Nobody Runs Forever

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2004 by Richard Stark

All rights reserved.

Mysterious Press

Warner Books

Hachette Book Group USA

237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Visit our Web site at HachetteBookGroupUSA.com.

First eBook Edition:: November 2004

ISBN 978-0-446-50733-2

Contents

By Richard Stark

ONE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

TWO

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

THREE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

FOUR

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

BY RICHARD STARK

The Hunter

The Man with the Getaway Face

The Outfit

The Mourner

The Score

The Jugger

The Seventh

The Handle

The Damsel

The Rare Coin Score

The Green Eagle Score

The Dame

The Black Ice Score

The Sour Lemon Score

Deadly Edge

The Blackbird

Slayground

Lemons Never Lie

Plunder Squad

Butcher’s Moon

Comeback

Backflash

Flashfire

Firebreak

Breakout

ONE

1

When he saw that the one called Harbin was wearing a wire, Parker said, “Deal me out a hand,” and got to his feet. They’d all come to this late-night meeting in suits and ties, traveling businessmen taking a break with a little seven-card stud. Harbin, a nervous man unused to the dress shirt, kept twitching and moving around, bending forward to squint at his cards, and finally Parker, a quarter around the table to Harbin’s left, saw in the gap between shirt buttons that flash of clear tape holding the wire down.

As he walked around the table, Parker stripped off his own tie—dark blue with thin gold stripes—slid it into a double thickness, and arched it over Harbin’s head. He drew the two ends through the loop and yanked back hard with his right hand as his body pressed both Harbin and the chair he was in against the table, and his left hand reached over to rip open Harbin’s shirt. The other five at the table, about to speak or move or react to what Parker was doing, stopped when they saw the wire taped to Harbin’s pale chest, the edge of the black metal box taped to his side.

Parker bore down, holding Harbin against the table, pulling back now with both hands on the tie, twisting the tie. Harbin’s hands, imprisoned in his lap, beat a drumroll on the bottom of the table. The other players held the table in place, palms down, and looked at McWhitney, red-bearded and red-faced, who’d brought Harbin here. McWhitney, expression solemn, looked around at each face and shook his head; he hadn’t known.

“My deal, I think,” Dalesia said, as calm as before, and shuffled the cards a while, as the others watched Harbin and Parker. Dalesia dealt out hands in front of himself, all the cards facedown, and said, “Bet the king.”

“Fold,” said Mott.

It was Stratton who’d taken this hotel room in Cincinnati. He pointed at McWhitney, pointed at Harbin, made a thumb gesture like an umpire calling the runner out. McWhitney nodded and quietly got to his feet, being sure the chair wouldn’t scrape on the floor.

Mott and Fletcher were seated flanking Harbin; now they held him upright while Parker peeled his necktie out of the new, deep crease in Harbin’s neck.

“These cards are dead,” Mott said, and Fletcher peeled the tape off Harbin’s chest, freeing the antenna wire and the transmitter box.

McWhitney, standing there, made a broad shrugging gesture to the table, a combination of apology and innocence, then came around to pick Harbin up in a fireman’s carry, bent forward with Harbin’s forearms looped around his own throat.

“Bet two,” Parker said, coming back to his place at the table.

Fletcher held the transmitter and antenna while Mott crossed to the sofa at the side of the room and came back with a cushion, which he put where Harbin had been seated. Fletcher put the transmitter on the cushion, and they all sat, making comments about the game they weren’t playing, except Stratton, who went into the other room, where his gear was.

McWhitney carried Harbin to the hall door, looked out, and left, carrying the body. At twenty after one on a weekday morning, there wasn’t likely to be much traffic out there.

They continued not to play, to discuss how cold the cards were, and to suggest they might all make an early night of it. They hadn’t been together in the room long before Parker had made his discovery, and so hadn’t yet started to talk about anything that the wire shouldn’t know. They were mostly new to one another, and would have had to get acquainted a while before they started to talk for real.

Stratton was back from the other room in five minutes, with one suitcase. He took his former chair and said, “Deal me out.”

The others all made comments about breaking up early, the cards not interesting, try again some other time. Fletcher, who, it turned out, could sound something like Harbin, with that same rasp in his voice, said, “You guys go ahead, I’ll clean up in here.”

“Thanks, Harbin,” Stratton said, and as they left, they all said, “See you, Harbin,” to the transmitter on the cushion.

2

Parker and Dalesia and Fletcher and Mott and Stratton rode the elevator down together. Mott said, “Which of us is in their sights, do you think?”

“I hope not me,” Stratton said. “I took that room. Not as me, but still . . .”

Parker said, “Most likely McWhitney, he brought him.”

“Or maybe,” Fletcher said, “just any target of opportunity. Decorate him like a Christmas tree, send him out to get them somebody else, because they’ve already got him.”

“That sounds right,” Stratton said. “They love to turn people. Tag, you’re it, now you’re on my side, go turn some of your friends.”

“They’re like vampires,” Fletcher said, “making more vampires.”

The lobby door opened and they went out to a big space empty of people except for one green-blazered girl clerk behind the check-in desk. Fletcher and Mott had come together, and went off together. The other three had all arrived alone. “See you,” Stratton said, and left.

Parker was also going to leave, but Nick Dalesia said, “You got a minute?”

Dalesia, a thin man with tense shoulders, was the one who’d invited Parker here, and the only one present he’d known before, and that not very well. “Yes,” Parker said.

“Let’s find a bar.”

At a booth in an underpopulated bar, the few other customers either male-female couples or male singletons, Dalesia said, “This means I’m still out of work.”

“Yes,” Parker said.

“And you, too.”

Parker shrugged.

Dalesia said, “I came here because the only other thing I had for a possible is maybe a little iffy and farther down the line. But now I’m thinking maybe I’ll look into it, and maybe you’d like to check it out, too. It’s good to have somebody with you where there’s a little history.”

“Not much history,” Parker said.

Nick Dalesia was a driver brought into a job Parker was on some years ago, brought in there by a guy named Tom Hurley, who Parker had known better. But Hurley got himself shot in the arm that time, and hadn’t ever gotten over it completely, and had gone away to life in retirement somewhere offshore, maybe the Caribbean. Dalesia had been competent that one time, but Parker hadn’t met up with him again until Dalesia had made the phone call that had brought them both here.

“A little history is enough,” Dalesia said, “if you feel you can trust the guy. This gold thing is dead, I think.” Meaning Stratton’s target, which they hadn’t gotten around to talking about: a shipment of dental gold.

“It’s dead as far as I’m concerned,” Parker said. “What’s this other thing?”

“It’s a bank,” Dalesia said, “in western Massachusetts.”

Parker shook his head. “A small-town bank? There’s not much there.”

“No, what this is,” Dalesia told him, “it’s a transfer of assets. These two local banks merged, or one of them bought the other one, so they’re shutting one of the main offices down, so they’re emptying a vault.”

“Heavy security,” Parker said.

“You’re right.”

Parker frowned toward the bar. “The reason it’s iffy,” he said, “is it comes with somebody inside.”

“Right again.”

“You know,” Parker said, “the amateur on the inside is what usually makes a good thing go bad.”

“What they’re doing,” Dalesia said, “they’re doing an all-night move, four armored vans, state police, private security. Moving everything, the bank’s records, the commercial paper, the cash. What Mrs. Inside gives us is not only what night do they do it, but which van has the cash.”

“Mrs. Inside?”

“The wife of the bank that’s being merged,” Dalesia said. “Don’t ask me what her problem is. The point is, nobody can take down four armored cars in a convoy, and what are the odds of getting the right one? But if you know the right one, chances are, you can cherry-pick it.”

“And if that happens,” Parker said, “not only do they know there was somebody on the inside, pretty soon they know who.”

“But she won’t lead them to us,” Dalesia said, “because she doesn’t know us. Who she knows is a guy used to work security for the bank, like head of all the guards or something—he skimmed a little too often, did time. That bent him over to our side, he’s been in a few things, I got to know him, Jake Beckham. Mean anything?”

“Never heard of him.”

“Good, so you’re even further away. The wife went to Beckham, offered him the job for a piece, he came to me, and I made the exact same face you’re making right now. But Stratton’s gold mine isn’t gonna happen, so I’m thinking I’ll call Beckham, see if it’s all still the same. Will you want to hear what he says?”

“I can listen,” Parker said.

3

Parker drove the MassPike east out of New York State and pulled off at the service area just west of Huntington, getting there a little before three in the afternoon. It was mid-September, the air crisp, the sunlight sharp, like a clean blade. He put his Lexus in among the tourists’ cars and got out to stretch. He was a few minutes early, but after driving up from New Jersey, he was ready to stand.

Over there to his right, the MassPike roared, heavy traffic in both directions. That was the easternmost leg of Interstate 90, beginning on the Atlantic coast at Boston and ending three thousand miles to the west in Seattle. This part of the road was always busy, the big rigs and the tourists and the commuters streaming along together, everybody at eighty, holding inside their own bubble of space in the flow or there’d be hell to pay.

He was there five minutes when a green Audi eased down the lane between the rows of parked cars and came to a stop. Parker nodded at Dalesia at the wheel and walked around the car to get in on the passenger side. Dalesia put the Audi in gear and said, “Well, even if it turns out to be nothing, we’ve got good weather for it.”

There was nothing to say to that, so Parker watched as Dalesia put them back up on the Pike, eastbound, then said, “Where we headed?”

“Exit’s about fifteen miles farther on, near Westfield. Then we turn north. Was that your car back there, or just something you picked up?”

“Mine.”

“Then we’ll come back for it.”

Once they got off the MassPike, Dalesia took them on increasingly narrow winding roads as they headed northwest. “All the real roads around here,” he explained as they stopped at and then crossed another larger road, “want to take you east, over to the towns along the Connecticut River. What we want is north, up near Vermont.”

They rode a few minutes in silence, and then Dalesia said, “I heard a little more about what happened after we left.”

Parker said, “Stratton and his dental gold?”

“Yeah.”

“Stratton was the one brought you in, wasn’t he?”

“Oh, yeah, it was his party. I called him a few days later.”

“On this thing we’re going to?” Parker wouldn’t like that.

Dalesia shook his head. “No,” he said, leaning on it. “If you make a meet, and one guy shows up wired, anybody could be the hot one, starting with the host.”

“And including you or me.”

“Well, not so much,” Dalesia said. “You didn’t know anybody there but me, and I didn’t know anybody but you and Stratton. So what I wanted to know was, were they looking at me now, just in case Stratton had been their first target. According to him, the very next day after we decided not to play poker after all, some state cops scooped up McWhitney.”

“He’s the one brought Harbin.”

“That’s right. Apparently, these cops were a little pissed. Their boy Harbin wasn’t anywhere to be found, and McWhitney must have been their target, since he’s who they went after right away. But they didn’t have anything. If he’d wanted to negotiate, McWhitney had a name or two on us, mostly wrong, but mostly all he had to do was tell them he didn’t know anything about anything. They had no probable cause, no specific crime, not even a discussion. Just a wire left behind in an empty room. So he’s out.”

“With a leash on him,” Parker said.

“Oh, sure.” Dalesia shrugged and said, “I figure Stratton’s got a leash, too, these days, since he’s the one called McWhitney for the meet.”

“If they think there’s something to be found,” Parker said, “they’ll look behind Stratton. They’ll want to know who else was in that room.”

“Here’s the funny thing,” Dalesia said. “They can’t get to you except through me, because Stratton didn’t know you from a bag of Bugler, and they can’t get to me except through Stratton, because the rest of them were new to me. But that doesn’t help them either, because I don’t know Stratton’s first name, and he doesn’t know my last.” Grinning, he said, “I mean, he really doesn’t know it. You remember, in the room, he introduced me as Nick.”

“I remember.”

Dalesia negotiated a steep climbing curve, moving up into the Hoosac hills, trending northwest toward the Berkshires. Then he said, “You’d be surprised how many people there are named Nick.”

4

The town was called Rutherford, built into a lower south-facing fold of the Berkshires. Vermont was another ten or fifteen miles farther north, New York State a little farther to the west. The town apparently had some seasonal tourist business because of ski slopes nearby, judging from the few specialty shops along the main street, but this wasn’t the season yet, and the place had a siesta look to it.

Driving slowly along toward the town’s only traffic light, the time now about four-thirty in the afternoon, Dalesia said, “We’re looking for a doctor, on the right, a big white shingle— There it is. Myron Madchen, MD.”

Parker looked and saw another two-story building, like most of them along here, with a store downstairs and either offices or residences above. This one had a florist below, venetian blinds over the windows upstairs, and that rectangular white sign with black lettering suspended out over the door beyond the florist’s window. He said, “We’re meeting at a doctor’s office?”

“Beckham’s idea,” Dalesia said, pulling into a parking place a few doors farther on. “I like it.”

They got out of the Audi, and as they walked back along the empty sidewalk, Dalesia said, “I heard of guys doing this with lawyers before, meet at his office because the law can’t bug a lawyer’s office because of lawyer-client privilege, but it works just as good with a doctor. Patient confidentiality. It could be even better, because lawyers worry about the law all the time, but what doctors worry about is money.”

Dalesia opened the door beneath the doctor’s sign, which had another, more discreet sign in its curtained window, and Parker followed him up a steep carpeted staircase with oak railings on both sides. At the top were two dark-stained wooden doors, both with brass plaques screwed to them. The one straight ahead read PRIVATE and the one to the right read ENTER.

Dalesia pushed open ENTER and they stepped into a large square waiting room with shabby armchairs and worn carpet. Three people who looked like the room were waiting there; all looked up from their magazines, then down again.

Across the way was a glassless window in the opposite wall, and beyond that a smaller office with a woman seated at a desk, behind her a row of white filing cabinets. Dalesia crossed to the window, Parker following, and said to the woman, “Turner, I got an appointment.”

“William Turner? Yes, here you are. Has the doctor seen you before?”

“Oh, sure, I’m in your files.” Jabbing a thumb at Parker, he said, “This is Dr. Harris, my diagnostician.”

This didn’t seem to surprise the woman at all. Making a note, she said, “Just have a seat, the doctor will see you shortly.”

“Thanks.”

They found adjoining chairs in front of the venetian-blinded windows, and leafed through fairly elderly newsmagazines. After about three minutes, the woman behind the window said, “Mrs. Hancock,” and one of the waiting patients got up and went through the interior door.

Parker said, “Lawyers are quicker.”

Dalesia thought that was funny. “Yeah, they are.”

Two or three minutes later, a man who must be the doctor himself came out the door that Mrs. Hancock had gone in. He was a heavyset, polished-looking man of about fifty, with lush iron-gray hair combed straight back over a high forehead, and large, pale eyeglasses that bounced the light. He carried a manila folder, and his eyes swept casually over Parker and Dalesia as he walked to the open window, bent there, and spoke briefly with the woman. He gave her the manila folder, turned away, scanned Parker and Dalesia again, and went back into his office.

Now it was less than a minute before the woman said, “Mr. Turner.”

Dalesia got to his feet. “Yeah?”

“Go right in.”

Dalesia and Parker stepped through the interior door to a narrow fluorescent-lit hallway with closed doors along both aides. A shy girl dressed as a nurse smiled at them and opened a door on the right, saying, “Just in here. Dr. Madchen will be right with you.”

“Thanks,” Dalesia said.

They went through, and she closed the door after them. This was an examination room, with a long examining table and two chrome-and-green vinyl chairs. The walls were covered with glass-fronted cabinets of medical supplies, and posters about various diseases.

Seated on the examining table, reading a People magazine while his feet dangled above the floor, was a stocky fiftyish man in an open gray zippered windbreaker and shapeless cotton chinos. He looked like a carny roustabout who didn’t realize he was too old to run away with the circus.

When Parker and Dalesia came in, he tossed the magazine onto the table, hopped to his feet, and stuck his hand out in Dalesia’s direction, saying, “Whadaya say, Nick?”

“Nice place you got here,” Dalesia said, shaking hands.

The man laughed and put his hand out toward Parker, saying, “You’d be Parker, I guess. I’m Jake Beckham.”

Taking the hand, finding it strong but not insistent, Parker said, “This is an examining room.”

“That’s what it is, all right,” Beckham said. He was proud of his meeting place.

Parker said, “So why don’t we all look at our chests?”

Surprised, Beckham laughed and said, “By God, you’re right! Nick, this guy is good.”

They all stripped to the waist, showing that none of them carried a recorder or transmitter. Dressing again, Beckham said to Parker, “Nick told you the idea, I guess.”

“Two banks merge, move the goods from one to the other. You’ve got an inside woman to tell you which truck the cash is in.”

“And some inside woman she is,” Beckham said, grinning to let them know he’d slept with her. “Sit down, guys, let me tell you the situation.”

While the other two took the vinyl chairs, Beckham hopped back up on the examination table. He was a bulky guy, but he moved as though he thought he was a skinny kid. Settled, he said, “Small banks are getting eat up, all around the country. If they don’t bulk up by merging with one another, they get swallowed by some international monster out of London or Hong Kong. The bank in this town—you might’ve noticed it, coming in: very old-fashioned, brick, with a clock tower—it’s called Rutherford Combined Savings, and the ‘Combined’ means it already ate a couple even smaller banks, outfits with three offices in three towns ten miles apart. So now Rutherford’s got maybe twenty branches all around the western half of the state, and a little farther south you’ve got Deer Hill Bank, four branches. Deer Hill’s who I used to work for before they caught me with my hand in the till.”

Parker said, “Nick says you did time.”

“Seven to ten, served three. Well, two years, eleven months, four days.” With the boyish grin that seemed strange on that heavy face, he said, “You know yourself, there’s some things you don’t round off.”

“No.”

“My history is simple,” Beckham said, “but I guess you oughta know it. Into the army at eighteen, they made me an MP, based in Germany for a while, saw how an MP could supplement his income. But I didn’t really like the army, so after a couple close calls—I never did get caught at anything, but I got suspected a lot—after a couple of those, end of my second enlistment, I quit. Seemed to make sense to go into policing, so I did. Not big towns—I don’t want to spend my life doing shootouts with drug dealers—small cities like this. But I think my army years made me a little too rough-and-ready for those civilians, so after a while I didn’t have any more police jobs, and that’s when I went to work doing security for Deer Hill. The president was a hard-drinking old guy named Lefcourt, Harvey Lefcourt, and him and me got along just fine. Harvey’s daughter Elaine was married to a smarmy piece of shit named Jack Langen, and Harvey was bringing him into the business, vice president and all, because on his own Jack Langen would starve to death in a supermarket and take Elaine down with him. So I was in charge of security, I hired and fired the guards, hired the companies that maintained the vaults and the deposit boxes, did all of that, found some ways to dip in here and there, but I’m afraid I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was.”

Beckham grinned and shook his head. He seemed mostly amused at himself, as though he were observing his own raffish kid brother and not himself. He said, “An audit found my footprints, followed them to me. Harvey didn’t want to prosecute, he’d of just let me go without a recommendation, but Jack Langen pressed it all the way. I don’t think he knew I was putting it to his wife, I think it was just the natural evil of a useless piece of shit handed a little authority. So in I went, and two years, eleven months, four days later out I got, and called Elaine, and we went back to seeing each other from time to time while I took a crap assistant manager job at a motel down by the MassPike. Harvey had died while I was inside and pissant Jack Langen was the president now, and when Rutherford Combined come along he was more than happy to sell out to them for lowball dollar and a make-work place on their board. Deer Hill doesn’t even get to keep its name, it just becomes part of the Combined.”

Parker said, “This doesn’t sit well with the wife.”

“With the daughter,” Beckham said. “She’s more Harvey’s daughter than she is Jack Langen’s wife. I think she’d have left him long ago except he had the bank, and the bank, as far as she was concerned, was Harvey. So she stuck around to watch out for the company the way Harvey would, and if he was alive Harvey would rather get swallowed up by some Chink from Hong Kong than the tight-asses of Rutherford Combined, that’s how Elaine sees it, and I think she’s right. So once Deer Hill is gone, she’ll be gone, too. Not with me, she’s got more sense than that, but gone somewhere she can do some good for herself. And for that, she’ll need money. She wouldn’t wind up very far ahead just divorcing Jack Langen, she knows what he’s like, so what the hell. She called me, we did some pillow talk, and the idea was, I put a string together and take Deer Hill’s cash and give her a third. That way, she screws Jack Langen and Rutherford Combined, and she can still divorce the weasel and get on with her life. And two-thirds of Deer Hill’s bank money would be a very comfortable amount for us boys.”

Beckham looked around at them, bright-eyed, pleased with himself. “Well, Mr. Parker,” he said. “What do you think?”

5

I don’t like it,” Parker said.

Surprised, Beckham said, “You don’t? What’s wrong with it?”

“Most things,” Parker told him. “The hinge of the thing is an amateur. Even a calm amateur is usually trouble, and this one is all emotion. It isn’t about money, it’s about revenge and anger and family pride. I can’t use any of those things.”

“No, you’re right,” Beckham said. He had nodded all the way through Parker’s statement, and now he nodded another minute more, as though mulling over in his mind the rightness of what Parker had said. Finished nodding, he said, “It may be I’m kidding myself, I hope not. It may be you can talk me out of a big mistake that’d put me right back inside, where I do not want to be. Because you’re right about the whole thing, Elaine is one pissed-off lady, and if I’m just some pussy-whipped clown she’s using to get revenge on her husband then I oughta be told about it by somebody before I do myself an injury.” He shook his head and turned to Dalesia to say, “The reason I went up last time, I wasn’t careful enough, didn’t take everything into consideration. Am I doing that again? I sure hope not.”

“Well, Jake,” Dalesia said, “so far, it sounds to me as though maybe that’s what’s happening.”

“Shit,” said Beckham. “Mr. Parker, let me try something here. Let me walk you through it the way I see it, how the details go down, and you tell me if there’s any more sense in it once you know what I have in mind. If you still say it’s no good, I’m gonna have to rethink here, and I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t have a plan B.”

Parker said, “How long can we stay in this room?”

“This won’t take long. Honest.”

Parker shrugged. “Go ahead, then.”

“The first thing you have to know,” Beckham told him, “is that Elaine isn’t any part of it. Not what we’re doing. The bank is gonna make this move, close down the Deer Hill office, no sooner than two weeks from now and no later than the first of November, because they don’t want to get all mixed up with weather and skiers. It all depends on weather, and when the armored cars and the private security are available. They won’t know for sure until about five days before they make the move. As soon as Elaine finds out through her husband when that will be, and which car the cash will be in, she’ll get word to me, and that’s the last she has to do with anything. I already know the route, so that’s taken care of. The night comes, we make our move, we disappear.”

“Well, you don’t disappear,” Parker told him. “You’re on parole, aren’t you?”

“And I’m being a very good boy, believe me. And Dr. Madchen is gonna see to it I’m in the hospital that night, I’m gonna come down with something not too serious. He’ll put me in a private room, so I can sneak out of there to do the job and then back, and that’s my alibi.”

Parker and Dalesia looked at each other, expressionless. Then Parker said, “Beckham, what’s this Dr. Madchen to you?”

“There’s a cousin of his,” Beckham said, “got into drugs, wound up in the same can as me. I knew the doctor from before, you know, just as a patient, and he wrote to me, asked me to help with his cousin, he was afraid the cousin wasn’t up to taking care of himself on the inside, and let me tell you, was he ever right. So I did help, and took care of the guy, and now the good doctor feels he owes me one, and this is it.” Beckham grinned again, in that boyish way that seemed so at odds with who he was. “So there you are,” he said. “There’s my alibi. I’m in the hospital when it happens, I couldn’t be involved.”

Parker shook his head. “No,” he said.

Now Beckham looked more frustrated than worried. “Still no? Why? I’ve got the emotional one out of it, I’ve got my own alibi, you guys are big boys and can take care of yourselves, work out your own cover. The job is good, Mr. Parker, I know it is, that target is good, that armored car full of cash.”

“Yes, it is,” Parker agreed. “That part is all right, that’s what got me here. If it was just that, we could do it and no problem.”

“You still see problems,” Beckham said.

“Two, to start with,” Parker said. “In the first place, it’ll take the cops about twenty minutes to work out the link between you and the doctor.”

Beckham looked bewildered. “Why are they gonna look?”

“Because you’re the one they’re going to want for the job, from the start,” Parker told him. “The minute it happens, they’re going to be looking for you, and there you are in a hospital. Hospital? Who put you in this hospital? What’s the connection between you and this doctor? If another doctor looks you over, because the police want to know what the story is here, what’s he gonna find?”

Beckham shook his head, a man bedeviled by gnats. “But why are they gonna just think about me?”

Dalesia said, “Let me tell him that part.”

“Go ahead,” Parker said.

Dalesia said to Beckham, “Parker’s right, the job’s all clouded up because of emotions. Including yours, Jake.”

Beckham reared back on the examination table, his feet floating above the floor. Clutching at his chest, he said, “Mine?”

Dalesia said, “The husband— What’s his name?”

“Jack Langen, the little prick.”

“There you go,” Dalesia said. “You just said it yourself.”

Beckham spread his hands. “Said what?”

“Jack Langen isn’t the little prick,” Dalesia told him. “He’s the angry husband. He knew you were putting it to his wife from the very first.”

“He doesn’t know his ass—”

“That’s why he pressed charges on you the first time,” Dalesia told him. “Overrode his father-in-law, put it to you because he knew you were putting it to the missus. And the minute you got out, he knew when it started up again. Part of this bank merger deal is to get back at the wife and not be the young nobody brought into the family business any more.”

Parker said, “And the second this job goes down, he’ll know it’s you, with her help. He’ll right away start saying your name to the cops, and telling them why it has to be you, and why his own wife has to be the insider. You’re all they’ll look at, and that’s why they’ll see through the doctor alibi in a heartbeat.”

Dalesia said, “Jake, all you wanted was to feel contempt for the husband, like he didn’t matter, like you were that much smarter than him. That’s called underestimating your enemy, Jake.”

“Shit,” Beckham said. “You mean, it still can’t be done?” Turning to Parker, he said, “You said yourself, without the emotions in it the job is good. I really want to do this, Mr. Parker, I need the stake, I need to get my life together. Do you see any way at all we could still pull it off?”

“One way,” Parker said. “I was thinking about it while Nick was telling you things. There’s one way you might get the cops to stop looking at you.”

“I’ll do it,” Beckham said.

“We’ll see.”

“Why?” Beckham looked a little alarmed. “What do you want me to do?”

“Violate parole,” Parker said.

6

Violate—” Beckham stared at Dalesia, then at Parker: “What are you talking about?”

“How often you have to report in?”

“Twice a month. But I don’t see—”

“When’s your next time?”

“Next Tuesday,” Beckham said. “Ten in the morning. But—”

“You don’t show up,” Parker said. “What you do—”

“The hell I don’t show up!” Beckham was so agitated he actually hopped off the examination table and stood with one hand pressed on the table behind him. He wasn’t angry; he was just staggered by the idea. “The whole thing I been doing since I got out,” he said, “is build a record, no violations. Same as when I was in, got full good-behavior time credit.”

Dalesia said, “Listen to him, Jake.”

Beckham didn’t want to. He shook his head, then folded his arms and glowered at Parker, waiting.

“What you do,” Parker told him, “the day you’re supposed to report, you fly to Vegas. That’s Tuesday. Saturday, you turn yourself in to the Vegas cops, you’re a parole violator, you don’t know what came over you, met a woman, got drunk, flew away with her, you know you’re in trouble, nothing like this ever happened before, you just want to get straight with the law.”

“They’ll lock me up,” Beckham said.

“Yes, they will,” Parker said. “By the time they check you out, do a hearing there, bring you back, give you a hearing here, decide what to do with you, it’s three weeks. If the bank move has gone down by then, you get a lawyer, you talk about your good record inside and since, you work your ass off to get time served. If it didn’t go down yet, you’re sullen, you don’t want anybody’s help, you’ll get another thirty days tacked on.”

“Thanks a lot,” Beckham said.

Dalesia said, “Jake, don’t you get it? You couldn’t have had anything to do with the bank job because you were in jail, you were in a cell, the law had you.”

“You were already in a cell,” Parker pointed out, “before you could have known anything about the details of the bank move.”

“But I gotta be there to do it,” Beckham said. “What good is that, I’m in some jail cell? I’m in some jail cell, the job doesn’t happen.”

“We do it,” Dalesia said.

Beckham frowned at Dalesia. The idea had never occurred to him. He said, “You do it without me?”

“You’re still part of it,” Parker assured him. “You brought it to us, so you’re still in it, you get your share. But the law isn’t looking at you.”

“Jake,” Dalesia said, “what Parker’s doing, he’s getting all the emotion out of it, including you. So it’s just us, and anybody else we have to bring in.”

“But—” Beckham couldn’t get his mind around this idea. “I have to be there,” he said. “When it happens, it’s my— I have to be there.”

“If you’re there,” Parker told him, “you’re in jail the next day, you and your lady friend both, in different jails, for the next twenty years.”

“If you’re not there,” Dalesia said, “if you’re already in jail then for some other reason, that’s it, you’re never behind bars again, you’ve got your stake, you wait out your parole, the world is yours.”

Parker said, “Do you want the score, or do you want to make a point? Tell the world off, and go down in flames.”

“Jesus.” Beckham didn’t sit on the examination table again, but he leaned backward against it, brow furrowed like corduroy as he stared at the floor, trying to work out this new situation. “You’re asking me . . .,” he decided, and trailed off.

Dalesia picked up on that. “What, to trust us? You’d never find Parker, Jake, but I couldn’t hide from you. We go back a long way. You never wondered about me before. We’ve been in tents by trout streams up above Quebec, Jake, and we both slept like babies.”

“I know that,” Beckham said, and roused himself. “Jesus, I don’t mistrust you, Nick, and if you say you don’t worry about Parker, I won’t worry about Parker. But this was my baby, it’s been my baby from the beginning. It’s not like I go off with Elaine at the end of it, what I get is the cash, but it’s my cash, my score.”

Dalesia said, “It just happens, Jake, in your score this time, you put the two of us on the send, we come back with the winnings. Meantime, you cover your ass.”

Beckham sighed. “I gotta get used to this,” he said. “All right, if this is what has to happen, what do you want from me?”

Dalesia turned to Parker, who said, “What does Elaine drive?”

“A white Infiniti.”

Dalesia laughed: “So the marriage isn’t all downside.”

Beckham showed him a sour face. “The car’s leased by the bank,” he said. “It’s all scam. She doesn’t get to choose it, and she doesn’t get to keep it.”

Parker said, “Do you have a place to stash the money car, once you’ve got it?”

“Yeah, a good one.” The idea made Beckham smile. “It’s one of those old nineteenth-century factory buildings, old brick, concrete floors, the jobs moved to the South seventy years ago, abandoned ever since, take it a thousand years to rot away.”

“All right.” Parker turned to Dalesia. “You got anything to do between now and tomorrow?”

“Only this.”

To Beckham, Parker said, “Tomorrow morning at ten, she drives the Infiniti to the service area on the MassPike west of Huntington. Eastbound side. She parks there, and we’ll find her.”

Dalesia said, “You better tell her what we look like.”

“I don’t know,” Beckham said. “You’re bringing her in?”

“She brought herself in,” Parker said, “and you brought her in. She meets with us, she has a map of the money route, she tells us what she knows about which armored car we want, and we give her a phone number to call when she’s got the date it’s going down. Then she leaves again. The only thing left for her to do, when the move is scheduled, she calls that number. Then maybe she should go shopping in New York for a few days.”

“She does those to Boston,” Beckham said, “on account of I can’t leave the state.”

Dalesia laughed. “Funny thing is,” he said, “on the day the job goes down, you really won’t be able to leave the state.”

7

The old empty factory Beckham had described was in a remnant of a town ten miles south of Rutherford, on a narrow, hilly road that was itself a branch off a secondary road. Down below them to their left, through pine trees, was a fast, twisty stream that the road followed.

As they drove, Dalesia said, “Jake’s problem is, he’s still part amateur himself.”

“He is,” Parker said.

“I like him, don’t get me wrong, but he didn’t start out to be one of us. He started out to be a soldier boy, obey orders, get drunk, chase girls. He got turned and turned, and he’s with us now because he’s got no place else to be.”

“He brings us a job,” Parker said, without emphasis, “he got from the woman he’s in bed with.”

“I know. It’s worse than a soap opera. Do you think you got him to back out of this?”

“Maybe. If not,” Parker said, “you’re the one he can finger.”

Dalesia laughed, but then he said, “No. I put one in his head before that.”

“Then her head, too.”

Dalesia, considering, said, “You think so?”

“Never trust pillow talk.”

Dalesia thought about that for a while, then said, “We could just keep driving.”

“We could.”

“I got nothing else.”

“Neither of us has anything else.”

Dalesia nodded. “For Jake’s sake,” he said, “I hope he can keep himself under control.”

After a while, the road they were on descended to a flatter, more open area at stream level, and that was where they found the town, or what was left of it: a few old wooden houses with junked cars around them and clothes drying on lines extended back toward the encroaching pines. There were no stores or other commercial establishments.

Then the road made a left turn over a small concrete bridge, with just beyond it the hulk of the factory building on the right and an abandoned old wooden hotel and bar on the left; even the For Sale sign on the hotel had an antique look.

Dalesia turned right onto the weedy gravel on the far side of the factory and stopped at a sagging, rusty chain-link fence. They sat in the Audi a minute, looking out at the brick hulk, and Dalesia said, “To get here, you gotta go past those houses back there. On this road, at night, you don’t do that without lights.”

“Those people don’t call the law,” Parker said.

Dalesia thought that over, then nodded and said, “You’re right. Also, we can see where this road goes next. You want a look at the place?”

It was seven in the evening now, twilight just setting in, but still bright enough to see. Parker considered the dark hulk of the factory building, then shook his head. “I take Beckham’s word for it.”

“Me, too.”

They drove on, and after another four and a half miles they came to a numbered county road. There had been no more occupied buildings since the town.

“So what we do,” Dalesia said as they turned south, “we bring the armored car in from the other way, because that’s where their route is between the banks, but the vehicles to take things out again come this way.”

“Stashed ahead of time,” Parker said. “Right. It’s just the one trip that night.”

They drove south a while in silence, toward the general area of the MassPike, and then Dalesia said, “If it’s just you and me and the armored cars and the state cops and the private security, we’ll be fine.”

“That’s right,” Parker said.

8

They chose a motel that was not the one where Beckham worked these days, and in the morning they checked out and went back to where Parker had left his car. Dalesia put the Audi near it and went on into the restaurant to find a booth, while Parker leaned against the driver’s door of his Lexus to wait for Elaine Langen.

At ten in the morning, the parking area was nearly empty—too late for breakfast and too early for lunch; everybody was on the road. Except for the truckers, who had their own parking area around to the side of the building. As Parker waited, a thin but steady trickle of semis arrived and departed, snorting in and groaning out.

She was a few minutes late, which was to be expected, but when she arrived, the white Infiniti would have stood out even if the lot had been full. Watching her roll tentatively down the lane, looking at him but not yet sure he was the right one, Parker nodded first at her, then at the restaurant, then turned to walk indoors.

The interior was cafeteria style, with a mix of freestanding tables and booths along the windowed walls. Truckers and a few civilians ate at widely scattered tables. Dalesia had taken a booth near the back, beyond the windows. Parker walked toward him and saw Dalesia’s expression change, meaning she’d followed him in.

Dalesia was on the side of the booth that faced the front and the entrance, so that whoever sat on the other side would be invisible from most parts of the restaurant. Parker slid in next to him and only then looked toward Elaine Langen.

Well. The first impression was of a slender, stylish, well-put-together woman in her forties, but almost instantly the impression changed. She wasn’t slender; she was bone thin, and inside the stylish clothes she walked with a graceless jitteriness, like someone whose medicine had been cut off too soon. Beneath the neat cowl of well-groomed ash-blond hair, her face was too thin, too sharp-featured, too deeply lined. This could have made her look haggard; instead, it made her look mean. From the evidence, what would have attracted her husband most would have been her father’s bank.

She walked directly to the table, looked at them both, and said, “Say a name.”

“Jake Beckham,” Parker said. “Elaine Langen.”

“That’s me.”

“Sit down.”

She looked at the booth, looked at the privacy they’d arranged for her, and said, “Thank you.” She slid in and said, “Jake had to talk me into this, you know.”

Dalesia said, “Into this, or into the whole thing?”

Her laugh was brief and harsh. “Into this,” she said. “I had to talk him into the whole thing. But I guess you two must agree with me.”

Parker said, “About what?”

“There was an old movie,” she said, “called, Nice Little Bank That Should Be Robbed.”

Dalesia laughed and said, “That’s what we’ve got here, huh? In the movie, did they get away with it?”

“I never saw the movie,” she said. “I just noticed the title, in a TV listing. It struck me.”

“Probably,” Dalesia said, “being a movie, they didn’t get away with it. Movies are very unrealistic that way.”

She seemed amused by him. “Oh? Do bank robbers usually get away with it?”

“They always get away with it,” Dalesia told her. “What orders do the bosses give the tellers in your bank? ‘If they show the note, give them the money. If you can slip them a dye pack, good, but if not, just give them the money.’ Less hassle for everybody, right?”

“That’s right,” she said. “But still, they do get caught sometimes.”

“The really stupid ones,” he agreed. “Also, if you do it a hundred twenty-two times, the hundred twenty-third they’re gonna grab you. Everybody’s gotta show a little restraint.”

She considered him. “What number are you up to?”

“One.”

Parker said, “You’ve got a map for us.”

A little surprised, she gave Parker an appraising look, then looked again at Dalesia. “Well, it isn’t exactly good cop, bad cop,” she said, “but it works the same. Yes,” she told Parker, and reached into the shoulder bag she’d put on the seat beside her.

Parker said, “You got a gun in there, too?”

Surprised again, she said, “As a matter of fact, yes. I don’t intend to show it.”

“Then don’t carry it.”

She had taken from her bag a sheet of typing paper folded in half, but now she paused to say, “I’ve taken courses. I know how to fire a weapon, and I know how to hit what I aim at. And I also know never to show it unless I intend to use it. I carry it because I live in an uncertain world.”

“That’s true,” Parker said.

She extended the paper toward him. He took it, unfolded it, and it was a Xerox copy of a page from a Massachusetts atlas, in black-and-white, showing one small section of the state in close detail. On it a route had been indicated by a few short lines in red ink. Deer Hill was at the southern end of the red line, Rutherford at the north. West Ruudskill, the town with Beckham’s factory in it, was a dot off the middle of the route, to the right.

Parker folded the map twice and put it in his shirt pocket. She watched him, then said, “Jake says you’re doing it without him, but you’ll still share and share alike.” She sounded as though she didn’t entirely believe it.

Parker said, “Did he tell you why he’s staying away?”

Dalesia corrected that: “Why it’s better for him that he stays away.”

Her mouth, thin to begin with, twisted a little. “You’ve got him convinced Jack knows about us.”

“Knew the first round,” Dalesia said, “knows this round.”

She held a hand up to stop him. “Don’t give me the arguments, please,” she said. “They’re just arguments. You’ve convinced Jake, that’s all that matters, and he’s going to do whatever it is you told him to do, but it so happens I know my husband. Jack could not fool me, not for a minute.”

Parker said, “Beckham didn’t tell you what we thought he should do?”

“No.” She shook her head, remembering. “To tell the truth, he seemed a little embarrassed about it.”

“He is,” Parker said. “We told him he should violate parole.”

She stared. “You what?”

“That means he’s inside,” Dalesia explained, “from before anybody knows the date of the move. After the job, he comes back out.”

“My God,” she said. “I know how Jake feels about prison. You really sold him a bill of goods.”

“We showed him what’s out there,” Parker said.

She shrugged. “Well, that’s up to him. You’re supposed to give me a phone number or something?”

This was Dalesia’s part. “It’s a fax number,” he said. “I think we can be pretty sure the move won’t happen until October, that’s less than two weeks from now.”

“I think so, too,” she said.

“So when you know the date,” he told her, “you write just that, the day, seven or fifteen or whatever—”

“I get the idea.”

“You write just that on a piece of paper,” he said, “and fax it to this number. It’s somebody I know that’s not gonna ask me what it’s about. All I want you to do, get rid of the fax number afterwards.”

“I assume,” she said, “it’s a long-distance call. It will be on my bill.”

Parker said, “There are fax machines in your bank branches.”

Surprised, she said, “That’s true. All right, I can do it.”

Dalesia already had the number on a small slip of paper in his pocket. He handed it to her and said, “Don’t copy it anywhere.”

“Don’t insult me any more,” she said, and put the paper in her bag.

“Sorry,” Dalesia said.

Parker said, “You were gonna tell us about the armored cars.”

“Four of them. They’ll be coming that day from Boston,” she said. “There’ll be rooms for the drivers at the Green Man Motel outside Deer Hill for that night. They’ll get some sleep, then get up and get to the bank at one-thirty to start the move. We’ll have people from a moving company to do the heavy lifting. One decision that’s been made for sure is that the car with the cash will not be the first or the fourth, so it’ll be one of the two in the middle.”

Parker said, “When do you know which?”

“When they start to load.”

Parker shook his head. “That’s no good. The idea was, we’d know which armored car of the four, not which two of the four.”

Sounding dubious, she said, “I could fax that number, I suppose, that night, a two or a three.”

“Too late,” Dalesia said.

Parker said, “Are you going to be there, to watch the move?”

“For a while, at the start,” she said. “It’s interesting, it’s kind of fascinating, to make a move like that. But I don’t intend to stay up all night.”

Parker said, “You’ll leave before they finish loading.”

“That’s what I plan to do, yes.”

He took out of his pocket the map she’d given him, unfolded it onto the table. “Which way do you drive, to go home?”

“The same route, really, most of the way. I turn west before Rutherford, on Route Twenty-seven. It’s a little county road.”

“I see it,” Parker said, tracing the road with his finger. “Where do you meet a stop sign on that road?”

Again she made her bitter, unamused laugh. “Everywhere. I hit four of them on the way home.”

“How about Route Thirty-two here?”

“That’s one of them.”

“What time do you want to get there? One-thirty? Two?”

“No later than two. But you know, they’ll still be loading, back at the bank. I might not know whether it’s going to be the second or the third when they leave.”

“Those armored cars,” Parker told her, “are part of a fleet. They’ll have their own numbers on them. By the time you leave, you’ll know which one is getting the cash. You write the fleet number of that car on a piece of paper, you get to that intersection at two o’clock, and when you stop there a car will come the other way, with one of us in it. We stop, you hand the paper over, you drive home. Will your husband still be at the bank?”

“Until the bitter end, absolutely.”

“Then, when you get home, you phone him. He knows what time you left, he knows what time you got home, he knows you didn’t have time to stop and talk to anybody.”

Frowning, she said, “You really believe it, don’t you? That Jack will suspect me.”

“Whether he does or not,” Parker said, “do you like to take risks?”

“To wind up in jail, you mean?” Her mouth twisted again. “Prison orange is not my color.”

“You’ll stop at the stop sign at two, you’ll call your husband when you get home.”

Dalesia said, “Just call us worrywarts.”

She looked at him, and could be seen to relax, just a bit. “Good cop, bad cop,” she said, and looked at Parker again. “Is there anything else?”

“No. We won’t see you again, except at the stop sign. Now, you want to leave here before we do; we’ll give you a few minutes.”

“Good.” She gathered up her bag, but paused before she got out of the booth. “You didn’t even buy me a cup of coffee,” she said, then rose, and walked away.

9

In this part of New Jersey, three hours south of Massachusetts, the September days were sometimes summer, sometimes fall. This was one of the summer days. Parker thumbed the garage opener on the Lexus visor and drove in from bright afternoon sunlight to the cool, dim interior. As the garage door noisily slid downward again, he got out of the car and went through the door into the kitchen, then on into the living room. Looking out past the screened porch toward the lake, he saw Claire swimming strongly back and forth out there beyond the boathouse. A little later in the season, after the summer people had closed up their “cottages” for the year, leaving only a fifth of the houses around the lake occupied, and on those rare autumnal days of strong sun, it would be possible to swim nude, but in mid-September half the houses were still in use, so as Claire swam, Parker caught glimpses of a bright blue two-piece suit.

He carried his bag to the bedroom, changed into his own swimsuit, and went out to the lake. She saw him and smiled and lifted an arm in greeting, but didn’t break off from the rhythm of her movements; she was doing laps, competing with herself.

Parker dove in from the end of their concrete dock and swam beside her a while, working his muscles. The long hours in the car had left him stiff, too aware of his body.

The water was cold and clear and slid over the skin like velvet. If you put your head beneath the surface, you could see the muddy bottom, quickly sloping away toward the deep middle. If you looked around, there was no one else on the lake, either swimming or boating.

This was the earliest in the year they would ever occupy their house. From Memorial Day till Labor Day, when the summer people were here, running their motorboats and their barbeque parties, Parker and Claire traveled. Without a passport, he couldn’t leave the country, except occasionally to Canada or Mexico, but they found places to interest them.

The best times here at the house were in the depths of winter, with the lake frozen solid enough to drive a car on, and no other lights to be seen anywhere around the nine-mile perimeter of the shore after the brief twilight was done. But this now in mid-September was all right, too, when swimming and privacy both were possible.

Neither spoke till Claire was finished counting her laps and they paddled together to the dock. Then, climbing out, she said, “Was everything all right?”

“So far.”

They toweled themselves, moving toward the house and the bedroom. She said, “When do you go again?”

“They’ll call me.”

“Good,” she said. “You’ll be here a while.”

It wasn’t really cool enough for a fire that night, but Claire liked the look of it, so after dinner she laid one as he made drinks. He brought them to the living room and they offered one another a silent toast. They were both in their dark satin robes, which gleamed dully in the firelight.

They sat a while on the side sofa, where they could see the red-black of the fireplace to their left and the white-black of the moonlit lake to the right. An open window competed with the fire, and the night sounds of insects competed with the crackle of the burning wood.

He told her about Elaine Langen, and Claire said, “She’s unhappy.”

“She could have folded the hand.”

“No, I mean, if she’s unhappy, you don’t know who she’s going to take it out on.”

“We’re keeping her at a distance.”

“Good.”

He said, “How about here? Everything all right?”

“The checking account is getting low.”

“I’ll get some cash, later on.”

When Parker scored, he stashed part of it away for use later, when needed. At times like this, when he hadn’t earned for a while, he would visit one of those stashes.

They were handy, but they were not in the house. At one-thirty that morning, in black polo shirt, chinos, and rubber-soled black deck shoes, he left the darkened house and went out the driveway to the road that circled the lake. Turning left, he walked in the darkness past houses already boarded up for the winter and others that would still be occupied for a few more weekends. There were no streetlights out here, nor could he see any other light.

The residents of several of these houses would never know that thousands of dollars in cash were salted within, behind paneling or under floors. If there were a few of these stashes he didn’t get around to reclaiming, somebody doing new construction work years from now would be in for a happy surprise.

The house he chose tonight, a broad black shape against the moon-reflecting lake, was empty but not yet closed up for the season. He’d arranged simple entry for his storage houses, and didn’t need light for what he was doing. When he came back out, the four Ziploc bags beneath his shirt contained five thousand dollars in cash each. Claire could deposit it, three and four thousand at a time, in the checking account she used to keep this place going. He didn’t use it; he didn’t sign checks.

The next Tuesday afternoon, Parker was seated in a chaise on the deck, in the sunshine, thinking about nothing, when he heard the phone ring in the house. He stood, and was halfway across the lawn when Claire came out, the cordless phone in her hand. “Nick,” she said, with a rising inflection: Did he want to be home?

“That’s good,” he said, and reached for the phone.

As she handed it over, she said, “Does this mean you’re going now?”

“Not yet.”

But when he spoke into the phone, Dalesia’s voice said, “A glitch.”

“What kind?”

“Jake was a good boy. He kept his parole appointment.”

10

This time there was no nonsense about doctors’ offices. Dalesia knew that Beckham lived in a mobile home park near the motel where he worked, so they drove there, this time in a Saab from the long-term parking at Bradley International Airport, north of Hartford, less than an hour away.

They pulled in at the parking lot in front of the mobile home park office just as twilight was settling in. Behind a large wooden sign reading Riviera Park were several rows of mobile homes in pastels and silver and white, like a cross between a lineup of Monopoly houses and a display of beehives. The office itself was a similar structure, but smaller and simpler; if it still had its wheels instead of those concrete blocks, it would be called a trailer.

They went into the former trailer through the metal-and-glass door under the red neon OFFICE sign, and a very old and very wiry woman in jeans and gray sweatshirt looked up from the crossword puzzle book she had spread open on her counter, to say, “I hope you fellas aren’t lookin for a place to park. I’m full up.”

Dalesia said, “An old pal of ours is a tenant of yours. We thought we’d come by and say hello.”

She put down her pen and straightened up. “Who would he be?”

“Jake Beckham.”

She smiled, pleased at the name. “Oh, Jake! Very nice fella.”

“Sure is,” Dalesia said. “We know he works over at that motel, so we didn’t know if we should look for him here or there. What is it now?” He looked up at the round clock on the wall above and behind her. “Almost seven-thirty. I think he works days, doesn’t he?”

“Lemme call him,” she said, “see is he in.”

“Thanks.”

She had to look up the number in a ledger book from under the counter, then dialed it, listened, and perked up when she said, “Oh, Jake! There’s a couple fellas here for you.”

Dalesia said, “Tell him it’s Nick.”

“He says it’s Nick.”

Dalesia said, “Could I talk to him?”

“Hold on, Jake, he wants to talk to you.”

Dalesia, full of good-fellowship, said into the phone, “Whadaya say, Jake? We’re in the neighborhood, we thought we’d come by, say hello. If this isn’t a bad time? Great. Nah, we’ll come back to you, we’re just driving through. See you in a minute.” Handing the phone back to the woman, he said, “Thanks.”

“Any time.” She put the phone away and said, “You can’t drive back there, though, we don’t have room for cars inside. Even the residents, they park out here and walk in. Some keep little wagons behind here to carry their groceries.”

“We don’t mind walking,” Dalesia assured her.

She turned and pointed at the wall behind her. “You go out there and walk straight, you’re on Cans Way. First you cross is San Tropays Lane and the next is Nice Lane.” She pronounced it like “a nice day.” “Nice Lane is what you want,” she said. “Go down there to the right, Jake’s house is second on your left, a very nice pea green.”

“Thank you,” Dalesia said, and they went back out the door they’d come in, around to the back of the onetime trailer, past a bunch of rusty red wagons chained to a long iron bar fastened to concrete blocks in the ground, and past an ordinary street sign, white letters on green, reading Cannes Way.

The road was not much wider than the mobile homes parked to both sides. Dalesia said, “They must get themselves a river pilot to bring these things in and out.”

“Maybe so.”

“Or airlift them.”

They passed a cross street signed St. Tropez Way, then turned right on Nice Lane, and there was Jake Beckham waiting for them, standing in the open doorway of his pea-green mobile home.

“I know what you’re gonna say,” he said as they approached. “And don’t say it.”

Dalesia went on inside, but Parker stopped in the doorway, looked at Beckham, and said, “I was going to say, the job works just as good with you dead.”

Beckham blinked, and Parker walked past him into a long, narrow living room with dark paneled walls and, on the small windows, red and white checked curtains like tablecloths in a French restaurant.

Dalesia had gone off to the right, to look in the bathroom and both bedrooms, while Parker turned left, to look at an empty small galley kitchen, the brushed-chrome built-ins neat but the dirty dishes piled on them not.

Dalesia and Parker both returned to the living room, shook their heads, and turned to Beckham, who had shut the door and stood with his back to it, warily watching them. Parker said, “Tell us about it.”

“You didn’t have to say that,” Beckham told him. The usual boyishness that was such a misfit on him had been rattled now. He was acting his age. “That was unnecessary,” he said, “you didn’t have to say it.”

“So far,” Parker told him, “you’re putting yourself at risk, and you’re putting the job at risk. Is there any way you can put me at risk? I don’t think so, but now I’ll wait and see.”

Pursuing his own thought, Beckham said, “And it isn’t even true, what you said. You don’t need me? Of course you need me. If I’m dead, Elaine gives you nothing. If Elaine doesn’t give, what’ve you got?”

“Jake,” Dalesia said, sounding sad for his friend, “what Parker was saying was, you disappointed us. You disappointed me, Jake, and I’m the one told Parker you were all right, the job was all right. He counted on me, Jake, and I counted on you.”

“It’s all figured out,” Beckham said. Still with wary looks toward Parker, he took a step into the room. “Why don’t we all sit down?” he suggested, and fluttered a hand at the plaid-and-maple furniture.

“Not yet,” Parker said. “It was all figured out that you had to take yourself out of the job in a way the law would believe, or they’d be all over you and then all over our backtrail. That was what was figured out.”

“It still is,” Beckham insisted. “Dr. Madchen—”

Exasperated, Dalesia said, “Back with that, Jake? We already know that doesn’t work.”

“I can’t do prison again,” Beckham said. “I don’t care if it’s just a county jug somewhere, I can’t do it, I can’t go back, not again.”

“Then there’s no job,” Parker said.

“There is. Will you listen to me about the doctor? We worked it out, I went to him, we got it worked out. Jesus Christ, fellas, come on, will ya? Sit down, we’ll all sit down, let me tell you what we got, and if you don’t like it, you don’t like it, but no matter what happens, me being dead doesn’t help, you know that.”

“Maybe it relieves our feelings,” Dalesia said, but he sat down, and so did Parker, and then so did Beckham.

Parker said, “You went back to this doctor.”

“Yeah, I needed something except jail, I needed—”

“What does he know, this doctor?”

Beckham took a deep breath. “He knows I’m on my way to a score, so when I can retire. He knows the guys he saw in his office are in it.”

“Does he know what the score is?”

“Yes, but he’s all right, he isn’t a problem for us, he’s a help. I’m gonna give him a piece out of my share and you guys don’t have to have anything to do with him. And in the meantime, he’s solved this problem here.”

Dalesia said, “How did he solve it, Jake?”

“The first change is,” Beckham said, “I stay in the hospital.” Now that he was getting to tell his story, the irrepressible kid inside him was beginning to emerge again, giving him more animated gestures. In that chair, his feet touched the floor, but he acted as though they didn’t. “You remember,” he said, “the original idea was, I was gonna sneak out of this private room, be part of the operation.”

“That was never going to fly,” Parker said.

“Okay, I’ve accepted that,” Beckham said, moving his arms and his shoulders around. “I’m away from it, but I still get my taste.”

“If you’re locked up,” Parker told him, “as a parole violator.”

“This is just as good,” Beckham insisted. “See, I go to the doctor about these stomach cramps, he does tests, he can’t find the problem, it could be a bunch of things. Believe me, he knows what to put down for the diagnosis.”

“We believe that, Jake.”

“Fine. He puts me in the hospital for tests and observation, I’m going in next Monday, he’s doing all the paperwork now, all the stuff to show the law, if anybody comes around—I even told my parole lady about it this morning. See, this was a long-term medical problem, the time was right to put me in the hospital, do the tests. If they don’t find anything, fine, it was nerves, still shook up from being inside and then outside. Bring on all your second opinions in the world, nobody’s gonna find a thing.”

Dalesia said, “Parker? What do you think?”

Parker said, “Beckham, he was your doctor before you went inside, right?”

“Oh, yeah, we already knew each other, I was already his patient.”

“Still a private room?”

“No! An eight-bed ward, man, it’s all I can afford with the insurance I get at the motel.”

“You’re going in Monday.”

“And today, in fact,” Beckham said, “the doctor’s started making the appointments for me, the date, the bed, the tests. I mean, the alibi’s already started.”

Dalesia said, “Parker? Okay?”

Parker shrugged. If it was going to happen, this would have to be the way. “It sounds good,” he said.

“It is good,” Beckham insisted.

“And not wanting to go back inside . . .” Parker spread his hands. “I can understand that.”

11

When Parker got back to the lake a little before noon the next day, Claire was in the living room, reading a shelter magazine. She tossed it aside, got to her feet, and said, “Oh, good, I was hoping you’d be home before lunch. Take me someplace nice, with a terrace. There won’t be many beautiful days like this left.”

“We can drive over to Pennsylvania,” he said. “There’s some places along the river there.”

She looked doubtful. “With good food?”

“You want good food and a terrace?”

She laughed. “You’re right. Come with me while I look at my hair. We got a very strange wrong number this morning.”

“What kind of strange?” He stood in the bedroom doorway and watched her poke at her trim auburn hair, which had been flawless when she started.

“He asked for somebody called Harbin.”

Harbin was the guy in Cincinnati who’d worn the wire. Parker said, “Then what?”

“I said wrong number, he said why didn’t I ask around the people here, and I said there wasn’t anybody to ask, not at the moment. He said he’d call back. There. All right?”

“Perfect,” he said.

The guy called again the next day, Thursday. Claire took the call and brought it to Parker, looking at New England maps in the living room. “It’s him again.”

Parker took the phone, and she went away to give him privacy as he said, “Yeah?”

“I’m looking for Harbin.” The voice was gravelly and a little false; not as though he were trying to sound tougher, but softer.

“Which Harbin would that be?”

“The Harbin from Cincinnati.”

“Don’t know the guy, sorry.”

“Well, wait a minute, I think you can help me.”

“I don’t.”

“From your phone number, I got a pretty good idea your general geographical location. I can get up into that northwest corner of New Jersey in, say, an hour. Give me directions to your place, we can talk it over.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“I just don’t want to leave a stone unturned here,” said the gravelly voice, sliding back and forth between menace and gentleness. “I’m the kind of guy, I’m dogged, I just keep coming.”

“Then I tell you what,” Parker said. “What kind of car you driving?”

“Oh, you wanna meet somewhere else. Sure, that’s okay, I’m in a dark red Chevy Suburban, Illinois plates. What about you?”

“On Route Twenty-four,” Parker told him, “eleven miles from the Delaware Water Gap, there’s a Mobil station, north side of the road. I could be there in two hours.”

“So could I, pal. What kinda car am I looking for?”

“I’ll recognize you,” Parker said.

Of course he didn’t show up, but neither did Parker. The voice had said he could make it to this neighborhood in an hour, so forty-five minutes after the call, Parker took up a position at the diner across the road from the Mobil station and a little farther on toward Pennsylvania. From where he sat, he was unobtrusive, but he could see everything that drove by the Mobil station, and after two hours not one red Chevy Suburban had done so. There were no pedestrians out here along this country road through pine woods, so there was nothing for him to watch for but a car, and none showed up.

Had the guy lied about his car, or was he hanging even farther back somewhere behind Parker or down the other way, eastward, toward New York?

Who had the other people been at that meeting? Parker had never met any of them before except Nick Dalesia. What were their names? Stratton, their host, was the one Dalesia had known, who had invited Dalesia in. McWhitney was the one who’d brought the wired Harbin, but had sworn he hadn’t known about it. The other two were Fletcher and Mott.

This gravelly voice on the phone was none of those, but he had to be connected to one of them. At this point, he could represent either side of the law.

But whatever he represented, Parker wanted nothing to do with him and didn’t want to have to spend a lot of time on him. This week wasn’t so bad, but after this week the bank job could happen on any day. He needed to find out who this guy was, who he was connected to, and what he wanted. And then he needed, one way or another, to make him go away.

Two hours and fifteen minutes outside the diner. It was now three hours since the call. Parker started the Lexus and drove away from there, not seeing any sudden activity in his mirrors.

He drove to the turnoff at the lake road, made the turn, and then drove very slowly, watching the intersection back there. He was almost around the first curve to the left, which would block the view, when a small black car made the turn into his mirror.

He accelerated around the curve, then slowed again. This road went all the way around the lake, partly straightaways and partly left-leaning curves, and then came back out onto the state highway two miles farther west.

Because he’d accelerated into the curve, then slowed, the small black car was closer when it next appeared, but it immediately braked, its nose dipping, then came on more slowly, trying to hang farther back.

It was the stutter that said this was no civilian. Parker drove on past his own driveway, with the mailbox marked WILLIS, the name Claire used around here. Behind him, the black car kept pace, well back.

At the far end of the lake was a clubhouse Parker had never entered. The summer people used it for a number of things; then it was open weekends only, in fall and spring. It was closed now, the vehicles of a few maintenance workers clustered up against the low clapboard building. Parker turned in there, stopped among the other parked cars, and watched the black car, a Honda Accord with the mud of many miles on it, stream steadily by. The driver, alone in the car, was a woman. It was hard to see her face, because she was talking on a cell phone.

Parker pulled out of the lot and followed the Honda, pacing it the way she had paced him. She must have seen him back there but did nothing about it, kept a steady thirty-four miles an hour all the way around the lake, signaled for a right at the state highway, and turned north, toward the Mobil station.

And beyond. He followed her across the bridge at the Delaware Water Gap and into a mall on the other side. She drove to the parking area in front of a supermarket, left the car, went into the store. She was tall and slender, very blonde, in heels and jeans and black suede jacket over fluffy pink sweater. She looked urban, not rural.

Parker circled once, then took the nearest empty space, behind the Honda in the next row. He switched off the engine, sat there to wait, and a red Chevy Suburban pulled in next to him.

The gun Parker kept spring-clipped under the Lexus driver’s seat was a small and lightweight .25 automatic, a Firearms International Beretta Jetfire—not much use beyond arm’s reach but very handy in close. As a bulky guy got out of the Chevy on the far side from Parker and came around the front of his car, Parker reached under the seat, snapped the Beretta into his palm, and rested that hand in his lap.

The guy coming toward him wore black work pants, a dark blue dress shirt, an open maroon vinyl zippered jacket, and a self-satisfied smile. He had a big shaven head, a thick neck, small ears that curled in on themselves. He looked like a strikebreaker, everybody’s muscle, but at the same time he was somehow more than that. Or different from that.

As Parker thumbed open his window, the guy came up to the car, leaned his forearms on the open windowsill, smiled in and said, “How we doing today?” It was the gravel voice from the phone call.

Parker showed him the Beretta. “One step back; I don’t want blood on the car.”

The guy took the step back, but he also gave a surprised laugh and stuck his hands up in the referee’s time-out signal, saying, “Hold on, pal, it’s too late for that.”

Too late? Parker rested the Beretta on the windowsill, his eyes on the other’s eyes and hands, and waited.

The guy nodded toward the supermarket. “Sandra’s already been on the horn with the DMV. Claire Willis, East Shore Road, Colliver’s Pond, New Jersey oh-eight-nine-eight-nine. Why don’t you wanna have a nice little talk?”

“You’re not law,” Parker said.

The guy shook his head. “Never said I was.”

Being with a partner, running a license through Motor Vehicles, having all the time in the world for a stakeout, not particularly impressed by the sight of a handgun. “You’re a bounty hunter.”

“You got it in one, my friend,” the guy said, grinning, proud of either himself or Parker. “If you’re not gonna blow my head off, I can reach in my jacket pocket for my card case, give you my card.”

“Go ahead.”

“Not that a Beretta like that’s gonna blow anybody’s head off,” the guy said, reaching into his jacket, coming out with a card case. “Though it would make a dent, I’ll give you that.”

He extended a card, holding it flat between the first two fingers of his outstretched right hand. Parker put the Beretta hand in his lap again, held the card in his left, and read, Roy Keenan Associates and, under that, in smaller lettering, Tracer of Lost Persons. There was an 800 number, but no office address.

“Sandra’s the ‘Associates,’” Keenan said. “What she walks around with mostly is an S and W three fifty-seven. I don’t see her at the moment, but it could be she could see us.”

“You people like to talk.”

“Yes, we do,” Keenan said, with another comfortable smile. Then he said, “Oh, I see, you mean she won’t be quick enough on the trigger. You may be right, but what the hell, pal, here we both are. Why not let me say what I have to say, listen to what you have to say, if there’s anything you want to talk about, and then you’re done with me, and we don’t have a lot of three fifty-seven Magnum bullets flying around a parking lot.”

“We’ll talk in your car,” Parker decided.

That made him laugh again. “Still worried about bloodstains, are you? Come along.”

12

The interior of the Chevy was laid out almost like a police car—a hunter’s car, anyway. An over-under shotgun was attached by clips to the under part of the roof, and extra radios and scanners filled the space between the driveshaft hump and the bottom of the dashboard. The rear side windows were tinted glass with metal mesh inside, which would be for when a prisoner was in the backseat.

Keenan sat at the wheel, engine off and windows open, Parker to his right, hand in his pocket with the Beretta. Parker said, “You want to talk.”

“Well, you know what I want to talk about,” Keenan said, “I want to talk about Michael Maurice Harbin.”

“I didn’t know those other names.”

“The impression I got,” Keenan said, “that meeting you were all at, you were some kind of pickup group. Not long-term pals, I mean. A little more complicated for me, that’s all. I’m not being nosy here, I don’t wanna know what that meeting was all about, none of my business. My only business is Harbin.”

“I don’t know where he is.”

“I believe that,” Keenan said. “But I also believe one of the other fellas at that table just might know where he is. So the way it looks from here, if I’m going to find Michael Maurice, who has just absolutely vanished from the face of the Earth, I’m going to first have to find the rest of you guys from the meeting.”

“Starting with me?”

“Well, no.” Keenan gazed thoughtfully out the windshield. “I started with Alfred Stratton. He was the one rented the room, and I noticed he used a false name and ID to do it, which slowed me down a little. But that was pretty interesting.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want his wife to know he plays poker.”

“Maybe. He used a credit card in that phony name, though, that’s pretty far to go for peace with the missus.”

“Not impossible,” Parker said.

“Well, let’s just say that’s something else outside my need to know,” Keenan said. “I know there was a meeting. I know Stratton called it, and Harbin was there. Stratton has disappeared just about as completely as Harbin, so maybe they’re both together, time will tell. But I got my hands on Stratton’s phone bills, and the only thing interesting there was two calls to a guy named Nicholas Dalesia, who it turns out has something of a record as a heister.”

“Is that so.”

“Not that I care. Anyway, I’ve been trying to make contact with this guy Dalesia, but so far no luck.”

“Another disappearance?”

“No, he’s around, but he’s in and out, he seems to be a very busy man, I just haven’t managed to touch base with him yet. But I did get to his phone bill, and there’s not much on it, but there’s a call to somebody in New Jersey named Willis.” With a sidelong look at Parker, he said, “You wouldn’t be named Willis, would you?”

“Not usually,” Parker said.

“I thought not. Anyway, there’s three other guys at that meeting I haven’t tracked down yet, so it could be you could help me on that side. Or you might have some idea where I could find out a little more about our friend Harbin, who, after all, is the only and sole point of my entire inquiry.”

“Maybe he’s dead,” Parker said.

“Show me where to dig.”

“Or maybe not.”

“Dead doesn’t bother me,” Keenan said. “If I can show proof of death, I collect just as much as if I walked in with the miscreant on the hoof. Mr. Not-Willis, my usual livelihood comes from overly trusting bail bondsmen, but now and again some government reward money comes along that’s rich enough to cause me to change my diet. I don’t know what Harbin did or didn’t do, but there’s both state and federal paper out on him, and the combined jackpot is enough to get Keenan and Associates on the trail.”

“Then I’m sorry I’m wasting your time,” Parker said.

“Those other guys at the meeting.”

Parker shook his head. “New to me. I believe they were new to Nick Dalesia, too, except for Stratton. Stratton called him and invited him. Then Nick called and invited me. He said I wouldn’t know anybody else there, and he was right. Nothing came of the meeting, it turned out we weren’t going to work anything out after all, so we went our separate ways.”

“I spend much of my life,” Keenan said, “wishing I’d been the fly on this or that wall. Mr. Not-Willis, far be it from me to cause you to leave bloodstains here and there around the world, but I want you to know, I am not going to be satisfied until I have my hands on either Michael Maurice Harbin or some certain sure proof of his death. I don’t suppose you can help me find Nick Dalesia, either.”

“He travels around a lot, he’s a busy man.”

“So I’m finding out.” Keenan shook his head. “I know we’d both like it,” he said, “if I could guarantee you we’d never see one another again, but I’m too much at sea here to say never again. You keep thinking about Michael Maurice, and any way at all that you could be of help to me, so that if, just if, I find I have to stop by and speak with you again, we don’t have to spend a lot of time scaring each other with firearms.”

“Goodbye,” Parker said, and got out of the Chevy.

13

The problem was, what to do about Keenan? It would be best if nothing had to be done, at least not by Parker. If Keenan’s search for Harbin would lead him sooner rather than later to McWhitney, the one who’d brought Harbin to the meeting, that would take care of it. McWhitney would at least keep Keenan busy for a while, and might even get rid of him. Somebody might eventually have to get rid of Keenan, one way or another. Having a bounty hunter rooting around in the background while they put together a bank job would not be a good thing.

What did Keenan know, and what didn’t he know, and what did his knowledge mean? He knew there had been a meeting of seven men who weren’t well known to one another. He knew Harbin was one of them, and he knew Harbin disappeared after that meeting. He knew there were rewards out for Harbin, sufficient to bring somebody like himself sniffing around.

But what didn’t he know? The purpose of the meeting. The backgrounds of the people who were there. He had some low-level tipster somewhere in law enforcement, but he wasn’t hooked in with the law in any major way. He could not have heard the tape, and so he probably didn’t even know that Harbin had gone to the meeting wired.

All of which meant that Keenan wasn’t getting much by way of help or input from the law. He was a freebooter, on his own, developing his sources and his information the hard, one-step-at-a-time way. If it became necessary to get rid of him, no lawman would care, or no more than usual.

As Parker had told Keenan, Dalesia was hard to get hold of. He had a phone but never answered it, had no machine on it, used it only for outgoing calls if he happened to be home. Parker could reach him eventually by sending a message to whoever was at that fax number Dalesia had given Elaine Langen. It would be good to let Dalesia know that this guy was lurking in the underbrush, but would it be necessary?

He hadn’t decided that question when he’d finished the drive back from the conversation with Keenan, but then it turned out the decision had been made for him. He came into the house, found Claire in her swimsuit just coming in from the lake, and she said, “Nick called. He left a number where you could call him, at six, or seven, or eight.”

It was now quarter past five. The number Dalesia had left would be a pay phone. “I’ll call him at six,” Parker said.

Outside the Mobil station where he’d waited in vain to see the Chevy Suburban was the phone-on-a-stick Parker used when he wanted to make a call that wouldn’t be monitored for training purposes. He got there just at six with a pocketful of change and dialed the number in upstate New York, and Dalesia answered on the first ring: “We got an event.”

“So have I,” Parker said. “Would yours be the same one? A guy named Keenan?”

“No, mine is Jake Beckham. He was shot.”

“Shot?” That made no sense. “The husband?”

“He’s not that kind.”

“How bad is he?”

“Hit in the leg, above the knee.”

“In the hospital?”

“Yeah, for a couple weeks. Actually, it’s not that far from where we wanted him, only now he’s gonna have a limp.”

“This isn’t what we wanted,” Parker said. “We didn’t want the law looking at him, wondering what he’s been up to lately, what did he have on the fire, who’s he been hanging around with.”

“That’s true,” Dalesia said. “We also didn’t want Jake’s reading on the thing.”

“Reading? What do you mean, reading?”

“Well,” Dalesia said, “he thinks you did it.”

TWO

1

Gwen Reversa had decided to change her first name from Wendy even before she knew she was going to be a cop. The name Wendy just didn’t lend itself to the kind of respect she felt she deserved. Wendys were thought of as blondes, i.e., airheads. Well, Gwen Reversa, now Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa, Massachusetts CID, couldn’t help it if she was a blonde, but she could help being a Wendy.

It was in a name-your-baby book that she learned that Wendy wasn’t even a proper name all by itself, though that’s what her mother had picked for her and that’s what it said on the birth certificate. But Wendy was actually a nickname, for Gwendolyn.

Well. Once she’d discovered that, it was nothing at all to switch herself from a nickname without gravitas—Wendy—to a nickname with: Gwen. She was now twenty-eight, and at this stage in her life only her immediate family and a few early pals from grade school even remembered she’d once been a Wendy, and she was pretty sure they usually forgot.

“Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa, CID,” she told the wounded man in the hospital bed, and he wheezed a little, nodded his head on the pillow, and said, “Glad to see ya.” Would he be glad to see a Wendy? Nah.

“You feel strong enough to talk, Mr. Beckham?”

“Sure, if I had anything to say,” he told her. “They missed my lung by about three feet.”

She laughed, mostly to put him at his ease, and pulled over one of the room’s two chrome-and-green-vinyl chairs. Since he was a crime victim, and the perp might be interested in a follow-up question, Mr. Jake Beckham was in a private room.

Gwen took two notebooks and a pen from her shoulder bag, then put the bag on the floor and moved the chair so the shoulder bag strap looped around one leg, which is how you learned to keep control of your bag when you had a gun in it. Then she sat on the chair, opened one of the notebooks, and said, “Want to tell me about it?”

“I don’t know a hell of a lot about it,” he said. He was fiftyish, heavyset, weak and a little dour from having been shot, but there was nevertheless something boyish about him, as though, instead of lying around here in a hospital bed, he’d much rather be out playing with the guys. He said, “I was just coming out of work—”

“Trails End Motor Inne.”

“Yeah, that’s where I work, assistant manager. I was coming off my shift, I went out to my car—they want us to keep our cars out at the end of the parking lot—”

“Sure.”

“I was on my way, I felt this sting first, my right leg”—he rubbed it beneath the hospital sheet and blanket—“I thought it was a bee sting, something like that, I thought, Jesus Christ, now I’m getting stung, and then, at the same time— See, I didn’t hear the shot at first. I mean, I heard it, but I didn’t pay any attention to it because I was distracted by this bee sting, whatever it was. Then I realized, my leg’s going out from under me, that’s something more powerful than a bee, and then I realized, holy shit, that was a shot! And there I am on my ass in the parking lot.”

“Did you hear a car drive away?”

“I didn’t hear or see a goddam thing,” he assured her. “I’m on my back on the blacktop, I’m suddenly weak, now I’m getting sudden-like light flashes around my eyes, I’m thinking, I was shot with a poisoned bullet! I gotta get outa here! That’s what I’m thinking, and I try to roll over, and that’s when I passed out, and woke up in the ambulance.”

“The bullet came from behind you.”

“Yeah, behind and to my right, cause that’s where the bullet went in, halfway up between the knee and the top of the leg. They tell me the bullet’s still in there, but it didn’t hit any bone, they’ll take it out in a couple days.”

There’d been very little to write so far in this first notebook. Gwen now opened the second, which contained the details she’d already collected, and said, “So whadaya think? This the past catching up with you?”

He looked almost angry at that. “Past? What past?”

“Well, Mr. Beckham,” she said, tapping the notebook with her pen to let him know she had the goods, right in here, “you have been known to hang out with the wrong kind of people.”

“Not any more!”

“You’ve done time—”

“All over!” He was agitated, determined to convince her. “I did the minimum, got all my good behavior, that’s behind me.”

“You’re on parole right now.”

“Perfect record,” he insisted. “You could check with Vivian Cabrera, she’s my parole—”

“I’ve talked with her,” Gwen said. “On the phone, before I came here.”

“Then she can tell you,” he said, pointing at the notebook as though wanting her to write all the good reports down in there. “Not one black mark, no unacceptable associates, got a legitimate job, I learned my lesson, that’s all over. And it was only the one mistake anyway. Over.”

“So,” she said, “you have no idea who would take a shot at you.”

The way his face went, for just a second there, told a different story. His eyes shifted, his mouth skewed as though searching for some safe expression, and the whole countenance seemed to go slack with wariness, as though he’d just heard a dangerous noise. Then it was all swept off his face; he turned, round-eyed with innocence, and said, “I been lying here, I been thinking about it, I mean, I got nothing else to think about, and I just don’t get it. Maybe it was mistaken identity, because the guy was behind me, or just a wild shot, or I don’t know what.”

He knows who did it, Gwen thought, or he thinks he does. The worst thing to do now, she knew, was confront him directly, push him, because then he’d just close up forever. She said, “Well, we’ll hope to find out from the shooter himself what he had in mind.”

“That’s the way to go,” he agreed.

She tapped the notebook again. “So who do you pal around with these days?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, and he was just a little too casual. “There’s some people at work I hang out with sometimes, that’s about it. You know, the position I’m in, I gotta be very careful these days, I don’t wanna mess things up after I built all this good record.”

“No, I can see that,” she said. “You’re smart to think that way. Any lady friends at the moment?”

“Nah.” He was being boyish again. “You meet somebody, you know, you say you’re on parole, it isn’t a turn-on.”

Laughing, she said, “For some women, it is. I’ve seen them.”

“Well, those are the ones,” he said, “I shouldn’t hang out with anyway.”

“You’re right. Elaine Langen? See much of her any more?”

“Oh, my God, you even know about that! You sure checked me out, Det— What is it?”

“Reversa. Just Detective is fine.”

“Okay. Anyway, you know everything about me, you know more’n I do, you don’t need to ask me nothing.”

“Well, just in case,” she said. “Elaine Langen, for instance.”

“That was a long time ago, Detective,” he said, and when he was being solemn like that, as though talking about a religious subject, he was more boyish than ever. “That ended when I did the crime and I did the time.”

“You don’t see her any more.”

“Not like that. We live, I don’t know, seven, eight miles apart, I see her on the street, that’s about it.”

“And her husband? Jack Langen, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, Jack.” There was something dismissive in the way he said the name.

“Do you see much of him these days?”

“What, Jack Langen? I don’t think I’ve seen him since I got out. Well, since I went in.”

“Do you think he holds a grudge?”

“Against me? After all this time? I—” Then his face lit up with amusement. “What, you think he did it? Shot me? Jack Langen? He isn’t gonna shoot anybody.”

“You’re sure of him,” Gwen said.

Beckham was sure. There was no faking now. He said, “Jack Langen got even with me when he pressed charges and got me put away. The old man wanted to give me a pass. No, if anybody was gonna shoot anybody, and I’m not going to— No, I won’t even say it.”

“But since you’re not seeing her any more, there’s no reason to.”

“Exactly.”

She tapped the notebook some more, looking at the history recorded there in her small, neat printing. There was too much emptiness in this life; there was something missing. She said, “So you aren’t close to anybody right now? You won’t be having any visitors while you’re in here?”

“Well, my sister,” he said, and suddenly lit up with triumphant amusement. Pointing at the notebook, he crowed, “You didn’t know about her!”

“That’s true,” Gwen admitted. “Tell me about your sister.”

“She’s been living over in Buffalo,” he said. “To tell you the truth, we haven’t been so close for a while. Long time, really. But she got divorced last year, and one of her kids is in college and the other works for IBM, so when I called her to tell her about this she said she’d come help out while I’m laid up. You know, water the plants in my house and like that. In fact, she’s gonna stay in my house while I’m in here, she’s driving over from Buffalo today, she might even be in the place by now. Well, not yet, she’ll phone when she gets there.”

“Well, that’s good,” Gwen said. “You’ll have family close by. What’s your sister’s name?”

“Wendy Rodgers.”

“So she’s a Wendy,” Gwen said.

“Yeah. Wendy Rodgers. If she’s keeping the husband’s name.” Then he laughed and said, “Well, she kept everything, the house, the kids.”

“I’m looking forward to meeting her,” Gwen said, and got to her feet. Picking up her shoulder bag, putting the notebooks and pen away, she said, “If I think of anything else to talk about, I’ll drop back.”

“Any time,” he said. “I’ll be here.”

She handed him her card. “And if you think of anything that might be of some help to me, give me a call.”

“Will do.” He held the card as though it were precious.

“Bye for now,” she said, and as she waited for the elevator out in the hall, she thought, he lied twice, about not knowing who might have shot him and about his current relationship with Elaine Langen. But he doesn’t think those two things are connected, he doesn’t think the husband shot him.

There’s somebody else in this story, she thought. Jake Beckham’s life can’t be that unpopulated. He’s concealing something, and whatever it is, that’s what shot him.

Maybe the sister, Wendy, knows. Be interesting to talk to her. But first, it would be very interesting to talk with Elaine Langen.

2

When the duty nurse told Dr. Myron Madchen that a police detective was in with Jake Beckham, the doctor, in the first instant, thought everything must have come undone, that the detective must be here to arrest Jake and that everybody’s plans were now destroyed, his not least of all, plus those of Jake himself and those two tough-looking fellows Jake had met with in his examining room. But then, on a moment’s reflection, he realized that the detective must be here to investigate the shooting, that in this instance Jake was the victim, not the perpetrator.

“I’ll wait till the detective’s finished,” he told the duty nurse. “Call me, I’ll be in the staff lounge.”

She looked doubtful, but raised no objections. “Certainly, Doctor.”

The fact was, as he knew full well, he had no real right to the staff lounge here, not being attached to this hospital or, at the moment, having a patient checked in here. Jake couldn’t be considered his patient under these circumstances. Myron Madchen was Jake’s primary care provider, but in this hospital it was the specialists who mattered, not the GPs.

Still, Jake was his patient in the normal course of events, and there was a certain professional courtesy to be expected in the circumstances, and no one would really expect him to go sit out in the regular waiting room with the civilians, so through the unmarked door he went and back to the area of peace and privilege of the staff lounge, a place rather like an airline’s club members’ lounge, but without the alcohol.

Sitting there, leafing through a recent Newsweek, he thought that in some ways what had happened was a positive thing. It was like the false hospitalization they’d been planning, but with the advantage that it was real; no lies had to be told.

Of course, the disadvantage was that a shooting would naturally draw the attention of the police. Would their presence interfere with the robbery? Dr. Madchen sincerely hoped not. He sincerely needed that robbery. He sincerely needed it to save his life.

Some years ago, when Dr. Madchen was at a very low point in his life, when he had reached a point where he wasn’t sure he would be able to go on, he had happened to come across a very strange statistic in a professional journal. It seemed that a quarter century before, the state of California had done a statistical survey, using state records, to compare divorces and suicides according to occupation. One result showed that doctors of all kinds, except for psychiatrists, had the highest suicide rate and the lowest divorce rate of any occupation in California.

When Dr. Madchen read that item, his immediate reaction was dread. He became as frightened as if a tiger had walked into his living room. He felt so threatened, so alone and vulnerable and helpless, that he had to stop reading and leave the house and go for one of the longest walks of his life, around and around and around his lovely, expensive neighborhood with its curving, quiet streets and broad green lawns and large, sprawling wood or brick houses, mostly prewar, set well back from the road.

It was late spring at that time, and the gardeners of the neighborhood had been hard at work, so the bright, hard colors of northern flowers were everywhere, backed by the eternal bass note of the dark pines. Dr. Madchen, walking, looking at the beauty of his world, had thought, I don’t want to die. I don’t want to leave this. I have to remember that.

Because, in fact, suicide had been very much on his mind. On his mind but not acknowledged, the idea seeping into his brain like dampness in a basement until, without a drop of water having been seen to move, the entire basement is soaked.

He had been thinking about it, thinking about simply checking himself out of this life, thinking how easy it would be for him, as a doctor, to find a gentle, peaceful, painless way to end it all. That was what the article had suggested, that one reason doctors were so high on the suicide scale was because it was so easy for them and they could act with the assurance that they would neither hurt themselves nor make a mistake.

And the other reason, the article suggested, had to do with imagination. If a person in an unhappy life could imagine some other life, he was likelier to seek a divorce. If his training in the hard realities of medicine had left him unable to imagine another way out, he would reach for the sleeping pills. That was why writers and psychiatrists were at the extreme other end of the scale in that survey, having the highest divorce and lowest suicide rates. They were used to looking for new narratives, new connections. They could imagine a satisfying alternative to what they had, whether they ever achieved it or not.

I can imagine a different life, Dr. Madchen told himself as he walked through that spring day. I can imagine . . . something.

But how? A loveless marriage was at the heart of Dr. Madchen’s unhappiness—a marriage entered into for cold reasons, a mistake from the beginning. He had married Ellen for her money, and it was still her money, and he was still tied to it. Ellen was a cold, vindictive woman, who begrudged him any thought that wasn’t of her. To divorce her would be so grueling, so harsh, that of course he thought of suicide as the easier way. A divorce from Ellen—that he could imagine, and the image left him weak with misery.

Besides which, even if he managed to extricate himself from the marriage, what then? It was still her money. In fact, since she’d helped pay for his medical education and had entirely paid for his office, and given Ellen’s disagreeability, she would no doubt not only keep all her own money but would also use her lawyers to beat some of his money out of him. No, no, it could not be contemplated.

One thing that article did do for him, however, was make him more self-aware and more open to anything at all that might bring comfort to his life. And his life needed comfort. He had come to believe, during that period, that many of his patients led much better lives than he did—even some with chronic medical problems, even those with quite serious illnesses. He could see happiness and hope in their faces, when he knew he had neither in his.

One of these patients was Jake Beckham, a hearty, rowdy man who would surely never put up with a woman like Ellen, not for (literally) a million dollars. Dr. Madchen admired and envied Jake, and when Jake was arrested and imprisoned, neither the admiration nor the envy lessened. How staunchly Jake took his bad luck; how thoroughly he refused to be defeated. There was a man who could imagine another life for himself and make a leap for it, and so what if he failed this time? He would surely try again.

It was a happy coincidence that Jake wound up in the same state prison where Dr. Madchen’s worthless cousin, after years of drug addiction, had inevitably been placed. It had been to remain in contact with Jake as much as to be of help to Conrad that Dr. Madchen had asked Jake to help the worthless man. And of course Jake had helped.

A very different kind of patient, toward whom Dr. Madchen felt tenderness and pity, was Isabelle Moran, a healthy and beautiful young woman whose medical problems centered on an abusive husband. It was Dr. Madchen who patched up the bruises and the sprains and the scrapes, while telling Isabelle time and again that she should report the husband to the police. But she wouldn’t; she couldn’t; she was too afraid.

When, shortly after reading the statistics article, he had to treat Isabelle once more, this time for a badly scraped knee, a broken rib, and a broken finger (the man always left her face alone), Dr. Madchen realized that he and Isabelle were in one way very much the same: tied to a hateful spouse, unable to escape.

But they could console each other. They had been consoling each other for nearly three years now, secretly, hiding from the wrath of their spouses, and it had become, for both of them, intolerable. They had to get away, somehow. Neither could divorce, but both could flee. Or they could flee if they had money.

Jake, for Dr. Madchen’s assistance and silence and cover concerning the upcoming bank robbery, would give the doctor a third of his share of the take. A third.

He and Isabelle already knew they would go to California.

The wall phone in the lounge rang, and another doctor, in green scrubs, went to answer it, then turned to say, “Dr. Madchen?”

“Yes,” the doctor said, dropping the unread magazine and getting to his feet.

“Your patient is ready.”

3

Feeling better about herself, feeling she had done everything she could to ensure her more pleasant future, Elaine Langen drove homeward in the crisp fall afternoon light and thought how she would miss the seasons here, if nothing else. Not this white Infiniti, beautiful as it was, and so much more like a glove she wore than a machine she drove. Not the house toward which she steered, full as it was of bitter memories. Not her past, her friends, her remaining relatives—all of them felt tired in her thoughts, a dusty and dog-eared aura about them. Only the seasons—that’s all that she would miss.

Not that the south of France doesn’t have seasons—of course it does, but they’re not the same ones. They don’t contrast so much; they don’t so often create their own excitement. Well, too bad. Once this bank business was over, Elaine was prepared to create her own excitement, on her own terms, in a setting of her own choice.

In the meantime, it was necessary to be amiable and accommodating with husband Jack just a little while longer. Jack was, she knew, her own damn fault, and the result of a rebellion against her father that had been wrongheaded to begin with. Harvey Lefcourt had been an authoritarian father, sure, but so what? He’d built Deer Hill Bank from scratch, and survived some very hairy economic times, too.

The fact was, when Harvey believed he knew what was best for his daughter, he was almost always right. Her angry feuds with him were not because he was wrong, but because he left her no space to come to the right answers on her own. Since he preempted the right, she had no choice, the way she saw it, but to defiantly claim the wrong as her own.

Thus, Jack Langen.

Well, it wouldn’t be for too much longer, and in the meantime Jack wasn’t particularly hard to get along with, all wrapped up as he was in the coming merger. A self-involved man, once he’d captured Elaine and the bank she sat on, he was content to let life just roll along.

Especially now, with this takeover that he’d insisted on, over her own objections and the posthumous objections of Harvey, relayed through Elaine. This was not a merger! It was a swallowing up, and Elaine knew it, and so did everybody else.

Well, Jack would be happy in the new headquarters of Rutherford Combined Savings, where he could play at being an old-money banker the rest of his life. And Elaine would be happy in the south of France, with all the money she’d need until she found the right well-off replacement for Jack. And Jake Beckham would be happy wherever he decided to go with his piece of the pie, so at the end of the day everybody’s happy, so what’s the problem?

Waiting, that’s all.

But now, she arrived at the house, deep in the hilly countryside, rolling lawn and a three-story brick colonial with four white pillars across the front. Elaine had always thought the pillars a bit pretentious, but Jack had loved them, probably more than he’d ever loved Elaine, from the first time he’d gazed on them, bringing her home after their first date.

Elaine thumbed the garage opener on the visor, drove in, walked on into the house with one sack of groceries, and was barely in the kitchen when the front doorbell rang. She wasn’t expecting anybody, so let Rosita get it; opening doors to salesmen was a job for the maid, not the mistress of the house.

“Mrs. Langen.”

“Yes, Rosita?”

“Man here. Says you know him from the highway.”

“From the highway?” They weren’t going to tear up the road again, were they? Let them not start until I’m safely in France, she thought, but said to Rosita, “I’ll take care of it,” and walked to the front door to see one of the bank robbers standing there. In her good cop, bad cop image of them, this was the bad cop, the one who never joked.

But good God, people like that weren’t supposed to come here. Looking past him at the dark blue Lexus parked on the wide part of the drive, she said, “What are you doing? We’re not supposed to know each other.”

“I’m here for the gun,” he said.

At first she really didn’t understand him. “What gun?”

“The one you shot Beckham with,” he said. “You want to talk about it out here, or in the house?”

“Shot—”

“Fine, I can talk out here.”

“No, no, come in. It’s all right, Rosita!” she called, and led him down the hall, past the front parlor, to the smaller rear parlor, where they sometimes watched television. “Sit down,” she said, “and tell me what wild idea you seem to have.”

Since the chairs all faced the television set, he half-turned one toward her before sitting down. Then he said, “A pro would throw the gun away right after, but you’re not a pro, and you are greedy, so you held on to it.”

“If you’re saying I shot Jake—”

“We’re past that,” he said. “You did it, and sooner or later a cop is gonna show up here, and you’ve got a license for that gun. They’ll want to see it. If you say you lost it, they’ll get a warrant and search the house and find it and match it to the bullet they’re gonna take out of Beckham.”

Being called greedy had overshadowed everything else he’d said. She said icily, “I really don’t see—”

“What happens to you, I don’t care,” he said. “But if they nail you as the shooter, the whole bank job comes undone. I don’t want it undone.”

“Why on Earth would I try to kill Jake Beckham!”

“You didn’t,” he said. “You tried to put him in the hospital. When I told you, at that highway place, that he planned to miss a meeting with his parole officer, so he’d be safely in the can when the job went down, you said there was no need for that, nobody’s gonna suspect Beckham anyway. But then, when he didn’t miss the meeting, you realized, if he does draw attention to himself, he’s also gonna draw attention to you. If he goes down, you go down. So you shot him, to put him on ice for a while, but you weren’t smart enough to get rid of the gun, so—”

The doorbell sounded again, at the other end of the house. Irritated, she said, “Now what?”

“Probably a cop.” He stood. “Where’s the gun?”

“I don’t see—”

Rosita was in the doorway: “Missus, a lady policeman here.”

Her heart leaped into her throat, and she stared at the robber, who didn’t even seem to have heard what Rosita said. As quietly as before, he said, “Where’s the gun?”

“Kitchen,” she said, suddenly breathy. “Top drawer, farthest right, near the door to the garage.”

He nodded, then said, “The car out front belongs to a guy gonna do some landscaping. He’s here to take measurements outside and then he’s going, he’s not coming into the house.” And he turned and left the room.

Elaine blinked at Rosita, then regained some control of herself. “That man was not here.”

“No, missus.”

“I’ll see the policeman in the front parlor.”

“Yes, missus.”

By the time she got to the front parlor, she was no longer visibly shaking, but she didn’t look forward to being questioned by a policeman, not even a lady policeman. If that man had so immediately understood that she was the one who had shot Jake, and why, who else might see it? And he’d even known she’d keep the gun; he’d just assumed it, that she would be so careless.

She had to be careful. Starting now, she had to be very careful.

The lady policeman didn’t look like a policeman at all, but was a very attractive blonde in her twenties, long-necked and slim-hipped, stylishly dressed in boots and slacks and a tan high-necked blouse. She was what Harvey would have called a thoroughbred. Why would such a person choose to be a policeman?

“I’m Mrs. Langen. May I help you?”

“Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa,” the woman said, and showed a gold badge in a dark leather case. “I’m the investigating officer in the Jake Beckham shooting.”

“Oh, poor Jake,” Elaine said, praying she sounded innocent and shocked. “You don’t know yet who did it?”

“Not yet,” the detective said, and smiled. “But there’s always hope.”

“Yes, of course. Oh, I’m sorry, do sit down. That’s the most comfortable chair.”

“Thank you.”

They sat, Elaine on the sofa, the detective on the comfortable chair, and the detective first put her shoulder bag on her lap, then took a notebook and pen from it, saying, “You’ve known Jake Beckham for some years, I believe.”

Elaine was astonished to feel a blush rising into her cheeks, but then was pleased by it, too; that would be a proof of innocence, wouldn’t it, a blush? Cheeks hot, she said, “Oh, Jake and I were a scandal, years ago. The one time I strayed from my marriage. I’m not proud of it, I can tell you that.”

“But you and Mr. Beckham remained friends.”

“He’s had so much trouble, poor man, and I suppose it’s partly my fault. I take it you know about his imprisonment.”

“He stole from your husband’s bank.”

“My father’s bank. Well, it was then, but it’s true, Jack, my husband, he was the one who insisted on pressing charges. Now I realize that meant he knew all about us.”

“You mean, if you hadn’t been having an affair with Jake Beckham, he might not have gone to prison.”

“He definitely wouldn’t have gone to prison. My father liked Jake, he would have been perfectly happy to give him another chance. But my husband was determined.”

The detective nodded, looking around the room, seeming to weigh it on some sort of scale. Then she said, “Are there any guns in this house?”

“Yes, one,” Elaine said, and she couldn’t believe what a close call that had been. “I have a pistol,” she said. “I even have a license for it.”

“But your husband has none?”

“No, Jack doesn’t like guns. He says, ‘I can argue, or I can run, but I don’t know how to shoot.’”

“But you know how to shoot.”

“Oh, yes. I took classes, I even used to go to the range and practice every once in a while. Haven’t done that for years.” Smiling, trying for a lightness of tone, she said, “I hope you don’t think I could shoot anybody. Especially Jake.”

“Especially?”

“Well, he’s a friend,” Elaine said, then leaned forward to emphasize the point. “Nothing more than that, not since our sordid story all came out. But we’ve stayed friends. I had a drink with him, oh, two or three weeks ago. When I’m glum, you know, he cheers me up.”

“Yes, I can see where he would,” the detective said, and smiled again.

“Oh, you’ve talked to him, of course you have. How is he? I didn’t think I should visit him in the hospital, I wouldn’t want tongues wagging again.”

“He’s in good spirits,” the detective said. “Could I see this gun of yours?”

“Oh, I have no idea where it is,” Elaine said. Her heart was pounding, and for the first time she was uncertain she could carry this off.

The detective frowned. “You don’t know where it is? A gun is a serious thing, Mrs. Langen.”

“Oh, I know, it’s just— Years ago, I was taking women’s defense classes and things, and the gun was just a part of all that, that empowerment everybody went through. After a while, I just lost interest.”

“Still, to not know where you keep a gun—”

“Well, I used to keep it in a kitchen drawer, near the door to the garage, so it would be handy if I were going to the range or whatever, but then Jack said, what if somebody breaks in, if they come in through the garage that drawer’s the first thing they’ll open.”

And it was true, Jack had said just that, several times, and she’d ignored him every time. She was used to ignoring things she didn’t agree with.

“So then you moved it,” the detective said.

“I think I did. It could still be there, but I don’t think so.”

“Could we take a look?”

“Miss—Ms—what do I call you?”

“Detective is fine.”

“All right. Detective, do you really think there’s the slightest possibility I shot Jake? For what earthly reason?”

“Or your husband,” the detective said blandly. “Or anyone else with access to that firearm. May we take a look, see if it’s there?”

“Well, I suppose so,” Elaine said, and they both stood. As they walked together through the house, toward the kitchen, the detective said, “Is that your Lexus parked out front?”

“No, that’s a landscape man, he’s here to do some measurements outside.” Again with a stab at girlish lightness, she said, “He wouldn’t have access to the firearm, he’s just measuring things outdoors.”

In the kitchen, she led the way to the right drawer and opened it, and there lay a small hammer, two screwdrivers, a small pair of pliers, three pencil stubs, and a box of cartridges for the gun, but no gun.

“You still have the ammunition, I see.”

“Yes.” Her hand shook slightly as she picked up the surprisingly heavy box. “I don’t know how old these are by now.” Opening the box, she said, “About half left. It’s really been a long time.”

Looking around, the detective said, “Would you have moved it somewhere else in this room?”

“Or up to my bedroom, the closet there, I truly don’t know. I’m really very sorry, but I’d stopped thinking about that gun ages ago.”

“It would be better if we could find it,” the detective said. “I mean, just informally, without going through the process of getting a search warrant from a judge or anything like that.”

Feeling increasingly put-upon, Elaine said, “Do we really have to make such a big deal over it?”

“If you’d like,” the detective said, “I could phone for a few officers to just come out and look for it while we chat. They wouldn’t disturb anything, I promise. Of course, if you’d rather check with your attorney . . .”

“No.” Elaine sighed, and that was as honest as the blush had been. “Go ahead,” she said. “Make your call.”

4

When Jack Langen saw the dark blue police van parked at his front door, next to a nondescript tan Plymouth Fury, his immediate thought was, What’s she done now? He just took it for granted, if the police were here, it would be because of something Elaine had done. She was a prickly, difficult woman, and a part of the problem of her existence was the way she would suddenly spurt into action somewhere without the slightest thought for the consequences. So if the police were here, what had Elaine done now?

Thumbing the garage opener on the visor, putting his black Lincoln Navigator into the garage next to Elaine’s white Infiniti, Jack told himself he shouldn’t be hasty in his assumptions. Hasty, half-baked assumptions were Elaine’s specialty, after all, not his. So if the police were here, and say for argument’s sake it was not because Elaine had been stupid or careless, what reason might it be?

The bank move. The date for that had just been settled this afternoon. Elaine didn’t even know it yet, unless the police had just told her. The four armored cars from Boston would arrive here the night of October 4, just one week from today. Rooms for the four drivers and the eight accompanying guards had been taken at the Green Man Motel. The packing of over seventy-five years of correspondence and records and files and all the many kinds of necessary government forms had just begun. The cash reserves in the vault in the basement of the Deer Hill building would undergo a final audit in the two days before the move, being brought up to the bank itself starting after closing time on the fourth.

This was going to be the largest single act of Jack Langen’s life. The company they’d hired to oversee the operation, Secure Removals, the American subsidiary of a British private security corporation, had already been on-site, and Bart Hosfeld, the manager in charge, had told him this afternoon that the closest thing in life to a move of this sort was an invasion in a war. “Well, except,” Jack had said, “there’s no enemy shooting at you.”

“With this much money in cash floating around the midnight roads?” Bart had answered. “Don’t be that sure.”

A happy thought.

But that was why they were keeping the whole move as secret as possible, and why, he told himself as he got out of the Navigator and walked around the Infiniti and on into the house, it might very well be that the reason for the police presence at his house at this moment had something to do with the move.

But not. When he walked into the kitchen, a woman in police uniform was in there, wearing white rubber gloves and searching the kitchen drawers. She looked around when he entered, nodded and said, “Good afternoon, sir.”

Nothing to do with the bank. Everything to do with Elaine. But why are they searching the kitchen? Jack said, “Is my wife here?” half-expecting she was in a jail cell somewhere.

But the woman cop said, “Oh, yes, sir, she’s in the front room with Detective Reversa.”

“Detective Reversa.”

“Yes, sir. Excuse me, I’m almost done here.”

It was now twenty to five in the afternoon. Usually, when Jack got home from the office each day at around this time, he would make himself a small scotch and soda to begin the daily unwinding process, but he somehow couldn’t see himself mixing a drink under the eyes of a uniformed woman cop searching for . . .

For what? What on Earth could this woman policeman be looking for in Jack Langen’s kitchen? What has Elaine done now?

Feeling stupidly awkward in his own home, Jack said, “Well, um, nice to meet you,” and left the kitchen. As he walked through the house, bracing himself for whatever mess Elaine had made this time, he reminded himself that this difficult period of his life was very nearly over.

When he’d met Elaine shortly after college, with her family and her money—and her own bank!—the difficulties of having to deal with her seemed a small price to pay. Besides, old Harvey was still alive then, and could keep some sort of control over her.

Once the bank merger was complete, then he could make his move. Now, Elaine could still throw a monkey wrench into the process, but once the merger was a done deal, a very quiet little divorce would shortly ensue, and then Jack Langen would be a free and a happy man.

To have leveraged that chance meeting with Elaine into marriage and money and a career at the bank was wonderful enough for an impoverished nobody like Jack Langen, but now, to have leveraged her bank into a senior position of his own at a larger and more successful bank, run by a bunch of fellows with whom Jack could get along very well indeed, and in which Elaine herself was shuffled out of any position of power or importance, that was a coup of which Jack felt very justly proud. So all he had to do now was wait it out, wait it out, wait it out. No matter what Elaine had done this time, just wait it out. The end was in sight.

He couldn’t think what this trouble might be. Not another affair; that business with Jake Beckham had been, Jack was sure, the most humiliating experience of Elaine’s life. He knew that what she really wanted, and would always want, would be to get herself out of this corner of Massachusetts forever, go someplace entirely different, where no one would know what an ass she’d made of herself back home.

Well, after the divorce, she’d still be reasonably well off, so let her go where she wanted. Alaska, or some island.

Jack didn’t realize he was smiling when he entered the front parlor, but then the smile faded, replaced by confusion when he saw Elaine sitting in there with a very good-looking young woman, a tall, svelte blonde of the sort Jack himself fancied from time to time, though never at home, never anywhere around here. He wouldn’t make a public fool of himself, the way Elaine had, no matter what the woman looked like.

Though this one did look good. “I’m sorry,” he said to both of them. “They said you were in here with a policeman.”

“I am,” Elaine said, and both women stood as Elaine said, “This is Detective Reversa. Detective, this is my husband, Jack.”

Detective Reversa—who would have guessed?—put her bag back on her shoulder, as though she planned to leave, but then she smiled and stepped forward with her hand out, saying, “How do you do, sir?”

“I don’t quite know,” he said, receiving her firm handshake. “I wonder what’s happening here.”

“I’m the officer assigned to the Jake Beckham shooting,” Detective Reversa told him.

“Oh, Jake! That’s right, he was shot, I barely registered that. We have a lot going on at the office right now.” Smiling, finding this whole thing amusing for some reason, he said, “You don’t think Elaine did that, surely. Rather late for a lovers’ quarrel.”

“Jack,” Elaine said, in such a pained way that he looked more closely at her, and saw she was truly feeling miserable. He almost felt sorry for her. But then she said, “They’re looking for my gun.”

That made no sense. “Your gun? It’s in the drawer in the kitchen.”

“No, don’t you remember?” she said. “You told me I should move it because a burglar would find it right away.”

“And you moved it?” he asked, astonished that she would take his advice on any subject at all. “Where to?”

“Well, I don’t remember,” she said. “That’s why the police are here, looking.”

“It isn’t a question of suspicion,” Detective Reversa assured him. “It’s just a loose end to be tied off, a gun owned by a friend of Mr. Beckham.”

In other words, it damn well was a question of suspicion. Jack said, “So I take it, there are policemen all over the house.”

“Not for much longer,” the detective said. “Shall we sit? I understand your bank is about to make a major move.”

So we’re going to chat, Jack thought, as all three sat. Looking at that pinched, nervous, unhappy expression on his wife’s face, he was surprised to realize she hadn’t lost the gun at all. She’d hidden it, or thrown it away.

For God’s sake, why? Had she shot Jake Beckham? What for?

If our merry band of cops don’t find that roscoe, Jack thought, and I’m pretty damn sure they’re not going to, I am going to have to keep a very close eye on Missy Elaine until I’ve gotten her well out of this house.

5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bud or Coors Light?”

“Bud.”

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

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

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

“Mike Harbin. I was told you—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fine.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure.”

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

“Sure.”

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

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

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

“No, no, not like that! Let me—”

“I’ll see to Dalesia.”

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

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

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

6

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

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

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

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

“Come on, Wendy, not while I’m down.”

“You don’t sound down.”

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

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

“Not till I’m on my feet.”

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

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

“When are your visiting hours?”

“Eight a.m. to six p.m.”

“All day?”

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, yeah.”

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

“Unless family things come up.”

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

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

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

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

“Police.” But it was a woman’s voice.

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

“That’s me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s good about that.”

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

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

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

“Sibling rivalry.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The wife.”

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

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

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

“Sure she did,” Wendy said.

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

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

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

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

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

“I will. But first, shop.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oohh,” she breathed, “It’s hers.”

“You know about her.”

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

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

“I will.”

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

“I will.”

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

7

He makes a perfect ex-husband,” Grace said.

Monica, who had one husband, no exes, shook her head yet again, and said, yet again, “Well, to me it seems weird.”

The two women, who clerked together in the claims office of one of the big insurance companies in Hartford, and who had been pals since both had hired on here almost ten years ago, were similar in kind: both rangy and sharp-featured, both pessimistic about life in general and their own lives in particular, and both choosing to face the world with a kind of humorous fatalism. They disagreed about very few things, but one of those things was Grace’s ex, a subject that tended to come up, as it had today, while they were on their ten a.m. coffee break in the ladies’ lounge, where they could have some privacy.

Monica was going to do the litany again, no stopping her. “You never see him,” she said.

“A good thing in an ex,” Grace said. “I got a memory bank full of pictures, I ever want to go stroll down there.”

“But I mean you never see him,” Monica insisted. “I don’t think anybody ever sees him.”

“No, that’s pretty true,” Grace admitted. “I guess he’s like the tooth fairy in that.”

“The tooth fairy!”

“Or Santa Claus. You know he’s been, because the tooth is gone or the presents are there, but you never see him at work.”

“Grace, he’s a criminal!”

“Another good reason not to see him at work. If people see Nick at work, they’ll dial nine-one-one. Right away.”

“Let me say this about Harold,” Monica said, referring to her husband, which sooner or later she always did. “Harold may not be the most exciting man in the world, or the most brilliant man in the world, but at least he’s there. And when he puts bread on the table, he puts it there with the sweat of his brow.”

“With the ink of his brow, you mean,” Grace said. “Monica, he’s an accountant.”

“You know what I mean. It’s honest money, honestly earned, and it puts honest bread on the table. Grace, you’re living off a gangster!”

“He is not,” Grace said. “In the first place, he’s not a gangster, he’s a heister, which is a very different thing. Gangsters deal in prostitution and gambling and drugs, and Nick would never do any of that. In his own way, he’s almost as law-abiding and moral as your Harold.”

“That’s why he’s in hiding all the time?”

“He’s not in hiding, he’s just very careful, because you never know. The world he’s in is full of dangerous people, so he’s smart to be cautious.”

“Harold can walk the street in the sunshine with his head up high and not be afraid of anything.”

“Monica, Harold lives in the world of accountancy.”

“Don’t try to make Harold sound dull.”

“That wasn’t my intent.”

“Anyway,” Monica said, “not that I ever expect anything like this for myself, God forbid, but you don’t even have proper alimony.”

“That’s the other thing I was gonna say,” Grace told her. “I’m not living on Nick, I get a salary here, same as you do. I get a supplement from Nick.”

“When he feels like it.”

“Which is often. From time to time I can help him out a little, pass a message on, whatever, and from time to time he helps me out a little, with a money order. It probably works out to more than alimony anyway, and there’s no lawyers involved, no judges, no bad feelings on any side. Honest to God, Monica, I understand why you think what you think, but I’m telling you, I’ve got the best ex-husband in the world, because I never have to confront him, I never have to argue with him, and I never have to be mad at him.” With a little grin, she added, “And in addition, I’ve got Eugene.”

“Oh, Eugene,” Monica said, with her own little grin, because both women agreed that Eugene was a total stud muffin. Unfortunately married, but nobody’s perfect.

“Never you mind Eugene,” Grace told her, though she had no fear that Monica might poach. “You just go on feeling sorry for me over Nick.”

“I don’t feel sorry for you,” Monica insisted. “I just think it’s weird, that’s all. Well, you heard me on this before. Time’s up, anyway.”

Back at her desk, Grace saw that a fax had come in. It was just the one sheet of paper, blank except for a large, scraggly handwritten 4.

This was precisely the sort of thing Monica would find weird, so Grace had never gone into detail with her about the kinds of favors she sometimes did for Nick. He’d phoned her about this a few days ago, that a fax would come in containing a number from one to thirty. He didn’t tell her what it was about, and she didn’t want to know.

So here it was, and now she was to phone Nick. He wouldn’t answer—he didn’t even have the ringer on at his place, wherever that was—but after ten rings a light would go on, and she’d hang up. On her way home today, she would stop at the public library and go to the hardcover mystery section, and put the folded fax into The Gracie Allen Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine, which was always there, and then she’d continue on home.

And in a little while, a nice money order would arrive in the mail. What was so weird about that?

8

The bullet coming out was worse than the bullet going in. Not the instant of it—they had him doped for that—but the aftermath. The anesthetic wore off slowly, leaving him dazed, with a jumble of dreams he couldn’t remember, couldn’t even understand when they were going on, except that some of them seemed to have something to do with prison. Happy goddam thing to dream about.

What brought him out of the daze finally was the discomfort. They had his leg in a sling hung down from a contraption over the bed, so it was up in the air with the heel pointed at where the ceiling met the wall to the right of the room door. He was like that, and would be for the next few days, because they didn’t want him to lie on the wound for a while. But that meant he couldn’t move much of himself at all, except his arms.

His leg hurt like hell, once he was conscious again. It felt much worse than when he was shot, like a really hard punch that just wouldn’t ease up.

There was a television set on a shelf high on the wall, and he tried watching it for a while, but everything he saw irritated him. So after a while he switched the thing off and just lay there, alone with his thoughts.

Alone. They’d told him, no visitors right after the operation; he’d be too woozy. But he wasn’t woozy exactly; he was just uncomfortable, with the leg aching as if a dinosaur had just bit him there, and stuck up at an angle so he couldn’t get comfortable even without the ache.

He spent a lot of the time thinking about yesterday’s visit from Wendy. The amusing part was her meeting with Parker. It took a lot to knock Wendy off her pins, but Parker had done it. Jake wished he could have been there when Parker opened the candy box and showed her the gun. She was still a little green around the gills when she’d told him about it.

The other things she’d told him were more serious, and they all had to do with the fact that it was Elaine who had shot him, and she’d shot him so he’d be in the hospital at the time of the robbery and wouldn’t be a suspect. Stupid Elaine; where did she ever get that bright idea?

If he’d known she was going to react this way, the hell with it, he’d have skipped his parole officer meeting after all; he’d have gone to Vegas or someplace and checked himself into a county jug.

But the worst thing Wendy’d told him was that the woman detective, Reversa, thought maybe it was Elaine that had done it. Elaine or the useless husband—she was ready to go either way—but the problem was, she was already pointed in the right direction.

She didn’t have any motive yet, not for Elaine, but thought maybe she had one for the husband. But when the robbery went down? Here she had a woman linked both to the bank and to the guy that was shot, her onetime and maybe still boyfriend. Here she had a woman whose gun was conveniently lost just at the right moment. Here she had a robbery of that bank just when all its assets were being transferred. And to put the cherry on the icing, the mysteriously shot guy was an ex-con with former associates of the wrong kind, what Wendy yesterday had called his “bad companions.”

Was that enough for Reversa? Would she look at what she had, and connect the dots? Jake might not remember those anesthesia-induced prison dreams, but he remembered prison, and he didn’t want to go there again.

Maybe the job was no good. Maybe Elaine had screwed it up for everybody, and now it was nothing but trouble.

And if it was trouble, some of the other people might take it on the lam, but Jake himself wouldn’t get far, on his back in a hospital bed with his leg pointed at the ceiling.

Come to think of it, the trouble was probably exclusively for Jake and Elaine. Parker and Dalesia could go ahead as planned. So far as they were concerned, nothing had changed.

Jake was beginning to feel desperate. This was some miserable bind he was in, all of a sudden.

What if . . . what if he could give Detective Reversa a different motive, one that didn’t have anything to do with the bank? But what motive would that be? “Oh, yeah, Detective, I think you’re right, Elaine shot me, because uhh . . .”

And then what? Yeah, we’re seeing each other again? How does that get me away from the robbery? If Elaine is the one that shot me, then that ties me to the robbery.

But what if it was Jack? Oh, he’s wrong about us, we aren’t seeing each other any more. But if he’s wrong, and there’s no evidence, why would he suddenly turn into this violent guy he’d never been before?

It made Jake’s head ache, along with all the other parts that already ached and itched and burned. It made him so frustrated, this unexpected problem looming down on him, that he did get woozy, and dropped off to sleep, and when he woke up, Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa was sitting there in the chair beside the bed.

“Oh, good, you’re awake,” she said with a bright smile.

“I’m not supposed to have visitors,” was the first thing he thought to say, because he wasn’t ready to deal with all this, to deal with Elaine and this keen-eyed cop and the fact that Parker and Dalesia had nothing to worry about. They had nothing to worry about.

“Oh, I get special dispensation,” Detective Reversa told him, still with that sunny smile he didn’t trust for a second. “I promised I wouldn’t stay long, and I wouldn’t get you all upset.”

“Well, good luck with that,” he said.

She cocked her head, smiling and alert. “Really? Why do you say that?”

“Because if you’re here,” he said, scrambling to keep his mind ahead of his mouth, and also feeling ridiculous because he was lying here in front of this fine-looking woman with his leg aimed upward like an antiaircraft gun, “if you’re here, that means you think you know more about who shot me, and anything you want to tell me about that is going to upset me.”

“Well, there is news, you’re right,” she said. “We now know more about the bullet that was used.”

“Well, sure,” he said. “It isn’t in me any more, so you could look at it.”

“It was a thirty-eight Special,” she said. “Do you know anybody with a gun that uses that ammunition?”

“I don’t know anybody with a gun at all,” he said. “When I was in security, and before that in the police, I was around guns, but not any more.”

“It’s hard for me to remember,” she said, “you used to be on the police yourself.”

“Not like you,” he said. “Not a detective. I was just the guy who waved at the traffic.”

“But the fact is,” she said, “you do know at least one person who owns a gun.”

He frowned. “I do?”

“Your friend Elaine Langen.”

“Oh, my God!” he said. “She told me that years ago!” I hope I’m not overdoing this, he thought, and then, trying to tiptoe his way through the right reactions, he frowned at her and said, “You don’t think she did it.”

“Not necessarily,” she said. “We do know it was the right caliber. Unfortunately, Mrs. Langen has lost her gun.”

“Lost? How do you lose a gun?”

Detective Reversa’s smile turned ironic. “That’s a very good question, Mr. Beckham,” she said. “But really there’s another question first.”

“There is?”

“Well, two people had access to that gun,” she reminded him. “Both Elaine Langen and her husband.”

“Oh, because it’s in the house.”

“Exactly.” Leaning forward, being concerned, being on his side, she said, “If it turned out that Mrs. Langen’s gun was the one that shot you, which of the Langens would you guess might have used it?”

This was the nub, the hinge. This was the point where, if he was ever going to get out from under what Elaine had done to both of them, he would do it now. He would find the words. He would deflect the investigation, take it off somewhere far from the robbery.

She watched him, smiling faintly, in no hurry, and he thought, I can’t put it on Jack Langen. I would love to, but no way. “No way Jack Langen would shoot me,” he said.

She looked surprised. “You seem very positive of that.”

“In the first place,” Jake told her, “he’s got no reason to be sore at me, not any more, not for years. And in the second place, that isn’t what he’d do, it isn’t the way he operates. If Jack Langen wanted me shot, he’d get somebody else to do it. And he wouldn’t loan the guy his wife’s gun.”

“No, I don’t suppose he would. So you think Elaine did it.”

He turned away from those sharp eyes, that fake smile. Elaine did it; yes, of course, Elaine did it. They were going to know that, if they didn’t already. They might not ever be able to prove it, but they’d know it. “I’d hate to think so,” he said.

“Because you were very good friends.”

Well, he didn’t have to put up with that much irony. Facing the detective again, he said, “I had an affair with Elaine Langen. It was never going anywhere, we were never gonna run away together, and we both knew it. Then her husband must’ve found out the same time he found out I was stealing. He got his revenge, he pressed charges, he paid me back, it’s all over as far as he’s concerned.”

“Is it all over? Between you and Mrs. Langen, I mean.”

“Absolutely,” he said, and all at once he saw it. The road out of the woods. “She wanted to start up again,” he explained, “when I got out, but I’m done with all of that, every bit of it. I’m Mr. Staight-and-narrow. I told her, it can’t pick up like before, it just can’t.” Then he allowed himself to get a bit wide-eyed. “Holy shit.”

Alert, she said, “Yes?”

“You’re right. She did it.” Hushed, he said, “Elaine took a shot at me.”

“That’s what you think happened.”

“But, listen,” he said. “Think about it. Look where she shot me,” and he pointed up at his inclined leg.

“Yes?”

“She’s a good shot, Elaine,” he said. “She told me, she used to go to the firing range and practice all the time. So if she did shoot at me, and okay, maybe she did, but if she did, she wasn’t trying to kill me.”

Detective Reversa looked skeptical. “Why would she do that, Mr. Beckham?”

“She was trying to attract my attention,” Jake said. “She really can’t stand her husband, I can tell you that, but she’s stuck with him, and for a while there I helped her sort of put up with the life she had to lead. I went into prison, I came out, I said no, she got desperate— I don’t mean I’m some kind of fantastic lover or anything, I’m just the guy that made it easier for her to live her life, that’s all. I was like, I don’t know, like her Valium. And I said no. And she brooded about it, and she decided, let’s attract his attention.”

Looking and sounding honestly amused at the idea, the detective said, “And to let you know, next time it could be worse.”

“That’s it,” he said. “Jesus, Detective Reversa, I bet you that’s just what happened.”

“You could very well be right.”

“And she threw the gun away. At least she threw the gun away. Though she could buy another. Or maybe she just hid it. But I don’t care, I don’t want to press charges.”

“She shot you, Mr. Beckham.”

“I understand that,” Jake said. “But I understand why she did it, and I understand it was a felony for her to do it, and if you can catch her on your own, that’s fine. But I don’t want to help. I’m sorry I said as much as I did.”

Detective Reversa considered the situation, then nodded. “For your sake, Mr. Beckham,” she said, “I hope Mrs. Langen appreciates your gesture.”

9

Nelson McWhitney was a bartender to begin with, but the bar he bought from his former boss never did make much of a living. A few of the regulars in the place, though, were connected to another line of work that was certainly more profitable but also chancier. Still, when these guys began to invite Nels along, he was happy to go. At first, he was just brought in for the heavy lifting, or the muscle if muscle were needed, but after a while he got to know some things, like how to open certain safes, how to bypass certain alarm systems, and his value to his partners only increased.

Unfortunately, mistakes by a couple of those partners had led to two brief stints inside, where he’d picked up a wider acquaintance, so he could pick his future partners with better care.

One of the first things he’d learned, way back, was never to trust those partners for a second. A thief is a thief. If he’s stealing anyway, he might as well steal from his partners, if he gets the chance.

It had been a long while since Nels had given anybody that kind of chance. With his mistrust of his partners had come a certain pragmatic wariness and a habit of protecting himself in certain ways. For instance, if he was going to be working with this fellow or that fellow, he liked to know where the fellow could be found later on, just in case.

Whatever the dental gold job with Al Stratton might have turned out to be, it had aborted before Nels could do that kind of homework on the rest of the group, including Nick Dalesia, but Al Stratton he could find, and Stratton would know how to put Nels together with Dalesia.

He hadn’t expected such stupidity from Dalesia. A man had died at that meeting. You don’t make jokes about it. You don’t hint to strangers—and a bounty hunter, no less!—that Nels McWhitney could tell you where to find Mike Harbin. That’s just stupid.

What was it for? Revenge maybe, because Nels had brought Harbin to the meeting? Whatever Dalesia’s reason, it was stupid, and Nels was looking forward to asking the question in person.

Which meant going to visit Al Stratton, who in his straight life was a furniture refinisher in a small town outside Binghamton, New York. Stratton had taken what had originally been a dairy farm, sold off the grazing land, lived in the farmhouse, and converted one of the barns to a workplace where he had room enough for any piece of furniture a customer might want dealt with.

Like most people who live some distance from town, Stratton kept a couple of dogs on the place that would let you live once their master said you were okay. McWhitney drove in from the county road, and as he circled the old wood-shingled house, both dogs came tearing out of the barn, yelping and throwing themselves around, snapping at the moving tires as McWhitney crunched along the gravel to stop at the barn’s open door.

He kept the car windows closed, and one of the dogs lifted his forepaws onto the driver’s door, onto the ledge just under the window, and dared McWhitney with a snarl. The other dog, still on the ground, ranged back and forth, barking.

Until Stratton came out and yelled at them. Then they immediately turned away from McWhitney and went trotting over to Stratton, who came a pace closer to peer through the windshield. When he recognized McWhitney, he nodded, waved, and said something more to the dogs as he pointed at the barn. Obediently they went inside, not bothering to look back, and Stratton came over to the side of the car as McWhitney rolled his window down.

Stratton said, “You surprised me.”

“I don’t like to talk on the phone.”

“No, I understand that.”

Stratton could be seen trying to figure this out. He and McWhitney didn’t hang out together, had only a work relationship and not much of that.

“I need to find Nick Dalesia,” McWhitney explained. “I figured you know where he is.”

“Well, I did,” Stratton said. His eyes were watchful.

“The thing is,” McWhitney said, “there’s a fella has maybe a job, and if he does have it there’s maybe a spot in it for me. But he doesn’t know me, and he does know Nick, though not where he is. But I need Nick to tell this guy I’m okay, and also maybe see if he wants a piece in it.”

Stratton nodded. “Any more pieces around?”

“It’s not my pie, Al. Sorry.”

“I understand. I think I got a phone number for Nick.”

“The way I’ve been told, Nick never answers his phone.”

“I think he lives over in Connecticut or Massachusetts,” Stratton said. “I may have an address. You wanna come inside?”

“I don’t know,” McWhitney said. “Do I?”

Stratton grinned. “Oh, don’t worry about the dogs. Once I tell them you’re all right, you’re all right. Unless you start beating on me.”

“I’ll remember not to,” McWhitney said, and got out of the car.

He followed Stratton into the barn, which looked mostly like a stage set for some upscale family drama. It was all clean, but not particularly neat. A couple of old-fashioned sofas stood around among armoires, dining tables and chairs, some smaller tables, and a dry sink. Some of the items looked very good; others were in several pieces. Toward the rear of the place, the dogs were lying on old, scuffed blankets. They watched McWhitney, but didn’t move.

Stratton led the way to an old rolltop desk against a side wall. “Customer never paid me for this,” he said as he rolled the top up out of the way and sat down. “So it’s mine now.”

“It’s a beauty.”

The desk’s pigeonholes were full of notepads of various sizes, thick envelopes, some folders. Stratton reached into the jumble, pulled out a smallish address book with a dark red cover, and said, “I only do first names in here, so that’s how they’re alphabetized. Here we are. Nick.” Pointing to a corner of the desk, he said, “Take a scrap of paper there, and a pencil.”

“Sure.”

“Box twenty-three, County Route forty, Greengough, Massachusetts.” Stratton spelled the name of the town. “Box numbers are hard to find sometimes.”

“Oh, I’ll find it,” McWhitney said, pocketing the address. “I’m motivated.”

10

Nick Dalesia drove the roads between Deer Hill and Rutherford, with side trips to and past West Ruudskill, where they would take the armored car. Because the countryside was hilly and had been settled for a long time, there were multiple routes between any two points. Some roads dead-ended where an early settlement hadn’t lasted, leaving nothing but a family name: Granthornville. Some roads went out of their way to loop past a water source that hadn’t been needed in two hundred years. It was terrain a heister could make good use of, but first he’d have to learn it.

The way Dalesia figured it, the people doing the move would not be the regular bankers but professionals, hired because this kind of move is what they do. They would try to keep the move secret, but they would know that leaks are just part of the human condition, and that at least some unauthorized people out there would know, by the time of the move, that the move was going to happen. Among those unauthorized people there might be some who would fantasize about getting their hands on all that money and all those securities, but would there be a few who might decide to take an actual run at it? Such robberies had happened before.

Yes, they had, and Nick knew they had, just as much as the bankers did. It had happened in America, it had happened in France, and it had happened in Germany that he knew about, and probably other places, too. And the MO was always the same: A gang, ten or twenty strong, would lie in wait along the route, pop out, kill or otherwise get rid of the drivers and guards, and drive away to some field or parking lot where the getaway cars were stashed. The fast ones didn’t get nabbed while making the transfer; the slow ones did.

The job Dalesia and Parker were putting together was different. No gang, only the two of them. And they only needed to pluck out one armored car from a caravan of four.

So it was very important to find the right place to do it. They needed an intersection, small and tight, that they could dam with the disabled armored cars they’d leave behind. They needed that intersection to give them a good, easy run toward the abandoned mill in West Ruudskill where they’d make the switch, without it being obvious from where they pulled the job exactly where they had to be going.

So Dalesia these days was putting a lot of mileage on the car. His job was the terrain, Parker’s the materiel. They would need guns, and they would need other things as well. Parker was off promoting the gear they wanted, while Dalesia traveled the county roads, looking for just the right intersection.

And he believed he’d found it. It was not part of any town, but it had a little commercial buildup around it; a cafe open only for breakfast and lunch, a gas station that shut at dark, a used-car lot with cars behind a chain-link fence and with a small shed out front with a handwritten sign on the door: PHONE FOR APPT.

The area was occupied, but not at night. The roads heading north and east met other turnoff roads almost immediately, making an escaper’s route very hard to guess. At the intersection itself, the two roads coming up from the south and east met at dogleg angles, no straight lines. And the diner, the used-car shack, and the layout of the gas station made for a somewhat constricted area around the intersection. The armored cars would have to come through very slowly.

For breakfast and lunch, the diner’s parking lot at the front and left side was full of pickup trucks. This was where the labor force in this part of the world ate everything but dinner. They were all regulars, talking to one another about their jobs and their bosses and their favorite sports teams. They paid no attention to Dalesia when he sat among them and spent some time over coffee at a window table at the front, looking out at the intersection, pleased with his choice.

The point was to be here before the armored cars arrived, to set themselves in useful positions. They had a rough idea how to pull it off, and how to lead the target car away, but where should they place themselves to begin with? The armored cars would come up that road over there, to cross the intersection northbound. Parker and Dalesia would want their special one to go out the road on that side, they would want the other three armored cars to block the intersection there and there, and the more Dalesia looked at the place, the more it seemed to him they needed two guys on the ground and one to bird-dog the target.

Three. They needed one more man.

Dalesia paid his check and left the place, thinking about people he knew, wondering if Parker might know somebody who’d be available almost any minute now. He walked around the side of the diner, and at first he didn’t recognize the guy seated on the passenger side in his car, just thought, somebody’s in my car. Why?

Then he saw it was McWhitney, one of the guys from Al Stratton’s meeting, the one who’d carried Harbin away, and he grinned as he walked over and opened the driver’s door to say, “You’re just the guy I’m looking for.”

McWhitney showed him the automatic in his right hand and said, “I don’t think I am, Nick. Get in.”

Something’s wrong, Dalesia thought, and he thought, something’s wrong with me. I didn’t expect him, I didn’t know why he was all of a sudden in my car, and I just walked up to him grinning like an idiot, as though nobody’d ever been dangerous to anybody in the whole history of the world.

I’m still alive, anyway, Dalesia thought, as he got behind the wheel. Maybe this is only bad, not worse than bad.

Since he had the stupid smile on his face anyway, he left it there and said, “What’s wrong? Nelson, isn’t it?” I don’t even know this guy, he told himself, and I walked right up to him. I deserve whatever I get.

McWhitney said, “I just have one question, Nick.”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

“Why’d you wise off?”

“I’m sorry?” Thinking, this son of a bitch is gonna kill me for a mistake, an error, he said, “Wise off to who? About what?”

“Oh, you been talking to a lot of people?”

“I haven’t been talking to anybody,” Dalesia said. “Except Parker. You don’t mean Parker.”

McWhitney looked uncertain, and then certain again. “I don’t give a shit about you and Parker,” he said. “I mean you and Roy Keenan.”

“Never heard of him,” Dalesia said, because he never had.

Now McWhitney was angry. “Never heard of him? You talked to the guy about Mike Harbin and you never heard of him?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Dalesia said, “you mean the bounty hunter.”

“Oh, you do know him.”

“No, and I don’t want to. Parker told me about him. He found Parker, but Parker brushed him off. He says the guy doesn’t know anything, he doesn’t even think he ever heard the tape Harbin made.”

McWhitney frowned mightily. “Keenan never talked to you.”

“Never.”

“He did talk to Parker.”

“He’s looking for all of us,” Dalesia said. “He’s looking for you, too, because there’s some kind of reward money on Harbin. But he doesn’t know anything.”

“He found me,” McWhitney said.

Dalesia looked at the automatic, now resting in McWhitney’s lap. “Is that why the hardnose?”

McWhitney sighed and slipped the automatic out of sight under his jacket. “I’ll tell you what happened,” he said. “I fell for an old one.”

“Yeah?”

“This guy Keenan, he comes to me, he says you told him he should ask me where to find Harbin.”

Dalesia laughed. “Why would I do that?”

“That was my question. What were you up to. But it wasn’t you up to something, it was Keenan. That’s the old dodge, he tells me you told him this thing or that thing, then I’m supposed to figure it’s okay to tell him more.”

“He had no idea what was going on.”

“None,” McWhitney agreed.

“So that was a big mistake he made.”

“Yeah, it was.”

Dalesia grinned. “I bet he learned a lesson from it.”

“Yeah.” McWhitney nodded. “He learned the harp.”

THREE

1

I like retirement,” Briggs said. “Turns out, I was nervous all those years.”

“You looked nervous,” Parker said.

And it was true; Briggs looked calmer than the last time Parker had seen him, after a broken heist where Dalesia had been the driver, Parker and Tom Hurley and a guy called Michaelson had been the doers, and Briggs the explosives man, fussy and petulant but very methodical behind his thick spectacles. When an alarm had gone off that hadn’t been in the plan they’d been sold, Michaelson wound up dead, Hurley went off for revenge, but the guy who’d sold them the plan had disappeared forever, and Briggs decided he’d had enough. “I’m running a streak,” he’d said. “A very bad streak. I believe I’ll just retire for a while, and wait for it to go away.”

He’d already had this house in Florida, not on either coast but inland, on a lake near Winter Garden. He had a wife, too, but she wouldn’t be coming out to see their visitor, and Parker wouldn’t be going inside the house. He and Briggs sat on a patio in front of one corner of the low, broad house, facing the lake glittering like a diamond pin out there, where motorboats snarled and white sailboats slid silently among them at a slant.

Watching the movement on the lake, Parker said, “You like things calm. No commotion.”

“We get commotion sometimes,” Briggs said. He’d put on a few pounds but was still basically a thin unathletic man who looked as though he belonged behind a desk. Nodding at the lake, he said, “A few years ago, a tornado came across from the Gulf, bounced down onto the lake, looked as though it was coming straight here, lifted up just before it hit the shore, we watched the tail twist as it went right over the house, watched it out that picture window there. That was enough commotion for a while.”

Parker said, “You watched it out a picture window?”

Briggs either shrugged or shivered; it was hard to tell which. “Afterwards, we said to each other, that was really stupid.”

“So you want to stay retired,” Parker said.

“The last time we met,” Briggs said, “we were crawling through a tunnel with alarms going off. Michaelson got shot. I don’t want any more of that.”

“Let me tell you what I’ve got,” Parker said. “I don’t need you there, when it goes down. I need materiel.”

Briggs looked doubtful. “You want me to sell stuff to you?”

“I want you to provide it,” Parker told him, “for a piece of the pie. Come along and show how it works, but then be somewhere else when it’s going down.”

“What materiel do you need?”

“I need to stop three armored cars, and open one more.”

“That’s a lot of armored cars.”

Parker told him the setup, and Briggs said, “Using them as roadblocks, that’s nice.”

“You’re the one knows what would work.”

“Well, a lot of things would work,” Briggs said. “I’ll tell you something I can get my hands on. You know the Carl-Gustaf?”

“Sounds like a king.”

“It’s an antitank gun, made by the Swedes, ever since the Second World War. It’s heavy, but you won’t be carrying it except in cars.”

“How heavy?”

“Thirty-six pounds, a little over four feet long. It’s eighty-four millimeter, shoots different kinds of rounds, including antitank. The antitank shell is almost six pounds all by itself.”

“It sounds old,” Parker said.

“But it’s still in use,” Briggs assured him. “The NATO countries used it a lot. Singapore’s got two hundred of them right now, Uganda uses them. There’s a place in India makes the ammunition.”

Parker said, “And you can get hold of some of these Carl-Gustafs.”

Grinning, Briggs said, “I’m retired, but not that much. The difficult part, these days, you start dealing in arms, the feds figure you’re probably hooked up with terrorists. Makes it hard for a private guy to get along. But the good thing is, I know people who have materiel they’re afraid to move, because anybody they talk to could turn out to be undercover. And one of these people I know has Carl-Gustafs.”

“Could you get them to New England by October fourth?”

Briggs considered. “Five days from now? I’ll drive them up in my van.”

“Good. One of the people with us manages a motel, we can put you there without paper, so you never left home.”

Briggs nodded, smiling at his lake. “That’s the goal, all right,” he said. “Never leave home. What else do you need?”

“To get into the last armored car without setting fire to anything.”

“They’ll have a radio in there,” Briggs pointed out. “And a global positioning device.”

“I know that,” Parker said. “So it all has to be fast.”

“You’ll want an Uzi or a Valmet or something like that, to shoot out the tires and the door locks. Do you worry about the guards?”

“If they’re sensible,” Parker said, “it’s better to leave them alive. Doesn’t get the law as agitated.”

“I agree. So the three Carl-Gustafs and two assault rifles. Do you want tear gas?”

“Then we’d need masks,” Parker said, “so we could go into the car to get the goods, and everything slows down. No, it’s up to the guards. They get out of the way or they don’t.”

“I suppose so.” Briggs frowned out at the lake. The noise of the motorboats, an irritation at first, after a while seemed to become a part of the day, like the droning of insects. Briggs said, “In my years on the heist, I never liked it when somebody died. I still think about Michaelson from time to time.”

“That wasn’t us,” Parker said. “He was shot by a guard.”

“He was dead.”

Parker said, “I don’t want these armored car people dead, but I’m not going to have a lot of time to spend on them.”

“No, that’s true.”

“We’re giving them the choice, that’s all.”

Briggs looked troubled, but then he said, “Let me tell you something I learned about retirement, I mean, besides it’s boring.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s expensive. Where in New England am I meeting you?”

2

Dalesia picked Parker up at Bradley International Airport in his Audi, and they drove north toward Massachusetts. Along the way, Parker said, “Briggs is aboard. He’s got stuff we can use, he’ll drive it up, but he doesn’t want to be in on the job.”

“I was thinking, though,” Dalesia said, “we could use a third man.”

“You say that,” Parker said, “as though you’ve got him.”

“Well, don’t you think we do?”

“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Parker said. “Who’ve you got?”

“McWhitney.”

“McWhitney? Where did he come from? The last time I saw him, he was carrying Harbin out on his back.”

“Remember the bounty hunter braced you a little while ago?”

“Keenan or something.”

“He made a mistake with McWhitney,” Dalesia said. “He came on like one of the guys, but he didn’t know anything about anything, so when he told McWhitney I’d said he should ask him how to find Harbin, McWhitney didn’t like it.”