream. As she followed, Parker looked back at the white house. The two cops were still inside.

“They’ll call in reinforcements,” he said. “But they won’t come from this direction.”

“I wondered why you wanted to go east.”

Up ahead, McWhitney jounced over the bridge, the van wallowing from all the weight it carried. The Honda took the bridge more easily, and Sandra said, “Did Nelson tell you about the guy who followed him?”

“Guy? No.”

“Oscar Sidd.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Nelson says he’s somebody knows about moving money overseas. Nelson talked to him about our money, but he didn’t expect Oscar to follow him.”

“Oscar thought he’d cut himself in.”

“That was the idea.”

“And Nels’s idea, talking to him in the first place was, cut us out.”

“I noticed that, too.”

“What happened to Oscar?”

“I popped a tire, left him in a ditch.”

“Alive?”

“I don’t kill people, Parker,” she said. “All I shot was his tire. He maybe got a concussion from the windshield, but that’s all.”

“So he’s out of the picture. Fine.”

Sandra said, “How long do we go east?”

“You can talk to Nels, can’t you?”

“On our cells, sure.”

“Tell him, we’ll be coming to a bigger road soon. He should turn right and look for a diner or someplace where we can stop and talk.”

It was a bar, a sprawling old wooden place with mostly pickup trucks out front, a pretty good Saturday afternoon crowd at the bar, and an active bumper pool table in the open area to the bar’s left. On the other side were some booths. Pointing to them, McWhitney said, “Grab a place. I’ll buy.”

Parker and Sandra picked a booth, and she said, “You want to drive the whole way tonight?”

“Away from here, anyway. Let’s see what Nels thinks.”

“The thing is,” Sandra said, “my stuff is still in my room at Mrs. Chipmunk’s. But if I go there, that leaves you being two men in a truck again.”

McWhitney came back, his big hands enclosing three beer glasses. Putting them on the table, he bent low and said, “Drink up and we’ll get outa here.” Then he sat, next to Parker.

Parker said, “Something?”

“You see behind the bar,” McWhitney said, “those posters. It’s you and me and Nick again.”

“They’ve been around all week.”

“They got a new one of you over there,” McWhitney said. “I hate to tell you this, but it’s a lot closer.”

Sandra said, “How’d they do that? It better not be Mrs. Chipmunk. I don’t want to walk into a lot of questions about who do I associate with.”

“You’ll talk your way out of that,” Parker told her. “But we’ve got to decide.” To McWhitney he said, “Sandra has to go back to the place where she’s staying, her stuff is there.”

“So you and me travel together, you mean.” McWhitney shook his head. “Back to matching the profile.”

“If that new picture’s that good,” Parker said, “I can’t chance a traffic stop. Sandra, you’ve got to drive me some more. Once we’re south of the Mass Pike, we’re out of the search area, we’ll be okay. Drive me down there, then come back up. I’ll go on with Nels, and you’ll catch up with us at his place later.”

“Another two hours in the car,” she said. “That’s just great.”

5

They were still north of the Mass Pike, in hilly forested country with darkness beginning to spread, when a northbound state police car did a kind of stutter as it passed them, and Parker said, “He’s coming back.”

Sandra looked in her mirror. “Yep. His Christmas tree went on. I guess I should do the talking.”

“No,” Parker said. “He doesn’t want us, he wants the van. Don’t volunteer. If we stop, he’ll throw a light on me.”

Sandra eased to the shoulder to let the cop go by, saying, “I don’t like to leave McWhitney alone.”

“With the money, you mean. But that’s okay. He won’t run out on us, he’s too tied to that bar of his.”

“Then what was he gonna do with Oscar?”

Up ahead, McWhitney pulled off the road, the cop sliding in behind him. Parker said, “He was gonna kill us with Oscar, if he could. Or else just let it play out and see what happens. If it falls that way, he can suddenly say, ‘Oh, here’s a guy can help.’”

“You have nice friends,” Sandra said.

“He’s not my friend.”

Sandra drove over the hilltop and down the other side, and far ahead of them, downslope, the Mass Pike made a pale band of footlights between the darkening ground and the still-bright southern sky.

“I’m gonna stop there,” Sandra said, and nodded ahead toward an old grange hall converted to an antiques shop. An OPEN flag in red, white, and blue hung from a short pole slanting upward above the entrance. Two cars were parked in the small gravel lot at the side. She drove in, parked closer to the road than to the other cars, and watched the rearview mirror. After five minutes she said, “It shouldn’t take this long.”

“Maybe Nels doesn’t look right for the part.”

“I’m going back.”

She U-turned out of the lot and drove back over the hill.

There had been two troopers in the patrol car, both now out. One stood beside McWhitney’s open window, holding his license and registration, talking to him. The other had the rear doors of the van open. Two of the hymnal boxes were on the ground behind the van, their tops at a tilt. The trooper was leaning forward into the van, moving boxes, trying to see if there was anything else inside there. McWhitney’s face, when they drove by, was bunched like a fist with his effort to stay calm and impassive.

“They didn’t like his looks,” Parker said.

“All that trooper has to do,” Sandra said, “is see there’s two kinds of boxes in there.”

Parker looked ahead along the road, but in this direction there were no antiques shops, no buildings at all, just the bright-leaved trees on both sides, reflecting the last of the daylight. “Just pull off on the shoulder,” he said, “If it looks like they’re calling for backup, we’re getting out of here.”

“You know it.”

She angled them onto the shoulder and stopped, lights off and engine running, then watched the scene behind them in her mirror, while Parker adjusted the outside mirror on his side so he could also see what was going on.

There wasn’t a lot of traffic at the moment on this two-lane road, and the few cars that did pass in either direction just went on by the stopped van and patrol car with its flashing lights. They were used to seeing troopers stop other drivers.

Finally the troopers decided to give up. The one handed McWhitney his papers, while the other stood and waited at the rear of the van, hands on his hips. Then the two walked back to their patrol car, with the lights still flashing on its roof. They left the two boxes of hymnals on the ground behind the open rear doors of the van.

“They’re not neat,” Sandra said.

“They’re punishing him for making them not like him,” Parker said, “and then for not giving them a reason to pull him in.”

The troopers got into their car, its flashing lights went off, and they steered out past the van and away. Once they were out of sight, McWhitney, furious, came thumping out of the van to put the boxes back.

Parker said, “Drive over there.”

Sandra made the U-turn, and they pulled in to a stop behind the van. Just as McWhitney finished stowing the boxes and shutting the doors, Parker opened his window and called, “We’ll stop at a motel down by the Pike. This is enough for today.”

“More than enough,” McWhitney said, and stomped away to get behind the wheel.

Sandra didn’t wait for him. She pulled out onto the road and ran them south again, saying, “I’ll drop you at the motel, but then I’m done.”

“I know.”

“I’ll stay in touch with McWhitney, find out what’s happening with the money.”

“You can tell your friend to come back from her vacation now.”

Sandra laughed. “I already did.”

6

It was a chain motel with an attached restaurant and bar. Before dinner, Parker and McWhitney met for a drink in the bar, where Parker gave him cash to cover his room, since McWhitney had put the whole thing on his credit card. “It’s getting harder to operate without plastic,” McWhitney commented.

“I’m getting new when we’re done with this.”

The bar was mostly empty, a dim low-ceilinged place with square black tables and heavy chairs on dark carpet. A young waitress in a short black skirt brought them their drinks, and McWhitney signed the bill. When she left, Parker said, “I think I may know somebody who could take care of the money.”

“Somebody to take it off our hands?”

“He probably could,” Parker said. “But he might not want to. We had a disagreement the last time around. But he’s a businessman, he might go along with it.”

“Who and what is he?”

“A guy named Frank Meany. He works for a liquor import outfit in Jersey called Cosmopolitan Beverages. They’re mobbed up and they do a lot of under-the-counter stuff. Some of it is with Russia.”

“That sounds good. How come you didn’t say anything about him before?”

“We didn’t have the money before. Until I’ve got something to trade, I’ve got nothing to say.”

McWhitney nodded. “What was the disagreement?”

“They involved themselves in somebody else’s argument, somebody thought he had a beef with me.” Parker shrugged. “I convinced them to get uninvolved.”

McWhitney laughed. “Stuck their nose in somebody else’s business, and you gave it a little bop.”

“Something like that. I’ll try calling him tomorrow. If he tells me to go to hell, fine, I can’t blame him. If he says, sounds good, let’s meet, it could either mean it sounds good and he wants a meet, or he’s holding a grudge and wants another crack at me.”

“But you figure this is a better bet than Oscar Sidd.”

“Maybe. Worth a try anyway.”

“And I bet you want me along, if the guy says okay, no hard feelings, let’s meet.”

“That’s right.” Parker gestured over his shoulder. “Without the money.”

7

Around eleven Monday morning, Parker took Claire’s car, still the rental Toyota, to the gas station not far from her house where he usually made his phone calls, to avoid leaving records on Claire’s line. It was a process that required nothing more than patience and a lot of change. It was an exterior pay phone on a stick at the edge of the gas station property, unlikely to be observed or tapped. In this rural setting, there was little to draw anybody’s attention.

“Cosmopolitan Beverages, how may I direct your call?”

“Frank Meany.”

“Who shall I say is calling?”

“Parker.”

There was a little pause. “Is that all?”

“He’ll know,” Parker said.

The operator was gone a long time, and when she came back she said, “Mr. Meany’s in confer—”

“Tell him we both know all about that.”

“Sir?”

“Tell him we talk now, or we don’t talk. I won’t call back.”

“Sir, I can’t—”

“Tell him.”

It was a shorter wait this time, and then the remembered voice of Frank Meany came on the line, a hard, fast, tough-guy voice. “I thought we were done with one another.”

“You mean the little trouble. That’s all over. Everything’s fine now.”

“But here you are on the phone.”

“With a business deal.”

There was a little shocked silence, and then: “A what?”

“I need expertise and a particular kind of access,” Parker said, “and I think you’re the guy has it.”

“Which expertise would that be?”

“Frank, do you really like long conversations on the phone?”

“I don’t like long conversations with you.”

“Up to you.”

Parker waited while Meany tried to work it out. Meany was a hard-nosed businessman in that gray area where the legal part of what he did, importing hard and soft drinks from various parts of the world, spread a protective blanket over the illegal part. He wasn’t his own boss, but worked for a man named Joseph Albert whom Parker had talked to on the phone that last time but had never met face-to-face. The conversation with Albert had been about how much of Albert’s business he was willing to lose before backing away from his confrontation with Parker. The first asset Parker had been offering to remove was Meany. Happily for everybody, Albert had seen there was no reason to be a romantic; cut your losses, and go.

Would Meany still resent that? Of course. Would he be ruled by his resentment? Parker was betting he was too realistic for that.

Finally Meany said, “You wanna come here again? I’m not sure I want you here.” Here being the corporate offices and warehouse of Cosmopolitan, in a bleak industrial area of the Jersey flats just south of where the New Jersey Turnpike Extension, a steel and concrete slab miles long, rose high and blunt over the industrial scree to the Holland Tunnel.

Parker said, “No, I don’t need to go there. Up in the northern part of the state, you know, off the Garden State Parkway, there’s a state park. They got a picnic area there, right in front of the park police building. When people have lunch there, they feel very safe.”

“I bet they do,” Meany said. He sounded sour.

“I bet you and me, just you and me, I bet we could both get there today by two o’clock.”

“From here? Sure. What’s in it for me?”

“That’s what we’re gonna talk about.”

Meany considered that, and then said, “A little picnic lunch with you, in front of the park police.”

“But out of earshot.”

“Yeah, I got that. All right, No First Name. I’ll see you at two o’clock.”

“Brown-bag it,” Parker said.

His second call was to McWhitney’s cell phone. “He’s on. Two o’clock.”

“I’ll be in red.”

8

Parker was the first to arrive. Leaving his car in the parking area, carrying a deli-bought Reuben-on-rye sandwich and a bottle of water in a brown paper bag, he chose a picnic bench midway between the facade of the low brick park police building and the narrow access road around to the parking area. He sat with the building to his right, access road to his left, parking area ahead.

It was a bright day, but a little too cool for lunch in the open air, and most of the dozen other picnic tables were empty. Parker put the paper bag on the rough wood table, leaned forward on his elbows, and waited.

The red Dodge Ram pickup was next, nosing in and around the access road to park so the driver was in profile to the picnic area. Then he opened a Daily News and sat in the cab, reading the sports pages at the back. Parker would have preferred him to move to a table, as being less conspicuous, but it wasn’t a problem.

The next arrival might be. A Daimler town car, black, it had a driver wearing a chauffeur’s cap, and it stopped on the access road itself. The driver got out to open the rear door, and Frank Meany stepped out, looking everywhere at once. He was not carrying a brown bag.

Meany said a word to the driver, then came on, as the driver got back behind the wheel and put the Daimler just beyond the red pickup. A tall and bulky man with a round head of close-cropped hair, Meany was a thug with a good tailor, dressed today in pearl-gray topcoat over charcoal-gray slacks, dark blue jacket, pale blue shirt and pale blue tie. Still, the real man shone through the wardrobe, with his thick-jawed small-eyed face, and the two heavy rings on each hand, meant not for show but for attack.

Meany approached Parker with a steady heavy tread, stopped on the other side of the picnic table, but did not sit down. “So here we are,” he said.

“Sit.” Parker suggested.

Meany did so, saying, “You’re not gonna object to the driver?”

“He gets out of the car,” Parker said, “I’ll do something.”

“Deal. Same thing for your friend in the pickup.”

“Same thing. You didn’t bring a sandwich.”

“I ate lunch.”

Parker shook his head, irritated. As he took his sandwich out of the bag and ripped the bag in half to make two paper plates, he said, “People who ride around in cars like that one there forget how to take care of themselves. If I’m looking at you out of one of those windows over there, and you’re not here for lunch, what are you here for?”

“An innocent conversation,” Meany said, and shrugged.

“In New Jersey?” Parker pushed a half sandwich on a half bag to Meany, then took a bite of the remaining half.

Meany lifted a corner of bread, “Reuben,” he decided. “Good choice.” Lifting his half of the sandwich, he said, “While I eat, you talk.”

“A couple weeks ago, up in Massachusetts, there was an armored car robbery. The news said two point two million.”

“I remember that,” Meany said. “It made a splash.”

Parker liked it that Meany didn’t want to rehash their last meeting, because neither did he. He said, “They caught one of the guys right away, because it turned out they had all the money’s serial numbers.”

“Tough,” Meany said. His small eyes watched Parker as intently as if Parker were a tennis match.

“The people who have the money can’t spend it,” Parker said.

Meany put what was left of his sandwich down onto the paper bag. “You’re saying you have it.”

“No, I’m saying you have business overseas.”

Meany thought about that, and slowly nodded. “So the way you’re thinking about it, I could take this money and make it meld into the international flow and just be anonymous again.”

“That’s right.”

Meany thought about that, looking off toward the Palisades. “It might be possible,” he said.

“Good.”

“And then we’d share whatever I got out of it.”

“No,” Parker said, “it wouldn’t work like that. You’d buy it from us and we’d go away.”

Watchful, Meany said, “What price are you thinking about?”

“Ten cents on the dollar. In front.”

“And the take on this robbery was over two mil?”

“There was some slippage. Call it two even.”

“Two hundred grand.” Meany said, and shook his head. “I couldn’t give you all that in front.”

“I can’t get it any other way.”

Meany said, “Yeah, but what are you gonna do if I just say no?”

Parker said, “You fly to Europe sometimes. You go business class, right?”

“So?”

“Anybody else in the plane?”

Laughing, Meany said, “I get it. There’s gotta be other customers out there. Where’s this money now?”

“Long Island.”

“So you got it out of Massachusetts.”

“That’s right.”

“And now you’re ready to trade. This was north of two mil? How can I be sure?”

“Read the news reports. Look, Meany, I’m saying ten percent on the dollar. You can’t get a steeper discount than that. If the final number’s a little off, one way or the other, who’s gonna complain?”

Meany thought about it. “And you’re gonna want cash.”

“Real, unmarked, and unstolen.”

Meany laughed, “That’s what we usually deal in. I’m gonna have to consult.”

“With Mr. Albert.”

Meany didn’t like the reminder. “That’s right, you had that phone call with Mr. Albert. He didn’t like it I let you get that close to him.”

“No choice.”

Meany nodded, “Well, Mr. Albert’s a sensible man,” he said, “He understood I didn’t have any other choice either.”

“Good. So he might like this.”

“He might, I might not mention the vendor’s you.”

“That’s all right with me.”

“I thought it would be,” Meany said. “So where do I get in touch with you?”

Parker looked at him. “I like the way you never give up,” he said. “When should I call you?”

Meany grinned. He was liking the conversation more than he’d thought he would. He said, “You got any time problems on your hands?”

“No. Where it is it’s safe for as long as we want.”

“Too bad. I’d rather you were under the gun.”

“I know that.”

Meany thought it over. “Call me Thursday,” he decided. “Three in the afternoon.”

“Good.”

Meany waved a hand over the sandwich remnants. “We don’t have to do lunch,” he said.

Massachusetts

Two and a half weeks after the big armored car robbery, and still neither the robbers nor the money had been found. No one would admit it, but law enforcement was no longer completely committed to the hunt. The track was cold, and so was the case.

On that Monday afternoon, troopers Louise Rawburton and Danny Oleski were nearing the end of an eight-a.m.-to-four-p.m. tour, when they passed St. Dympna United Reformed Church. Louise happened to be driving at that moment, Danny every once in a while insisting she take a turn, so she braked when she saw the church and said, “There it is again.”

Danny looked at it. “So?”

“I wanna see it,” she said, and pulled off the road to stop beside the church. “I’m sorry we didn’t go in there last time.”

“Well, we were kind of busy last time. And we had to report that broken window across the road.”

“Well, we’re not busy now. Come on, Danny.”

So Danny shrugged and they both got out of their cruiser, adjusted their belts, and went up to the broken side door. It was early twilight here at this time of year, still plenty of light, but it would be dark inside the church, so they both carried their flashlights. They pulled the door open and stepped in, their light beams shining across the rows of pews and, near the doorway, three of the hymnal boxes squatted on the floor.

“Looks like,” Danny said, “they couldn’t fit them all.”

“Suppose we should take these? Donate them to somebody.”

“We can take them back to the barracks anyway,” Danny said.

“Good idea.”

Aiming the flashlight this way and that, he said, “It’s a real shame. This building’s still in good shape.”

Louise bent to one of the boxes and tugged. “These things are heavy,” she said.

“Well, yeah, they would be. Books.”

“Maybe we should just take some of them now,” she said. “Be sure there’s anybody wants them.”

“Just take one book,” Danny said. “They’re not going anywhere.”

Louise lifted the top off the box she’d been trying to lift, and they both looked in at the rows of greenbacks. The two flashlight beams trembled slightly, converging on all that money.

“Oh, my God,” Danny whispered.

“Oh, Danny,” Louise wailed, “Oh, no, Danny, it was them.”

“We talked with them,” Danny said. He was wide-eyed with shock. “We stood out there and we talked with them.”

“That goddamn woman gave me a hymnbook.”

Danny’s flashlight suddenly spun around, to fix on the basement door. “Why was he down there?” he asked. “What was he doing down there?”

Bitterly, Louise imitated the guy who’d come up out of the basement. “Oh, there’s nothing down there. Appliances all gone, everything gone.”

“Louise,” Danny said, “what was he doing down there?”

She had no answer. He walked over to that door and pulled it open and shone the flashlight down the stairs. Then he uselessly clicked the light switch a few times. Then his nose wrinkled and he said, “Jesus Christ. What’s that smell?”

Detective Gwen Reversa knew there were times she received an assignment only because she was a woman, and was thought therefore to be of a more sympathetic nature than the average male cop. She didn’t disagree with the assessment, but it irritated her anyway. She would have preferred gender-blind assignments, but when the woman’s touch was wanted, she knew she was always going to be that woman.

In her current case, for instance, she was clearly the only one in the office even considered to take the squeal. It was a wrongful death emerging out of a long-term case of simple slavery. The perps were a middle-aged Chinese couple named Cho, early beneficiaries of the Chinese economic miracle. The Chos designed toys, which were made in their mainland factories and sold worldwide. So successful were they that five years ago they’d bought an estate in rural Massachusetts, less than three hundred miles from either Boston or New York, and now split their time between China and the United States.

Their staff in the Massachusetts house was five Chinese nationals with no English, illegally brought in, mistreated, and paid nothing. The finale came when the Chos’ cook died of a burst appendix. The Chos, unwilling to risk exposure by seeking medical assistance, had preferred to believe the cook was malingering and could be cured with a few extra beatings. When they’d tried to bribe a local mortician to keep the death quiet, he instead went to the police.

So now Gwen was here in this stately New England country house filled with bright-colored Oriental decorations, sitting with a woman named Franny from Immigration and a translator named Koh Chi from a nearby community college. The four remaining staff/slaves, frightened out of their wits, were haltingly telling their stories in Mandarin, while Koh Chi translated and a tape recorder stood witness. The Chos themselves were at the moment in state holding cells, and would be questioned when their attorney arrived from Boston tomorrow.

This particular job was slow and tedious, but also heartbreaking, and Gwen wasn’t entirely displeased when the cell phone in her shoulder bag vibrated. Seeing it was her office, she murmured to Franny, “I have to take this,” and went out to the hall to answer.

It was Chief Inspector Davies. “Are you very tied up there?”

“Pretty much, sir.”

“They found some of the money,” he said.

It had been too long. She said, “Money, sir?”

“From the armored car.”

“Oh, my gosh! They found it?”

“Some of it. Also a body. We’re working on ID now.”

“I’ll be right there,” she said, and went back to explain to Franny and to make her promise to send a tape after the interviews.

It was the conference room at the state police barracks this time. In addition to Chief Davies at the head of the table, there were a pair of state troopers sitting along one side, a man and a woman, who introduced themselves as Danny Oleski and Louise Rawburton. Both looked very sheepish. It wasn’t a usual thing to see a state trooper look sheepish, so Gwen wondered, as she took a chair across from them, what was going on.

Introductions over, Inspector Davies said, “Let the troopers tell you their story.” He himself was looking grim; “hanging judge” was the phrase that came to Gwen’s mind.

The troopers glanced at each other, and then the woman, Rawburton, said, “I’ll tell it,” and turned to Gwen. “Out on Putnam Road,” she said, “there’s a church called St. Dympna that was shut down some years ago. My family went there when I was a little girl. The week before last, when we were told to forget the roadblocks and concentrate on empty buildings instead, St. Dympna was in our area.”

“When we got there,” the male trooper, Oleski, said, “two men and a woman were unloading boxes of hymnals from the church into an old Econoline van. It had the name Holy Redeemer Choir on the doors.”

“We looked in a couple of the boxes,” Rawburton said, “and they were hymnals. When I said I used to go to that church the woman even gave me one of them.”

Oleski said, “The minister’s house was across the road. Also empty. Upstairs, we found a back window broken out, looked as though it could have been recent. When we went back to our car to report the broken window, the van was gone.”

Gwen said, “I think I know where this story is going. You went back to the church. Why was that?”

“We happened to go by it,” Rawburton said, “and we didn’t go inside last time, and I realized I just wanted to see what it looked like.”

Gwen said, “You didn’t go in last time?”

Oleski said, “The three people were very open. I looked at license and registration, all fine. One of the men was in the basement when we got there, and he came up and said everything was stripped out down there, appliances and all of that.”

“They were happy to have us search,” Rawburton said. “They seemed happy. There just didn’t seem to be any point.”

Gwen said to Oleski, “You looked at his license. Remember the name?”

Oleski twisted his face into agonized thought. “I’ve been going nuts,” he said. “It was Irish or Scottish. Mac Something. I just can’t remember.”

“I Googled Holy Redeemer Choir in Long Island, just now,” Rawburton said. “There is no such thing.”

“When you went in there today,” Gwen said, “what did you find?”

“Three boxes of hymnals on the floor,” Oleski said. “But when we opened them, it was all money. And when I opened the basement door, the smell came up.”

“It was Dalesia,” Davies said. “We’ve got a positive ID now.”

“I keep thinking,” Rawburton said, “we should have done more, but what more? We checked the driver’s ID, the car registration, looked in boxes.”

“That you opened?” Gwen asked. “Or that they opened?”

Oleski said, “One I opened, two they opened, the second one when the woman gave Louise the hymnbook.”

“That’s a nice touch, isn’t it?” said Davies, the hanging judge.

Gwen said, “And the two men? Any idea who they were?”

Rawburton, looking and sounding more sheepish than ever, said, “They’re the two from the posters.”

“But that new one, of the guy that was in the basement,” Oleski said, “we didn’t get to see that until after we’d met them. And it was a lot closer than the first one.”

Gwen shook her head and said to Davies, “Nine days ago. They were here, just the way you said, and so was the money, and nine days ago it all left.”

“There’s no trail,” Davies said.

“When I think how many times,” Gwen said, “they just slid right through.” The idea she never would be calling Bob Modale over in New York to describe the arrest of John B. Allen and Mac Somebody grated on her, but she’d get over it. “Inspector,” she said, “I should get back to my Chinese slaves. At least there, I think I can deliver a happy ending.”